Dear Karma

A Transformers Story

Co-written by Mein Benutzername and A Humble Reader

Note: Well. Here it is. It's been a while, but we're much more available to each other to work on this lately. We hope you enjoy the latest installment.

Words: 3911

Pages: 12

Chapter 7

Those Who Panic Prosper

In which a little desperation goes a long way to getting what you want. Unforeseen consequences not-withstanding.

Alright. Steady, deep breaths. That's what they tell you, right? People are supposed to take several slow, steady, deep breaths to calm down.

Sam let a puff of air rush past her lips as she wiped at her eyes again. She had a little breakdown in the janitor's closet. Whatever. She was tough, she could handle this.

At least, that's was what she had been telling herself for the past three and a half minutes. She was still feeling that terror from the hanger. Seeing the gun come alive and glowing like it was the sun.

You could kill someone with that, with a gun. Guns were for killing people. That was literally their only purpose. It was kinda terrifying when she really thought about it. An object created for the sole purpose of murder.

But she needed to move past all of that. So Sam wiped away her tears and scowled in the relative darkness of the tiny closet she was hiding in. Her eyes had adjusted through her crying session, and she could see the faint outline of a mop and a broom leaning against one corner, and an itching in her nose that she guessed was that nasty chemical smell from cleaners. Her nose was a little too messed up to register much of anything at the moment.

Sniffling again, Sam braced herself against the floor, and then slowly clambered to her feet, wiping her hand under her nose and sniffing grossly. She cursed when she kicked some kind of toolbox in her attempt to stand, and awkwardly cradled her foot while she leant against some shelves until it stopped hurting so much.

"I hate crying." She mumbled quietly. It felt good to hear her own voice again. Maybe she was going crazy, with this whole talking out loud thing, but she really needed it at the moment. "It just sucks. It doesn't do anything, just makes you feel sick and look ugly." She shuffled around in place, shifting her weight from one foot to the other with her arms crossed and her shoulders hunched. Her eyes darted around the small, crowded closet space.

So, she ran away from the absolutely terrifying monsters and bastards in the hanger, but now she was at a loss. All she really knew was that she was done, absolutely done, with all of the government bullshit. She didn't want to stay here for another week, she couldn't stay here, it would drive her crazy (er).

So maybe she'd just leave?

Yes, okay, so when put in so many words, it didn't sound like anything other than stupid, but the more she thought about it, the more it made sense. She didn't really have to listen to these people! What if they weren't even actually a part of the government!?

"Everyone is busy trying to calm down *Gun-arm McGee in the hanger." She thought aloud, bringing her hand up to wipe away another sniffle absently. "It was...pretty crazy in there. I've only been gone for a little bit, they're probably still trying to talk it down, or restrain it, or something." She stared blankly at the floor as she thought it all out in her head.

She was on the ground floor. Everyone was probably converging on the...the main hanger. (She remembered that Will said it was the main hanger. Of all the things to remember.)For the moment, she had been forgotten. Heck, she wasn't even actually supposed to be in the hanger. Anyone else who knew about her situation would think she was safe and sound in the break room, except for Will and Ba-uttface McLiar pants. The second.

She could do this. She had to do this. There was no way she could handle the robots again. She would go insane. She would pee herself with fear. She was surprised she hadn't already.

It was a bad plan. It could hardly even be counted as a plan, actually, but it was all that she had. It probably wasn't ever going to work. But...

"Let go, or I'll rip your arms off!"

No. Sam shivered and hunched in on herself a little. She stepped forward and opened the door.

"Nope." She whispered quietly, glancing around the hall for anyone coming. "Hop on the Nope train, Sunny, we're headed to Fuck-That Ville." Quietly, she closed the door behind her and began tip-toeing softly down the hall, in the opposite direction she came.

She disliked her nickname. All of her nicknames, as unfortunately they were numerous. But she wanted a reminder of something normal. Stupid Anna and her dumb nicknames. She smiled thinly, and hardened her resolve to get as far away from this insane asylum as she could possibly manage.

She didn't recall much from her mad-dash out of the hanger. All that she knew was that she left the hanger and went into some kind of arched hallway, kind of like the hanger itself, actually, before running into an actual building and then getting herself lost in the halls.

She guessed it was like a big interconnected base thing above ground, like in the movies. But now, of course, she was presented with a very important question;

How did she find her way out?

"Fantastic." She muttered. Sam cast a glance around the hallway, looking for some kind of clue that would help her out. That's when she saw the sign with arrows pointing conveniently towards the labs, secondary hangers three and four, and...

The exit.

"Holy shit." She whispered, walking up to the sign so she could stare at it incredulously for a moment. Did she really have that kind of luck? Was she actually going to get outside of this god-forsaken building for the first time in a week?

Yes.

She was motionless for about another three seconds before she spun on her heel, sneakers squeaking on the linoleum as she darted down the hall. There it was, a glorious, glowing, red exit sign waiting for her above the door to freedom. Sam burst out of the hallway as though the hounds of hell were on her heels, breathing heavily. (More accurately, she stumbled.)

"Dear god." She gasped, bending over and putting her hands on her knees. "A thirty second sprint and I'm wheezing like an eighty year old woman." After catching her breath, Sam straightened up and scowled out into the desert landscape in front of her. "I am so out of shape."

And so her escape mission began anew.

From what she could see...it was kind of huge. It was more like a complex instead of just a few interconnected buildings; so basically it was a bunch of interconnected buildings – but not all of them were interconnected. How helpful.

Okay, this was fine, this was cool. She could handle this. It wasn't like there was, oh, you know, a barbed wire fence, some jeeps driving around the border, some people guarding the only exit she could see off to her left...

No, of course there wasn't. Whatever gave you that idea? Crazy, that.

She took a moment to drag her hands down her face and reconsider exactly what she was doing.

"What am I doing...?" Perhaps reconsider wasn't the right word. It was more like she began to question her sanity. "Then again," She mumbled, her hands still pressed against her face as though to hide her from her problems, "it'd probably be more insane to stay..." Sam sighed and let her arms drop to her sides.

She would do this because she had to do this. She had to get away from...that. Sam looked back at the door she had just come out of. She huffed a breath of air and then turned around again.

She had just come out of what she was assuming, for better or for worse, was the main building, since it had to be connected to the main hanger she was originally in. Sam sidled along the wall and to her left so that she was closer to the exit of the compound.

A jeep rumbled by, kicking up a large cloud of dust, but it was driving along the fence, and way too far away to notice her. Probably too far away. Hopefully.

The gate-fence-exit-thingy she had made her goal had barbed wire fences on either side of two towers, that may or may not have had people at the top. She was going to play it safe and assume that they did. There was another, smaller tower in between them, with some of the liftable-lowerable bar-things. It was basically a toll gate. (She had no idea what those things were actually called, but that was exactly what it looked like. Toll gate. Okay. Deep breaths.)

"Alright, Sam, how you gonna do this?" She murmured quietly. She had herself pressed against the wall, but she was probably pretty visible, so she revised her position and instead moved into a crouch. "I'm out of the building. Okay...now I just have to get past the barbed wire, and the toll gate." She began rubbing the palms of her hands into her eyes.

"But how," she growled, feeling her frustration build, "am I supposed to do that? Ugh." Sam let her hands drop limply to her sides and leaned herself against the wall, still in an awkward crouch. Her head tilted itself upwards, as though the answer she was looking for would be displayed proudly in the heavens for her to see.

"Well...how do people escape places in movies?" She really didn't know why she was talking out loud. That meant you were going crazy, right? She ended the train of thought, because nagging feeling in the back of her brain made her feel like she had followed that pathway before. Like, five minutes before.

"Usually it's something epic," she continued, shifting into a sitting position and closing her eyes. The backs of her eyelids looked red from the midday sun. "You know, steal a car, plow through the gate, miraculously don't get shot, and then save the day. Ta-da..." Except, there was really no day for her to save, so that part was kind of pointless and unavailable to her as an option.

"Or they convince someone who works at the place they've been held in to help them escape." Sam snorted to herself derisively. "Fat chance, Sunny." Anna would say something like that, wouldn't she? (Gone for a week, feels like months...)

"So stealing a vehicle is out. So is getting a turncoat. What else? Somebody come into save them...not happening. They have...laser eyes...uhm..." Sam's thoughts were racing. She was sitting here, talking to herself like some kind of crazy person (and she wasn't crazy, thank you very much), trying to figure out how to pull a jail break and get away from a top secret military conspiracy base of doom.

She wanted to scream. She was still a bundle of hormones and emotions after her mini-panic attack in the janitor's closet.

God damn it, why couldn't she think of a way out!?

Sam stood abruptly, shoving herself off of the ground so roughly that she almost overbalanced herself. Once she was steady, she faced the wall and splayed her palms against warm stone, eyes shut tight. From metal hanger to concrete buildings. Military base. Trapped. She was trapped. She couldn't get out.

"God Damn it!" She finally shouted, pushing off of the wall and then kicking it with a lot more force than she should have if she wanted to keep from hurting her foot.

The same foot that she had already stubbed her toe on back in her shitty janitor's closet.

"Ow ow ow ow OW!" She hissed. Sam hopped around like a headless chicken for just a little bit until she managed to sit back down again. What the heck was with her and hurting her feet? It happened all the god damn time!

"First," She spat, holding her foot in her hands gingerly, "I get a piece of glass stuck in my foot, and then keep on walking like an idiot, only to be dragged into conspiracy theory wonderland. Then, after I've been allowed some normalcy - only to be dragged back into the loony bin, mind you! - I stub my toe on that freaking toolbox, and not even like, ten minutes later decide to kick the freaking concrete wall like the absolute biggest-!" Sam paused in her angry tirade, mouth still hanging open as something occurred to her quite suddenly.

Toolbox. She had stubbed her toe on a toolbox, earlier. Well, how was it that the people in the movies got out of prisons and top secret bases?

With tools.

She scrambled to her feet, pain (mostly) forgotten, and went barreling back in the direction she came.

She could get back inside, hopefully remember her way to the janitor's closet, get something out of the toolbox, or see if maybe they had a shovel, and –

She was rattling the door handle frantically, but nothing was happening. The door wouldn't budge. She even kicked at it a few times, (with her uninjured foot), but there was nothing. Nada. Zip. Zero. The door was locked, and remained steadfastly so. The number pad on the wall beside the handle blinked little red lights at her mockingly.

"Come on, come on!" Sam pleaded to no one. Seriously? This couldn't be happening; she had a way out, past the fence, and all she needed was something from the stupid freaking janitor's closet. She was so close, she was so close! "Just open up!" she begged, "Just open up so I can get something to get past the fence with! Please!" She wiggled the handle one more time. The door still didn't open.

Sam sighed and rested her forehead against the door, trying to keep herself from crying all over again. She was acting like an emotional baby, she told herself, and she needed to toughen up and take it like a man.

But she still felt close to tears. For a second there, she really thought she might have had a chance to get away from this. And she had missed it by a hair.

Now, she would just have to wait outside for the commotion to die down, wait for somebody to go looking for her and bring her back into her little prison cell of a room. More tests. More liars. She didn't want to.

Click.

For a moment, Sam almost thought that she had imagined it. There was really no way. Not a snowball's chance in hell. But she lifted her head from the door regardless, and tentatively, fingers just barely shaking with nerves, rested her hand back on the handle.

She turned her wrist, and pulled. The door swung out.

It was unlocked.

Overall, it had been a tiring couple of *orns. Not that Soundwave would ever admit that aloud. Part of his job was to look stoic and intimidating, which was a bonus, because honestly? It wasn't that hard.

The reason it had been a tiring couple of orns was annoying, arrogant, purple, and had wings.

After Skywarp botched what should have been a relatively simple retrieval mission of an unknown but potentially valuable artifact, it was discovered that this possibly useful, possibly useless sphere was actually one of the most legendary constructs in the history of their race.

They retrieved the globe, yes, and due to the nature of Skywarp's abilities, the Autobots would most likely be scrambling to search the outer edges of the solar system looking for it. (They would, quite logically, assume that Skywarp teleported outside the range of their sensors and left for the war front in space, when in reality, it remained on the human's own planet.)

It should have been a huge victory, the acquisition of an incredibly powerful weapon that might be able to win them the war. (Though that was a fool's thinking. This war was endless.)

There were, however, a few...problems.

Firstly, no one knew how to access the power of the Novus Globe. The first order of business was that. Except that in the preliminary scans, a cyber-signature lock was detected.

The function of the lock was fairly simple; it was designed to latch onto the first sentient cyber-signature, hailing from Cybertron, that it came across when in perceived peril. It might have been locked onto whatever protector was guarding it so long ago, but the program was coded to fall dormant if the signature deactivated, or if the threat abated. Therefore, since the lock was open but searching for a signal when it reached the earth (as read by the logs), the globe should have been coded to Skywarp. It was not.

It quickly became clear that something within the Globe was damaged, either in transit or by Skywarp's idiocy. Whatever the cause, the Globe was already locked onto another signature somewhere, acquired not long after reaching the planet. This also shouldn't have been a problem, because they could eventually track down whatever bot the globe was coded to and deactivate them swiftly.

But the coding was corrupted, the signature untraceable, and after nearly an entire earthen month of cleaning and defragmenting and reconstructing, Soundwave found out what the corruption was.

The Signature Lock was defective. Somehow, part of its programming was corrupted in space – or maybe even in its long entombment - and the globe no longer possessed the ability to distinguish between Cybertronian cyber-signatures, or the signature of another mechanical sentient.

Or, for that matter, the bio-signature of an organic one.

The globe was coded to the bio-signature of one of the "intelligent" lifeforms that scurried across the surface of the planet dirt like so many tiny insects.

And it was all Skywarp's fault.

Not that Skywarp was aware of Soundwave's ire. But that didn't really matter. He could find himself some kind of petty revenge another day. What was important was that he had finally found the core of the corruption, and would be able to get started on tracking the bio-signature.

In all likelihood, it was probably that human adolescent that the Seeker had glossed over in his report. He claimed that the Autobots had arrived and "rescued" the human almost immediately after he acquired the globe, but Soundwave knew for a fact that wasn't true. Not only did Skywarp's very own personal logs (nothing was secret from him) detail almost the exact opposite, but it was well known that Skywarp tended to play with his "food."

Soundwave shrugged off his irritation in favor of locating the adolescent in question. At the very least, he had finally reconstructed what he could of the cyber-signature lock's primary coding, though not all of it was salvageable. The lock was only the first problem – further scans revealed that the lock was only the least of the corruption within the core's matrix, and he had only scratched the surface.

The Globe was heavily corrupted, even in some of its most basic, automatic functions. It was old. For all anyone knew, the legends of the Globe were nothing but whimsical tales told as bedtime stories to younglings at the height of the golden age. It was very, very possible, and incredibly likely, that the globe was nothing more than a particularly well-remembered, but overall useless hunk of metal.

Soundwave was wasting valuable time and resources on this effectively worthless planet. The Globe was just another of the many dead-ends Megatron's quest for dominance had led to.

But it wasn't his place to question his leader's decisions, at least not in this. No matter how useless he thought the project was, it was his duty to do as Megatron asked. So he did.

Attaching the globe to a clean datapad, Soundwave did a scan of the United States. It was unlikely that the key had fled the nation, and even less likely that the Autobots even had reason to suspect she was afflicted in some way. In fact, it was almost certain that she remained in the same territory the globe was recovered from. He set the parameters to cover the entire continent anyway.

SCAN: COMPLETE.

INCONCLUSIVE. SIGNATURE NOT DETECTED.

That was impossible. There was no way that the Autobots could have detected the lock without the globe. They were not even aware that they needed a key, or that there was even a lock to begin with.

Soundwave ran the scan again.

SCAN: COMPLETE.

INCONCLUSIVE. SIGNATURE NOT DETECTED.

Soundwave only barely resisted allowing a violent burst of static to escape his vocalizer. Swiftly, he enlarged the area of the scan and ran it again.

SCAN: COMPLETE.

INCONCLUSIVE. SIGNATURE NOT DETECTED.

The signature was not anywhere within north or south America. He enlarged the scan to encompass the entire planet, and a small portion of space beyond its atmosphere.

SCAN: COMPLETE.

INCONCLUSIVE. SIGNATURE NOT DETECTED.

That was impossible. Either the signal was being blocked, the signature was too weak to detect, or his scans were faulty. Obviously, the latter of these options could not be the case.

Soundwave resolutely set the scan to run continuously and finally moved his attentions to something less frustrating than the Globe and its corrupted coding.

Just a few breems later, his scan came up positive.

Quickly and efficiently he returned to the scan and zeroed in on the bio-signature's coordinates. She was just outside a known AHA stronghold. He hacked into the cameras in her area, and waited a beat before a grainy image appeared on his HUD.

"Just open up so I can get something to get past the fence with! Please!"

It took Soundwave a nanoklick to understand. Escape. She was trying to escape. Soundwave's processor came alive with this information. The signal was blocked by the shielded autobot base. The autobots were unaware of what they had in their possession, and possibly even unaware of the globe's existence. They did not have good relations with the human that was inadvertently caught in their web.

It was the perfect opportunity to fulfill Lord Megatron's wishes and gain the key necessary to access the Globe. Swiftly, Soundwave unlocked the door for the human to re-enter the base. He would lose her signal while she was inside, but hopefully this way she would soon be out of the enemies servos.

It may have been risky to rely on the human's own initiative for her escape, but obviously she had managed to exit the building on her own somehow. As long as she remained discreet while she was inside the facility, Soundwave would be able to more cleanly orchestrate her "escape" once she was back outside. He would just need a few more tools to complete his objective.

Quickly constructing a mission brief for the unlucky mech, Soundwave pinged one of his more reliable, if surly, subordinates. While he did that, he discretely began to fiddle with some of the systems at the Autobot's little base.

"Soundwave to Barricade; Acknowledge."

"Acknowledged. What is it?"

Retrieval mission; acquire human bio-signature in disguise at these coordinates. File attached."

There was a brief moment of respite as Barricade received and read the file. Underneath his mask, Soundwave smirked.

"Why am I doing this? Why don't you get the royal purple glitch-maker to do it, this is the same human he-"

"Orders; Acknowledge."

"Whatever. Acknowledged. I'll get your stupid human. Barricade out."

Now that that situation was solved, Soundwave could finally get something important done.

*Gun-arm McGee – A borrowed reference from a PM conversation concerning the 4th Transformers movie and Lockdown, a.k.a. "Gunface McGee." Thanks, Aspen. :]

*orns – in this fic, an orn is 13 days, or approximately two weeks. So two orns would be about a month, roughly.

Not as long as we'd have liked, but you deserved an update sooner rather than later.

A notice for the readers who don't check our profile (not that it's updated regularly), we are going to be doing a lot of editing on all of the previous chapters of Dear Karma. Nothing truly "plot-significant" will be changed. Mostly, it will be the wording choices, and perhaps the removal of some extra or unnecessary scenes, so you shouldn't have to go back and re-read to understand anything. Unless you're doing that anyway because we update so sporadically.

Thank you all, and please stop by again,