Exiles

by Alex Irvine

  Decepticons, was Hightail’s first thought. They are here. So that would make the enormous figure looming over the rest of the landing party Megatron.

  He debated what to do. Best not to let on immediately that he had talked to 777. In fact, the best course of action was probably to keep quiet and stay out of the way. So that was what he did. He went back into the hangar and busied himself there until the landing bots strode in. They had all manifested weapons. Hightail took a closer look at them. A motley assortment of bots, bearing signs of old wounds and nonstandard customizations.

  The largest of them, which Hightail originally had taken to be Megatron, stepped forward out of the group. “Bah-weep-graaaahnah wheep ni ni bong.” The assembled Velocitronians answered with the same. Even as isolated as they had been, they had not forgotten the universal greeting. After this courtesy, the Velocitronians waited. The giant bot at the head of the visitors’ group took another step forward and looked them over closely.

  “Are there Cybertronians here?” he growled.

  Override, on the far side of the hangar, watched through the silence that fell after that question. She almost answered him but held herself back. She did not like answering questions when she did not know the reason they were being asked.

  “ARE THERE CYBERTRONIANS HERE?” the bot bellowed.

  His aggression spurred Override into action. She came to meet him from the far side of the hangar. “This is Velocitron, not Cybertron,” she said. “I’m in charge here.”

  “Is that right?” The leader of the visitors stepped up close to her, towering over her and bending to put his face right in hers. “If you want to stay that way, you’ll bring out your Cybertronians. Now.”

  “She is a Cybertronian!” came a voice thundering from the other side of the hangar, the corner nearest to where Override had been. Ransack emerged from the shadows there, one arm extended directly at Override. “And anyone who stands with her!”

  “You lie,” Override spit. “But even if it was true, what shame is there in being a Cybertronian?”

  She felt herself seized and spun around, and before she could fully register her reaction—shock, indignation, anger, and a little pain—she found herself face to face with the gargantuan leader of the … “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “Are you Cybertonian?”

  “No,” she said firmly.

  “Cybertronians were here, though,” the huge bot said. “I tracked them here. Their ship leaves a special energy trail from an isotope of the fuel. I have reasons. I have evidence. And I assure you I have a legitimate grievance against Cybertron. I will have my satisfaction.”

  “I told you!” Ransack shouted. “She’s Cybertronian!”

  One of Override’s most trusted bots—later she would learn that it was Blurr, but in the chaos of the moment she didn’t know—blasted Ransack off his feet with an electro-laser pulse.

  Ransack’s thugs immediately deployed weapons and began shooting at any target that presented itself. The invaders brought their own weapons to bear. Over the sounds of explosions and energy discharges, their leader roared again, “Give no quarter!”

  On Velocitron, that was how the war began in earnest.

  I am unable to stop considering the possibility that we can send word to Optimus Prime. Wheeljack assures me that he has found a way—using remnant energies that still abound in the Well of the AllSpark and the devastated partial consciousness of Vector Sigma —to break open a brief passageway through the continuum of space and time. It could be used, he suggests, to send either a message of some sort … or a bot.

  We have talked at great length about which is the more desirable course, Wheeljack and I. He advocates for a message, and I find myself in the unaccustomed position of articulating a more radical position.

  Of course, I have the glimmerings of a plan whose entire outline I cannot yet divulge to Wheeljack. This frustrates him. It frustrates me as well. Ideally, I would want lines of communication to be completely open, but in wartime this is of course not possible. Still, I understand how Wheeljack must feel knowing that I have decided there are things he must not know. If our communications are compromised, the consequences could be disastrous. Wheeljack’s innovation, if it works as he believes it will, could also be put to nefarious use by Shockwave.

  And there lies the real reason for both my reluctance to communicate openly and my advocacy of the radical step of sending a bot over this untested and dangerous channel: We may only get to do this once.

  If Wheeljack has discovered this delivery system, we must assume that Shockwave has as well. And if it is possible to communicate with those who have left—in however rudimentary a fashion—then it will not be long before Megatron, learning of this method, uses it to pick up the trail of the Ark.

  Should that happen, we must do whatever we can to make sure that Optimus Prime knows that pursuit is coming.

  No. It is time to be more decisive than that. We must assume the worst, that Megatron is already on the Autobots’ trail. Wheeljack’s innovation must be tested, and the only way to test it is to use it. A courageous volunteer from among the depleted ranks of the Autobots will ride between the dimensions and, if all goes well, emerge wherever the Matrix of Leadership is currently located.

  It occurs to me that if this does not work—if it goes wrong in any of the myriad of ways it could go wrong—I will, in all likelihood, never know. Perhaps I will never know even if it works perfectly. I must consult Wheeljack about this and see if there are ways for the device to return information along the same path it has traversed with a physical passenger.

  It cuts strongly against my instincts to undertake so speculative a course of action. Yet in a battle whose sides are so asymmetrical in strength, every fleeting advantage must be seized and deployed the moment its worth is understood. This discovery of Wheeljack’s might only work once … but work once it must.

  This decision in hand, I turn now to considering which of the Autobots would be best suited to this mission. I dare not send any of the seasoned officers and leaders. There are too few, and the loss of any of them would demoralize our rank and file, already stretched to the breaking point. For millions of solar cycles, they have been a micron away from losing their resolve, but just at the point of snapping they discover that last extra resilience that keeps them going through one more battle, one more campaign, one more orbit.

  I, too, must keep my resolve. Recent events have made this both more necessary and more difficult as I feel the attention of the Decepticons beginning to focus more intently on me.

  Shockwave has been here. Here, in my study, he sat in the chair where once Orion Pax came to me for consultation on difficult points of cataloging and the minutiae of archival work. I do not know how he found his way past security. I heard nothing, and no alarm went off. After his visit I discovered that the two Autobots set to guard the door that leads from the public areas of the Hall of Records to the inner chambers had seen nothing. This, perhaps, unsettles me more than the fact of the visit itself.

  But I am getting ahead of myself. I was researching the locations of Space Bridges when I looked up to see Shockwave present, just inside the door of my study.

  “Alpha Trion,” this mad destroyer of bots said, “I observe you.”

  I acknowledged this statement but did not respond, since no useful response presented itself.

  “You are a traitor,” Shockwave said.

  “I preexist your Decepticon ideal by some millions of cycles,” I said. “It is hard for me to understand how I can be a traitor to ideals that I neither subscribed to nor promulgated but opposed from the beginning. Call me enemy if you wish. But do not call me traitor.”

  Shockwave is not used to being opposed. He runs his affairs on Cybertron the way he always ran his laboratories: with madness and brilliance, shocking cruelty coexisting with exhilarating discoveries. No matter what, though, the only voice of control is always his own. Even Megatron largely left him alone.
He regularly denounces bots and on the strength of those denunciations has them destroyed or consigned to his experimental facilities in the ruins below Crystal City. From that dark place no bot returns unchanged. The ruined surface of Cybertron more and more is home to Shockwave’s failed experiments—what he prefers to call his “intermediate subjects.”

  Some of them, it must be said, have come over to the Autobot side and made valuable contributions. Like any other zealot with aspirations toward despotism, Shockwave finds the sight of his own misakes repellent. They have thus become invisible. Referring to them in any way is strongly discouraged, and woe betide the bot who attempts to help one of these unfortunates.

  This outcast status makes them perfect spies and perpetrators of acts of espionage. Shockwave is quick to label those acts terrorist, but no thinking bots can take that seriously when they see the remorseless machinery of his show trials and his horrific experimental dungeons.

  All of this knowledge and experience made me a bit nervous when I was talking to him, but I am one of the Thirteen. I do not show fear, whether I feel it or not.

  “Enemy, then,” he said.

  “Yes, enemy. Are you here to parley, then, or have you come on a more violent errand?” A part of me I had thought long dead—the part that gloried in the battles among the Thirteen and the first great wars in the early days of Cybertron—that part of me almost wished that Shockwave had come to arrest or destroy me. I was ready for battle.

  Yet I did not wish to remove myself from the Autobots’ fight. I was never the mightiest warrior, though I was mightier than many of my enemies supposed; I found my true value to any side in a conflict was the marshaling of knowledge and information. Strength of arm and accuracy of optic are not what wins wars. Putting soldiers in the right place at the right time is what wins wars. Will win wars.

  Shockwave came to the Hall of Records at Iacon expecting my will to fail. Instead, I watched as his own resolve—whatever it had been—crumbled, revealing him for the petty dictator he was.

  “I came only to warn you,” he said. “Your current course of action is most unhealthy.”

  “It has served me well these billions of solar cycles,” I said. “I would be a fool to change now.”

  Shockwave took his leave then, since I would not back down before him and he is not, in the end, possessed of courage when his opponent is not either greatly outnumbered or physically restrained. But he will be back. Of that I have no doubt. He will in all likelihood bring Decepticon militia.

  It is time, I expect, to bring the Wreckers in for a consultation about how to repel an assault on the Hall of Records.

  It is also time to see if this invention of Wheeljack’s will work. I have a volunteer in mind. I expect he will be ready and willing; it remains to be seen whether he or Wheeljack is able.

  Optimus Prime has been gone a short time, but it feels like much longer. I wonder if, when he has been gone for a long time, he will recede into that nebulous territory of story that is the final destination of all real things. If so, what kind of Cybertron will he return to find?

  It is times like these when I wish I could read the pages of the Covenant that spell out the future. I understand why this is not possible, however; to know the future is to imprison yourself in it—or to create a new one, in which case your initial knowledge was not knowledge, after all. Would we really want a future we could change? Or is it better to not know the future and to create it from an endless succession of present moments?

  I had better put the philosophizing on a secondary circuit. If Shockwave is getting ready to move against me, there are a number of preparations I must make.

  And if, as I fear, Megatron will soon pick up the Autobots’ trail, I must set in motion some …

  I was about to say desperate plans. But perhaps I should characterize them as bold.

  “We have a signal from Velocitron, Optimus,” Ratchet said. “A distress signal. It’s—”

  “Let me hear it,” Optimus Prime said.

  Ratchet reset the file on the Ark’s media systems and restarted it. The voice that came out was immediately recognizable as Blurr. “Optimus Prime! Autobots! Jazz! We need help, we need help, they came all of a sudden and now Override and Ransack are at war. Not just the fight in the hangar like before. It’s war here, and all because of—”

  The transmission cut out.

  “Run it again,” Optimus Prime commanded.

  Ratchet did.

  “Can you cut out Blurr’s voice and run it one more time with just the background noises?”

  “Give me just a klik,” Ratchet said. He leaned over to ask Sideswipe something, then ran the entire harvested signal through a filter. “Okay. This should be it.”

  The file ran again. Every bot on the Ark’s bridge except Optimus Prime listened closely to try to hear what had made him want to run the whole thing again. Optimus Prime listened for confirmation of something he thought he had heard.

  There. In the background, close to the end of the message, a roar:

  … Cybertronians!

  The signal ended. Into the silence that followed, Optimus Prime said, “Sound familiar?”

  “Megatron,” Jazz said. “He’s on our trail.”

  “That’s what it sounds like,” Optimus Prime said. “If he tracked us to Velocitron, he’ll probably be able to track us here as well. We’ll need to be ready.”

  “Or we need to go back,” Silverbolt said.

  Optimus considered this. “Perhaps,” he said. “Is it more important to do that or to make sure we get the Star Saber put together?”

  “I don’t know,” Jazz said. “Are you leading all bots, or are you leading a resistance against Decepticons?”

  This was the crux. Optimus had no good answer. “We will return to Velocitron,” he said. “But not until we have figured out the Star Saber puzzle. It won’t do anyone any good if we sacrifice ourselves without removing the Decepticon threat.”

  There was silence around the room. Optimus Prime knew that some of his closest friends disagreed with the decision. They wanted to go back to Velocitron immediately and square off with Megatron where they could be sure that Override would fight with them. Optimus Prime also knew that they were keeping their disagreements to themselves out of respect for him as Prime. There was a gulf between him and them. The responsibility was his, the decision was his, and they would all have to live with the consequences.

  He had three pieces of the Star Saber—if indeed that was what the fragments would form once they were assembled. “We don’t know for certain that was Megatron,” he said. “Are any of you sure?”

  He waited, but none of the Autobots present could answer in the affirmative. “Our choice is to head back to Velocitron on the strength of a garbled signal that may or may not contain a voiceprint that may or may not be Megatron’s … or move ahead with the quest the Matrix has given us. It seems to me the choice is clear.”

  There was no dissent, at least none spoken out loud. “It is decided, then. Now we must get our next step figured out,” he said.

  “And how do we do that?” Ironhide asked.

  “If I was looking for answers about a broken sword,” Optimus Prime said, “I might look for the place that sword was made.”

  “So you want to go find Solus Prime’s forge,” Jazz said. “Great. Why didn’t you just say so?”

  “It may not be as hard as you think. As any of you might think,” Optimus Prime said. “In fact, I’m starting to think that we’re going to find more of Cybertron’s history out here than we ever could have imagined.”

  “Here’s hoping,” Jazz said. “Long as we don’t just find more junk.”

  Optimus Prime kept on with his optimistic demeanor until he was alone again, and only then did he give full vent to his misgivings. What if he couldn’t find Solus Prime’s tomb? What if he couldn’t find all the pieces of the Star Saber? What if he did find all of the Star Saber’s pieces but then couldn’t use the forg
e to reassemble them?

  Too many ifs. Remember, Optimus Prime told himself, when there are too many variables, decide on the outcome you want and act to make it happen.

  He wanted to find the rest of the Star Saber. With one hand over the Matrix of Leadership, his palm tingling ever so slightly from its constant emission of powerful and ancient energy, Optimus Prime asked himself: Where might that last piece be?

  He could not figure out what the existing three pieces had in common apart from their being practically indistinguishable. The stories said there were five, though. And some of the stories spoke of guardians, each charged with guarding a particular piece of the Saber. If Optimus Prime’s recent experience was any indication, those guards no longer were performing their functions.

  Which meant … what, exactly? That the pieces of the Saber had lost whatever power they once might have possessed? Or simply that the guardians, like the universe, had aged?

  I will go forward, Optimus Prime resolved. I have spoken to one of the Thirteen, I have seen some of the great artifacts of Cybertronian civilization. I cannot stop believing now. There are five pieces of the Star Saber until I find out definitively otherwise. And there is a way to put them back together.

  The answer, he felt certain—and here the Matrix, Optimus Prime could tell, agreed—was on the other side of that Space Bridge.

  So that was where he would go.

  Prowl had kept up nearly constant surveillance of Axer since the discovery of the ship with Shearbolt’s body in it, but Axer was a difficult bot to track. His bounty-hunting experience had given him a keen sensitivity to pursuit as both pursuer and quarry. At first Prowl tried trolling through Axer’s known haunts, the various places around the rim of the main pit where he was known to broker deals and occasionally provide services for gullible or desperate Junkions.