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On the deck of the warship, under the disbelieving gaze of Captain Crane and every sailor in view, the oversized helicopter began to transform.
The process was fast and intricate. The tail boom folded and reconfigured into a leg. The cockpit assembly opened and restructured into a torso. The rotor mast retracted. Panels rotated, components telescoped, and the entire aircraft reorganized itself, in the span of a few seconds, into a ten-meter mechanical giant of dark gray armor threaded with deep red.
Every sailor on the warship's deck stood frozen. Only the small Bureau delegation, who had been briefed in advance, did not.
The newly upright Blackout turned its head toward the Bureau officer who had addressed it, and its red optical sensors narrowed.
"Insignificant insect."
The voice rolled across the deck, low and grinding and distinctly irritated.
"Do not presume to issue me instructions. I will complete the Master's task to the fullest of my capability. I do not require your reminders."
The Decepticon's hardcoded temperament had not been improved by being addressed as Comrade Blackout by a man it regarded as beneath its notice. Blackout served Ethan with absolute loyalty. Its attitude toward every other human being in existence ranged from indifference to contempt, and the Bureau officer's polite request had landed, in Blackout's processing, on the contempt end of that range.
The roar shook the sailors out of their paralysis.
Captain Crane, in particular, had gone somewhere quiet and distant inside his own head.
"My word," he said softly, to no one. "Is this a miracle. Have I been at sea so long that the world changed without me. When, exactly, did helicopters acquire this feature."
The Bureau officer who had been roared at was also badly shaken. His mental discipline was not weak, but mental discipline was calibrated for conventional adversity. A ten-meter mechanical giant roaring directly into a man's face was not a conventional adversity, and the officer's carefully maintained composure had evaporated entirely.
Having vented its irritation, Blackout wasted no further time. It moved toward the edge of the deck, preparing to dive and conduct the seabed survey.
Then its combat intuition activated.
The warning was instant and overriding. Blackout's Decepticon architecture included threat-assessment instincts that operated below the level of deliberate thought, and those instincts had just registered incoming danger. Without hesitation, the Transformer snapped its faceplate shut, drew a specialized weapon from its back mount, and dropped into a combat posture.
The sailors on the deck tensed, alarmed and confused.
Only Captain Crane understood. He spun and ran for the command bridge.
"Number Two, Number Three, this is the Flagship. The mechanical unit on our deck is not hostile. Stand down your weapons. Repeat, the unit on our deck is friendly. Stand down immediately."
On the other two warships of the formation, the commanders exhaled with audible relief and ordered their weapons systems to safe.
A kilometer away, the escort ships had watched a ten-meter robot materialize on the flagship's deck without warning. Unable to identify it, unable to confirm its intent, they had done exactly what trained naval crews were supposed to do: they had brought their shipboard weapons to bear on the unidentified contact.
What none of them had said aloud, even after standing down, was the quieter thought underneath. They had aimed their weapons at the thing. They were not at all confident the weapons would have stopped it.
Back on the flagship deck, Blackout registered the disappearance of the targeting hostility. It snorted, a sound of grinding mechanical contempt, and retracted its weapon. It swept the assembled sailors with one last wary scan, then somersaulted off the deck and plunged into the sea.
Captain Crane watched the white column of displaced water settle.
He stood at the rail for a moment, and a curiosity laced with retroactive fear moved through him.
If the shooting had actually started, he thought, could three of my warships have brought that thing down before it reached us?
He found, examining the question honestly, that he did not know the answer.
And not knowing the answer disturbed him more than any answer would have.
In the reception hall of the New Future Technology Energy headquarters, several hundred of the Republic's most senior figures were staring at the display screen.
A ten-meter mechanical giant. Armored. Weaponized. It had risen out of a parked helicopter on the deck of a naval warship, roared at a Bureau officer, drawn a weapon, and dived into the sea, all in the space of a single uninterrupted shot of live footage.
The audience turned, as one organism, toward the stage. The collective expression was somewhere between demand and accusation. Explain. Explain that. Right now.
Ethan stepped forward to the microphone at exactly the right moment.
"That," he said pleasantly, "is a new-model Transformer. Its designation is Blackout."
He paused.
"But I'd ask everyone not to get distracted. Blackout is not the point of today's demonstration."
A ripple of strangled disbelief moved through the hall.
Not the point.
The audience's collective eyelid twitched. New-model. The word new was carrying a structural load it could not bear. The previous Transformer the world had seen, the one called Bumblebee, had transformed from a sports car and had stood roughly six meters tall. The thing on the screen had transformed from a heavy military helicopter and stood well over ten.
Three or four months had elapsed between the two. In three or four months, Ethan Mercer had not iterated his Transformer technology. He had leapt it. The size, the form, the weapons loadout, the combat behavior, all of it represented a generational advance compressed into a single quarter.
And the founder had just told a roomful of cabinet officials and energy magnates that the ten-meter weaponized war machine was not the point.
Before the audience could finish processing that, the Transformer on the screen reached the seabed.
The footage followed Blackout down.
The Signal Bee descended with the Transformer, its camera tracking the long fall through progressively darkening water. The audience watched the light bleed out of the frame, watched the false-color depth imaging take over, watched the seabed finally resolve at the bottom of the descent.
Then Blackout breached the surface again.
The footage cut back to the warship in time to catch the Transformer erupting from the sea in a tower of white water and landing on the flagship's deck in a single clean leap.
Captain Crane, on the deck, looked as though his cardiovascular system was lodging a formal complaint.
It can submerge, he thought, a little wildly. It is a machine, full of electronics, and it can submerge. And not to some shallow recreational depth. That is the deep sea. That is well over a kilometer of crushing pressure. And it simply went down and came back up.
Blackout, ignoring the stunned attention of every human on the deck, scanned the air, located the hovering Signal Bee, and angled its body toward the drone's camera with a posture of sudden and complete respect.
"Master. The seabed is level. I cleared all debris from the site prior to surfacing." The grinding voice had lost every trace of its earlier contempt. "Do we proceed with installation?"
On the deck and in the reception hall alike, the listeners frowned.
Installation.
Install what? There was nothing here but open ocean and three warships. What could possibly be installed in the middle of the sea?
"Proceed."
Ethan's voice carried out through the Signal Bee's two-way relay, audible both on the warship's deck and across the reception hall's sound system.
Blackout did not hesitate.
The ten-meter Transformer turned, bent, and hoisted onto its shoulder the enormous piece of industrial equipment that had been the warship's unexplained cargo all morning.
On the deck, Captain Crane's eyes went wide.
He had personally supervised the loading of that equipment before dawn. It had taken multiple crane arms working in coordination to lift the thing aboard. He had estimated its weight at the time, and his estimate had not been generous.
If that piece of equipment weighs less than fifty tons, Crane thought, with the grim certainty of a man making a private wager he was confident he would win, I will run the length of this deck without my uniform.
Blackout settled the fifty-ton mass onto its shoulder as though it were carrying a duffel bag. It bent its knees and leaped off the deck, back into the sea.
This time, the Signal Bee descended with it.
The footage tracked the long fall. Fifteen hundred meters. The depth where most species could not survive, where only a small population of specialized deep-sea life moved through the permanent dark.
Today, the dark had a visitor.
After nearly ten minutes of descent, Blackout reached the seabed.
In the reception hall, the audience was no longer merely shocked. Mixed into the shock was something the audience had not expected to feel today: genuine, reluctant admiration.
Intelligent autonomous robots had been, until very recently, a distant theoretical proposition. In this young man's hands, they were not only real, they were advancing at a rate that defied every projection. A machine that flew like an aircraft, fought like a soldier, and dived like a submarine.
If Ethan Mercer had founded a robotics company, not one person in the reception hall would have doubted that he could build it into a global top-tier enterprise within a few short years.
But he had not founded a robotics company. He had founded an energy company. And the assembled executives, watching the Transformer descend, felt a collective flicker of something close to regret on Ethan's behalf. The young man had a once-in-a-generation talent for intelligent machines, and he had chosen, for reasons the room could not fathom, to point it at the energy sector instead.
It seemed, to the watching room, like a waste.
The regret lasted exactly until Blackout set the fifty-ton device down on the seabed.
The moment the equipment settled onto the seafloor, J.A.R.V.I.S.'s voice resounded through the reception hall's sound system, calm and clear.
"Sir. Suitable terrain confirmed. Shall I deploy Seabed Reactor Number Two?"
The reception hall stopped breathing.
Seabed Reactor.
The enormous, unexplained, fifty-ton hunk of industrial equipment that had ridden a warship across the Eastern Sea and been carried into the abyss on the shoulder of a war machine.
It was a nuclear reactor.
And the number attached to it was two.
Which meant, somewhere out in the silent dark beneath the Republic's coastal waters, there was already a Reactor Number One.