Chapter Text
“Let me guess. Chased out of the archives?”
“Yeah. I had to jump out of a window this time. Almost died! It was wild!”
Pax’s voice, bright with enthusiasm, rose above the clatter of couplings as the train plunged toward the miners’ district. With his back to his comrades, Ratchet vented his irritation and dialed down his audiosensors’ sensitivity. Every absurd stunt that hyperactive glitch pulled ended the same way: with unauthorized dents. Usually on Pax’s own frame, though sometimes others got caught in the damage. And the thought of that — on top of having to patch up idiotic injuries — burned straight through the newly minted medic’s neural net.
The latest crew rotation had gone smoothly, strictly by protocol. No incidents. No disciplinary marks. After four cycles on shift, the miners were headed for eight orns of rest. Ratchet hadn’t stated any preference for assignment — he didn’t really have one. With his new duties keeping him mostly on standby, it hardly mattered which crew he was attached to down in the shaft. Or so he had thought. That illusion lasted right up until he had the dubious pleasure of meeting Iacon’s chief instigator.
“And digging through ancient data is worth dying for?” D-16 asked.
“Yes, it is.” Pax straightened and nodded with conviction.
“I need a new best friend…”
That red-and-blue slagger tumbled out of the toolbox he’d been hiding in, landing with a loud crash. Ratchet snapped his helm around and shot a dark look over his shoulder. The last thing they needed was someone getting injured before they even reached the mine. D-16’s broad back blocked his view of the culprit. In their duo, he was the processor — steady, rational, calm — and more often than not he ended up caught between hammer and anvil.
Lowering his audiosensors’ sensitivity even further, Ratchet let Pax’s impassioned chatter fade into background noise and swept his gaze over the other passengers instead. The miners spoke in low, unhurried voices, conserving energy before the coming shift. Just another routine run in Lower Iacon. His optics moved automatically over the familiar silhouettes in the crowd — heavy helms, broad shoulders, yellow insignias stamped across their chassis.
Ratchet looked at them — the laborers he himself had once been one of — and felt an old fear roil beneath his now-white armor. It prickled through his hydraulics, churned the fuel in his tanks. Abruptly, he released the overhead rail and swayed with the motion of the train. He tried to focus, clenched his servos into fists, and for a long klik stared blankly at the red plating of his own hands.
“Don’t you want to choose your own path?” Pax’s voice slipped into his hollowed processor, smooth and insistent, still aimed at D-16. “Do whatever you want?”
“We’re miners,” D-16 replied evenly. “We mine, that’s all.”
“No, there has got to be something more I can do,” Leaning an elbow on the toolbox, Pax narrowed his optics in concentration. “I can feel it.”
For millions of ordinary Iaconians like him — those without a T-cog — there had never been much choice about what to do with their lives. Everyone needed fuel, and in the mines rations were issued as part of one’s wages, which meant at least some certainty for the next orn. Miners were never paid well, but together with an honest cube of energon, their shanix were enough to keep their pedes from giving out. So despite the risks, there was no shortage of working servos.
Ratchet had been one of many: a rank-and-file tunneller, unremarkable except perhaps for his agility and foresight. He never broke protocol, had solid endurance, and overall made for a reliable cog in the well-oiled mechanism of a tunneling crew.
For the first ten vorns, the work had gone smoothly — like well-lubricated gears. The miners consistently met their quotas; the drillers traded routine, good-natured barbs with the tunnellers over narrow tunnels, joked about extra shifts, and by some improbable stroke of luck avoided serious injuries. Limbs crushed by equipment and the occasional blunt-force damage hardly counted. Their two crews worked with enviable efficiency.
Until that ill-fated chord, when one of the new cuts had to be driven through an unstable nickel seam.
As became clear much later, no one had truly been at fault — the main shaft supports had held. The structural shift had been local, and while poorly timed, still technically within projected parameters. Even when the commlink erupted in a storm of urgent alerts, the tunnellers kept their composure, prepared to secure the drillers’ safe extraction at any cost.
“Returning with a casualty,” the drillers’ lead reported tersely, without real panic.
Those waiting in the shaft exchanged uneasy looks. At the time, no medics were assigned to specific teams. And there were precious few medics to begin with — hardly any of those with a T-cog felt inclined to bother with miners.
Pacing the corridor that shuddered with distant transformations, Chisel, the tunnellers’ foreman, worried at the base of his left audial and pushed his commlink to maximum range, trying to reach a medic.
Ratchet watched his gray-green frame move through the veil of fine, shimmering dust kicked up by the shifting tunnels and couldn’t fully grasp the gravity of the situation.
“Have you called for medics yet?” In the half-dark of the shaft, the heavy silhouette of the senior driller, Glowrig, began to take shape.
Moving quickly but carefully, Glowrig carried a laser drill over one shoulder and half-dragged, half-supported his partner with the other arm — another mech just as massive as himself. Magnoburst’s blue optics flickered; he swayed, barely staying on his pedes, still trying to speak, but static tore through his vocoder with every step.
Casting him a sharp look, Chisel hurried forward and took the wounded mech under his other arm.
“There’s no one from medical down here,” he replied tightly. “The one topside promised to be here in five or six joors.”
“He won’t last,” Glowrig said quietly, bringing their unsteady trio to a halt.
It would take them at least three joors to get out of the shaft. Even if they managed to lay Magnoburst on one of the cargo carts — which in itself would be a questionable decision — he wouldn’t survive the pressure shifts on the ascent. Glowrig and Chisel, their faceplates frozen in identical expressions of grim understanding, eased him down to the ground.
At first, Ratchet didn’t understand why blue light flickered so sharply across the commanders’ features. Then he shrugged the heavy bundle of magnetic support braces off his shoulder and edged closer. And realized. It was the Spark — laid bare, blazing through the shattered wreck of a chestplate.
Staring numbly at the light no one was ever meant to see under ordinary circumstances, Ratchet sagged back against the shaft wall and vented harshly, dust-clogged grilles rattling.
Because beyond the sight itself — terrible and beautiful in equal measure — the first thing he felt was the electromagnetic field. Unable to form coherent speech, Magnoburst was calling for help in raw, base-coded bursts. His EM field lashed out in sharp waves of panic and depletion, stinging with the searing pulses of mounting shock. It slipped beneath armor plating as if it weren’t there; no matter how tightly one sealed their panels, there was no shutting it out.
It hovered at the edge of physical sensation and ground across the audiosensors — a strange not-sound that disoriented and ignited every circuit in Ratchet’s frame, reverberating in heavy, thunderous pulses within his own Spark chamber.
“…’chet? Hey, Ratch?”
He became aware of someone gripping his shoulders, holding him upright. He jerked instinctively, trying to wrench free, but the movement was clumsy and futile. Red, his processors registered automatically as his vision cleared — a great deal of red armor and piercing blue optics.
“Are you all right?”
Ratchet opened his mouth to answer, but only static slipped past his dermas — an echo of that voiceless scream still tearing at his sensors and raking something deep within his protoform. He rebooted his vocoder once, then again, and finally forced out:
“No, Hide.”
At least he knew who was standing beside him. Ironhide frowned, confused, trying to understand what was wrong. And Ratchet, stunned, unable even to turn his helm away, kept staring at the glimmers of azure light playing over the shoulders of the miners bowed in grief above their fallen comrade.
That chord, the young tunneller saw a Spark extinguished for the first time.
Saw it dimmed by the hands of those who had worked beside you for vorns — dimmed out of mercy.
“Elite— I mean, Captain, you’re looking especially shiny this morning. New polish?”
Strangely enough, Pax had the voice of a born orator: deep, resonant, easily carrying even over the din of the processing zone. Crews all around them assembled and deployed their equipment, trading snippets of news as they worked, while the stationary machinery thundered on, grinding raw ore to slurry — a familiar, oddly comforting blend of sound, if somewhat punishing on the audiosensors.
“Orion Pax, I’m sorry that I somehow gave you the impression that we’re friends.” Elita-1 shot back without breaking stride, a trace of sarcasm in her tone.
“Apology accepted.” Orion’s broad, satisfied grin didn’t falter in the slightest.
Shifting the drill to a more comfortable grip, Ratchet hurried past Elita-1 and her talkative escort. Before the shift began, he still needed to return tools to Wheeljack, double-check his medkit, and collect support braces. Routine was excellent at distracting him from the gaping maw of the shaft.
He didn’t have to go down there. His new position allowed him to remain within the processing zone, ready to receive casualties in the event of cave-ins or tunnel collapses. And yet, even four vorns in, the still-unfamiliar medical subroutines urged him to stay as close to the action as possible. Sometimes the difference between life and deactivation came down to a handful of kliks. Besides, his experience as a tunneller still outweighed his experience as a medic — and tunneling crews never turned down skilled servos with sharp optics.
And so he found himself at the lip of the shaft, burdened with support braces and a medkit, standing alongside Elita-1 and the rest of the miners. The drillers prepared for descent with focused efficiency, checking their jetpacks. Only Pax persisted — admirably, if misguidedly — in continuing his animated monologue to D-16. Voices shattered against the iridium walls of the shaft, creating the uncanny impression that four times as many mechs were crowded there. The echo cut straight through Ratchet, and the viscous sensation he had barely suppressed through routine preparation returned, wrapping around him and filling his frame with unnatural weight.
“All good, Ratch?” Ironhide’s low voice by his audial might have startled him, if he hadn’t sensed the familiar EM field a moment before the question.
“Yes.” Pulling himself free from uneasy thoughts, Ratchet fixed him with a steady look and gathered as much confidence into his own field as he could. “Just thinking.”
“Don’t sweat it.” Ironhide smiled, adjusting the energy shield generator on his shoulder. “We’re ready for anything.”
There was always something oddly dissonant about the sharp perceptiveness beneath Ironhide’s blunt, inelegant manner — but Ratchet was grateful for the reassurance. It became much easier to take his place among the miners, knowing that behind him pulsed a dense, steady, and unwaveringly confident electromagnetic field.
…The clang with which Ironhide dropped onto the bench opposite him made Ratchet flinch with all his dark-blue armor.
“Talk,” his friend demanded, quietly but firmly.
Ratchet forced a miserable sound through his vocoder — a wordless plea to be left alone. He couldn’t bring himself to lift his faceplate from his hands.
The two chords since the accident in the mines had been spent reacquainting himself with engex — badly distilled, as always; miners favored quantity over quality. And he had achieved the desired effect: for those two chords, he had managed to forget. Ratchet had fueled himself as if he planned to deactivate the next day. Judging by how easily Ironhide had hauled him back to the miners’ shared habsuite and shoved him into a recharge berth by force, that outcome might not have been far off.
After seven joors of troubled hibernation — haunted by endless nightmares he couldn’t escape — Ratchet felt as though he’d been in a collision and then run over by a dock hauler. Or perhaps an entire shuttle.
“C’mon, Ratch.” Ironhide lowered his voice and leaned forward. Ratchet felt the soft, steady brush of his friend’s EM field. “We’ve stuck together since activation. You know you can tell me anything.”
“I know.” With visible effort, Ratchet lifted his helm. He hunched inward, rubbing his gray hands together anxiously. “Sorry, Hide. I just… I don’t know how to explain it.”
Ironhide smoothed his faceplate into an expression of patient attention. He didn’t interrupt, giving Ratchet space to gather his thoughts, letting their electromagnetic fields mingle easily — an unspoken sign that he was ready for whatever might follow.
“It’s about what happened to Magnoburst,” Ratchet said at last.
“A tragic accident. None of us are immune to that,” Ironhide replied when the silence stretched too long.
Ratchet cast a quick glance around the habsuite for stray audiosensors, saw no one within range, and turned back.
“That’s true. But it wasn’t just the accident itself… I felt something. Something extremely unusual.”
“You mean his EM field?” Ratchet jerked his helm up sharply, optics locking onto him, and Ironhide continued, “Yeah. It was… chaotic. And honestly, unpleasant.”
“Unpleasant?” Ratchet’s voice tightened. “I felt his agony down to the last impulse. Most of my protoform still aches. My hydraulics are wound so tight they’re practically screaming, and—” He faltered. “In that moment, it felt like his field was tearing into my Spark chamber. I’m not even going to mention what it did to my processors.”
Ironhide offered a crooked, uncertain smile and leaned back, bracing himself on his palms. The bench protested beneath his weight.
“You sure that wasn’t your engex marathon talking, Ratch?”
With a groan, Ratchet dropped his faceplate back into his hands, squeezing his optics shut for a moment before replying hoarsely, “Maybe the headache’s from the engex. But the rest of it definitely isn’t.”
Ironhide’s EM field flared warm with concern and unease. He was trying to shield Ratchet — though from what, he likely didn’t know himself. The strength of that protective impulse pressed close enough that Ratchet lifted his gaze again. Ironhide hadn’t moved, but his expression was steady.
“If you felt something the rest of us didn’t, that’s a reason to see a medic.”
“That’s humiliating. They never take miners seriously.”
“I know. But the engex didn’t fix it, did it?”
Ratchet vented sharply in irritation.
“C’mon,” Ironhide added more gently. “What’s the worst that could happen if you ask for a routine systems scan?”
“Here we go! This one won’t be open long. Brace it up!” Elita-1’s clipped orders left no room for hesitation.
The tunnellers went first, in a strictly defined sequence so familiar it bordered on instinct. The medic’s servos no longer trembled with anxious anticipation; the familiar weight of the jetpack against Ratchet’s back steadied him. He identified his assigned section along the tunnel wall and, in one smooth motion, drove a magnetic support brace into place. A shaft had to be secured quickly — always.
“Lower channel is open,” Elita-1 announced, her voice carrying both through the tunnel and across the shared comm frequency.
The drillers roared past in a heavy surge of activated jetpacks. Pax flashed a grin over his shoulder before vanishing into the depths of the cut.
Their planet was alive in its own way. Tunnels opened and sealed without warning, yet the miners had learned to anticipate those shifts. Cybertron moved with enviable regularity; it was almost astonishing that the capital had avoided large-scale restructuring for so many vorns.
While the drillers searched deep within the new passage for optimal drilling points — fracturing raw ore and establishing the first transport line — the tunnellers fortified the shaft, adding more braces. They also set up a relay station for anyone needing a brief rest and laid down a secondary track for ore carts. The first shift was nearing completion when Ironhide finished installing shield generators at the mouth of the shaft and returned to assist the crews.
“Getting bored?” he asked, flicking dust off the medic’s white shoulder plate with a teasing motion.
Positioned near the mouth of the active cut, crouched beside the seismosensory blocks, Ratchet studied the readouts tracking structural stress in real time. So far, all indicators were stable. The drillers checked in over comm every fifty kliks like clockwork. Elita-1 appeared here and there, overseeing and redirecting as needed. A thin haze of dust drifted out from the active tunnel.
“No time to be bored, Hide,” Ratchet replied, rising to his feet.
“You worry too much, buddy. Relax while you can.”
Ironhide tapped the reinforced wall beside them with exaggerated nonchalance. Ratchet’s optics narrowed in warning, irritation prickling through his EM field, and Ironhide pulled his servo back. Since integrating medical directives, Ratchet had become noticeably less restrained in conversation. Ironhide suspected he was trying to counterbalance the heightened responses of his new programming to familiar stimuli. At times, it made him a genuine pain in the aft.
With a sharp click, the medic rebooted his vocoder, ready to explain — clearly and at length — why worry had become a professional necessity.
But at that exact moment, his commlink flared to life on the emergency frequency he monitored constantly in the background.
“…I tapped a vein,” Wheeljack reported tensely.
“…It’s unstable! We’ve got to go, we’ve got to move!” Pax’s voice cut in, edged with alarm, followed by the roar of jetpacks spooling up.
Ratchet snapped his faceplate toward the active cut and listened. The shaft was loud, but the trained audiosensors of an experienced tunneller easily isolated the low, barely perceptible hum of stress building within the tunnel. The scattered threads of raw ore embedded in the shaft walls flared brighter without warning.
Then, deep in the far end of the cut — half-lost in shadow — a familiar purple glow ignited: energon vapors burning off.
“Evacuate!” Elita-1 reacted instantly, positioned in the archway between the cut and the shaft.
The tunnellers still inside bolted at once. The weakening flame caught up to them at the exit, licking across their backs before dissipating into darkness. The low rumble from the tunnel’s depths intensified, joined now by the high, strained whine of overloaded support braces.
Catching a sharp spike in Ironhide’s EM field, Ratchet reached out and tapped his red shoulder, quickly assessing for serious damage. His own internal diagnostics reported superficial armor scorching, though he barely registered it.
“Your back’s smoking,” Ironhide replied distractedly, returning the gesture.
“Yours too,” Ratchet shot back, scanning the crew for worse injuries.
For a full klik, the surrounding EM fields broadcast nothing but anxiety and tightly leashed readiness. Then Elita-1 evaluated the groaning, overstressed supports and issued the order:
“Everyone out! Evacuate immediately! The tunnel is closing.”
She was addressing the drillers, but judging by the strained voices flooding the commlink, they were already pushing for the exit at maximum speed. Within another klik, the steady stream of updates shattered into a crash of noise, static interference — and a desperate scream.
The sound sent prickling tendrils beneath Ratchet’s armor. He flinched, instinctively rubbing at the base of his audial as though he could physically wipe away the sensation.
“Elita, we’ve got a trapped miner,” Pax rattled off. “Jazz is stuck! I’m falling back to assist.”
“Negative!” came the firm reply. “Do not break protocol. Evacuate!”
Ratchet stepped toward her without thinking, ready to argue. His mouth had already parted when Ironhide’s solid servo clamped onto his shoulder and hauled him back. Ironhide gave a small, grim shake of his helm.
“Don’t,” he murmured, regret threading his voice. “Her job is to minimize losses in any incident.”
“My authority in an emergency can override hers,” Ratchet shot back, surprised that the rough hiss of his overworked ventilation resolved into coherent words.
“And what are you going to do?” Ironhide seized his other shoulder and gave him a sharp shake, trying to pull him back to reason. “Run into the cut after them? Risk the only medic we’ve got?”
Ratchet never answered. A blast tore through the commlink feed, warped by static. Something detonated inside the cut — with the unmistakable crack of an overloaded jetpack tearing itself apart.
“Pax, what’s happening?” Elita-1 demanded, freezing mid-stride in the shaft.
“Nothing much. Just normal protocol-following stuff,” Orion replied, bravado firmly in place. “It’s all good.”
“Orion Pax, could you please exit the tunnel?” Elita-1’s voice softened — dangerously so, in a way everyone on the crew recognized.
An energy surge burst outward from the cut, igniting the energon filaments threaded through the walls in a brief flare. The supports inside the active zone lit up with red warning indicators as the structure took damage. Ironhide released Ratchet’s shoulders and spun, locating the shield generator he had installed at the start of the shift. The barriers were holding — for now. The miners in the shaft remained relatively safe.
Then the transformation began. The cut constricted rapidly, crushing support braces as it closed. Walls buckled under shifting masses of cybernite. Deep within the narrowing throat of the tunnel, through a haze of dust, two miner lamps flickered.
Elita-1 moved first, as expected. She hurled a support brace toward the oncoming rockbreakers, trying to slow the collapse — then another. Both crumpled as if made of low-grade aluminum. The third she drove into the walls at the very mouth of the exit and held in place manually. Pax burst into the shaft with the injured mech slung over his shoulders. D-16, sprinting behind them, grabbed Elita-1 and yanked her free from the narrowing tunnel in the final yards of their mad dash.
“Oh, Primus…!” Jazz vented, stunned.
He tumbled in a loose roll straight to Ratchet’s pedes — missing one leg, his visor flickering unevenly with pain and lingering fear. His EM field pressed hard against the medic’s, sharp and needling through Ratchet’s protoform in familiar, piercing waves.
“Lie still for a couple of kliks. I’ll handle it,” Ratchet rasped, dropping to one knee and steadying Jazz by the shoulder as he tried to push himself upright.
The driller’s visor flickered uncertainly for a moment, then he yielded to the guiding servos and leaned back.
“Right… You’re a medic now, aren’t you, Ratch?”
“Yes. And I’m glad your hard drives are intact.”
It was easy to let the medical programming take over. Beyond granting accelerated access to diagnostics, it autonomously leveled the strain in his emotional dampeners and reset his vocoder. He focused on the injury, filtering out the heated argument erupting only a few strides away — Elita-1 was dressing down Pax and D-16 for breaking protocol. And Darkwing, the mine’s overseer, had arrived amid the commotion; his habitual arrogance — earned by possession of a T-cog — did nothing to ease the tension.
Jazz’s self-repair system had already sealed the severed fuel lines at the knee joint, but his sensory clusters were still spiking erratically. Ratchet concentrated on shutting them down one by one. It took a few moments, but gradually the jagged edges of Jazz’s EM field softened. Ratchet straightened with quiet satisfaction. He didn’t need to ask — he could literally feel the change in the driller’s condition.
“You know, Ratch… they pulled me out,” Jazz vented shakily. “Pax and D-16. I told them to leave. Pax grabbed a jetpack, jammed it under the debris and—”
Ratchet hummed noncommittally through his vents as he helped Jazz to his pedes. He had seen the three of them burst from the cut, Orion carrying Jazz across his shoulders. That talkative glitch had broken protocol and risked his own life to save a partner. Unexpected for such a puffed-up slagger, but—
“Buy me a cube of high-grade after shift and we’ll call it even,” Pax chimed in with a grin, stepping up to take Jazz’s other hand.
“How about a dozen cubes for you and Dee?” Jazz echoed his tone. “When’s the next shift?”
“In two chords — assuming we’re not all fired after today.” Pax jerked his helm toward the argument still unfolding. “Elita’s already been demoted.”
Ratchet opened his mouth to urge them to get moving — Jazz’s condition was stable for now, but reconstructing his leg would take time — when another EM field pressed in against his from behind. It burned low and steady, its heated pulses unmistakably signaling injury.
He turned quickly and found D-16 standing there, frowning, one hand clamped to his jaw. A rapid visual sweep revealed strained tension cables and a faint fracture in a hydraulic actuator. Pax’s field wasn’t steady either — there was a familiar flicker of mild distress concentrated near his left audial, likely a damaged comm unit.
“All three of you are coming with me,” Ratchet ordered curtly, stepping off while making sure Pax and Jazz could match his pace.
“All three?” Orion arched his optic ridges with that insufferable grin.
“Is your linguistic firmware malfunctioning, Pax? Yes. All three,” Ratchet snapped. “D-16 has a cracked drive pin, and your comm’s misfiring.”
“You didn’t even scan me—!” Orion’s optics refocused sharply, confusion flashing across them.
Ratchet shot him a flat look, briefly wondering whether Pax’s processor had shorted out. Instead, he found something disturbingly close to awed admiration in the other mech’s expression. It made him throttle back his irritation.
“Scanning is meant to refine the diagnosis,” he explained more evenly. “I, however, feel your injuries without it.”
A miracle occurred. Orion Pax remained silent for an entire klik. Then, predictably, he failed to maintain it and flashed a grin at no one in particular.
“Our medic’s a regular miracle of Primus, wouldn’t you say?”
Ratchet didn’t believe in higher powers, but something had to rein the chatterbox in. He rolled his optics in exasperation as they walked and muttered:
“Don’t blaspheme, Pax.”