Exiles

by Alex Irvine

  Transformers: Exiles is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  A Del Rey Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2011 by Hasbro, Inc. All rights reserved.

  Based on Hasbro’s Transformers® Action Figures

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  HASBRO and its logo, TRANSFORMERS, and all related characters are trademarks of Hasbro and used with permission. © 2011 Hasbro. All Rights Reserved.

  ISBN 978-0-345-51986-3

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-8054-2

  www.delreybooks.com

  www.hasbro.com

  Del Rey mass market edition: October 2011

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One: Prologue Alpha Trion

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Part Two: Alpha Trion

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Three: Alpha Trion

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Part Four: Alpha Trion

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Part Five: Alpha Trion

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Other Books by This Author

  War has torn Cybertron to pieces.

  The heart of the planet itself, the AllSpark, has been jettisoned into space—I know not where. The great hope of freedom for all Cybertronians, the Autobot leader Optimus Prime, has left to find it—and to draw after him the poison of the Decepticon terror and its mighty figurehead, the onetime gladiator Megatron. In their absence, the mad scientist Shockwave has the planet in his sadistic thrall. The Autobot resistance continues bravely, but they are vastly outnumbered, and bravery itself cannot win in the face of such overwhelming numerical superiority as the Decepticons possess.

  The only hope for Cybertronian civilization is that Optimus Prime will one day return with the AllSpark. While he is gone, the planet—itself a living being—slumbers, slowly healing even as the continuing conflict on its surface inflicts further wounds. I fear that Shockwave contemplates damaging the planet further as part of an experimental regime that none of our spies have been able to uncover. It could be that he does not wish Megatron to return and thinks that if Cybertron is crippled, it will be left to us: the dregs, the remnants of what was once a proud civilization.

  I do what I can. I chronicle these times. I counsel caution and prudence on the part of the remaining Autobots. Yet they are perhaps a little too brave for their own good, particularly the Wreckers and the indomitable Ultra Magnus. I have lost count—I, the archivist!—of how many times the Wreckers have stood down a numerically superior Decepticon force. And how many more times have they struck in a daring raid on Decepticon facilities, destroying munitions and supplies? It might not be an exaggeration to say that were it not for Ultra Magnus, the war would already be over.

  And with it, I believe, my liberty to continue this chronicle.

  Despite the heroism of the Wreckers—and those other Autobots who fight on in Optimus Prime’s absence—the situation here is dire and deteriorating every moment. I do not know why Shockwave has not appeared in the Hall of Records to drag me away to one of his reformatting laboratories. It would be within his power to do so; that he has not surely means that he is more interested in observing me. All of my actions are certainly recorded and reported back to Shockwave. Very few things happen on Cybertron without his notice.

  I believe he might find some surprises should he attempt to remake me. It has been many, many cycles since I last fought a battle, but once I was mighty. Cybertron is in the hands of its enemies, and perhaps I will be called on to fight again. Even we Thirteen must die sometime.

  There has been no news from Optimus Prime. This is not a surprise, but it is a worry. His quest to recover the AllSpark and lead Megatron away from Cybertron is noble but perilous. Only a Prime would have any hope of surviving it, and even a Prime can have no idea of how long it might take. I can feel the AllSpark—as I imagine all Cybertronians can—like a distant pulse in the fabric of the universe, a murmur of life and certainty. But so very far away.

  One wonders if he is as anxious for news of Cybertron as we here are for reports of his progress. Probably. And there is, perhaps, a way to achieve this. I must consider whether it is worth the risk. For now, I must put down the Quill and return to my second role as strategist and planner for the doomed and noble Autobot resistance. Did I write “doomed”? I did. But I do not believe it. At times such as these, periodically one must indulge one’s more melancholy fancies. Then, having done so, one must return to the business of winning an unwinnable war.

  This, then, I will do.

  Optimus Prime stood at the command console of the Ark’s bridge looking out at the vastness of space and the unfamiliar scattering of stars. He felt a faint tug that he knew to be the AllSpark calling to him. It was very far away. The Ark automatically scanned the nearest sector of space, returning a three-axis hologram that showed no other structures or ships within sensor range. The Space Bridge, catapulting them away from Cybertron in the moment of its collapse, had malfunctioned badly. They had no idea where they were, and there was clearly no Space Bridge there to further their journey.

  The other bots on the bridge looked to him for guidance. “Make sure there is no sign of the Nemesis,” Optimus Prime said.

  The scan repeated with the same result. From the pilot’s chair, Sideswipe said, “We’re all alone. Just us and some drifting molecules of interstellar gas.”

  “Good,” Optimus said.

  “Good?” Jazz repeated. “We’re in the middle of interstellar space here. We don’t know where, and we don’t know how far from the AllSpark, and we don’t know where Megatron is. How is that good?”

  “Because before we got to the Space Bridge on Cybertron, I wasn’t sure any of us would survive,” Optimus said. “As long as we survive, so does our quest.”

  “Better than the alternative,” Silverbolt commented.

  “That’s what I mean.” Optimus looked out through the viewport on the bridge. Stars, the occasional streak of nebular gas. This was the problem with flight, he thought. It was far too easy to lose track of where you were going. He much preferred having his feet—or wheels—on solid ground.

  “So wh
at do we do?” Jazz asked.

  “Objective number one is to get ourselves oriented,” Optimus said. “If we don’t know where we are, it’s going to be hard to figure out how to get where we’re going.” He kept looking at the stars as he spoke, willing them to resolve into constellations he could recognize, though of course they wouldn’t. “Number two, we try to figure out where the Nemesis is. If Megatron is close, we need to decide whether we confront him or just try to beat him to the AllSpark. But let’s take care of number one first. Silverbolt, any indication from the Ark that it knows where we are?”

  Silverbolt had been working through a series of system checks and trying to scan the nearer stars for their spectrometric signatures. “Not yet,” he said. “We’re a long way from home, that’s for sure.”

  “What’s the nearest star system with planets?” It was possible, Optimus reasoned, that the reason for their appearance in this area of space was that there once had been a Space Bridge somewhere near … although “near” was a relative term out there in the reaches of interstellar space. That Space Bridge would be near a planet more likely than not, so Optimus thought there was reason to believe that finding a planet would give them the best chance of finding a Space Bridge.

  He did not say all of that out loud because even in his mind it sounded like a rickety structure of supposition piled on guesswork piled on unwarranted inference.

  But it was the best chance they had. The alternative—taking off at sublight speeds across the galaxy in the general direction of the AllSpark—was not worth considering. They didn’t have a trillion cycles to waste.

  Yet he did not feel fear. The AllSpark called to him, and if it took a trillion cycles and half the stars of the galaxy grew cold in the quest, he would find it and bring it home. It was his destiny and the reason for his existence. He rested a hand on the center of his torso, over the Matrix of Leadership.

  At the touch, something happened. Optimus Prime tried to speak and found he could not. He lurched to one side, banging into Jazz, who steadied him.

  “Optimus,” Jazz said. “You okay?”

  Optimus Prime could not answer. A surge of energy inside him overwhelmed all of his systems. He could barely stay upright even with Jazz’s support. The Matrix began to glow inside his torso, its radiance so fierce that it shone through Optimus’s external armor. He was made into a window through which the Matrix cast a hologram into the space above the command console. Optimus turned, and the hologram turned with him, expanding and holding its place in the center of the bridge. “Look,” he said finally.

  “We are,” Jazz said. Optimus nodded absently but made no other response, and Jazz followed up with the first thing that passed through his mind. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Of course,” Optimus Prime said. Jazz had the sense that he would have given the same answer to any question, so absorbed was he in the hologram manifestation.

  “It’s a star map,” Ratchet said. He reached out and touched the edge of the hologram. It spun and angled itself around, reacting to the touch and presenting Ratchet with the view that Optimus had seen when the hologram spawned. “See? We’re here.” He indicated a glowing triangle.

  Yes, Optimus thought. The surrounding constellations started to make sense with what he could see in the hologram.

  “Where did this come from?” Jazz asked.

  “The Matrix,” Optimus Prime said.

  “Well, why?” This was practically the first thing Perceptor had said since the Ark had lifted off from Cybertron. A dedicated astronomer and physicist, he spent most of his time looking at the stars. Maybe, Jazz thought, he hadn’t seen anything worth commenting on until the appearance of the map. “I mean, why would the Matrix be showing us a star map? We can look out the viewport, and I could calculate our position easily enough.”

  “I wonder how old this map is,” Jazz said. On the hologram, the triangle representing the ship moved ever so slightly. “It still doesn’t tell us where we are if there aren’t any known stars to steer by.”

  “You’re not listening, Jazz,” Perceptor said. “All we need is a brief spectrographic sweep and I can identify enough stars to fix our position.”

  “Well, excuse me,” Jazz said. He knew Perceptor was speaking with a scientist’s typical bluntness and disregard for social protocol, but he was unsettled and in no mood to be talked down to.

  “The more interesting question is why the Matrix contains a star map,” Ratchet said.

  “Not to me,” Perceptor said.

  “Well, you’re not like an ordinary bot,” Ratchet said. “The rest of us are curious. Prime, what do you think?”

  “I do not know,” Optimus Prime said. “The answer may be contained in the map itself.”

  “It’s almost like the Matrix knew this would happen,” Ratchet said.

  Perceptor shook his head. “There’s no reason to get mystical,” he said.

  “You don’t have to get mystical to think that there’s more to the Matrix than we understand,” Jazz argued. Perceptor shrugged and busied himself plotting the relationships among the stars on the map, trying to coordinate them with the Cybertron-based star maps contained in the Ark’s memory banks.

  Optimus reached out and touched the triangle. “I agree with Perceptor, at least in part. There must be at least some known stars on this map regardless of what we might see through the viewport.” He watched as the star map reoriented itself again, zooming in a thousand or ten thousand times until they had a view of the ship and the nearest stars.

  Jazz pointed at a blinking blue sphere. “That one’s different,” he said. “Touch it.”

  Optimus Prime did, and the map zoomed farther in, revealing a hot yellow star with seven planets orbiting around it. One of them remained blue and steadily blinking.

  “It’s telling us to go there,” Optimus Prime said.

  Jazz looked skeptical. “If you say so.”

  The Matrix thrummed within Optimus, pulsing in time with the blink of the blue-tinted planet. “I do say so,” Optimus replied. “Would you rather drift in empty space waiting for the Nemesis to arrive?”

  “Depends on what we find on that planet,” Jazz said. “Ask me again when we know what awaits us there.”

  “If you want to know, we are going to have to make planetfall. There is no telling from here,” Optimus pointed out.

  Bumblebee buzzed, clicked, and then made a bunch of noises that were nearly words. If they were words, they would have been “Let’s go, then.”

  Which was what all of them had known he would say.

  The Ark established a geostationary position over the planet in preparation for an initial series of scans. The results were surprising enough that Silverbolt ordered them to be repeated. “There are Cybertronians here,” Jazz said when the Ark confirmed the initial results.

  It was true. The planet abounded in the unique spectrographic signature of Energon. No other being in the universe was known to use Energon, which was produced, so far as was known—only on Cybertron. From the scans, the Ark inferred the presence of several thousand bots, living in fairly advanced circumstances.

  One of the lost colonies? Optimus Prime could hardly believe it. How many of them were there? How long had it been since they had been in contact with Cybertron?

  “Prime,” Perceptor said. “I have completed the spectrographic scan. The Ark should now be able to fix our location.”

  Optimus Prime laid one hand on the Ark’s command console and said, “Ark. Ascertain three-axis coordinates with respect to Cybertron.” The Ark executed a series of simulations using the brightest visible stars in conjunction with the star map provided by the Matrix of Leadership. In short order it had a fix on their position and displayed it on a holographic map of the galaxy.

  For several cycles every Autobot on the bridge was struck silent by what it showed. Then Jazz said slowly, “We’re a long way from home.”

  That much was certainly true. If they had not traversed
a Space Bridge, they could not have come this far in the known history of Cybertron. Their home planet winked in an arm of the galaxy far to the spinward of their current location, which was approximately halfway out from the galactic core in a region defined by a trio of large clusters with smaller groupings of stars spread among the triangular space.

  “It’s hard to believe any Cybertronian ever came this far,” Ratchet said.

  In that statement, thought Optimus Prime, was contained much of the recent history of Cybertron: the loss of a great heritage and the Autobots’ first steps toward recovering it.

  Now came the real question.

  “Ark,” Optimus Prime said. “Cross-index this position with known colony worlds as of the collapse of the Space Bridges.”

  Time passed as the Ark accessed that information, which was buried deep within rarely used archives. Then a chime sounded on the bridge, and the galaxy map reoriented itself. A single star system enlarged, and information about it spilled across the holographic field.

  Velocitron.

  The name sounded strange to them, a series of sounds out of Cybertron’s distant past. All of them had thought it mythical, just as they had thought the old stories of the Thirteen were mythical …

  The war has taught us this much, if it’s taught us anything, thought Optimus Prime. We built our stories to conceal truths that someday we would need again.

  “Velocitron?” Jazz said. “When I used to go to the races at Hydrax, there was a Team Velocitron. I didn’t know it meant something else.”

  “I doubt any of us did,” Optimus Prime said. “But now we do. And once we make contact with Velocitron, we might find out that they consider us a myth as well.”

  “They need to hear what’s happened to Cybertron,” Bulkhead said. Optimus Prime looked at him and nodded. It was rare for Bulkhead to jump into a tactical conversation. He had served with the Wreckers, letting Ultra Magnus make the decisions, and came aboard the Ark only in the chaotic last moments before the Ark’s liftoff. Like all the Wreckers, Bulkhead was massive and taciturn, his muted coloration matching his temperament. He must have been deeply unsettled by something if he was provoked to speak.