#sieverange

One mission summary showed that she had weaseled her way into some Decepticon barracks and installed an unholy array of security cameras that gave the Aggregate a few leads on future combat sites. Why hadn't she received an awa... Oh. He groaned at the last few lines of the summary. She had shown up a few hours later than she was supposed to, displaying plenty of paint transfers on her shaky frame and looking quite proud of herself. Apparently she had fun in there. "Oh Primus, Sieve..." 

Her pre-war information was a little cloudy, but from the police reports he discerned that Sieverange had been a bit of a live wire. Working under the name "Silver Bullet", she had been one of the top-tier racers in Iacon. During the last racing season before the war, she had had her aft beaten by only two bots: a special-frame Neutral and, of course, Blurr. Her progress during the other seasons was ridiculous. She was built for racing, but it looked like she was more ambitious and competitive than anything else.

Blurr was always the planetary champion at the legal matches, but everyone knew about the underground racing circuit that he and his buddies raced against, too. The underground teams held a monopoly over the raw, fuel-perfumed streets of Iacon just as Blurr and his legal circuits ruled the sparkling speedways. The only difference was that Blurr & co. were protected from the law. The Silver Bullet wasn't. 

He clicked on a few links, and he felt his cheeks warm up at the attached posters recovered from the pre-war period. The scanned image was grainy but there was no denying that the silver femme in the lineup was his coworker. The other bots were a fascinating troupe-- their manager Blensoot was a robust, well-sculpted black mech who made Breakwire's door wings flick up in extreme interest-- but Breakwire barely registered that this poster was a relic. Half of those bots might be offline by now, and their outrageous nighttime soirees were only echos summarized by lines of text on a background check. 

He closed the tab and looked at her basic information again. Her cocky ID photo grinned back at him, but it was a different grin than he was used to. Barely healing at the time the photo was taken, the cuts on her lipplates were still rimmed with bright blue. If he squinted, he could see faint healing tracks criss-crossing over the rest of her faceplate, joining at her lips. She must have had them lasered and buffed over before she came to earth, but the other scars his lips knew so well were clearly too deep to fix. 

"Oh, who's that ugly bot?" 

Breakwire jumped so high in his seat that his elbow slipped off the desk and he slammed his forehelm on the keypad. "P-PRIMUS!!" 

Suddenly a warm pair of servos wrapped around his shoulders, and the thrum of a spark against his door wings lulled his own spark into a steadier rhythm. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you like that..." Sieverange coaxed him into his seat and draped herself over his shoulder, turning her helm to pepper his neck and cheek with kisses. "Sorry, Breaky." 

"S-Sieve," he stammered, still buzzing and twitching from the shock she had given him. "I-I'm just looking at..." 

"Ooh, my background check," Sieve purred. She pointed at her photo. "Look, you can see where my faceplate was still patchy. Wow... What other stuff have you found out? Maybe I can add a few things." 

"Th-that won't be n-necessary." Breakwire drew his knees together in his seat. "You're not mad?" 

"Mad?" The femme snorted in amusement. "Pfff. Why would I be mad? There's nothing that I'd want to hide from any bots. At least nothing that made it onto your thorough background check." She kissed his audio again before withdrawing and practically slinking to the door. "I'm brewing energon, okay? Be right back, darling." 

Once he was sure she had gone, Breakwire turned to the monitor again and frowned to himself. One paragraph bothered him. He had barely managed to drag another window over it, and luckily the racer hadn't caught sight of the move. 

Sieverange's helm lolled to the side as the painkillers took effect. Something at the base of her helm gave her a heavy static zap, and suddenly her vision was clear. She registered that her facial material was no longer hanging off her support structure in gory tatters, but now it hurt just to blink her optics. "How.. How bad was it?" 

The medic sighed. Sieve turned her helm to look at him. "That bad?"

He crossed his arms over his chestplates and frowned at her. "I had to refit your face over your supports, 'n' after I applied some regenerative nanites, I figured all you needed was micro-refittin' 'n' some serious stitchin'. You wanna talk 'bout why you stumbled in with your face fallin' off?" 

"Got into a fight," she breathed. 

"Need me to call the cops?" 

She shook her helm slowly. "Nah, I got out of there as soon as I could. She was just stronger, so..." She lifted her servo and gestured at her patched-up face. "I'll be okay, though. I always am..." Watching the medic clear up his work space, she struggled to remember the name he had given her when she first found the clinic, but the only sound she could remember was his odd back-roads accent. "What was your name?" 

"Houston... 'N' you're Silver Bullet." 

Sieve's stiff brow pulled itself into a frown. He recognized her, even though her racing circuit was absolutely underground and definitely illegal. Was this a hack doc? From the gleaming white armor and his friendly cyan optics, she couldn't tell exactly where he was on the legality scale. "I--" 

He lifted his servos in a peaceful gesture, looking rather oversized for the narrow space between the berth and the counter. "Hey, I ain't gonna turn you over to the cops. You're still recoverin', 'n' damn if I turn in the fastest femme on the planet, illegal or not. I spent the past few decades fightin' in the slums for money 'n' stitchin' up other bots at my place, so I'm just as under-the-radar as you. Except now I'm official." 

She relaxed somewhat, but she could still feel the energon curdling in her lines. "What do you want from me, then? You know that murder wasn't an accident." 

"Oh, I'm sure that there was somethin' more than a simple pump failure in that incident," Houston muttered, sweeping his tools into the sanitizing cabinet. He leaned on the berth and sighed. "I don't want anythin'... You know Iacon's gettin' really bad. There's talk of bomb raids 'n'... Look, all I want you to do is to get outta here ASAP. I mean it," he added at her scoff. "It's gettin' ugly, 'n' I don't think you're fit to handle mob violence." 

She bristled. "What makes you say that I can't handle myself?" 

"I didn't say you can't handle yourself," he said kindly. "I don't want you findin' yourself in another situation like this, but against a Con troop. The Silver Bullet's gotta have somethin' goin' for her, other than beatin' out 97% of the rest of our species on the road." 

For the first time in eons, Sieverange considered something other than racing. What was she good at? With her really expensive electronic paintjob modification, she was adept at hiding and camouflaging herself anywhere. She was also light and fast. That was it! Espionage.. She could do that, with some training. Despite her pitiful position on the medical berth, the racer broke into a wide grin. 

"Ah, no smilin' like that!" Houston scolded, hitting her shoulder. "You'll pull the edges apart." 

"I can't smile??" 

"Not for a couple weeks," he sighed. "You can smile a little, but you gotta take it easy. Keep grinnin' like that 'n' you'll end up with some really deep scars on your lipplates, Bullet." 

"Yes, sir... And my name's Sieverange. Silver Bullet's my stage name." 

He grinned at her. "I figured. I like Sieverange way better." A jarring, beeping alarm started up over the clinic's PA system, rousing the white medic. He fumbled with something in the wall and quickly pulled up an opaque cyan energy field around her berth to give her some privacy. "Got another patient comin' in. Be right back, okay?"