Dilemma

Summary: When Sunblazer reaches Earth's solar system, , she finds herself in trouble, both from the composition of the system, and her own fears.

Rating: T

Warning: OC-centric

Disclaimer: Transformers belongs to Hasbro and DreamWorks/Paramount, not me.

Author's Notes: This story is a sequel to "Two Sisters, Three Choices" and occurs after Rian's story "The New Arrival." This story concerns Sunblazer's arrival.

Dilemma

Chapter One

An Unremarkable Solar System.

Sunblazer

It really had been a lousy couple of millennia.

First of all, there had been that Decepticon sneak attack that had caused the members of our space-travelling group in our cometary forms to scatter, to fight, flee, or escape to allow self-repair to take place. I had no idea if any of the members of our group had found each other to continue that journey, but by the time I had fought off or fled my own pursuers, I was far from where I had started, and upon cautiously returning, found nobody at that location, friend or foe. For the second time since reaching sub adult status, I had become separated from my younger sibling. Some big sister I was turning out to be!

I could not call her without risking calling foes down upon my head, who would be alert for any signals, particularly those of Autobots, who they would ruthlessly pursue until they lost them, of found and battled them. For the same reason, she could not risk trying to contact me.

Then I had spent much of the remaining time trying to trace either other Autobots, or a likely direction to head in. I found nothing tio indicate the presence of either.

Things had began to seem better when I had picked up, from quite a distance away, a signal from Optimus Prime, a call to arms. I at least now had a direction to head for, and I did so with renewed hope and purpose.

I was less than halfway there when there was a new message from our leader. It was a mysterious message, only stating that the planet they were on could be seen as a "new place to call home" and calling Any Autobots still out in Space to come and join them. The message simply ended "we are here. We…are waiting."

That, of course, explained little.

I headed towards the signal, looking forwards to finding some of my Autobot comrades, amongst them, I hoped, my sister Rian. Upon closer investigation, Optimus' signal originated on a small planet in an unremarkable solar system on the edge of an arm of a frankly mediocre spiral galaxy.

It was when I reached the solar system in question that I ran into trouble.

As usual, I didn't think to check approach angle that carefully, after all, the outermost satellites were so small that they were not worth worrying about. I didn't stop to think that the greater-sized bodies might be a big problem. The outer two were not, and it was only as I approached the ringed planet to investigate closer that I began to realise that pulling away from its gravity would take more energy than I had thought it would.

After finally managing to escape its gravity, by expending more energy than I had really wanted to, I found the massive world further in was also a problem, gravitywise, I had underestimated its effect, and again had to expend more energy to get out of its sphere of influence then I had wanted to. Perhaps if that had been the last problem I had to face, I would still have landed in better circumstances than I did, but then I began to receive signals, - audio, visual, and data - from the destination world.

The world was populated by intelligent beings.

I tapped into them to learn the language, culture, and hopefully to learn a little about whatever had happened to my Autobot comrades, and the Decepticons that were bound to have followed, and may even have been waiting for them. The most important question, that I was searching for the answer to, was, had the AllSpark been located, and by which side?

The 'Internet' of this world was able to tell me all that I needed in fragments - a bit here, a video clip there, a mention in a personal account somewhere else - to piece together the gist of what I needed to know. The Autobots had won the battle held in a city, and Megatron, the long-lost leader of the Decepticons, had been found on earth and perished during the fight, but the AllSpark had also been destroyed, thus lost to both sides forever.

The Allspark was the source of the Sparks that were put into bodies, either adult and child, with an appropriate amount of data pre-loaded into the processors. To my knowledge, we had almost all come to consciousness this way: AllSpark-birthed, craftsmech-built, the product of Cube and craftsmech becoming a new person. It was how our race had reproduced, although it was rumoured that a mech-femme Spark-merge could bring forth new Sparks. Frowned upon as blasphemous by many, it would now be the only way the Cybertronian race could be furthered.

Femme-Sparks were very rare: one femme for every four or five hundred mech Sparks brought forth from the Cube. Rian and I were unusual in being sisters, but as both our parental units' occupations had been as caretaker-guardians if the AllSpark, they had asked for two femme Sparks to be assigned to them As femme sparks were so rare, and other requests for femme Sparks came in as well, some with higher priority, was why Rian and I had two millennia between us.

I had no way of knowing if any of the other femmes who had left Cybertron were still alive. Even Rian, I realised, could have been killed in battle, met with an accident, or even, in certain dire circumstances, have destroyed her own processor clusters. It could be that I was the only femme to have reached this world, to have answered (or been able to answer) Optimus' call. If so, I feared that in the face of the alternative, my role could change, from soldier to a replacement for the AllSpark. This was, obviously, a role I did not want to be given, or be forced to take on.

I was faced with a dilemma. I now had two options open to me. I could proceed with my original plan-which was to go and find my Autobot comrades, and hope they had another idea, or would at least give me a choice, or going on the run, on my own, avoiding both sides, for although I knew the Autobots had always respected freedom, I didn't know if this would hold up, in my case, against the possibility of racial extinction.

Of course, if I went on the run, I risked being found and captured by Decepticons - some of whom, according to the Internet, had survived the battle and remained on Earth. If that were to happen, I suspected that I would have no say in my probable use to them, and swore to extinguish my own Spark if I had the chance before I let that happen to me-the 'extreme circumstances' I mentioned before that might have forced that same choice on my sister, Rian.

I was roughly brought out of my reflections by an impact on my cometary form. I scanned the immediate area, and would have gasped if I could have. Where had all these slagging rocks come from?

I checked the Internet. The humans knew of them, it was a belt of debris that had failed to become a planet. My problem now was that I was in the middle of it, and was getting the frag beaten out of my systems.

My cometary configuration was pretty tough, was designed to be, but nobody had forseen it taking a repeated barrage of very large and blunt instruments. I was low on energy thanks to the gas giants and my long journey, and I managed to program in an area to land in, close to the signal origin point, as my nav equipment was deep inside me and fairly well protected. Then I locked down, and tried to get through the asteroid belt intact.

Several of my systems were damaged as I traversed the asteroid belt, and I was glad that the fourth planet, and the third planet's natural satellite were not large enough or close enough to give me trouble, which was just as well, because by the time I entered the third planet's atmosphere I was suffering damage in several systems, was semi-online due to low energy levels, and only just able to guide my cometary form to land within the area I had specified.

I felt the entry into the atmosphere, felt my form heating up, felt the impact of my landing, and then I offlined entirely.