by Peter David
Laserbeak had clearly had enough. He angled his blaster around, and now he was indeed point blank. One discharge of his weapon and Sam Witwicky would never bother the Decepticons again.
Suddenly Sam shouted, “Bumblebee! Fire!”
Looking to the side, Laserbeak realized too late that Sam had maneuvered his head right in front of one of the ship’s cannons. Laserbeak let out an alarmed croak, and that was all that he had time for before the cannon blew off his head.
Releasing his hold on Laserbeak, Sam allowed the headless robot to slide off the ship and crash to the street below.
The problem was that when it came to hitting the street, the attack ship wasn’t far behind. Sam flattened himself, bracing for the impact that came seconds later. The jolt was so violent that he was sent tumbling off the ship and landed on the street next to it.
Carly climbed out of the cockpit and, trying not to collapse in a fit of the shivers, ran to Sam and crouched next to him. Placing her hands on his face, she said in loving wonder, “You … found me.”
“Yeah, well … I had some help,” he managed to say, and then he pointed behind her.
She turned and saw the most motley assortment of humans and robots ever collected.
Carly spotted Wheels and Brains among them, and naturally she knew Bumblebee as he hauled himself out of the ship’s cockpit. “Y’ know how they say that any landing you can walk away from is a good one?” said Wheelie. “Don’t believe it. That was one sucky landing.” Then he swiveled his attention to Carly. “Hey, sweetheart. Couldn’t stay away from our boy, couldja.”
“I guess not.”
One of the men with the guns, a black man, approached. He wasn’t in uniform; instead, he was wearing khakis, and he had a rifle tucked under his arm. “You Carly?” She managed a nod. “Name’s Robert Epps. You’re gonna be fine.”
“ ’Ey!” Roadbuster was holding up the object that had intercepted the blast that would have killed Sam. “Check this primitive dingus.”
“That’s a UAV! A NEST UAV! It’s an unmanned probe. Was it working before?” Epps said.
“Y-yes,” Carly said. “In fact, it flew into Laserbeak’s path. It saved Sam.”
“Then that means that someone back at NEST was controlling it. And maybe they can see or hear us.” Immediately he grabbed it out of the blue robot’s hand.
“I weren’t finished with that yet!” the robot protested.
“Shut up, Roadbuster!” He started shouting directly into the probe. “Flight control, copy? Repeat, do you copy? Acknowledge transmission … somehow. Rotate! Do something!”
At first the drone did nothing at all. But then the center ball, the one with the lens, nodded up and down.
Carly and Sam immediately darted in front of it. “If you hear us, this is ground zero!” Sam shouted.
And Carly, remembering all the things Dylan had told her—boasting in his confidence that nothing he said would go any further and enjoying his position of being in the know—said, “Sentinel’s here in Chicago, getting ready to launch!”
VIRGINIA
The exuberance in the Egg over the technician’s deft maneuvering of the probe that had saved Sam’s life quickly gave way to frustration. No one was doubting that it was worth sacrificing the device in order to buy Sam Witwicky even a few more minutes of life. But now their main source of information was down for the count.
The general had left the room to return to the White House, but Mearing and Simmons were still there, desperately trying not to let frustration overwhelm them. At first the screen had gone out completely, indicating that the camera was offline. Mearing snapped orders to the technician, telling him to do whatever he could to bring the device back online. After a minute of tinkering with it, he managed to get a partial image. It was grainy and indistinct, but it was something, and it seemed to indicate that the drone was on the street somewhere. There was a good deal of noise from nearby multiple voices and shouting, but it was garbled and hard to hear.
“Is that the best you can do?” she said to the technician.
“So far,” he replied tersely, continuing to adjust a control bank that was a truly staggering array of dials.
Then the drone abruptly shifted position in a manner that told them that someone had picked it up. A face appeared, pixillated into what seemed a thousand squares.
Mearing squinted. “Is that … yes! It’s Epps! And … oh, my God … behind him … that’s … Ratchet and … Bumblebee …?”
“Autobots! Haaaahaha!” Simmons was thumping one of the armrests of his wheelchair in undiluted glee. “I knew it! I knew they survived, those mechanical miracle workers!” Then he quickly turned his attention to the technician. “Can you let him know we can see him at least? And get the damned audio fixed!”
The technician fired him an annoyed look, clearly not pleased about Simmons barking orders at him. Then he twisted a dial, and the picture abruptly moved up and down.
“What’re you … oh, my God, that’s brilliant,” Simmons said. “You’re making the camera nod! Good going!”
“Can you boost the audio?” Mearing said. “Working on it.”
Garbled words began to come through. Two faces appeared: Sam’s and a female whom both Mearing and Simmons knew instantly.
It was hard to make out, but it sounded like Carly was saying, “Sentinel’s pillars … atop building … Hotchkiss Gould,” while Sam was telling them “to open … other … space bridge.”
“We gotta get this in front of Colonel Lennox,” said Simmons.
Mearing didn’t disagree. “Feed it through to him at Grissom.” As the technician prepared for the relaying of the images, she shook her head in quiet amazement. “He actually got to her. Hard to believe.”
“Never underestimate the lengths that a man in love will go to for his woman,” Simmons said.
She stared at him. “You really need to stop talking now,” she said.
“Got it.”
INDIANA
i
Grissom Air Reserve Base was situated approximately sixty-five miles north of Indianapolis. Named for the late astronaut Gus Grissom, it was home to the 434th Air Refueling Wing.
At that particular moment, it was also home to Colonel Lennox, who was seated behind a desk, feeling frustrated and uncertain. Time was ticking down, and he had no play. Instead he was left sitting there, staring at an array of monitors on the wall that were providing him with nothing. He had a collection of rumors, of half leads, but nothing definitive. He needed to be able to see, he needed rock-solid intel from someone on the ground, and he was being relentlessly deprived of all that. Technicians were monitoring the screens, constantly trying to find some sort of live feed, but nothing had come through.
Suddenly an image appeared on the screen, causing Lennox to jump to his feet.
He was reasonably sure that it was Bob Epps standing in the background, and in the foreground …
Sam. Of course, Sam. Who else but Sam?
“… will … transport … Cybertron here!” the girl was saying.
And Sam was now saying, “Have to … destroy … control pillar! Shoot it … down …!”
There were GPS readouts coming through as well, localizing where the broadcast was originating from. In the meantime his fax machine came to life, spitting out a rushed transcript of the entire broadcast for reference.
“Is this coming out of Chicago?” he called out.
“That’s the point of origin, sir, but it’s being routed through NEST!”
Another technician was holding up a telephone. “NEST on line one, sir!”
Lennox immediately grabbed the phone and jammed it against his ear. “This is Lennox!”
“You getting all this, Colonel?” came Simmons’s voice. “If you’re going, the time is now!”
ii
An array of extremely capable soldiers stood at ease in front of Lennox, having just been informed of the situation to the best of his knowledge and what was
expected.
He saw the eagerness in their eyes. Not a one of them was displaying the slightest hesitation in the face of what could well be overwhelming odds. Lennox wasn’t sure whether it was unstinting bravery or if they simply didn’t understand what it was they were going to be facing. It could well be a combination of both. How could you explain to anyone what it was to square off against the walking death machines called Decepticons? At least they’d been given the welcome news that reports of the Autobots’ deaths, like that of Mark Twain a hundred years earlier, had been greatly exaggerated. So they wouldn’t necessarily be all on their own in attempting to get into Chicago. But still …
“If we want to hit back, we’ll have to wing-suit in,” Lennox said. “I’m not promising a ride home. Anyone with me? The world needs you now.”
One young soldier immediately stepped forward. His nametag read “ZIMMERMAN,” and he was bristling with youthful certainty. He reminded Lennox of himself when he first became an army ranger. “I can find my own ride home, sir.”
In no time at all, every single one of them—nearly forty in all—had volunteered for the hazardous assignment.
Lennox thought about his wife and daughter waiting for him back home. This job wasn’t going to be about making it back because failing to do so meant that his wife was a widow and his little girl would grow up not remembering her father.
No, this was about succeeding so that they’d have a planet to live on.
The stakes were slightly higher this go-around.
CHICAGO
i
It was a difficult notion for Sam Witwicky to wrap his brain around and certainly there was no circumstance under which he would consider the loss of human life to be a lucky thing, but the harsh truth of the matter was that the Decepticons might well have done the opposition a favor by bombing the living crap out of Chicago.
If they had not taken such an aggressive posture—if they had continued to perpetuate the myth that they were not going to inflict any harm and waited to deliver their masterstroke until it was too late—they would have had a couple million hostages at their disposal to use in any number of ways to hamper the efforts of Sam and his allies. But the majority of the population either was dead or had gotten the hell out of Dodge, which simplified the problem of collateral damage tremendously.
Except now Sam was prepared to do some serious damage of his own.
The predator had been packing a Hellfire missile. The Wreckers had managed to cobble together a launching cylinder that they assured Sam definitely, positively, abso-fraggin’-lutely had an 89 percent chance of firing, take that to the bank, mate. It was, under the circumstances, going to have to be good enough.
Between the buildings that were still standing and the massive distribution of debris, there were still plenty of places for them to hide, enabling them to get as close to their target—the anchor—as they possibly could.
The Autobots had formed a protective circle around the humans, acting as the most formidable escort in the history of crowd control. They moved from spot to spot, trying to minimize their exposure to any prying eyes. In the distance, across the way, towering above the skyline, was their destination with the anchor pillar atop it. Except from this angle, although they had a decent view of Sentinel and Megatron, there was no clear view of their actual target.
“I say we just blow up the whole shebang,” Hardcore Eddie said.
“Won’t get the job done,” said Mirage. “Let’s say you manage to blow out the building’s foundation. It’s going to require more than that to take care of Sentinel and Megatron. They’ll just grab the anchor pillar and leap clear of the collapsing building.”
“He is correct,” Sideswipe said. “We need to target the anchor itself. And we can’t do it from down here; the angle is wrong.”
Sam abruptly looked down at the Hellfire missile he was carrying in his arms. When the Wreckers had thrown together the launch device so that it was functional—more or less just to see if they could—they’d then handed it off to Sam with a dismissive “ ’Ere, mate! Make yerself bloody useful! Carry something!” But now he was coming up with a plan of action that he was starting to like. “With this rocket, could we shoot that control pillar down?”
Epps did some fast calculations of their position versus their target. “Eight blocks away. Gotta get closer for the shot, and it’s across the river. Gonna have a hell of a time sneaking up.”
“Forget getting closer,” Sam said. “Think higher. All we need is a direct line of fire.”
Epps studied the area and muttered a profanity to himself. The destruction of Chicago had been accomplished in the same manner as when a tornado sweeps through a town. Some areas get clobbered while others escape unscathed. Buildings that would have been ideal for height had been destroyed altogether, whereas buildings that were too short remained standing. All except for …
He pointed. “If we got up into that one there, maybe …”
Sam looked where he was indicating and wasn’t thrilled with what he was seeing. About a half mile east by the River Esplanade was a tall glass building that kind of reminded him of Nakatomi Plaza from Die Hard. But at least Bruce Willis, for all that he had to deal with in that film, had been in a structure that remained resolutely vertical even when the shit was being blown out of it. This thing was tilting. Geometry wasn’t Sam’s strong suit. Apparently his strong suit was hairbreadth escapes from killer alien robots, which wasn’t a skill that looked good on a résumé, as he’d found out. Still, it appeared to be, to his math-challenged eye, at least at an eighty-degree angle from the ground. Common sense told him that anything short of ninety wasn’t the best use of real estate.
Epps saw the look on Sam’s face. “So it’s leaning. So what? That tower in Pisa, it’s been leaning for years, it’s still upright.”
Sam called, “Carly, how much does the Leaning Tower of Pisa, y’ know, lean?”
It just seemed to be the kind of thing she’d know. As it turned out, he was right. “About four degrees,” she said.
“Okay, so that thing’s leaning more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa. That’s got to be at least five, six degrees more lean, I’m thinking.”
“You got a better idea?” Epps said.
“Yeah. Waking up. Waking up right now, safe at home, finding out I’m dreaming all this and none of it ever happened. That’s my plan A.”
“Sam! Time for school!” Epps said as he reached over and pinched Sam hard on the ear, causing him to let out a yelp. Then he stared at him sardonically. “How’d that work out for you? Wake up, didja?”
Sam shook his head to ease the pain and then said, “So, plan B, then.”
“Looks like.”
Quickly they informed the Autobots of their new destination and their plan, such as it was. “It is a worthy endeavor, Sam,” Optimus said gravely. “We will see you through to your destination. We would enter the building if that were feasible, but I think our height and, of even greater concern, our weight”—he looked dubiously at the tilting structure—“would make that inadvisable.”
“Gotta agree there. All I ask is that you keep an eye on Carly while we—”
Without hesitation, Carly said, “No way. I’m coming in with you.”
He looked at her in surprise. “Are you crazy? There’s no reason—”
“I’m not leaving you again. Not ever. I love …” She hesitated and then, seeing the look in his eyes, switched tracks and continued, “… nothing about this plan, but it beats sitting around on ground level and feeling helpless. You go, I go.”
Wheeljack rolled forward, producing assorted high-tech equipment from wherever the hell he always managed to pull it out from (truthfully, Sam didn’t like to think about where he stored it). “Urban combat. A classic. Don’t forget my prototypes. Grapple gloves for climbing; release is a little tricky, but you’ll get it. And everyone take yourself a boom stick.” He lay down a set of intricately designed metal rods about two feet l
ong. One end looked like a flare; the other appeared to be covered by what almost looked like a metal fist with the fingers clenched. It was like a combination of a mace and a lightsaber. Wheeljack pointed to the flare end. “Safety off, arm, ignite, thirty seconds, boom.” The way he was doling out the equipment accompanied with wry understatement, Sam half expected him to conclude, And do try to bring it all back in one piece this time, Double-Oh-Seven.
Sam lay down the Hellfire missile long enough to pick up a grapple glove and a boom stick. The glove looked like segmented metal, running up to his elbow. On the top side of it was a launcher that would fire a grappling hook and a retracting line, which he thought would come in particularly handy if he was endeavoring to escape from the Joker. He shoved the boom stick through his belt and secured it.
Epps looked down at the missile. “Too bad we only brought one shot.”
“One shot?” Sam replied. “That’s all we’ll need.”
ii
(Megatron is still flush with humiliation from the manner in which Sentinel addressed him, grabbed him, slung him about as if he were nothing. His emotions are torn between wanting to prove his worth and wanting to lash out at the Prime for treating him so. He ultimately rejects the latter, because this is a time for unity, not fractiousness. Besides, he doubts that if it came to it, he could defeat Sentinel, anyway. So it is the former, then. Proceed with such efficiency and professionalism that Sentinel has no reason to question his capability again.)
(And then something catches his eye. Something running over the bridge connecting the north shore to the south, waving a white piece of cloth. That is the typical human gesture for surrender. He decides to target it for amusement and blow it to atoms, just to show how highly Decepticons value such concepts. His sight zooms in and his audio locks on, and then he realizes that, no, it is the human Gould. What is he shouting?)
