IDW - Beast Wars #8

Title: Pod, Part 2

Written by: Erik Burnham

Art by: Winston Chan

Colours by: Sidvenblu

Letters by: Jake M. Wood

Assistant Editor: Riley Farmer

Editor: Jazmine Joyner

Supervising Editor: David Mariotte

Plot

The Maximals receive an abruptly cut off message from Cheetor, calling for help, so they hunt him down in the halls of the Axalon, where they find him hung up in an Energon web, having been left there by Blackarachnia. 

The crew split up to hunt down the new Predacon, who is in the control room, trying to download the Axalon's database. Realizing that the Maximals are going to find her soon though, she cancels the download, and starts uploading a copy of her Predacon shell program to the still orbiting stasis pods.

Rhinox soon finds her, so she disconnects and starts the process to force the pods to descend, forcing Rhinox to stay behind to try and salvage their stranded crew members. He reports what's happened to the rest of the crew, who are still split up across the ship.

Eventually, Blackarachnia breaks out of the ship and tries to head to the Darksyde, but is attacked by Cheetor, though she tricks him into believing that she has set multiple traps in the Axalon, causing him to run back inside to try and save his friends...

Later, Rhinox reports that more than half of the pods have been affected by this code, which implants the most aggressive Predacon traits into the recipient, changing their loyalties in the process, and there is no way to know who is infected until they emerge from their pods, which are still descending.

Optimus now decides that this is too far, and declares that they are going to go after the Predacons more aggressively now...

Blackarachnia soon sneaks into the Darksyde, where she finds Tarantulas, who attempts to make her bow to him as his servant, but she states that command didn't go through on the code. Tarantulas still considers this a victory however, and plans to connect to the rest of the pods as soon as he can,but Blackarachnia simply tells him that she has wonderful news then....

Characters

Maximal

Optimus Primal - Gorilla

Cheetor - Cheetah

Rhinox - Rhino

Dinobot - Velociraptor

Rattrap - Rat

Nyx - Bat

Orbiting Protoforms 51% affected by Predacon code, all pods Descending

Predacon

Blackarachnia - Black Widow Spider

Tarantulas - Tarantula

Waspinator - Wasp

Megatron - Tyrannosaurus Rex (Mentioned)

Notes

• Rhinox reports that just over half of the orbiting pods have been affected by the Shell Program code. This is somewhat ironic since the Kingdom toyline, which most of the character models this issue are based on, has much less Predacon characters than Maximals.
• Blackarachnia's plan to send the code to all the inactive pods and half being converted into Predacons is actually pretty similar to the plot of the Gathering, the previous IDW Beast Wars comic series, where Razorbeast corrupted Magmatron's code, which kept half of the pods as Maximals instead of Predacons.
• Blackarachnia's code was supposed to be cause her to be subservient to Tarantulas, but that part of it failed to upload, most likely due to Rattrap interrupting the programming last issue.
• Waspinator has a teddy bear that he sleeps with, and much like Megatron's rubber ducky, it has metallic details.