Sandstorm is secretly the Covenant member Scorpius, a hard-shelled mystery of a robot, wrapped in a soft-shelled cover-identity and cemented by a tasty bean-paste of lies. The Covenant's resident expert on court intrigue, Scorpius's billions of years of experience made him a natural to survey the deepening crisis on Cybertron due to Shokaract. He did so with gusto, immediately vanishing into a cover identity so thoroughly that even the Covenant couldn't contact him. His rise to power paralleled Shokaract's, and Sandstorm eventually ascended to become the leader of the (much diminished) Predacons, leading the anti-Shokaract rebels in the sub-levels under Iacon.