Retribution

by David J. Williams

  “What are your orders, my lord?” Starscream asked.

  “What do you think? Follow them, of course.”

  With that Megatron turned his back on his troops and stared out into the vast panorama of stars. Soon, Optimus, he thought to himself.

  Soon …

  Chapter Five

  SOMETIMES OPTIMUS PRIME HAD DIFFICULTY BELIEVING just how far he’d come. As the lowly data clerk Orion Pax, he’d spent countless hours dreaming of making a difference. Now that he was commander of the Autobot forces and a Prime no less, the very future of the Autobots rested squarely on his broad shoulders. Every day he had to put it on the line. Every moment.

  Moments like now …

  Optimus streaked forward through the smoke, his sensors working overtime, the engines on his heavy cargo transport mode pushed up to full throttle. The enemy was somewhere nearby; the fact that he couldn’t see him meant that staying mobile was the best defense. The problem was that such a defense could be anticipated—if the enemy could guess your vectors, he would aim just ahead of your path … but at the last moment, Optimus slammed on his brakes, letting the incoming rockets streak past him. Through the smoke and fire, he could make out the humanoid shape of his opponent. He gunned his motors and made a beeline for that shape, vectoring past more missiles as the enemy emptied his racks and drew two pulsating energy blades to deal with the onrushing Optimus—who waited until the very last second to shift into robotic form, letting his momentum carry him straight over the head of his adversary as those blades slashed past his wheels, mere inches beneath him. He landed with a resounding thud, quickly rolling to his left as his opponent fired one of the blades. It grazed Optimus, sending chips of red armor flying.

  The next moment, the two combatants were too close for ranged weapons. Optimus activated his energy ax and sword as his combat mask slid into place; the creature sprang two more limbs, each one equipped with another glowing blade. Battle was joined in a whirl of light as Optimus’s two weapons clashed with his opponent’s three. He feinted a blow from his ax; as he expected, his opponent dedicated two spinning blades for defense, leaving the third to deal with what would surely be the inevitable counterthrust from Optimus’s sword.

  But the blow never came. Instead Optimus kicked out savagely, catching his enemy off balance and knocking him to the floor, exposing for the merest of moments the lightly armored underbelly. His opponent rolled, but it was too late: Optimus’s blue fists were already driving deep into the downed robot’s guts, clenching and tearing out a large chunk of machinery and wiring. Somehow the bot pulled itself to its feet, attempting to change to its spaceship form—and failed, falling flat onto its face, oil leaking from its perforated innards.

  The computerized voice of Teletraan-1 chimed across the battlefield.

  “Ending simulation.”

  Instantly, the smoke and fire disappeared to reveal the spartan walls of the Ark’s training room. Optimus’s mask slid back; he turned to see Jazz, Ratchet, Perceptor, and Bulkhead applauding.

  “See? Less than three minutes against a level ten battle-droid,” said Ratchet. “That’s almost a record.”

  “Yeah, just don’t forget who set it,” Jazz said.

  Jazz served as Autobot deputy commander and head of special operations. In a less official capacity, he was Optimus’s closest friend. Ratchet was perhaps the finest medical officer Optimus had ever worked with, Perceptor was chief science officer, and the hulking Bulkhead was second to none with machinery. Optimus was grateful to have such comrades in arms; just seeing them together gave him a renewed sense of hope for their mission.

  “Looks like all that practice is paying off,” Ratchet said.

  “I couldn’t have done it better myself,” Jazz added, clasping Optimus on the shoulder. “You’ve really come a long way.”

  “You didn’t come down here to watch my workout,” said Optimus. “What’s the situation?”

  Perceptor stepped forward.

  “Remember when you asked me and Bulkhead to fine-tune the long-range sensors for Energon detection?” Not long after the battle at Junkion, Optimus had decided that they needed to investigate every possible angle to find the AllSpark, so he’d asked Perceptor to make a number of modifications to the ship’s sensor package, dramatically increasing its sensitivity to Cybertronian artifacts. To the Autobots that had seemed like a sensible precaution. But there was more to it than that.

  Optimus had a secret. He had no intention of telling anyone lest he fatally affect morale. But the truth of the matter was that the unthinkable was happening.

  He was having grave doubts regarding the Matrix of Leadership.

  Secure within his chest, it had been so reliable for so long, yet ever since they’d arrived in the Orion Arm, the Matrix had been acting more than a little peculiar. For one thing, it kept showing him blurry scenes from Cybertron’s distant past that made no sense, though they filled him with foreboding: Cybertronians shuffling forward, their heads bowed, as though they were being driven somewhere.

  As though they were slaves …

  Yet disquieting as that was, it was the Matrix’s present capabilities that were the real problem. As they moved across the galaxy, Optimus would have expected the AllSpark’s signal to be growing stronger; instead, it had faded to the point of nonexistence. Had the Matrix somehow led him astray? Was it possible that it was no longer working? The question plagued Optimus night and day; the absence of a reliable guide made him feel very much alone. He wished he could talk with Alpha Trion, for the scribe’s knowledge would have been most welcome. But Optimus knew deep down that his mentor had his own road to travel, that he would have to discern the secrets of the Matrix for himself.

  And lately that had been getting ever harder.

  “We’ve found something,” said Bulkhead.

  TO SAY SIDESWIPE RELISHED HIS DUTIES AS THE PILOT of the Ark would be to indulge in considerable understatement. Never before had he felt so needed. His duties on the Ark humbled him given how critical the ship was to the continued survival of the Autobots. If they weren’t able to find the AllSpark, Cybertron was as good as gone, and the Ark was the only way the Autobots were going to pull it off. Some had said it was the most powerful ship ever built in the history of Cybertron. Unlike so many of the planet’s machines, it had no alternative form—just the single function of transporting over three hundred Autobots and destroying any enemy ship that stood in its way. The Ark’s four hyper-accelerators achieved superb performance at sublight speeds and in hyperspace. Though the Ark’s main computer, Teletraan-1, wasn’t sentient, there were days Sideswipe could have sworn it was developing its own preferences—its own personality, however subtle. But Perceptor had assured him that was impossible and had gone on to suggest that maybe Sideswipe should stick to driving and leave the deep thinking to the professionals.

  That rankled Sideswipe. So what if his job was being a pilot? He knew deep in his circuits that none of these other scrap heaps could do a better job. It was no secret in the ranks that some Autobots thought they were better than others, a factor that Sideswipe chalked up to the lingering effects of Cybertron’s once-rigid caste system. But back in those days all the Autobots were considered relatively unimportant. Now the business at hand was too important for distracting one-upmanship.

  Sideswipe glanced up as Optimus, Jazz, Ratchet, Bulkhead, and Perceptor strode onto the bridge. He grinned insouciantly.

  “Evening, gents, and thanks for flying Air Sideswipe.”

  Perceptor scowled as he strode past Sideswipe and activated the science station’s viewscreen. “Enough with the jokes,” he said. “We have serious business.”

  “Don’t you always?”

  “Show us what you found, Perceptor,” Ratchet said with some irritation. It wasn’t that he didn’t have a sense of humor, but the bickering between Perceptor and Sideswipe got old. Especially when there were more pressing matters to discuss. A green world appeared on one of the screens,
planetary rings encircling it, holographed statistics scrolling alongside. Perceptor cleared his throat.

  “This is right in our path. And it wasn’t on any of the charts or databases we have.”

  “That doesn’t mean much,” Jazz said. “Much of our exploration data is millions of years old. Maybe somebody just missed it. Or a database got corrupted.”

  “A possibility, but I’m more inclined to believe that somebody deleted it.”

  Now that was interesting. “Deleted it?” Jazz asked. “When?”

  “Obviously not recently. The last update to the Universal Navigation Crystal was maybe two million back. The star charts weren’t well maintained during the civil war. But if you scan back far enough—we’re talking Golden Age or before—there was an update to this area of space, and I think that update might have been a deletion. I get the feeling somebody didn’t want us to know that this system was here.” He enlarged the magnification, filling the screen with a green hue.

  “Tell us more about this planet,” said Optimus.

  “It’s a ringed aquatic world, orbiting a K-class star.” Perceptor enlarged the view of the planet on the main viewscreen. “Weather systems cover most of the planet, but as far as we can tell, it seems to be almost entirely water.”

  “A water world?” Optimus mulled this over. “That’s a rare find.”

  More holographic displays blossomed. “Initial scans indicate robotic populations living under the water in highly concentrated areas.”

  “Submerged cities,” Jazz breathed.

  “Presumably. Unfortunately, the depth of the oceans precludes a more detailed analysis.”

  “What about the system itself?” Ratchet asked.

  “The central star seems stable,” Perceptor said. “They don’t have the same problem as Velocitron, at any rate.”

  “What do you think, Optimus?” Jazz asked. “Has the Matrix told you anything?”

  Optimus closed his optics, concentrated, and felt that fearful sense of being alone again. He had no idea why the Matrix would leave him in the lurch like this. But this was neither the time nor the place to bring it up.

  “It’s said nothing,” he said, trying to sound more casual than he felt.

  “Are you sure?” Perceptor asked.

  “All I’m sure about is that the Matrix said we take this heading. And that’s what we’ve been doing.”

  “For a long way,” said Perceptor. “You would think that it would have given us a hint—”

  “Since it hasn’t said much, I can only assume we’re still on the right track,” Optimus interrupted, maybe a little too sharply. “Perhaps this planet isn’t important to finding the AllSpark. But if nothing else it could be a place where we can make some repairs. And its inhabitants might have information that can help us in our quest.” He turned to the Ark’s pilot. “Sideswipe, put us in orbit.”

  “Aye, aye,” said Sideswipe. As the ship vectored into a polar orbit, Optimus studied the screens and came to a decision.

  “Get an away team together,” he said.

  “You got it,” said Jazz.

  Chapter Six

  CYBERTRON

  IACON WAS A BELEAGUERED CITY.

  There were no besieging forces. No assault lines surrounding the capital. No attackers in sight. But that didn’t mean that the city wasn’t under constant pressure, for the Autobot Wreckers dominated the countryside. Only the largest Decepticon forces ventured beyond Iacon’s massive walls without fear of ambush. Indeed, the war for Cybertron was proceeding as anyone familiar with the patterns of guerrilla warfare might have anticipated, with the stronger force dominating the cities all across the planet while the areas between those cities were subject to assault at any time by fast-moving Autobots who hit hard and then ran for their lives before the Decepticon commanders could concentrate their strength. Those commanders found the situation frustrating, to say the least.

  Still, they couldn’t complain about the big picture. Ever since Optimus Prime had left the planet, the Decepticons had had the upper hand. In the wake of the Ark’s departure, the remaining Autobot strongholds had fallen quickly. For a while it looked like Iacon would be the site of the Autobots’ final stand. But just as the Decepticons were bringing up their reserves for an all-out assault, Ultra Magnus and the Wreckers had decided that it was better to live to fight another day; they’d withdrawn overnight, retreating across the north pole and into the border regions. From there, they scattered to embark upon the insurgency they’d conducted with such vigor ever since.

  But that success had its limits. Guerrilla warfare is by definition the recourse of a force that dare not engage the other in open battle, and that was certainly true for the few Autobots left on the planet. Yet they held on nonetheless, a thorn in the Decepticons’ side. The countryside had become a no-man’s-land; the population had retreated back into the cities. This was partially because of the martial law the Decepticons had implemented: All able-bodied Cybertronians had to report to the factories to meet the production quotas. But the emptying of the countryside was also an inevitable response to the constant skirmishes, the unceasing Autobot attempts to cut the cities off from one another.

  Iacon itself appeared to be relatively untouched by war. The skyline looked almost the same as it had the day the Ark thundered out into deep space. But the city had changed dramatically nonetheless. For one thing, there was hardly any activity visible on the streets and overpasses. They were all inside, counting their blessings and—like the majority of people in any civil war anywhere—hoping they could survive until it was all over.

  But it was at night that the real difference became apparent, for Iacon was a mere shadow of its prewar glory. Where once it had had a panoply of shimmering lights to rival the Milky Way itself, now it was virtually dark. The power was rationed, diverted to military bases and those directly involved in the war effort. Yet there were those who whispered that there was more to it than that—that in the face of constant conflict, the Energon reserves of the Decepticons were running low—that they hadn’t just cut power to all nonessential areas, they had been forced to deprive even some of their active fighting units of fuel. They were desperate, some said, and all their talk that they would shortly crush the Autobots once and for all was just that: talk. Bravado, plain and simple. Then again, maybe the bravado was simply that of those muttering in the shadows, speculating about the course of a war they dared not participate in, a conflict that when all was said and done they knew very little about. In war, the larger picture is so hard to see. All that was clear right now was that a once-great city lay dark.

  But not entirely.

  One building was an exception to the general blackout. One building blazed with lights and dwarfed all else. One single structure stood at the very center of Iacon: a massive tower that was the newest addition to Iacon’s skyline, the only such improvement, if it could be called that, to be made during the entire war. The tower had been built by Autobot prisoners forced to work at gunpoint in slave-labor conditions. What had happened to those prisoners subsequently, no one knew. But they had constructed the largest building on Cybertron by far, twice the height of any other structure on the planet, stretching up and up until it seemed it might burst through the atmosphere and touch the heavens.

  It was the Tower of Shockwave.

  Cybertron’s master, the Decepticon whom Megatron had personally delegated to be his lieutenant to rule as he saw fit until the day the Nemesis returned victorious, with the head of Optimus Prime a trophy in its hold. Until that time the only head that mattered was the one to whom the summit of the tower bore more than a passing resemblance. An enormous elongated oval within which burned a piercing light. That Shockwave would have ordered an edifice built in his own image surprised no one unfortunate enough to deal with him directly.

  Right now Shockwave was contemplating the imminent arrival of the latest prisoner to be summoned to his presence. He sat in his personal suite, which encompass
ed the highest level of the tower. The walls were lined with screens, all of them carefully monitored by Shockwave’s single glowing eye. Some of them showed the position of troops across the planetary surface, but most of them depicted subjects far closer to Shockwave’s heart: calculations, data, experimental results. The screens without data had been left transparent, providing a breathtaking view of the city and all that lay beyond. One could see all the way to the pole from this room, but Shockwave couldn’t have cared less. He wasn’t interested in aesthetics. What interested him was the visitor he was about to welcome. He watched as the room’s double doors slid open. Insecticon guards entered, trailed by a large hover-cart that floated mere inches above the floor.

  Strapped to that cart was Alpha Trion.

  His arms were secured by reinforced clamps, and electromagnetic spikes driven into his circuitry at select points rendered him immobile below the waist. But the expression above his long white beard was one of utter calm as he met Shockwave’s gaze with a serenity that belied his situation.

  “Leave us,” Shockwave said to his guards. They flitted back through the door they’d come through, which slid shut behind them. Shockwave turned back to Alpha Trion.

  “So good of you to join me,” he said.

  Chapter Seven

  RODIMUS, BUMBLEBEE, AND KUP STOOD OUTSIDE THE dropship listening to Prowl’s lengthy mission briefing while Ironhide completed the craft’s preflight checklist. Jazz had chosen Prowl as the away team leader because of his natural discretion and the investigative skills he had acquired as a police officer on Cybertron. Not only that, but Prowl’s experience with the civilian high council back in prewar days spoke well for his ability to address the diplomatic niceties a first contact scenario might require. No doubt about it, Prowl was no-nonsense and business-oriented.