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Chapter contributed by : LightningCross

Urban Shock

Chapter 2: Highway to Hell

By LightningCross

G1/STSE Universe

A/N: Sorry it took me so long to update, life's been pretty busy the past couple of weeks.

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Lucas sighed in frustration as the truck came to an abrupt stop. The traffic had become increasingly congested as they approached the Route 53 junction. Drivers in the cars around them were beeping in frustration that traffic had completely stopped moving. Some motorists even got out of their cars, shouting various profanities as they demanded to know why nobody was moving.

From the heightened vantage point of the truck cabin, Lucas was able to see what was holding things up. He could see police lights flashing red-and-blue just below the underpass ahead. Three black vans were lined up across the road; they had no visible police markings. Two of the vans were parked perpendicularly across the roadway just below the overpass. The other van was parked the same way across a guardrail where traffic merging into I-90 flowed.

Something is wrong here, Lucas thought to himself. If these guys were cops responding to an accident, then why weren't they making any attempt to clear one of the lanes for traffic? If it was a crime scene, then where were the cops laying down yellow police tape and making attempts to reassure the motorists that were now stepping out of their vehicles? He didn't see a single police officer anywhere.

"What the hell's that?" the trucker said, pointing towards the sky with one hand as he rolled down his window with the other. Lucas couldn't make out what he was pointing towards at first, the glare of the highway lights and headlights making it difficult to see anything in the pitch-black sky. He was able to hear it, though; the loud engine hum that grew increasingly loud as it got closer to the highway. It sounded like an airplane of some sort at first, but airplane jets would've made a smoother "whooshing" sound. The sound these aircraft made got choppier as they got closer to the ground, like the sound of spinning helicopter blades.

He was then able to identify them clearly as they descended closer. There were three helicopters descending at a rapid pace. One looked like a dual-rotor transport chopper, like the type he'd seen the US Army use in movies. The two single-rotor choppers descending with it looked like attack choppers, although he had seen these in enough movies and TV shows to know exactly what they were: Apaches.

Lucas felt a cold chill work its way down his spine and back up to the base of his skull. He only felt this sensation when he suffered severe anxiety bordering on a full-blown panic attack. He realized why the black vans were blocking traffic on the highway and why military choppers were now approaching the highway junction from the sky. Those weren't cops blocking their path. The attack choppers weren't military.

Somebody was after the clones.

Lucas and the truck driver both gasped as they felt the ground shake violently. Had they not been able to see the massive explosion that caused the tremor on the highway above them, they might have mistaken it for an earthquake. More tremors and explosions followed as the Apaches strafed up and down Illinois Route 53, firing volleys of missiles at the motionless vehicles on that roadway. Neither of the men could do anything but look up in horror as the vehicles burned. Some of the people in their cars had been spared from excessive suffering, their vehicles exploding as the missiles ignited their fuel tanks. Others weren't so fortunate. One man's engine had caught fire, all of its windows blown out by a nearby missile impact. Lucas could only watch in horror as the man fumbled desperately with his seat belt, his face, torso and arms covered in glass shards. It was hard to tell from the distance, but Lucas could have sworn that he saw the man screaming. He didn't have to suffer long as his vehicle exploded, sending both the man and his vehicle into the grass of a field near the highway junction.

The military helicopters pulled away from Route 53, their attack complete. One now moved west over Interstate 90, the other west. The westbound helicopter did not start firing missiles until it was at least fifty yards away from the Trakersly Corporation truck. If it hadn't been clear to Lucas before, it was now. These people were deliberately avoiding doing damage to their vehicle.

"I don't know about you, but I'm getting the fuck out of here," the truck driver said, panic in his voice as he opened his door and began to run for the nearby field. Lucas didn't say a word as he found himself immobilized by sheer panic and fear, his mouth wide open in absolute shock. His mind vaguely registered that the truck driver had forgotten to shut his door, as he was now able to hear the shrieks and screams of the people outside. Some were calling for help; others could be heard crying out to God to either rescue them or kill them and end their suffering. The majority of those who hadn't been injured in some way by the explosions were running for their lives, jumping -- or, if they were injured, stumbling -- across the guard rails, desperate to escape the helicopters and exploding vehicles.

The transport chopper then moved lower, hovering directly above the interchange, the noise of its rotors drowning out the screams. It had two machine guns mounted on its sides. Lucas could see that both of them were firing, their yellow tracers making their paths clear against the bright highway lights and the raging flames of the burning vehicles. They were massacring everybody as they desperately fled for their lives.

Lucas forced himself to relax, practicing the slow-breathing exercises that his therapist had taught him. "If you don't control your breathing, you're going to faint," he told himself. "And then you'll really be fucked."

After about a minute or so, he was calm enough to think clearly. These... terrorists?... were after the clones in the trailer. They were all fully-armed and functional. If he could activate one, maybe they would be able to handle the three helicopters...

At that moment, the rear doors to the black vans that had blocked traffic only minutes before swung open. Lucas could see about four men get out of each van, all clad in black body armor and ski masks. They made a beeline for the Trakersly truck as soon as they saw it, and before Lucas was able to react he found himself completely surrounded by them.

"Get out of the truck with your hands up!" one of the men shouted in a thick Slavic accent. They were all pointing their assault rifles at Lucas, ready to kill him at the slightest hint that he would not comply with their demands.

I'm completely fucked, Lucas thought to himself. Gulping in trepidation, he opened his door slowly. When it was completely open, he stepped out slowly with both of his hands as high as he could possibly reach.

As soon as he had stepped out of the truck, one of the men grabbed him roughly and threw him onto the pavement. His hands were brought behind his back, and he was handcuffed.

Most of the highway had been cleared of people by now. Smoldering wreckage and burning cars were strewn across both highways. Corpses and various body parts could be seen between the vehicles. Lucas couldn't hear any more screaming, but he wasn't sure if that was because everybody was dead, or if it was because of the deafening roar of the transport helicopter's rotors.

Lucas felt a blunt object of some kind against the base of his skull. He assumed it was the barrel of an assault rifle. Were they going to kill him right here? Would he be just another casualty in this horrible terrorist attack? He could hear them shouting, arguing over something. Were they deciding whether or not to kill him?

Lucas' thoughts were interrupted with a loud bang as the door to the truck's trailer was blown open.

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When the ten Omega Project clones had been undergoing preparation for their long journey to Fort Bragg, the engineers at the R&D labs of Trakersly Robotics Corporation had been forced by time constraints to eschew protocol. They normally would have hooked the clones' metas up to an analysis computer and done a thorough scan of the clones' programs to ensure that none of them were corrupted or fragmented. This would have been followed by a complete disassembly of each clone, during which three engineers each would be assigned to a clone to inspect each of their parts and make sure that none of them were faulty.

The demands of the Department of Defense on their CEO had been passed on to the engineers by none other than Mr. Trakersly himself, who had made it clear to them in no uncertain terms that their careers were at stake if they didn't immediately get the clones shipped. Despite the strong urgings of many in the R&D department that more time was needed to make sure the clones were safe to transport and be used in military testing, Mr. Trakersly had refused to listen. So, against their better judgment, they had completely skipped the meta analysis and only done a cursory internal examination on the clones. Instead of sealing them in steel shipping crates as had been planned, they instead stood the clones upright in the trailer, using magnets to bind them to the sides and floor of it.

They would learn the price of their haste soon enough. During the internal examination on the Shockwave clone Omega-8, they had failed to properly close a tiny panel that sealed the deuterium/tritium nuclear fuel from the transport tube that would take it to the ignition chamber in the clone's chest. It remained open by about a millimeter or so.

Each bump the truck went over during the drive had jostled open the panel ever so slightly. It didn't move much with each bump, but the amount of bumps the truck had gone over accumulated over time. By the time the truck had reached the suburbs of Chicago, just before the helicopter attack on the highway, the panel was only one millimeter away from being completely open.

It didn't take much to open it completely. The tremors that had coursed through the ground when the first missiles struck were more than enough. The internal systems of Omega-8, detecting that the panel to the deuterium/tritium micropellets was open, interpreted this as its signal that the ignition process that would power the clone had been activated.

A single pellet coated in solid energon was sucked out of the containment chamber in the clones' abdominal region into a thin vacuum tube. The panel that had previously been improperly closed now automatically sealed shut. It was sucked through the tube upwards within the clone, until it reached the other end of the tube just outside of the spherical, radiation-shielded ignition chamber. A single beep was heard within the clone as a panel on the side of the chamber opened, and the pellet was dropped into a specially-designed cradle no larger than a bee's abdomen. A nozzle within the chamber pointed at the cradle, its tip beginning to glow with energy as the laser that would begin the nuclear reaction prepared to fire.

Alarms went off within the clone as the ignition chamber was sealed and the laser fired a concentrated burst of energy into the pellet for no more than five seconds. The solid energon encasing the pellet liquefied quickly, heating up the pellet. In a brilliant flash of unseen light, the outer layer of the pellet exploded outwards, the energy of the blast ricocheting off of the walls of the chamber and going back towards the pellet. The wave of energy collapsed inward onto the remainder of the pellet, triggering a sustained nuclear reaction within the chamber.

Another tube attached to the other side of the chamber now activated. As the nuclear reaction went on, it slowly drew off alpha particles, but not nearly enough to stall the nuclear explosion. It did this for about twenty minutes, transporting the particles at nearly the speed of light into the clones' primary battery.

When the reaction was finished, nothing significant was left within the chamber; nearly all of the pellets' mass had been converted into energy by the nuclear reaction. The high-capacity battery was now 100% charged, and would serve to power the clone for nearly 50 years.

With the battery charged, the internal monitoring systems of Omega-8 began to activate the clones' systems. Green lights began to shine within the clone, accompanied by mechanical humming and buzzing as the systems began to slowly activate. As the clone's meta was brought fully online, a single white optic flickered on within the darkness of the trailer.

"Model PO-8-TRC activated, Registered commander: None," the clone said in a slightly nasal voice that sounded as though it had been run through a vocoder. "Please designate a commander," it said automatically in the darkness, its voice drowned out by the violence and chaos raging outside of the truck trailer.

For two minutes the clone stood in the darkness, patiently awaiting a human to designate him a commander. It was then that his audios picked up human voices from outside the trailer. He could hear several men shouting in thickly-accented English, his data banks telling him that this accent was Russian. He increased the sensitivity of his audios, filtering out all background noise and focusing only on what these humans were saying. Two of them were arguing in Russian, his meta automatically translating their speech and feeding the translated conversation as text into his Heads-Up Display:

Man 1: We should kill him now! This Trakersly dog is of no use to us!

Man 2: Do not be so reckless, Dmitri! This man isn't some low-level Trakersly employee. Look at the way he is dressed, he wears a lab coat like a scientist. He could know quite a bit about these clones. He could be the only person who knows how to reprogram these military clones from their original loyalties.

Omega-8 continued to read the conversation as his meta now mulled over a programming dilemma he was faced with. One part of his programming prevented him from moving without having a designated commander. Another part of his meta recognized these men as potential threats to his safety that had to be dealt with immediately. The last part of his meta urged self-preservation and that he was to avoid capture in hostile territory at all costs.

The latter two concerns trumped the first, he determined. He found himself incapable of breaking free from his innate programming that required he have a commander, however.

At that moment, his meta formulated an idea to "trick" that aspect of his programming into being satisfied. He scanned through all of the capabilities that he had been programmed with, and discovered one that would be perfect in this situation.

"Omega-8, I hereby designate you to be your own commander," the Shockwave clone said in a thick Russian accent, perfectly imitating one of the humans he had heard speak outside. Such a ruse would have not normally worked, but the engineers at Trakersly had been forced to only install the most basic of loyalty recognition programs into the clones. The incomplete loyalty programs in Omega-8 recognized the human voice's designation of himself as his own commander. "Commander set: Omega-8," the clone automatically said to itself, logging its own voice and appearance into its data banks.

Omega-8 was very similar in appearance to the Decepticon Shockwave, with some slight differences. His chest armor was less angular than the transformer he had been modeled after. Instead it closely resembled a fit human male's chest, the armor plates designed to resemble pectoral muscles and six-pack abs on the outside. The sharp angles that had been present on the original Shockwave had been smoothed out, giving the arms and legs a smoother appearance. His armor plating was painted in MARPAT digital woodland camouflage. He lacked any Decepticon symbols, the seal of the Department of Defense taking their place on his armor. He had both of his hands intact, lacking the laser cannon that had been grafted on to the original Shockwave's left arm.

He was now free from his loyalty programs, able to issue his own orders and directives. He had to act quickly, as he now suspected that these Russian humans were here for himself and the other clones in the trailer. He ordered himself in his meta to escape from the trailer.

He strained at first against the magnets. They were strong, but they would be no match for his strength. He used his right arm, the only one that was not constrained by a magnet, to free his left arm from one of the magnetic restraints. He was then able to easily use both of his arms to free his legs from the magnets. He tossed the magnets onto the ceiling of the trailer so that he would not inadvertently reattach himself to one.

He switched to night-vision on his optic, now viewing the darkness of the trailer in a bright green haze. The clones had been arranged in five rows of two in the trailer. He was standing in the row closest to the door. He did a quick scan of the double-doors' structural integrity. It was made primarily of thin aluminum sheet metal. He would be able to break it down.

With a silent order to himself, Omega-8 balled his right hand into a fist and struck with all his strength at the doors. Both of he doors instantly snapped off of their hinges, flying several feet through the air before they came to rest on top of several abandoned vehicles. His optic dimmed slightly, automatically deactivating his night vision and reducing the sensitivity of his optic to compensate for the bright yellow highway lamps.

He stayed within the trailer for several moments, his optic logging the carnage outside into his meta. He jumped out of the trailer, turning towards the armed men he had heard in the trailer. He logged them all as combatants in his meta.

"Drop your weapons and surrender to me, or I will be forced to kill all of you," Omega-8 said flatly. Rather than comply with his demand, the men raised their assault rifles, preparing to open fire on the military clone.

The clone tensed slightly as his battle nets came online, preparing him for the coming fight.

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A/N: Omega-8 will be tested for the first time in combat next chapter. Also, Omega-8's just a temporary designation, he'll get his permanent one soon enough.
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