As Ratchet carefully worked his way back through the winding tunnels toward the main living areas, he vented quietly. Still no contact with the other Autobots. Try as he might, he had to be careful in any signal he sent and he could only assume the others were under the same limitations. Why else would he be having so much trouble making contact? There’d been a few times when he’d thought he’d finally zeroed in on an Autobot signal, only for it to turn out to be nothing more than random noise.
It was frustrating, but... also worrying. The niggling feeling of wrong had been with Ratchet for quite some time, but recently it had only grown more pronounced. It was as if something was circling, slowly pressing in, closing in... He paused momentarily, instinctively sending out a low-band scan of his immediate surroundings.
The air was still as the results came back negative. Still, the tension was almost impossible to ignore. Something wasn’t right. Picking back up his pace, Ratchet hurried the rest of the way back. Instincts had rarely led him astray, and the spark-deep dread washing over him now only reared its ugly head when something terrible was about to happen -
Sudden screaming sliced through the silence as surely they did his thoughts.
“FUCKING–! You’ll die for this, you little cretins!”
Ratchet barreled onto the scene just moments after Starscream’s dire threat. One human down - a cascade of injuries and warnings blipped across his HUD - three more terrified as the Seeker made to grab at them.
With no time to do anything but act, the sound of sirens filled the cave as several tons of charging medic slammed into the angry Seeker.