Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

The Captain had waffled between sticking around in the Medbay, or escorting Mikaela to the War Room. The girl could see it in her face; eyes narrow and considering as they sized up their errant Decepticon. In the end, however, she stayed with Mikaela, for which she was absurdly grateful. While the Captain was vehemently opposed to directly disobeying your superiors (which Mikaela was doing her best to convince herself she had not done, and almost believed it), she knew Starling wouldn't let her get thrown off the base. Or be stuck in the brig. Or…she couldn't really think of anything worse than being kicked out, so she stuffed her anxiety down somewhere unreachable and stuck her chin out.

Simmons was still attempting to breathe down her neck. But she'd faced down worse, and anyway, the Colonel was happily berating him: "Simmons, calm down. There's a new breed of bomb in Russia, commercial flights are dropping out of the sky, weapons manufacturers are going missing in the middle of Afghanistan… honestly, we've got bigger problems than one mechanic doing a little late-night tinkering."

So the odious man was silenced for the time being, though he made sure to stay at the head of the procession. His beaky nose led their way through the labyrinthine base, and was the first through the automated doors to the War Room. Guy really needs a hobby, Mikaela thought to herself with a little sigh. He's enjoying this way too much.

The War Room was what you'd expect: bare, with utilitarian chairs around an enormous holo-table that sat on the upper level, around the Autobots' line of sight. They sat in a semicircle around it, every chair facing her. From her position standing on the far side of the table, she could see that Simmons' face was flushed in triumph; Will's pale with tension. Behind them on the lower level Ratchet stood impatiently, arms crossed with a finger tapping at his forearm - fortunately for everyone except her, he had opted to backseat his rage until a more appropriate time (alone, in the medbay, with all his wrenches). Optimus' face was hard to read; calm, but there was something in the way he watched her that was unsettling. Ironhide was made conspicuous only by his absence; he was in the medbay, watching their errant Decepticon.

It was just as well; bad enough that she'd upset Ratchet, but having the others disappointed in her expounded on her guilt a thousand times over. She swallowed and wiped her hands off on her jeans surreptitiously, telling herself not to fidget. They were already staring; no need to give them any more reason to think she was more immature than she already was.

Simmons was very close to opening his mouth, but fortunately Will beat him to it. The Colonel sighed and leaned forward, lacing his fingers together carefully. "All we want to know is: did you knowingly and with intent disobey your superior, Ratchet, and bring Barricade online without any supervision?"

That one was easy. "No," she spoke adamantly. "I told you before, he wasn't hooked up to anything when he woke up, not a generator, not to the central computers…hell, I didn't even have the diagnostic gauges plugged in - "

"For crying out loud…she is lying. Can't you people see that? Or does she have to just bat those baby blues and you all roll over?" That was Simmons, naturally. His mouth was curled disdainfully in that expression only he could manage, glaring at her from his position beside the Colonel.

"That's out of line, Mr. Simmons. This is just a formal interrogation, for our records. The surveillance cams in the medical bay shorted out; not even Ratchet's completely sure what happened."

"Sure, sure. She's a troublemaker, always has been. That's what you get for letting a delinquent run the infirmary; chaos! Someone with her record shouldn't even be allowed near the kind of equipment the medical bay has stocked, much less be left to tinker around with actual people! She - "

"Am I mistaken, or did you finally admit that the Cybertronians are real people, now?" Captain Starling, from her position on the far left and closest to Mikaela, was smirking. Simmons snarled and jabbed a finger at her.

"I've got a few choice things to say about your tenure here, too, missy, and - "

"That's Captain Missy to you, Mr. Simmons. Let's not forget who helped and who hindered this entire operation back in the day."

The former Sector Seven agent's fist came down on the laminate tabletop. "You just gotta keep bringing that up, don't you? Damn Brit, why don't you fly back home across the pond where you belong."

"Enough." Optimus' voice rang through the massive room, thoroughly silencing everyone. Lennox rubbed at his mouth, trying to hide a grin. "Simmons, I am sorry to say this, but you are only exacerbating the problem, not aiding in a solution. Please: either contribute, or leave."

The Captain opened her mouth, no doubt to make a parting shot, but Optimus cut her off. "And Captain Starling, please stop baiting him. We're here for Mikaela right now; you may trade barbs at another time."

If she didn't know any better, Mikaela would swear that the stoic pilot was pouting. Must have been her imagination.

Optimus finally turned towards the mechanic. The girl in question held her hands up. "Don't look at me; I'm just here to be accused of something I had no control over."

Ratchet glared. "This isn't a laughing matter, Mikaela. I gave you explicit orders to not work on that thing, and you deliberately disobeyed me!"

She gulped and looked down at her bandaged hands, just barely restraining herself from correcting his choice of words. Now really wasn't the time.

The sigh from Optimus' vents ruffled the Colonel's hair, which he furtively patted back into place before speaking again. "Our CMO is right; this is a matter between the two of you, honestly. He's your superior, and he gave you an order which you ignored. It should be settled the same way. Does that sound reasonable, Optimus?"

The large mech nodded somberly. Simmons sputtered, "Wait just a second! This involves more than just two people, you know; any harm that thing does to anyone or anything as a result of her meddling will be on her head. I say her punishment should be the vote of all the officers, not just the Doc's."

Ratchet shifted, his mouth pursing; Mikaela realized that he must be communicating with Optimus via comm. Her stomach plummeted down to her toes. Finally her boss spoke. "No, Simmons. This involves her and me, alone. I am her CO, therefore I am the one directly responsible for her actions, for good or for ill."

Optimus nodded his support. Lennox leaned back with a relieved exhale, and Starling looked smug. Simmons groaned and tossed up his hands. "Fine, whatever. I just hope one of her punishments is the ole 'scrub the entire bathroom with a toothbrush' scenario. If I may suggest that, Doc."

Mikaela thought Ratchet looked far too thoughtful just then. "We shall see," was all he replied; but she could make out the start of a diabolical gleam in Ratchet's optics, and despaired.

Alexis had volunteered to escort her back to her quarters, first making a pit stop in the humans' common area to swipe some Twinkies; the girl suspected that had been her motive all along. At least the pilot was generous; she tossed two at the girl, before pocketing another two for herself and unwrapping a third. Woman had a sweet tooth.

"How's the hand?" Mikaela glanced down at her bandaged appendage, having forgotten about it in the uproar. She shrugged.

"Eh."

"That's good, then."

"It was impaled. Of course it still hurts." Though now that she was paying attention to it, she realized that it had hardly bothered her at all this morning. She squeezed her fist experimentally, but it barely twinged. Well, that antiseptic was some heavy-duty stuff.

The Captain made a considering noise. From out the corner of her eye Mikaela saw her roll her shoulders, as if throwing off a weight. With a scowl the girl turned to her, walking backwards down the hall to face the Captain. "How are you?"

When the woman gave her an incredulous look, Mikaela realized that she must not get that question very often, and immediately felt guilty. She shrugged again, tossing her Twinkie back and forth between her hands. "You just look…" - Nervous, grumpy, exhausted - "…tired."

"Hmm. Yes, let's turn the spotlight off of you for a moment, shall we?" Her voice was very dry as she eyed the girl in front of her. Then she shook her head in resignation. "I am…a little. Dreams. Homesick, you know."

She did know. "Talked to any of your family since you got here?"

Alexis shook her head, mouth tucking in at the corners the way it did when she was worried. "Can't reach them. They've gone dark, and no one can or will tell me where they are."

'Going dark' in military lingo meant that they were completely off the grid. Mikaela made a sympathetic noise. She'd only met the family as a whole once, when Alexis had been hospitalized after Mission City. While the other two brothers she had deemed decent enough, the head of the family, James, was someone she hoped fervently to never meet again. If she did she wasn't sure she would be able to control herself, and would either run crying out of the room, or deck him and then run. Alexis saw the look on her face before she could wipe it away, and snorted.

"Yes, a little bit of my family goes a long way, I'm afraid." Then she sighed, and proceeded to devour her Twinkie in two bites. Mikaela stifled a laugh; sometimes it was too obvious that she had been raised in an all-male environment.

Starling narrowed her eyes as the girl continued to walk backward, easily dodging the two personnel they passed on the way back to the bay. "So. you've got some explaining to do."

Mikaela scowled, continuing her backwards momentum. Time for another segue. "You know, you're awfully chatty this morning."

"I'm only curious as to why I was rousted out of bed at 0500 on my day off to babysit."

The girl hadn't realized that. "Oh. Well, they didn't have to get you -"

"Yes, they did. I'm by far the crankiest and least likely to let you talk me into anything. I have the Ratchet seal of approval."

A second Twinkie was inhaled, and Mikaela remembered she still had one in her hand. "Hey, you got me the chocolate ones. Thanks."

"It's a bribe so you'll be less inclined to ditch me and go haring off somewhere you're not supposed to be."

"Fair enough."

"Door."

"What - uff." Mikaela sidestepped the med bay door that had whisked open a shade too slow. "There's a door there."

Finally, she was able to coax a small smile from the taciturn blonde. Small victories, she thought, and flashed her a smile of her own before turning back around to take a closer look around the lab.

It was empty, quiet. Her belly twisted nervously. He was fine, she told herself. Ironhide probably just shunted him into the back. Glancing back around at Starling, she started to say, "I'm just going to go check – "

"Ahh, no. No, you're going straight up these stairs and you will stay put. Colonel's orders. Ratchet is going to be giving the Decepticon an assessment as soon as he gets back, so there is absolutely no need for you to be anywhere else but upstairs. Now, get."

"But he knows me, it will be easier for everyone if I could just – "

"Mikaela, I said no." Starling's tone was flat, and rung with the kind of authority that Mikaela associated with four a.m. drills.

She stifled a sigh. It was one thing to talk down Ironhide; Captain Starling was a different animal, and anyway, no amount of teenage grumbling would convince her to go against a direct order from a superior. So with stiff shoulders and a scowl Mikaela turned up her staircase, attempting not to stomp as she went. They already had her pegged as a truculent child, and right now she needed to show them that dammit, she was a - mostly - mature adult and could be trusted to act accordingly. Still, she couldn't resist one more try.

"You do realize that of all the people here, Ironhide and Ratchet are probably the worst two choices to watch him?"

"Do you realize that you are, in fact, in quite a bit of trouble, and shouldn't concern yourself with anything else right now?"

Mikaela grimaced. Touché.

The two sat in semi-comfortable silence for the better part of an hour, Mikaela spinning lazily in her desk chair while Starling reclined with her feet propped up on the work table. The girl felt the pilot eyeing her placidly from time to time, but it took her a while to speak again. When she finally did, her voice was low and abrupt in the enclosed space.

"How did you do it?"

Mikaela caught herself on her desk, bringing her chair to a halt. That was certainly a good question. She wished she knew how to answer it. She squirmed under her friend's level gaze, feeling her mouth twist. When she replied, as usual it wasn't a direct answer, but a question of her own.

"So, the cameras really were down?" Mikaela somehow wasn't too surprised by that; she suspected Barricade was involved somehow, whether he'd been aware of it or not. Strange things were happening left and right, so why not this?

Alexis grunted, staring at the girl from over steepled fingers. "Yes. Very convenient, one could say."

Once could definitely say. She snorted to herself. Well, at least no one had been witness to her more embarrassing acts, such as falling off the table. Small mercies and all that.

The Captain's brows were raised as she watched the girl waffle, and she visibly stifled a sigh. Mikaela bit her lip; the time to stall was over. She squeezed her left hand into a fist, feeling the bandage cut into her palm. Amazing, really, that it didn't hurt more than it did. But she was distracting herself again.

"Honestly? The generator wasn't hooked up. Neither was the diagnostic gauge. The computers…I'd detached everything. So I have no fragging idea what I did. One minute I was closing up his spark chamber, and the next…the next thing…"

- not going to break -

- my designation is -

"Mikaela." That was the Captain. Sitting across from her, in her lab. On Diego Garcia. For those few seconds, she'd lost herself again. Starling's face slowly swam back into focus; the other woman was scowling furiously. "What happened? The truth, now, all of it."

She took a bracing breath, letting it out slowly. The taste of metal coated her tongue; she'd bitten into her lip. She was bleeding far too much these days. Mikaela shook her head, whether to clear it or in denial of the truth that only she knew, she couldn't be sure. When she spoke again, her voice was small and tenuous.

"He just…woke up, Alexis. I finished the coding, connected the cables to his spark chamber, and the next thing I know, he's staring at me like I interrupted his nap."

Green eyes narrowed. "I was informed that Ratchet was in charge of the coding."

Frag. She squirmed beneath the Captain's gimlet stare. "I might have…tweaked things just a little. Ratchet, he's, you know…a genius and all, but he doesn't know everything about this planet, and I just noticed a few things that -"

"You reprogrammed him? By yourself?" Starling's arms had dropped to the arm rests of her chair, and she sunk her nails into the cheap foam. "Good God, girl, I thought you were at least more responsible than that! This is a military operation and that machine is the property of the U.S. government! He's not a bloody video game!"

Immediately Mikaela's hackles went up. She wasn't stupid. She wasn't incompetent. And she was sick of everyone judging her by her looks and her age; it seemed even her so-called friends didn't think that highly of her. A fucking video game, seriously? She bit her lip deliberately this time, letting the sharp little sting fuel her ire. "I don't give a good goddamn about the government; they were going to brainwash him!"

Starling's brows hit her hairline. "Beg pardon?"

Mikaela felt something like a snarl rising from her throat. She slammed a fist onto her desk, distantly hearing something clatter to the floor from the force of the blow. "You heard me. And he's not just a machine, he's a person! He has feelings, and thoughts! He's not just some weapon of mass destruction like all you people seem to want!"

The Captain had gone still during the girl's tirade. As the echo of her voice died, Starling leaned forward, eyes locked on hers. "As I seem to recall, Mikaela, this little project was your idea. Wasn't that part of your winning argument? Another gun for our arsenal?"

"That's not fair -"

Starling burst out laughing. It wasn't a nice laugh; mockery twisted through it, lending to it a bitterness that stung behind Mikaela's eyes. It disoriented the girl so much that she fumbled, nearly falling out of her chair in shock. She sucked in an unsteady breath, willing the tears not to fall, dammit. She was going to be mature, and keep her cool, and oh Primus don't you dare cry, girl. Suck it up.

The Captain leaned back in her seat, all traces of humor gone as suddenly as it had materialized. Absently she pressed her knuckles to her mouth as she studied the teenager sitting across from her. "Fair. Let's talk about fair, Mikaela. The government has granted you, a civilian, a teenager, an all-access backstage pass to the strangest show on Earth. We trust you. You are privy to secrets that other governments would kill for. By all rights you should be quarantined and never let off this base again during your natural life. But you're not. You've practically got the run of the place. You are trusted with highly advanced equipment, dangerous assets. You asked for this project. You wanted to be useful. To contribute to the advancement of this organization's goals. But what do you do the second our backs are turned? You bloody sabotage it!" And she slammed a fist down onto the armrest, rattling the economical frame.

"So tell me, girl, what exactly isn't fair."

You little hypocrite. Starling's face spoke the words her mouth wouldn't. She wasn't the kind to lower herself to name-calling. Mikaela looked everywhere but at her, watering eyes searching desperately for an answer in her keyboard, her bitten fingernails, the floor. It didn't work, as she felt the other's eyes burning into her skull. Biting down hard on her lip, she spoke to her sneakers.

"They were going to brainwash him. And it was all my idea. It was my idea, Alexis. I was going to take away his ability to choose and think for himself, and that's what's not fair. " She pulled her watering eyes up to her friend's, trying to make her see, to understand: that she'd made a huge mistake, she'd finally realized; the further they got along with the project, the more obvious it had become. And in the end, she wouldn't, couldn't, let herself go through with it.

"You didn't see him, Alexis. When he woke up. You didn't hear him, asking all those questions, so confused, he didn't even know what an alt mode was. Who the Autbots were. The Decepticons. He doesn't - he doesn't even know who he is."

Starling made a movement then, as if to say something, but Mikaela cut her off, voice cracking. "And I was going to take even that from him, I was going to take away his ability to ask, to wonder, to think - I had to give him that, Alexis, I had to give him the right to ask. To have your choices taken from you - is one of the most horrible things I can think of."

At least some part of what she'd said affected Starling, so much that the woman flinched, green eyes sliding away from her own and staring hard at something over her shoulder. Both women were quiet for a very long time.

Then it happened. Alexis had just opened her mouth to speak again, when a wall-shaking barroom reverberated up from below. Mikaela actually fell out of her chair, and the Captain was on her feet not half a second after. Shouts echoed from the room beneath them, and then came what Mikaela immediately recognized as Barricade's voice: "I warned you what would happen if you kept pointing that at me."

Lord have mercy, her gramma's voice whispered, and Mikaela fervently agreed. Alexis hoisted the girl to her feet, and together they ran for the exit. "I told you Ratchet and Ironhide didn't make the best babysitters," Mikaela panted as they bolted down the stairs. Alexis' only response was to pull her Glock from its holster and pull it into ready position.

As they hit the last step, Mikaela tumbled to an abrupt halt. There was an Autobot-sized body image scanner imbedded in the wall directly ahead of them, still quivering from the impact. Both women spun to face the rest of the room, searching for the cause. It only took a moment, then Mikaela laid eyes on a seething Ratchet, and a very unapologetic looking Barricade. He straightened at the sight of her, and gestured to the enraged medic, not seeming to care about his impending doom. "I thought medics were supposed to do no harm, or something like that. This - "

"Gonna stop you right there, buddy." Mikaela talked over him, hoping fervently that Barricade's armor could withstand Ratchet's rotary saw that was hanging from the ceiling nearby. Said mech was currently backing towards it with a deadly purpose. "No one throws Ratchet's equipment but Ratchet. Why don't you just - come - over here - with - me…" She scooted towards him carefully, getting as close to the explosive situation as she dared, all the while making what she hoped were non-threatening gestures towards her staircase.

Her Decepticon's face was set in mulish lines, reminding her strongly of an righteously indignant teenager. She nearly expected him to stomp a foot next. She grit her teeth. "Now, please? Right now."

Ratchet was nearly to his saw. Her gaze bounced back and forth between the two; she didn't dare take her eyes off either of them, even as she spoke an aside to Starling, who had her handgun raised, frame steady and still beside her. "Please don't call for anyone. Oh, my God, please don't. Let me deal with this."

The pilot made a noise low in her throat; Mikaela pretended it was a sound of assent rather than disgust. She raised her voice, hoping it didn't shake as she spoke to Ratchet, trying to distract him. "Why don't I take him off your hands, boss; I'll just take him to my lab upstairs and get him away from the main floor. Mmk?" She continued to make imploring, get-over-here-right-now-Mister gestures, to which Barricade finally, reluctantly, yielded.

Both Starling and Ratchet wore matching expressions of mistrust and possibly homicidal thoughts as they watched Barricade skulk up the staircase, never taking their eyes off of him. Ratchet hmphed. "Mikaela, you should not be alone with him; I didn't manage to get enough readings from his system to run a full - "

"I can run the diagnostic, Ratch, I promise. I'll do it right now, and send it to you as soon as I'm done."

"But his weapons system is online, Mikaela, I could not possibly let - "

"He's programmed to not hurt humans, remember? And Alexis is right here! With a gun! See the gun? It'll be fine. Alexis, tell him it'll be fine. I have to go now, my patient is waiting."

And she dashed back up the stairs after Barricade, leaving a seething Ratchet and a cursing Alexis behind her.

TBC.