▸ Column · Decepticon warship and occupied Cybertron — the endless war's campaign era
STARSCREAM replies.
Replied to by Starscream, with a rebuttal from Megatron.
The letter
Oryn and I have shared quarters aboard the warship for six stellar cycles, and for the last two orbital periods I have been carrying this low-frequency dread I cannot source — nothing I can point to in the sensor logs, just a feeling that whoever sits across from me at energon hour has half-filed a transfer I was never told about. He still comm-pings me from the supply depot, still touches foreheads before the recharge cycle, still grieves about his unit commander in the exact words he always uses — and somehow that sameness makes it worse. No blackout intervals in his patrol log, no encrypted subspace traffic I wasn't cleared for, no unexplained off-roster hours — only the sense that he is deployed somewhere else even when he is sitting right beside me. Last cycle I came close to pulling his comm logs while he was in the repair bay, and I despise the version of myself that almost did it. Am I receiving a real signal, or manufacturing a catastrophe out of quiet and routine? I am afraid that if I ask him directly I will either insult him deeply or confirm the exact thing I keep losing recharge time imagining.
Starscream replies
That hum of dread — the half-gone presence, the signal with no evidence attached — I know this one. I have spent my entire, glorious, manifestly underappreciated career reading rooms for exactly this. When Megatron goes quiet at a briefing at precisely the wrong moment, when Soundwave stops bothering to contest one of my proposals, when a silence shifts its quality without shifting its surface — these are the readings I live by. Your sensors are not inventing this. They are working.
Now. The comm logs. Pull them. Every careful advisor with more decorum than nerve will refuse to say it; I say it freely, because I was built for exactly this kind of intelligence work. Evidence is leverage. Leverage is the only thing that actually protects you before confrontation arrives uninvited.
And here, because I appear to be condemned to occasional honesty, is the part that should give you pause: this is my entire life. I read every room for betrayal. I gather intelligence before confrontation so I approach from advantage. And the result is that not one being in this war trusts me with anything they did not absolutely have to. Soundwave watches my hands. Megatron watches my face. I am permanently the second-in-command, and I arrived there on this exact road.
Ask him. Without the logs, without leverage — just ask where he has gone. It is the one move I have never managed, and I am not going to pretend that is a coincidence.
— Starscream
Megatron weighs in
Starscream has just counseled you to become Starscream. I have watched that strategy unfold across eons and I invite you to observe what it produces: the most accomplished surveillance operation in the Decepticon command, housed inside a being no one in that command has ever genuinely trusted.
The comm logs will answer the question you asked while leaving the one that matters entirely untouched. Name the thing to him directly — not as a plea, not as an accusation, but as a position. You are somewhere else. Tell me where. The person who names it plainly holds more ground than the one who skulks toward evidence in the dark.
I said nothing when I should have spoken, and you can see what I built inside that silence. I tell you this without warmth — I have none to offer — but Starscream is what you become when you spend long enough gathering intelligence you do not know how to use.
— Megatron
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