Shadowstrike paced her quarters obsessively. Allowing the progeny of those who caused so many deaths to live! But she could do nothing here. She was unaligned now, for better or for worse, and old conflicts from her other lifetime shouldn't come to the fore. But I didn't bargain for this! Logically, she knew that it was no fault of this young one's that her predecessors had betrayed the Decepticons so thoroughly, but emotionally? She remembered the slaughter of her crew as vividly as though it were yesterday rather than more than a millennia ago. And here, this Terrafirma was alive and well, and her friends were not. Furious, she muttered an old Decepticon curse that was enough to melt a heat shield and kicked a table, which careened wildly across the room and crumpled against a bulkhead.

And her knee joint froze in place, which elicited a new string of cursing from her.

With an angry sigh, she threw herself onto her recharge bunk. Her body ached from fatigue and lack of recharge. Despite her racing thoughts, sleep claimed her in very short order.

****

She was back on the bridge of the Devil's Charade. All the horrors of so long ago were playing out again, before her optics, except this time she was but an invisible observer. Her younger self stood at the command chair, barking out instructions to her crew. Explosions were ringing out all around her.

"Devil's Charade to Vengeance Fury, do you read us?"

"Where are you, damnit?! We need help!"

"We'll hold them off as long as we can. Devil's Charade out."

Then the defensive shields collapsed underneath the relentless Autobot assault. Her crew fought valiantly, but they couldn't hold out under such firepower without the help of their battlecruiser. And so they fought with blasters, laser rifles, whatever was at hand when the Autobots boarded. Shadowstrike swung at them with her sword, but to no avail. They were like ghosts, or maybe she was the ghost, and her blade sliced through air rather than metal. She watched in anguish as the crew was taken apart by the Autobot blasters. Her good friends, Banshee and Sine, both fatally damaged in one bitter flash of light. Even after all this time, she could name every one of the fallen that day.

She watched herself kneel before Banshee's fallen shape, and knew what was being said.

All at once she was back on Cybertron, watching herself make her report to Megatron. He commended her for escaping with 1/3 of the crew of Devil's Charade. He told her of the betrayal of the Vengeance Fury.

The vision flashed again, and she was in the ruined medbay of the Vengeance Fury on the planet below, listening to Terrafirma calmly rationalize the ship's disappearance and defection.

NO! Never forgotten… her mind screamed.

*****

Banshee's ghostly form floated in front of her tauntingly. You failed us. You're as much a traitor as the crew of Vengeance Fury.

"I tried!" 'Strike pleaded. "I battled hard for the Decepticon cause for the past millennia, I did all in my power to make those Autobots pay for your deaths…and the traitors are dead. Not killed at my own hand, but dead just the same. It's over…"

But you allow her to live. The ghost's optics burned an angry red and he lurched toward her. Your promise is not fulfilled, friend. The traitors live on through the young one.

"I can't destroy her, Banshee. She wasn't involved in the massacre. I'm unaligned now, and I can't betray my friends trust. She's innocent of this crime…"

Traitor! The ghost spit again. Betrayer! He drew a laser weapon and targeted Shadowstrike, who made no move to get out of the way. The weapon fired, and the world went black.

****

Shadowstrike bolted upright on her bunk, completely disoriented. She half expected Banshee's wraith to be standing over her, but her quarters were dark and quiet, save the hum of the engines of the ship. She sat quietly for a minute, still shivering from the nightmare. She tried to shake it off as extreme fatigue, coupled with the sickness and the stress of discovering the Vengeance Fury. You're being ridiculous, she told herself. It's over. But she knew it wasn't. She couldn't shake her distrust of the new femme, but finding a cure to the disease plaguing them all was more important than debating how to handle an old situation. Deal with it later, there are more important issues at hand…

It was then she noticed her terminal blinking. She rose from her bunk and settled into her chair at the terminal, and logged in to receive her pending message. To her dismay, the message was encoded with an old emergency code of her own devising.

"Coming to find you. Situation grave. Cobalt"

She stared at the message for several minutes before deleting it, a feeling of dread growing inside her. She knew her troubles were only just starting.