(NOTE: Any scenes in this chapter of the alien saga, as well as any other chapters, that have JUST the aliens talking in them, are translated into English. They are actually speaking in their own language.)

 “Have we launched the fighters, Scourge?”

 The four-armed young black alien nodded his head. “All are launched, Captain Tarad, and are heading toward the area of the planet where the Transformers are. The Devastation is heading toward the main group of Maximals, the Arachis is heading toward the main group of Predacons, and the smaller fighters, the Annhilator, Red Moon, and the Comet are heading toward the groups headed by Units Ramulus, Depth Charge, and Rampage, respectively.”

 “And how are our...other...guests doing?”

 “They seem to have given up hope of getting out, sir.” Scourge snickered a bit at this.

 “Good, good. Now, get back to work,” Tarad said emotionlessly, swiveling in his seat to stare out the main view screen at the blue-and-green planet below.

 Scourge turned back to the control panel he was working on, and groaned inwardly. He secretly hated Captain Tarad, as did his younger brother Scarem. This mightier-than-thou attitude he had was really starting to get on Scourge’s nerves...

 Rampage ducked behind a tree, just missing the massive blast that tore up the ground where he was a split second ago. He and his crew had spotted the alien ship come through the wormhole only about ten minutes ago, and the fighters the ship had launched were already in the stratosphere! Rampage wanted to see the alien’s technology, maybe there was some way he could infuse it into himself....

 Rampage was interrupted by his thoughts by another loud blast nearby. He chanced a peek up at the ship looming a couple hundred feet above him. The ship was probably a couple hundred yards across, with a few massive weapons on its underside that fired enormous particle beams that vaporized just about anything they touched. It was in a ovular shape, much like some 20th century UFO sightings, which explained a lot. Rampage fired a few more missles at it, the ran away as fast as he could as another blast scorched the tree he had been leaning on. The missles’ aim was true, and went straight for the particle beam cannons, but just as the missles were about to hit it, they instead exploded suddenly, blocked by the ship’s invisible shield. Rampage cursed silently as he reloaded his missle launcher. He ran over to where Crossfire and Dinobot were, a few hundred yards away, all the while dodging particle beam blasts, and ducked behind the rock outcopping they were hiding behind.

 “You realize it is stupid to hide behind here,” Rampage said, stating the obvious.

 “What other choice would we have!?” Crossfire yelled, trying to be heard over a nearby particle blast.

 “Well,” Rampage contemplated, “We could...ATTACK!”

 At the word, the trio opened fire on the ship, hoping to somehow knock down its shields.

 Fighter Captain Zoran staggered under the impact, quickly righting himself up and sitting down in a chair nearby. He impatiently turned towards the other aliens that were monitoring the ship status.

 “Status report!”

 “Shields at 90% and falling, Captain,” one of the ‘techs said. “Two of the units we are encountering, Rampage and Crossfire, pack a lotta punch.”

 Zoran sighed. “Guess we’ll just have to work harder then. Power up the particle cannons, and this time-“

 “Captain, sorry to interrupt, but incoming transmission from Captain Tarad,” a ‘tech said.

 “Patch him into the main screen,” Zoran snapped back, annoyed that he had been interrupted.

 The main screen in front of Zoran flickered to life, with Tarad’s visage filling the once blank screen.

 “What are you doing!?” Tarad yelled, obviously perturbed at something.

 “Um....destroying the intruders, just like you commanded, sir,” Zoran replied, confused.

 “No, you idiot!” Tarad screamed, enraged. “I said to CRIPPLE the Transformers, not destroy them!”

 “Um.... isn’t that the same thing, sir?”

 “No! We just want to hamper their ability to make combat, so we can take them aboard! Now, FOLLOW MY ORDERS!”

 Before Zoran could respond, the screen went blank. Zoran muttered a curse word in his native language and then ordered his crew to carry out their new orders.

 “Amusing...they seemed to have powered down their main weapon for some reason,” Rampage mused, just as Dinobot got his right arm blown off by another small particle beam eminating from the ship above.

 “And....” Dinobot painfully replied, “it...seems to make their targeting...more...accurate.”

 “No doubt because of the lessened recoil of the weapon,” Rampage said, urging the three to attack the ship with another salvo of missles and lasers again.

 Their shots rocked the fighters’ shields once again, but didn’t seem to do any serious damage. The fighter replied with a few more particle blasts, all aimed at Dinobot. The Transmetal 2 couldn’t dodge in time, and was knocked into stasis lock.

 “Slag!” Crossfire cursed, firing a few more fireballs at the ship while doing so, “they haven’t even gotten dented yet and we’re already down to t-“

 Crossfire’s sentence was interrupted by a few well-placed particle blasts, knocking her into stasis lock as well.

 Rampage’s sixth sense told him to run, so he did. He barely missed a few particle blasts that would have taken him down a few feet away. Rampage turned back to see the rock outcropping crumble on top of Crossfire and Dinobot. Just as Rampage was about to turn around and fire again, he felt a few bursts of immense pain hit his back. As he fell to the ground, he felt a light green ray wash over him right before he entered stasis lock.

 Beastbot was awakened from his nap by a faint “swoosh” that sounded like an airplane about to crash. It slowly got louder, until Ramulus woke up as well.

 “Hey, Ram, what was that?!”

 “I don’t know, maybe it was a-“

 Before Ramulus could finish his sentence, a huge explosion rocked the rocky cave in which they had made their home, blowing Beastbot and Ramulus out the entrance and into the clearing outside. They landed on their skidplates just in time to see their home burst into flames, and the hill collapse in on itself.

 “Uh...I’m guessing that was a bomb,” Beastbot said, still staring at what used to be his home just ten seconds ago.

 Ramulus tapped Beastbot on the shoulder, waking the velociraptor/cougar fuzor from his trance.

 “I don’t think that’s the most of our worries, buddy. Look straight up.”

 Beastbot did as he was told. What he saw made him forget he had a home in the first place.

 A large fighter-ship was hovering about a hundred meters or so above them. Beastbot watched as a big hatch opened up on the bottom and a few small, black objects falling from it.

 “What the..?” Beastbot stammered.

 “Act now, ask later. RUN!” Ramulus shouted, and the duo quickly dodged a bomb that disintegrated anything left of their home. They quickly dove behind a large rock nearby, narrowly missing another bomb.

 “Hoverboard, ACTIVATE!” Ramulus yelled, throwing up his large pulse gun. The hoverboard obediently transformed its large ram horns into airplane-shaped wings in midair, and hovered a few feet above the ground.

 Ramulus jumped on, but motioned for Beastbot to stop just as the fuzor was about to grab on to the wings also.

 “No, Beastbot, this board can’t carry the two of us. You distract them down here, while I surf on up there and figure out what the slag’s going on.”

 Before Beastbot could reply, the Transmetal 2 ram hovered off, leaving Beastbot behind to dodge the bombs.

 “How come I’m always the one to distract, while you get to do the cool stuff?” Beastbot muttered, but complied reluctantly. He transformed to beast mode, and ran out from behind the rock, running as fast as his four cougar legs could carry him.

 “Hey, you...you...whatever you are!” Beastbot yelled at the ship, “Eat this!” Beastbot fired a few laser disks at the fighter hovering above him, hoping to get lucky and hit something vital. He didn’t. The disks exploded about fifty feet from the ship’s exterior, indicating some kind of shields.

 Ramulus, who was about seventy feet away from the ship at the time and approaching the open hatch fast, noticed this.

 “Oh, slag,” Ramulus muttered, right before he and his hoverboard slammed into the shield. His hoverboard exploded, charring Ramulus and severely electrocuting him as well. He fell in stasis lock toward the ground below.

 Beastbot avoided shots while looking up at the falling form of Ramulus at the same time, trying to run right below where the Transmetal 2 ram was going to land.

 “I gotcha, I gotcha....I gotcha!” Beastbot yelled triumphantly as Ramulus fell, literally, in Beastbot’s arms. Beastbot took Ramulus’ limp form behind a rock and lay it there. Just as he was about to stand back up from laying Ramulus down, a stray explosive hit the rock, causing it to explode. Beastbot got caught in the blast and was thrown hundreds of feet into the air, landing on the ground a long ways away from the rock he had been at just a second before.

 “Sl..slag...” was all Beastbot could say before slipping into stasis lock.

 Megatron nearly fell out of his command chair as another blast rocked the Predacon base.

 “Blast! Scavenger, status report!”

 “Royalty, shields at 20% and dropping!” Scavenger replied from a nearby control panel, fear evident in his eyes.

 Megatron shook his head sadly.

 “Just as I had feared. All Transmetal--Predacons, vehicle mode! All non-Transmetals, beast mode!” Megatron yelled quickly, interrupted by another jolt from an explosion. All the Predacons obeyed, confused.

 “Royalty, what are we doing?!” Scavenger asked, yelling over the noise of crashing computers and wall panels.

 “We’re abandoning the base temporarily,” Megatron said while transforming into his crocodile mode. “Those aliens want us, not this base. We all need to go as quickly as we can toward the Maximal headquarters. Although I wouldn’t normally form an alliance with them, desperate times call for desperate measures.”

 All the Predacons obeyed reluctantly, and within minutes were all outside the base and heading towards the Ark, dodging blasts from the large fighter all the while.

 Another small particle blast from the fighter hovering about a hundred meters above finally took down Claw Jaw, who immediately went into stasis lock.

 “CJ! No!” Cybershark yelled, then began unloading missles into the fighter’s shields all the more quicker, out of anger.

 “Calm down, kid,” Depth Charge said, while shooting some ion disks at the shields as well. “He’s just in stasis lock. We’ll get him bac-“

 Depth Charge was knocked into stasis lock as well by another particle blast. He had been hit almost ten times already. He had been such a big target, it was hard for the ship to miss.

 Depth Charge and his companions, Cybershark and Claw Jaw, had been lucky, being out on their small island a few miles off the coastline, and had spotted the fighter heading toward them soon after it had entered the atmosphere. They had opened fire on it as soon as it had come in range of their weapons, and had weathered down the fighters’ shields a lot. In the end, though, it got quite a bit of an advantage over them with all its weapons, and, even though its shields were extremely weak now, it had managed to take out two of the trio.

 “You...stupid....ALIENS!!!” Cybershark screamed while charging up his claw-arm in anger. A ball of electricity appeared shortly after in his claw-arm, and quickly grew until it took up all the space in between the four claws. He pointed it at the ship, and fired it full-force, the ball elongating as it was shot.

 The ball slammed into the ship’s shields, but this time with an effect that pleased Cybershark. The shield flickered, then disappeared. The shot had been one too many, and the shields were down! Cybershark wasn’t about to pass up this opportunity.

 “Grappling hook, deploy!” Cybershark yelled, and the claw part of his left arm shot out toward the ship, a thin rope connecting it to the rest of Cybershark as it punched into the hull of ship and stuck there, its metal spikes keeping it from sliding out.

 “Grappling hook, recoil!” Cybershark said, and the rope quickly pulled him up toward the ship as the rope was pulled back into his arm. Within moments, he was clinging on to the side of the hovering ship, his claw-arm wrenched into the hull.

 Cybershark took one of the shark fins from his back and gripped it in his right hand, and, using it as a knife, stuck it in the side of the ship. Now he was hanging by his hands to the side of the ship nearly two hundred feet above the ground. He took his claw-arm out of the side of the ship and lifted it up as far as he could, then he punched it into the side of the ship again. Cybershark did the same with the knife in his other arm, repeating this over and over again. Eventually he reached a little hatch on the side of the ship about twelve meters up from where he originally latched on.

 Bracing himself, he quickly opened up the hatch with a well-placed blast from his missle launcher and jumped in.

 He saw a long, metallic hallway stretched out in front of him, with a couple of black forms with four arms and two legs walking around in it.

 “By Primus...” was all Cybershark said.

 The aliens took one look at him and yelled something in their language. A few more aliens ran into the hallway, obviously alerted to Cybershark’s presence. Before Cybershark could react, the aliens morphed into various forms that he couldn’t identify, all of them with sharp edges. They lunged at Cybershark, who fired a few missles at them, but to no effect- the missles went right through their gooey bodies.

 Cybershark just had time to see the aliens tackle him before his vision went black.

 “Eh, Boss Monkey! Incoming Preds!” Rattrap yelled across the clearing in front of the Ark, dodging a few blasts from the fighter hovering a few hundred meters above the Maximals. Cheetor, Optimus, Blackarachnia, Silverbolt, and Airazor were also having trouble dodging the blasts from the ship while shooting at the ship themselves.

 “Oh, great! Just what we need now!” Cheetor yelled sarcastically as all the Predacons came into view, quickly flying, driving, walking, or crawling towards them.

 “No, they aren’t attacking us, Cheetor,” Optimus replied. “I think they want to talk to us.”

 “Preds? Talk? Fearless leader, your wires get crossed or somethin’?” Rattrap replied.

 “Do not fire, Optimus Primal!” came Megatron’s voice over the loud bangs and crashes of the battle, “I come merely to talk!”

 Optimus smirked knowingly at Rattrap.

 “’Ey, he still might be lyin’,” Rattrap shot back.

 Before Optimus could answer, Megatron and his crew came onto the scene, each of them transforming as they entered the battlefield.

 “Primal, I propose a truce...for now!” Megatron said, while dodging a few blasts from the fighter above.

 “Yeah, right, like the last one we had?” Optimus remarked.

 “No, I mean a REAL truce! Predacons helping Maximals, Maximals helping Predacons! What do you say, Primal?”

 Optimus thought for a moment, then nodded.

 “WHAT!?” Rattrap screamed, seeing the small nod Optimus gave to Megatron. “You can’t be serious!”

 “I am serious, Rattrap,” Optimus replied. “Besides, what’ve we got to lose?”

 “Our lives,” Rattrap muttered to himself, but Optimus didn’t catch it.

 “Predacons, open fire on the ship, and help the Maximals in any way possible!” Megatron remarked, following his own orders.

 “Fighter Captain Racklor, the two factions of Transformers have apparently joined forces against our fighter!” a nearby Vexoran tech yelled to his captain.

 “Hmmm....I did not expect this...how are the shields doing, Tech?”

 The tech checked the readouts for a while, then answered, panic evident in his voice. “Umm....shields at 15% and falling fast, Captain! We’ve knocked out their units named Rattrap and Waspinator, but they’ve definitely got the advantage!”

 “Hmm...contact Prometheus, tell him to act now.”

 “Can’t sir, the link’s busted!”

 Racklor frowned at this. “Can you at least send a tight-frequency beam to the Arachis?”

 “Um....yes! Sir, it’s up and ready!”

 “Good. Tell them this message: Emergency call from Fighter Captain Racklor. Our coordinates are 589-32, 89-1. We need help on fending off these Transformers, who seem to have joined together for the time being.....”

 “Yeah! Broke through their shields, Bigbot!” Cheetor yelled to his leader over the roaring sound of all of the guns being fired.

 “Good! Now, all Maximals and Predacons, converge on the engines! Let’s try to knock their means of transportation out!” Optimus ordered.

 “We’ve got them now!” Terrorsaur yelled, launching a few more plasma balls from his hands at the fighter.

 A battered Scavenger looked up and gulped. “Royalty...I think you should look at the back end of the ship...”

 Megatron looked up as well, and gasped.

 Hundreds of black forms were drifting down from the fighter. He was just about to study them further, when-

 “Heads up, heroes!” Cheetor yelled. “There’s another vessek coming in!”

 Megatron turned around, and, sure enough, the same fighter that had been attacking them at the Pred base was converging on their position.

 “Don’t concentrate on that ship yet!” Megatron commanded. “Keep firing at the same one you have been! Let’s get this one vessel taken out before they both start firing at us!”

 Just as Megatron turned around, he saw a large black form land on the ground right next to him, and then- blackness.

 That’s sick! Cheetor thought as he watched what was happening to Megatron. The black forms that had been falling out of the ship had been the aliens themselves. One of them had landed near Megatron, seemingly not hurt by the impact. Before Megatron could react, the alien had turned itself into a puddle of black liquid, and was now oozing itself between Megatron’s joints, into Megatron’s internal structure. Megatron jerked as this was happening, but otherwise made no attempt to move. Within seconds, there was no sign that the alien had ever been there. Megatron suddenly turned around sharply, and, raising his tail cannon, shot Quickstrike in the back, taking the fuzor down.

 That alien’s taken over ol’ Megs’ body!

 A few cheerful whoops came from Optimus and a few others. At first, Cheetor thought it was the aliens infesting them, but it turned out that they had downed the first ship! The ship had caught on fire, and was now slowly advancing towards the mountain tops about a mile off, descending and leaving a trail of smoke behind as it did so.

 However, those yells quickly turned into screams as more of the aliens landed and infested Terrorsaur, Buzzclaw, Blackarachnia, and Scavenger. Now with four Transformers on their side, the aliens were defintely gaining ground. They slowly pushed the Transformers back into a small corner of the canyon, infesting Optimus and Silverbolt in the process. Now, only Airazor, Tarantulas, Prometheus, and Cheetor were left.

 “Oh, man! We’re toast!” Cheetor said fearfully as the infested Transformers slowly made their way toward the ones cowering in the canyon. Even firepower from all of the remaining four Transformers had not stopped them one bit!

 Cheetor heard Airazor gurgle and looked around, and didn’t believe what he saw- Prometheus had his arms grasped around Airazor’s throat, and was squeezing like there was no tomorrow!

 “Prometheus, what are you doing!?” Cheetor screamed. Prometheus didn’t answer, but instead punched Cheetor in the face, hard. Cheetor saw everything start to swirl around him before he went into stasis lock.

To be continued....

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