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Everyone on the deck had been staring at the monitor for the better part of thirty minutes.
The Signal Bee's feed had followed Ethan down to two thousand meters, through the debris-clearing work, through the pulse cannon barrage, through the bioluminescent swarm that had come boiling up from the deeper darkness like moths to a very dangerous flame. Now the feed had gone dark. The Signal Bee was climbing back toward the surface.
Dr. Calder's eyes were fixed on the water. His tablet had been clutched in a white-knuckled grip for the last ten minutes, and he appeared to have forgotten how to blink.
The sea began to churn.
A column of water erupted upward, sending a wave of spray across the bow. A figure shot out of the foam, arcing into the air, executed a lazy backflip at the peak of the climb, and came down on the deck with a heavy metallic thunk that rattled the boards.
The Bureau guards didn't react. They'd seen this show before.
Dr. Calder went white.
Not pale. White. The kind of color human skin takes on when the brain has finished rejecting a piece of information and is now working on denying physics itself.
Two thousand meters. Two hundred times standard atmospheric pressure. A depth that crushed modern submarines flat. And this teenager had just surfaced out of it wearing a suit of armor that, by any rational metric, should have been crushed like an aluminum can.
The proof was clinging to Ethan's shoulders.
Three deep-sea octopuses, ashen-pink and indignant, were wrapped around the Mark Five's pauldrons, waving tentacles in confused protest. They'd apparently grabbed onto the armor somewhere during the ascent and hadn't figured out how to let go.
Ethan glanced down at them, sighed through the helmet speaker, and muttered: "Guess lunch just got more interesting."
He turned his head toward the cabin.
"J.A.R.V.I.S. Contact him. Tell him to come over."
A soft synthetic chime confirmed the command.
Commander Hayes blinked. "Professor Mercer? Sir, we're a thousand kilometers from the nearest coastline. Who exactly are you calling?"
"Reinforcements."
"From where?"
Ethan didn't answer. He peeled the octopuses off his shoulders with the gentle annoyance of a man removing lint from a jacket, set them on the deck (where they immediately began fleeing toward the scuppers), and watched the horizon.
The guards exchanged glances. Whatever was coming, it was going to take a while to arrive from any conceivable port. They settled in to wait.
-----
Half an hour later, a black dot appeared on the eastern horizon.
The sound reached the ship a few minutes before the visual did. A low, heavy rotor beat, echoing across the open water with a deep, resonant thrum that didn't match any military aircraft the guards recognized.
A helicopter.
Which was, itself, impossible.
The Meridian Wave was a thousand kilometers from the nearest coastline. Standard military helicopters had an operational range of roughly three hundred kilometers. Even the largest heavy-lift rotorcraft in the Valorian fleet couldn't reach this position from any known airfield. A helicopter out here was a helicopter committing suicide.
And yet, as the black dot grew and the sound sharpened, a helicopter was exactly what came into view.
But it was the wrong size.
The approaching aircraft was enormous. Twice the length of a conventional military transport helicopter, with a fuselage massive enough to house a small cargo airship. Its rotor system was proportionally ridiculous, two massive blades spinning with the heavy, deliberate rhythm of something that didn't care about aerodynamic efficiency.
And slung beneath the fuselage, held by multiple reinforced cargo cables, was an object the size of a shipping container.
The object was pulsing with a deep, dark blue light.
Hayes's mouth opened.
"Is that… a reactor?"
"Looks like one," another guard muttered.
"That's impossible. That thing has to weigh fifty tons. A helicopter can't lift fifty tons. The airframe would tear itself apart before it got off the ground."
"So what the hell are we looking at?"
Dr. Calder, still in the grip of his ongoing worldview crisis, said nothing. He was past the point of being able to form sentences about what he was seeing.
The enormous helicopter closed the distance, slowing as it approached the research vessel. The downwash was brutal — waves slapped against the hull, rigging snapped taut, and loose items skittered across the deck. The guards grabbed handholds and braced.
At Ethan's signal, the helicopter began to descend.
As the cargo touched the reinforced platform on the aft deck — a platform that, Calder now realized, had been deliberately reinforced for this specific load — the Meridian Wave sank noticeably lower in the water.
Holy hell.
The ship's displacement was rated for forty tons of cargo. Whatever had just landed on the deck was well beyond that, and the vessel was groaning under the weight with the specific sound of steel objecting to physics.
Fifty tons, minimum. Probably more.
The helicopter released the cables, unhooked from the reactor, and slowly descended toward an open patch of deck.
And that's when the guards noticed.
There was nobody in the cockpit.
"Wait. Wait wait wait."
Hayes was staring through the helicopter's front canopy with the expression of a man whose day had just taken another sharp left turn.
"Is there a pilot in that thing?"
"I… don't see one."
"I don't either."
"Tell me you're seeing a pilot. Somebody tell me there's a pilot in the helicopter."
"There isn't a pilot in the helicopter."
"Okay. Good. Glad we're all in agreement. WHAT THE HELL."
One of the younger guards attempted a theory. "Drone? Remote operated?"
"A drone that looks like a helicopter? With a full cockpit? Who builds a drone with a cockpit?"
"Who flies a helicopter a thousand kilometers out to sea carrying a nuclear reactor?"
"Apparently the same person."
Ethan, who'd been watching the exchange with quiet amusement, finally raised his voice.
"All right, everyone. Enough."
He turned toward the helicopter, which had now touched down on the deck and was sitting silently with its rotors spinning down.
"Good work. You can land now."
The helicopter's fuselage rippled.
For a split second, the entire aircraft appeared to be made of water, with concentric waves moving outward from some invisible epicenter. Then the movement resolved into what it actually was: every panel, every plate, every component on the aircraft was shifting simultaneously. The tail boom folded. The rotor hub retracted. The landing gear unfolded into legs. The cargo bay became a torso.
Ten meters. Maybe more. A mechanical figure rose from the deck with the deliberate, grinding majesty of something that had been designed to intimidate.
Its armor was dark gray, threaded with deep red accents. Broader shoulders than Bumblebee. Heavier frame. Where Bumblebee's face was expressive and almost cartoonish, this one's was angular and severe — a featureless mask with two glowing red optical sensors that tracked across the deck with the unhurried precision of a machine that didn't need to hurry because it knew nothing on this vessel could stop it.
The downblast of its transformation knocked several loose items off the deck. Dr. Calder grabbed a railing to keep his footing.
The mechanical giant turned its massive head. Found Ethan. And dropped to one knee.
The impact made the ship rock.
"Master."
The voice was lower than Bumblebee's. Heavier. Grinding metal and controlled thunder.
"Blackout reporting for duty."
The silence on the deck was total.
Dr. Calder was, at this point, essentially a statue. Commander Hayes had removed his hand from the railing long enough to press it against his own face. The younger Bureau guards were staring at the kneeling Transformer with the expression of people who had officially given up on understanding anything that was happening in their lives.
Eventually, one of them turned slowly toward Ethan.
"Uh… Professor Mercer. Sir. D-did you… also make this one?"
Ethan kept his face carefully neutral.
He was, in truth, experiencing a small internal flush of satisfaction. Building a ten-meter war machine that could lift a nuclear reactor across an ocean and then kneel on command was, he felt, a legitimate flex. Any normal person would have allowed himself a smile.
But the composed-genius act had been working well so far, and it would be a shame to break character now.
"Yeah," he said, with the studied casualness of a man discussing a weekend project. "Had some downtime over the last month. Tinkered with a few things. Figured one of them might come in handy."
The guards looked at the ten-meter Transformer. Then at Ethan. Then at each other.
"A few things," one of them repeated.
"Small projects," Ethan said.
"That—" Hayes gestured at Blackout, who was still kneeling, which somehow made the absurdity of his size even more pronounced, "—is not a small project, Professor Mercer."
"Relative scale."
"Ten meters tall, Professor."
"Smaller than some things."
The guards gave up.
If Ethan Mercer wanted to pretend he'd whittled a ten-meter combat-capable Transformer in his spare time the way other people knit sweaters, that was his prerogative. They'd stopped being surprised about a year ago. The surprise muscle had atrophied.
-----
While the guards processed, Ethan turned his attention upward and examined his new creation.
Blackout. A Decepticon-class Transformer from the Earth-Prime memories, and in Ethan's world, the second autonomous unit he'd built. Two hundred and fifty thousand Prestige total — two hundred for the manufacturing technology, fifty for the disposable Spark. Worth every point.
Blackout's helicopter form was specifically suited for this mission. Conventional rotorcraft could lift roughly three tons. The nuclear reactor destined for the seabed weighed closer to sixty. To transport a payload of that mass, the Valorian military would have needed twenty specialized heavy-lift helicopters operating in coordinated formation, and even then, the operation would have been a logistical nightmare.
For a Spark-transformed Blackout, lifting sixty tons was a stretch but a manageable one. The Spark reorganized the chassis at the molecular level, producing metallurgical properties that didn't obey the material science of this world. Combined with a rotor assembly that drew power from the Transformer's internal reactor, the result was an aircraft that could carry payloads that physics said shouldn't be carriable.
And once it reached the deployment site, it could transform into a ten-meter construction worker capable of manipulating seabed equipment with precision no human crew could match.
Exactly what Ethan needed for this job.
Across the deck, Dr. Calder was sitting down on a coil of rope, staring at nothing in particular. His tablet lay forgotten beside him. His mouth moved occasionally, forming silent words that his vocal cords seemed unable to commit to.
A suitcase that became armor. A teenager diving two thousand meters into crushing darkness and coming back with souvenirs. A helicopter a thousand kilometers from land, piloted by no one, carrying a nuclear reactor. And now a ten-meter robot that called Ethan "Master" and knelt on command.
Every single thing on this boat, Calder thought distantly, was something that a week ago he would have classified as either impossible or fictional.
And the teenager standing at the center of all of it was now conversing casually with a ten-meter war machine about the next phase of a seabed construction project.
Calder closed his eyes.
When he opened them, everything was still there.
He'd been fighting the conclusion for two days now, ever since stepping onto this boat, and he finally let it through:
I'm going to have a very long career on this project.
And I should probably start taking notes.