Tales of the Intermezzo - Pairbond
                       A Transformers Universe Story
                     copyright 1999 by Dave Van Domelen
                 based on properties owned by Hasbro/Takara
===========================================================================

     "intermezzo - n. A brief entertainment between two acts of a play."
          - American Heritage Dictionary

     "Hey, there's a Knok at the door!" someone in the bar chuckled.  No one
else reacted, it was a tired old joke that only one old Cybertronian even
bothered to make anymore.
     Knok walked in slowly, tired from his long day of energy transfer work.
The bar wasn't really near either his workplace or his apartments, but it was
the closest place that served decent organic food, being near a spaceport.
He may have no longer needed to eat like an army to supply power for
Doubledealer, but he still needed to eat for himself.
     "The usual," he sighed, pulling up a seat at the bar.  The bartender
nodded, and signaled the cook in back.
     Then Knok noticed someone in the seat next to him.  The black and grey
color scheme was unremarkable, but the huge gun barrel mounted on the
stranger's back looked familiar.  In fact, the whole body was familiar.
     "Nightstick?" he asked the person next to him.
     She sighed with exasperation...at least the voice sounded female.  The
body was the typical neuter of most Cybertronians and cyborgs.  "No, I'm not
Nightstick.  And in case you're curious, you're the 34th to ask me that.
I've never met the guy, and I didn't even know he existed until people
started asking me if I was him."
     "Well, since I saw him die, I didn't really think so," Knok smirked,
mildly amused.  "Still, the resemblance is remarkable.  Name's Knok, former
Powermaster, current glorified junction box."
     She nodded, a little less ill at ease.  "My name doesn't translate well
to Cybertronian, but in Terran it comes out to Navarone, roughly.  Or so I'm
told, never been to Terra myself.  There's supposedly a joke in that, with me
turning into a gun."
     Knok paused.  "You're not Terran?"
     "Nope.  They're Banned, anyway."
     "Well, you're not Nebulan, or you'd know Nightstick...it's not like
there were a lot of us left when the Cybertronians arrived, everyone knew or
knew *of* everyone else.  So...what are you?"
     "I'm from Planet Master."
     Several Predacons at the table nearby snickered, and Knok had to
suppress the urge himself.  "Planet WHAT?" he asked.
     She sighed again...it seemed to be something she had a lot of practice
with.  "It used to be the administrative capital of a large empire, the
'Master' world.  Then all the organics in the empire died of a genetic
plague, leaving us mechanoids behind.  But you're from, what, a nebula?"
     Knok shrugged.  "Our word for our world translates out as 'Earth,' like
so many other planets.  But to the Cybertronians, that name was already
taken.  So they got poetic.  What's in a nebula?" he asked, leadingly.
     Navarone paused.  "Well, there's sometimes stars, and a whole lot of
dust..."
     "And another word for dust?"
     "Ah.  Earth."
     "Exactly," Knok nodded.  "Mind you, by the time the Cybertronians found
us, they might as well have called our world Dust.  A dead planet, we pretty
much wiped ourselves out.  No fertile females of the species left, once our
generation died that would have been it.  So we had nothing to lose by
joining in the battle, maybe we could settle some personal scores in the
process."
     Navarone paused.  "I know it's a sore topic for a lot of people, but...
which side did you pick?"
     "Neither.  Both," Knok shrugged.  "My buddy Skar and I both teamed up
with a Decepticon named Doubledealer, and it was my job to help him pretend
to be an Autobot.  But after a while it stopped being pretend, and I got out
of that situation before Skar and Doubledealer got skragged.  You?"
     "Autobot from the word go.  I even built my Transtector in the image of
the famous Jazz, although with different colors," Navarone replied, not at
all uncomfortable about answering the question.
     "Transwhat?"
     "Transtector.  We built bodies to ride around in.  Oh, I know about
binary bonding, which I guess is what you did.  But Stepper was just a
vehicle, I was the brains behind it," Navarone said wistfully.  "He...it was
blown up near the end of the War, and under the terms of the peace I couldn't
build another one," she sighed.
     Knok's dinner arrived, a steaming slab of algal matter treated with
vitamins, minerals and flavors so that you could almost pretend it was a
steak if you'd been away from real food long enough to forget what steak was
really like.
     "What kind of energon is THAT?" Navarone asked.
     Knok pulled off his grey and blue helmet to reveal the green skin and
black hair that marked him as a Nebulan.  "It isn't.  It's organic, like me."
     "You're...a squishy?"
     Now it was Knok's turn to sigh.  Even Autobots had anti-organic bigots
in their ranks.  "I'm a cyborg.  Part Cybertronian, part Organic.  You said
you knew about binary bonding...?"
     She shook her head.  "I assumed it was between two mechanoids, like a
limited gestalt situation.  I mean, it's not like I hate organics, or,
um...."
     Knok just picked up his utensils and started eating while Navarone
stammered into silence.

               *              *              *              *

     Navarone stood outside the energizing depot, nervousness zipping up and
down her neural nets like a virus.
     Knok had left the bar without another word to her, but she couldn't stop
thinking about him.  She'd never met an organic, even a cyborganic, before.
Oh, she'd protected enough with Stepper, even handled a few while getting
them out of tough spots.  But those had always been in crisis situations, and
she'd moved on to somewhere else before things cooled down.  She'd never
*met* any of the organics she'd saved.
     Maybe she hadn't wanted to stick around and meet any of them.  She was
old enough to remember the old Empire, back when organics came to Planet
Master on a regular basis to check up on things.  Oh, no organics lived
there, and she only saw them in the distance herself...Master was an
automated administrative world.  Those with the real ruling power lived on
planets far more hospitable to organic life.  But she still remembered the
horror of monitoring reports of the geneplague's spread, and it drove home
the essential fragility and mortality of organics.  Why risk making friends
with someone who'll die in a few dozen years at the outside...less than a
vorn, to use old Cybertronian time units?
     But a cyborg...that was something else entirely.  The Great War had
ended centuries ago, and here was this "Nebulan" still alive...obviously
there were benefits to being binary bonded.  Or maybe Nebulans just had
longer lifespans than most organics.
     Steeling herself, Navarone walked into the recharging station.  A quick
glance showed Knok was at the monitoring station at one end of the bank of
chargers.  
     Suddenly, one of the chargers emitted an alarm.  An old Maximal was in
the charger, and something was wrong.  She'd seen this happen once before,
back in the old precinct.  The poor devil's circuits had come out of
alignment, and now the charger's energon was overloading him.  Manual cutoff
wouldn't help, it was already too late.
     Knok jumped across the room, jets flaring from the backpack of his
armor, and landed right in front of the old Maximal.  He shoved his hands
into the seething energon fields and concentrated...and the alarms stopped.
The Maximal relaxed and stepped out of the charger.
     "You better go down and get fixed up, Feldspar," Knok gestured in the
direction of what must have been the local repair bay.  "And pay for the full
job this time, will ya?  That's the third time this vorn you've sparked out
like that."
     Feldspar nodded meekly and walked out, while Knok bent to the charger
and started inspecting it for damage.  Navarone quietly walked up behind him.
     "You've been asking around about me," Knok said without turning around.
     "Huh?" Navarone stopped cold.  "Well, ah...yes, I have.  I wanted to
apologize about the other night."
     "Don't sweat it," Knok shrugged.  "Not that mechanoids sweat."
     "I'd say I'm doing a remarkable simulation of it right now," Navarone
laughed nervously.
     "So...you've apologized.  Anything else?" he asked, standing up and
starting back to his monitoring station.
     "Well," she shuffled nervously, "I *am* new in this part of Cybertron,
and I was wondering if you could...show me around?"
     Knok laughed, a short barking sound.  "Sounds like you're asking me on a
date."
     "A...oh, right, part of mating rituals," Navarone realized.  She knew
that races with sexual reproduction often had elaborate patterns for deciding
who to reproduce with, but she hadn't realized until now that her invitation
could be taken in that way.  "Well, I guess it might be like a date, although
my race is asexual."
     Knok shrugged.  "I lost the relevant bits for that when I got binary
bonded, anyway."  He paused to think, and Navarone wondered how long it had
been since the Nebulan had seen any of his own race.  "Okay, I guess so.
Routine's been getting boring anyway.  I get off duty in a decicycle...that
okay?"
     Navarone shook her head.  "I go on shift in a few clicks, maybe in half
a cycle?"
     "I guess I've got a little while before tomorrow's shift I can show you
around," Knok admitted.  "What's your shift for?"
     "Police, heavy weapons unit.  I'm the heavy weapon," she grinned.

               *              *              *              *

     "RUN!" Knok shouted.  "They're only after organics like me...they'll
leave you alone if you're not caught with me."
     Navarone shook her head.  She'd only been "dating" Knok for a few dozen
cycles, but she knew she couldn't abandon him to these rampaging monsters.
"I'm not letting you die, Knok!  We can fight through to a safe area...there
can't be so many Vehicons that there's no safe areas, right?"
     But they both knew that there might very well be that many Vehicons.
Since the mysterious fleet had arrived in Cybertron's orbit a few cycles ago,
there had been no negotiating, no entreaty.  The Vehicons swarmed over an
area and eliminated any with a trace of organics in them, especially the old
Pretenders and the few "beast warriors" among the Maximals and Predacons.
Maximal and Predacon fought side by side against this returning "lost tribe,"
but it was a losing battle.
     A brace of flying drones came into view, spherical-bodied things with
flimsy wings and no apparently intelligence or ability to transform.
Navarone folded over into her gun mode and blew them out of the sky.  "Get
on," she shouted, "I can fly us faster in this mode than either of us can
run!"
     Knok hesitated.  If the Vehicons found him with her, they'd destroy both
the organic and the "contaminated" mechanoid.  But they might destroy her
anyway, as a potential sympathizer...someone might have told them about
binary bonding.  Then he got on and the two flew off into the night.
     For several clicks they managed to avoid detection, but they had to duck
down roads and alleys that even Knok was unfamiliar with.  The motorcycle
drones were everywhere on the ground, and the flying drones filled the skies
more densely with every passing nanoclick.
     "Dead end!" Knok called out, and Navarone pulled up short just in time
to avoid hitting a wall.
     "Now where?" she asked.
     Then they turned and saw IT.  A terrifying tank-like vehicle, bearing
down on them with all weapons pointed in their direction.
     Navarone fired, but her shot glanced off the thing's sloped armor.
"Damn, too low on power!" she cursed.
     The tank advanced slowly, almost contemptuously, having taken their
measure and found them to be no threat.
     "Not while I'm around," Knok replied grimly.  Letting go of Navarone's
body, he twisted in the air to become the powerplant he'd been engineered
into by the Decepticons.
     "No!" Navarone shrieked.  "You haven't eaten, you'll kill yourself!"
     She was right.  His stomach grumbled like an empty pit.  To pull this
trick, he'd normally need to eat a twenty course meal first...but he didn't
have a choice.  "And THAT will kill us both!" he replied, latching onto
Navarone's power couplings.
     The dead end alley was lit up by a brilliant flare as Knok poured power
into Navarone's cannon.  The blast tore through the tank as if it were made
from plastic sheeting, and they were rewarded by an impressive detonation.
     Screaming with pain, Knok dropped to the ground and transformed back to
his humanoid mode.  Navarone transformed and cradled him in her arms.
     "I'll get you to a nice restaurant," she promised, trying to ignore the
sound of the second tank coming up through the fireball.  "We'll have a big
dinner, then we can tell everyone how we..."
     Knok stopped screaming and gritted his teeth, fixing her with a look
that shut her up.
     "Yes," he agreed, talking past the pain.  "And, as the Terrans say,
we'll live happily ever after."
     "I love..." Navarone started.
     Then the plasma burst reduced both to drifting vapors....

==============================================================================

Author's Notes:

     Navarone's name in Japanese comes out to "Ne-bu-ro-n" and might be an
attempt to transliterate "Nebulan."  But I decided Navarone was a more
appropriate name for a Targetmaster.
     In Japan, the original Headmasters came from Planet Master, and built
Transtectors in order to function on the same scale as the Cybertrons and
Destrons.  Powermasters were only around in Masterforce, and they were all
humans.  Targetmasters appeared late in the Headmasters series, and as far
as I know they were not from Planet Master, but I decided to take a few
liberties here.  My "origin" of Planet Master is pure speculation, and may
even be contradicted in the canon.
     Yes, the ending of this story is a downer...but it strikes me that the
coming of the Vehicons was a bit of a bummer for everyone.  For those who
don't know, the Vehicons are the bad guys in the Beast Machines series.  I'm
also speculating about how the Vehicons arrived and took over, of course,
since that hasn't been revealed yet (as of 9/14/99).