ESCAPE 2

Con frequencies were dead. As were the high frequencies both factions used. Soundwave turned to assumed autobot range, but dead silence was all there was. He would hardly be able to decode 'bot frequencies, but he should have been able to detect them at least.

A distressed ping from Laserbeak interrupted his scan. The drone seemed disoriented and requested navigation aid. Soundwave quickly pinpointed her on the radar - she didn't fly far. In fact, she should have been much further according to the flight logs Laserbeak passed him. He guided her back to him, marvelling at how her speed seemed to change while in fact it was steady.

Some kind of space distortion it would seem. It was a long time since he had last encountered a space distortion big enough to be of significance. The drone landed on the grass beside him and pinged him with fear.

Soundwave reached down to pat her wings. /Fear not, Laserbeak. Nothing mystical here. I've seen it before/

He attuned his equipment to assess the gravity fields then. The data he got made him disconnect from Laserbeak to hide his own distress. The matter - the space seemed to lock onto itself in an infinite loop, threaded through itself like a string through the needle in what appeared to be a singularity.

That must have been their entrance point.

The spy motioned the drone to attach to her place on his armor, transformed and flew up to the space bottleneck. He felt distortion, but his hull was strong enough not to bend under this gravity disruption. He paused at the calculated event horizon. The pull was strong and he would hardly be able to withstand it past this point. Laserbeak pinged him with panic. He sent her a calming package and rushed toward the blackness of the singularity.

He didn't quite perceive what happened. One moment of blackness and he was rushing _from_ the entry point back toward Megatron's landing point. To rule out a stupid mistake, Soundwave turned back and aimed for the very center of blackness again - and he flew through with the same result.

So... the space had been looped!
He transformed and landed - there were massive calculations to be done. As a final check he reached to touch Megatron's corpse. His fingers slid through it.

Laserbeak pinged him questioningly.
/Not sure yet/ he responded, bending down to poke at the ground. The ground was solid.
/I didn't finish the frequencies scan. Check the human ranges while I adjust my calculus/

He was busy for the rest of the day. And the night. And another day. Laserbeak pinged him with agitation, but he responded with a "desist" package, unwilling to stop his work. Changing constants re-defined all his thinking. He made sure to backup everything for when they would return into normal dimension and that required a lot of storage capacity. He even had to remove some of his memories and now he had hard time deciding which ones he should let go. Of course, he did have a backup archive in Nemesis databanks - which is why he didn't hesitate to crush his drives when autobots tried to scare him. However, he could count no more on restore from backup. Who knows where Nemesis was now and what autobots did to it?

Laserbeak pinged him repeatedly.
/What?!/
Instead of answer, Laserbeak filled the air with intercepted cellular signals. There was something strange about them, but they were definitely human. This needed interrogation, but the basics had upper priority. /Good job. Rest./

It took him two more days to examine his memories and define which of them he could erase. He ended up letting go of Rumble and Frenzy - he was reluctant to do it first, but they had no significance other than emotional attachment and it was rational to sacrifice it for practical and useful things. He kept their blueprints though.

Once the new mathematical model of the universe was installed and tested (he made Laserbeak fly around this dimensional pocket and was satisfied that no contradictory measurements were registered), the communications chief turned his attention to human waves.

With the next sunrise Laserbeak returned onlined and pinged him with curiosity.

/Yes, I do have a working theory. The crossed streams interlaced and created an infinite loophole mixing a part of parallel universe with ours. We were unlucky to be part of the mixed matter. This dimensional pocket doesn't really belong to neither universes, it's a transitional zone that got locked onto itself. And this transitional zone is small. We fell through a wormhole and the only way out would be back through the bottleneck. The problem is, it appears to be a klein-bottle. There is no out, there is only in./

Laserbeak trembled and he traced her wings to calm her down a little. Truth to be told, he was awed by these results as well. He threw a quick glance toward Megatron's cask. The dead body didn't change a bit. Soundwave ex-vented and continued:

/We perceive our universe in light and radio waves frequencies. We can't make contact because of time-space shift. And it seems that cybertronians have left this planet. We're on our own./

The next ping from Laserbeak carried over a dawning hope she nursed

/Yes, I think I know how./