1. Just Another Day At The Office

Story Start: One And A Half Years After Part One Location: Unit E Headquarters

Pilots scrambled to their planes as I taxied down a runway and took off, three Skystriker V2s joining me, one of them taking flight lead as soon as we were in the air. Thirty seconds after lift-off a ground bridge portal opened ahead of us and we shot through. Coming out over jungle land, we kept along the heading we came out of and my radio came on as one of my squad mates let out a sigh and said "Ah the wonderful Vietnam peninsula. Home to absolutely horrid humidity, the most delightful parasitic insects, oh and the Neo Vietcong who would just love to shoot us down. You bring us to the nicest places Bravo 1."

"Keep the chatter down Bravo 4. I know it's not the best assignment but patrolling these skies is an important task." The flight lead said calmly and I could practically feel the pilot rolling his eyes towards Bravo 4.

"Right, because patrolling Vietnam while the third coming of Operation Desert Storm takes place over Saudi Arabia as we speak is the best use of our talents. Honestly, the whole planet's stuck in World War III and yet we're out here in the middle of nowhere on the off chance that some jungle brats might try to take a shot at us so that we can take out their revealed antiaircraft guns." Bravo 4 huffed.

"Could be worse, we could be flying over Antarctica right now." Bravo 2 sent, the pilot's head on a swivel as he followed Bravo 1.

All three of us could hear the shiver in Bravo 4's voice as she said "True that, if we never have to fly a mission down there again it will be too soon."

"Agreed." The rest of us, even Bravo 1 said over the radio before the flight fell silent as we started our patrol duties. The airwaves were silent for the next ten minutes before instruments began beeping and Bravo 1 came over the radio as he said "Head's up, contacts at twelve o'clock high. Range sixty miles."

A moment later we were in sight and Bravo 2 said "Guys, is that two Cybertronian warships I see in front of us?"

"Sure looks like it." I said.

"Well I'll be dipped." Bravo 1 said before more contacts began pouring out of the two ships and he said "Enemy fighters scrambling, whatever the cons want out here they're not willing to let us interfere. Bravo 2, you and I will go left, Bravos 3 and 4 take right. Bravo 3 get on the horn with Base and request immediate back up. Whatever the cons want we can't let them get it so take out the warships' engines as soon as possible."

"Roger." We all said before splitting in groups, me sending our coordinates and a request for immediate back up even as I rocketed towards the silver seekers headed my way. Bravo 4 and I quickly closed and it wasn't long before we were trading fire, Bravo 4's upgraded guns shooting energon bolts from blasters positioned under the airplane's more mundane cannons. We both scored hits on a few of the seekers, only three of which exploded, before we were in the cloud of tangos and my focus tightened to ten miles around me in order to keep me alive better. We fought our way to the ship's stern and I sent over the radio "Bravo 4, take out the engines once I've cleared the air."

"Roger Bravo 3." Bravo 4 said and my blasters fired taking out seekers in front of me while my three Hughes missiles took out the stragglers that were on my sides. Immediately after four missiles came out of Bravo 4's fuselage and slammed into the engines in a spread that would do maximum damage. Secondary explosions caused even more damage and the war ship began going down. Which was all well and good except for the fact its guns were still blazing at us along with the Seekers in the air with us.

We furiously dogfought for a minute before salvation came in the form of three more four man Skystriker V2 squadrons that split up to help Bravo flight. With more friendlies in the area, the pressure was taken off of us and we began actually pushing back the Decepticons long enough to do more damage to the warship, the squadron that had joined us taking out the gun emplacements with their missiles. With the guns out of play the warship became nothing but scenery, allowing us to put our full focus on the Seekers and fifteen minutes later the skies were clear.

As the four squadrons regrouped and began circling over the burning wreckages, I sighed and sent over the coms "This is going to take forever to clean up, and we still have the cons in the warships to deal with."

"Not for long we don't. Everyone pull back, Echo 2 was given fuel-air bombs for exactly this purpose after we got your message." Echo leader said and if I was in bot mode my eyes would have widened at that even as Bravo 1 said "Right, everyone clear the area!"

We quickly got out of dodge before the missiles were sent and the ships exploded in rather violent fireballs. Good luck to anyone surviving that. Still.

"Let's hope at least one data station on those things survived, or we'll have a rather hard time figuring out what the Cons were doing in 'Nam." I said with a mental frown.

"That's something for the techies to worry about when they get here." Leo leader sent over.

Time Skip: Thirty Minutes Later

Bravo squad flew out of a ground bridge portal over Unit E's airfield. As they came in for a vertical landing they were joined by two of the three reinforcement squadrons. The hatches of Bravo squadron popped up and the world around them turned to white.

Scene Change: Unit E's Simulator Hanger

I closed the simulation program and watched Special Agents Fowler, Darby, and Nakadai pop open the hatches of their simulators, Miko stretching her arms out as she said "Man, I thought that was just going to be a standard patrol, those cons came out of nowhere!"

"Yeah, I wasn't expecting them to be part of the simulation we had going. I mean, there's already World War III going on in there, adding the cons seems a bit much." Jack said as he stepped out of the cockpit.

"Always expect the unexpected kids, even in the simulators. I've learned that the hard way working with the bots." Agent Fowler said even as he glanced at me.

Said simulators were the product of Ratchet and Raphael working together with a mini-Forge supercharging the final products. For the last week, we had been using their simulator programs to train in a world that had once more erupted into a global war. The cons showing up during a patrol instead of the expected rebooted Vietcong had been an interesting surprise though.

"Well, now that the fun's part over, time for some chow!" Miko said, her stomach rumbling in agreement causing Jack to chuckle.

"Food does sound good right now." He said as he looked to his supervising officer.

Said agent checked his watch and nodded as he said "Debrief is in an hour, go get some food."

"Yes!" Miko said before she dragged Jack after her to go eat. I shook my head as Agent Fowler and I followed the two young adults out of the building's entrance. Five steps out, my form shifted as I grew to my normal height and I split off from the group to enter the building Ratchet and Raphael had claimed for themselves and so generously allowed me to stay in.

I found the two hunched over a piece of tech that looked like a grappling hook on steroids two times taller than the human member of the tech gremlins with wickedly sharp points on the claw ends and as I walked over I said "Dropping the cons on us without warning like that wasn't very nice Raf."

Said teenager looked up from his work with a grin and said "I thought it would be a good change of pace from dealing with the Arabs for five days straight."

I gave the fifteen-year-old (Fifteen and three-quarters!) a look that if I was still human would have fit quite well on a Vulcan causing the kid to let out a slightly nervous chuckle. (And he will always be a kid even when he's ninety years old if he continues to hang around Ratchet whose age was measured with commas separating some of the numbers) Ratchet looked up from where he was welding something inside the Grappler and said "How realistic were the Seeker flight patterns? We did our best to get them right but you have a lot more experience fighting them in the air."

"All told they were pretty realistic. There was one seeker that flew more like a pilot from the Vietnam War then a Cybertronian but considering he had one engine smoking that wasn't much of a surprise." I said before I gestured at the grappler and said "Do I even want to know what kind of monster you two intend to put that thing on?"

"It's going on one of NASA's newest satellites. Halley's comet will be at the closest point to Earth on its path in two months and they want to document the comet's path and everything around it. This grapple will allow the satellite to latch on once its close enough, reel it in, and keep it in place until the comet comes back around and is replaced with another satellite in 75 to 76 years." Raf said as he bolted a panel shut and began working on another open section.

Well that was yet another difference between this dimension and my original dimension. Halley's comet wasn't set to arrive at my original Earth until 2062. Shaking my head of the distracting thought, I said "Three quarters of a century? That satellite's going to need a long battery life, even with solar energy collectors. Hope NASA uses a Duracell."

Ratchet let out a short bark of laughter at that even as Raphael chuckled at the joke. Any further conversation was cut off as my com activated and I heard "Tac? It's June, can you come to the Infirmary? There's something I would like your input on."

"The hell?" I asked in confusion before I put a finger to my com and said "Sure thing June, I'll be right there." Looking to the other two, I said "Well duty calls."

"See ya Tac." Raf said while Ratchet waved a hand at me as he continued to weld.

Two minutes later, I transformed out of my 2007 GMC Topkick 6500 vehicle mode (Yes, the same truck as Ironhide had in the Transformers movie, I thought it was amusing to scan one of them one day) and shrunk back down to human size before walking into the infirmary as I said "What do you need June?"

"I need your access to Starscream's memories to tell me just what the hell I've been looking at today." Said nurse said as she looked at a screen that was connected to a high-powered electron microscope which in turn was looking at a large piece of metal that had a partial Decepticon emblem on it. Both items were in a containment chamber and Nurse Darby had Personal Protection Equipment on like she was in Lab Class again. Cocking my head in curiosity, I walked over and said "Let me take a gander." Wirelessly jacking into the electronic microscope, I continued "What's the story here?"

"Well, you know how Unit E's been going over the buried front end section of the Harbinger with a fine-toothed comb to see if anything there was anything there we could use?"

"Yes, for the past six months if I recall after they picked clean the much more easily accessible tail end, what of it?" I asked even as I frowned as I picked up a strange energy residue reading on the microscope.

"Well one of the labs seemed to deal with creating an organism that eats metal."

"And they brought it here?!" I asked in alarm looking at her incredulously. Scrappers were bad enough, but microorganisms that did the same?! We'd be lucky if we had a base left standing by the end of the day if it got free and started multiplying.

Nurse Darby waved a hand at the case and said "They irradiated that plate in five different types of radiation before bringing it here, and that's on top of whatever the Cons did to make it inert when they canceled the program. It is well and truly dead. That's not what I wanted you to look at though." Taking the equipment off, she walked further into the infirmary and I severed the link with the microscope before following. We came to a container as big as her that held a dark brownish liquid that looked a little sluggish and she said "We found a corpse in another one of the labs but an autopsy showed that he had some seriously weird Energon in him. I think he was experimenting with the stuff and used himself as a test subject. I wanted to see if Starscream knew anything about it before I dragged Ratchet away from his and Raf's NASA project." She patted the tank holding said fuel.

I studied the energon for a minute with a frown as I said "Nothing's popping up to me but let me do a more thorough scan of my drives." I closed my optics and did a thorough scan, searching through Starscream's memories of inspecting the crash and of what he had known had been housed on the Harbinger. Starscream may not have known about the Immobilizer but he might have known about any variations of Energon that was known of at the time the Harbinger was in service. And what do you know, he did know, but it wasn't what I expected. I opened my eyes and winced as I said "Oh yeah, he knew about it alright, nasty stuff you've got there."

"What is it?" Nurse Darby asked in curiosity.

"That, my favorite Nurse, is what happens when a Cybertronian indulges in too much of a certain chemical that was popular eons ago to put in their energon injections. Quite simply, you're looking at a drug addict's blood. I'm talking high level stuff that would make the most insane acid trip seem like a walk through the park, that stuff was POTENT. I recommend you wheel that case through the space bridge and dump it in the sun because Ratchet would probably have a fit if he learns it's on the base." I said giving another wince as I looked at the very much polluted Energon.

June blinked once and said "Huh, can't say I was expecting that for your answer. Ratchet's brush with the first variation of his Synth-En formula aside, I didn't even know Cybertronians even had the capacity to get addicted to anything."

"Not surprising since war-time is hardly a good time to get a fix. Still, this guy must have gone through quite a bit of the stuff for his Energon to get that bad." I said with a frown.

"Well in any case, I'll start the preparations to dispose of it all since it's clearly not something you want to have lying around, thanks Tac." June said giving the murky substance one last glance before she moved towards a computer to begin filing the necessary forms to use the Space Bridge for HMD, or Hazardous Material Disposal.

"Anytime June." I said before I began walking out. Shaking my head as I shifted back to my normal height, I muttered to myself "Just another day at the office."

FIN

Author's Notes: Thought I would show how things have been going on since the end of the movie. Second chapter is a time skip to Pilot Episode for Robots In Disguise.