“I suppose I don’t.”
“Well, that’s what might be happening here. Your brain is trying to alert you to something. But as to what that something is, perhaps time will reveal the fuller picture.”
“We may not have that time.”
“I realize that.”
“But from what you’re saying, you don’t think this involves the Matrix.”
“I didn’t say that. Actually, I’m sure the Matrix is involved with this.”
“Well, then you should take a look at it.”
But Ratchet shook his head. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you anything useful. The artifacts of the Primes, the way they work, all that; that’s not a medical problem per se.”
“That’s what has me worried,” Optimus said. But even as he spoke, his internal communicator buzzed to life, alerting him to an urgent message on his emergency channel:
“Ironhide to Optimus, come in, Optimus.”
“Go ahead, Ironhide, I read you.”
“We have a situation back here at the landing pads. Rodimus, Kup, and Bumblebee took the dropship out a few hours ago, and now I can’t raise them on the communicator.”
“They took it back into space?”
“No, Optimus.” Ironhide hesitated. “They took it underwater.”
For a moment Optimus was too stunned to reply. “Why?”
“They wanted to do some more exploration. I know I should have told them no, but—”
“Where was the last known contact location?”
“Last check-in was near a series of deep sea trenches in the southern sea. Then they fell right off the grid. That’s why I’m calling.”
“Hold your position. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
“Thanks, Optimus. I’m really sorry.”
As Ironhide disconnected, Jazz leaned over and nudged Optimus.
“Is there a problem, boss?”
“Some of the scouting party has gone missing.” Observing the agitated conversation, the Curator turned his attention from the parade.
“Is everything all right, Optimus?”
Optimus decided he might as well come clean. “It looks like some of our people might have gone exploring and gotten themselves lost.”
“My word. That’s terrible.”
“What can you tell us about the trench system around here?”
“Oh, my. Well, we have a few older facilities kept out there as reserve production units should our main ones go offline, but the currents above those trenches are treacherous. And then there are still some … er, ah …”
“Go on,” Optimus said.
“Well … there are still some creatures from our prehistoric age that evolved much more slowly than the rest of us—that became much larger than us—and that make their homes deep in those trenches.”
“So not every mechanoid on the planet is as evolved as you,” Perceptor said.
“Well, no. I never claimed they were. And there have been instances over the years of them occasionally coming up out of the trenches to hunt.”
“Well, isn’t that just great,” Jazz added with extra sarcasm.
“Your tone implies criticism,” said the Curator. “And I understand that you’re upset. But your bots ought to have consulted me before they went out exploring.”
“Too late now,” Jazz said.
“What’s done is done,” the Curator said. “But you have my word that we’ll do everything in our power to help you find your people, Optimus Prime.”
Optimus gave him a hard stare. “You can start now,” he said.
Chapter Fifteen
KUP BLINKED AND ADJUSTED HIS OPTICS AS THE INSIDE of the dropship came back into focus. They were no longer in motion, and the control panel was flickering. Had they sunk all the way to the bottom of the trench? How close were they to being crushed? He was sitting in a shallow pool of water, staring up at the floor overhead. Above him, Rodimus and Bumblebee were hanging upside down in their acceleration chairs, their arms dangling, their systems still coming back online. Kup quickly checked himself for serious dents or breaches in his armor; satisfied that everything was still functioning, he proceeded to cut his two comrades out of their harnesses. As he sliced away, Rodimus came to with a groan.
“Easy there,” said Kup.
“I guess … you were right,” Rodimus said.
“I was right?” Even now, Kup kept his trademark sense of humor. “Wow, you really must have taken a bang on the head.” He eased Rodimus gently onto the floor. “Easy, kid. You’re just a little banged up.” Kup turned to Bee and started cutting him down.
“How’s Bee?”
“Still out, but I don’t see any major damage. He should be up and at ’em in a few moments.”
“So we’re all okay.”
“Depends how you define okay,” Kup said. As he spoke, a seam gave way and jets of water sprayed into the room. The dropship shifted noticeably; metal creaked alarmingly. Rodimus eased slowly over to another viewport. This one provided more of a vantage point and made the reality of their perilous situation all too clear: They were tangled in a network of pipes along the trench’s clifflike wall. That was all that had saved them, and it wouldn’t keep doing so for long. Sooner or later, the whole twisted mess was going to give way and they would continue their inexorable descent to the bottom of the trench. Long before they reached it, they would be crushed by millions of tons of pressure. In the meantime, the crippled ship was rapidly filling up with water. Rodimus tried to activate the engines, but they didn’t respond; the dashboard flickered, but there was nowhere near enough power.
“We need to get out of here,” he said.
“Good idea, but where?”
“I’m still working on that,” Rodimus said as he looked back out the viewport. They were several kilometers down, so the idea of swimming back to the surface didn’t seem feasible. But that was when he saw it just beyond the tangled mess of conduits and smashed metal: a hatch set in the cliff wall amid the pipes. Its iris doors were sealed tight. He turned back to the control console.
“Grab Bee and get ready to move,” he said.
“You want to give me a hint as to what the plan is?” Kup asked.
“There’s some kind of service hatch over there, I’m trying to hack into it and get it open. Then we open our main hatch, jump, and hope the current carries us in.”
“Hope?” Kup asked.
“Look at what all that junk is doing,” Rodimus said. Out the viewport, pieces of debris were being swept against the side of the cliff by the unseen current. “So we’re at least going to be heading in the right general direction.”
“You do realize that debris is pieces of our hull, don’t you?”
“All the more reason to move now. I’m going to set both doors to stay open for exactly five seconds.”
Kup shook his head. “For the record, I hate this plan.”
“I’m not too crazy about it either, but—” Still another seam gave way. The jets of water intensified into a flood. The ship started to lean to the side.
“Primus help us,” Kup exclaimed. He grabbed on to Bumblebee.
“Here we go,” Rodimus said. He simultaneously opened the ship’s hatch and the one in the side of the cliff. Water poured in, smashed him back into the rear of the craft, then tore him out into the ocean as though it were a living thing. He caught a quick glimpse of Kup struggling to hold on to Bumblebee and saw the various pipes and fittings give way and snap off the cliff face as the weight of the dropship dragged the wreckage free. For a moment, Rodimus was caught in that inexorable undertow. He was on the point of being swept downward. The abyss was pulling him in, and his last thought was at least he’d given it his all …
But suddenly a steel hand clasped around his wrist, yanking him forward just as the iris valve squeezed shut behind him with a resounding clang. Water drained out through sluice gates in the floor. Rodimus looked up to find himself staring at Kup.
“Cutting it a bit close there, j
unior.”
Rodimus was too shaken to reply. Beside him, Bumblebee stood up, emitted a series of beeps, and then expelled water from his various sockets. Rodimus looked around.
“Where are we?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Kup said, helping him to his feet. The room they were in was at least thirty meters high, its vaulted ceilings covered in more of the weird runes they had seen in the city. Auxiliary parts and components were stacked all around, but there were no signs that this place had seen much use. At the far side of the room sat a large industrial cargo elevator, though the only direction it could go was down.
“Try your communication systems,” Kup said. “Can you reach Ironhide?”
Rodimus tried, but all he could hear was static. “I’m not getting anything,” Kup said. Bumblebee bleeped plaintively; he was striking out, too.
“We must be too far down to transmit,” Rodimus said as he retracted his antenna. They were just going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. He turned back to Bumblebee.
“Bee, do you think you can find us a way out of here?”
Bumblebee saluted, then began running scans. If anyone could get them clear of this place, Rodimus thought, it would be Bumblebee and his state-of-the-art mapping gear and natural sense of direction. A few more moments and Bumblebee emitted a series of chirps. According to him, their best bet for getting back to the island-city was to take the elevator.
“And go farther down?” Rodimus asked as though Bumblebee had just stepped on his toe.
Bumblebee explained through whirs and beeps: His sensors were picking up heavy concentrations of Energon storage below and a short distance off, near where some of the seabed pipes they’d seen earlier led back to the city. That meant there might be a way through there.
“Works for me,” Rodimus said. “Let’s take the elevator.”
They got in and set the controls. The floor began to drop through level after level. As much as Rodimus didn’t want to go farther down, at least they were putting rock between them and the water. A mile farther down and they reached what appeared to be yet another service annex. Rails led away into the darkness. Bumblebee’s sensors indicated that they’d been used recently to haul Energon.
“What do you think, Bee?” Rodimus asked. “Can we ride it back to the city?” Bumblebee issued a series of beeps and chirps.
“It’s going in the wrong direction?” Kup said. “Oh, great.”
“Maybe it runs into another junction,” said Rodimus. “We can’t just sit here.”
Suddenly Bumblebee shifted into his scout-vehicle mode and shot off down the tracks at high speed.
“Bee! Wait!” Rodimus yelled after him. “What are you doing?”
Kup watched Bumblebee go. Then he popped open a compartment on his leg, pulled out his last fresh cy-gar, and chuckled. Rodimus couldn’t believe it.
“Something funny, old-timer?”
“Oh, just taking the opportunity for a quick break.” Kup lit the cy-gar. “Never thought I’d get the chance to smoke one of these again.” Smoke wafted into Rodimus’s face, who sputtered in protest.
“Never mind your cy-gar! Bee shouldn’t just run off like that! He could get hurt! We should—”
“Wait right here until he comes back,” Kup finished. “Bee knows his job. And frankly, he’s a lot less likely than you to do something stupid.”
“You’re starting to enjoy this, aren’t you?”
“Heck, sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying, sonny.” He puffed away on the cy-gar. Not for the first time, Rodimus wondered if Kup’s zest for life was what had kept him together all this time. Maybe he ought to take up the same habit. Maybe cy-gars actually tasted pretty good … His reverie was interrupted as Bumblebee came back around the corner, braking right in front of his companions, beeping excitedly.
“All right,” Kup said, “let’s go check it out.” He shifted into his truck mode, Rodimus changed into a sports vehicle, and they followed Bumblebee down the tracks. Just over a mile later, they screeched to a half in front of Bumblebee’s discovery: a giant set of vaultlike doors.
“Well, how about that,” Kup said.
Shifting back into bipedal mode, they examined them. There was no keypad, no lock, not even a primitive counterweight system. But the tracks led directly up to the doors, so presumably they continued on the other side. Bumblebee let out a few high-pitched squawks.
“Energon,” said Kup.
Rodimus stepped back and unfolded his arm bows, snapping two hi-ex warheads into place. “We need some space,” he said. The three of them moved back up the corridor.
“I’m not sure this is a great idea,” Kup said.
“Got a better one?”
“No, but—”
“Open sesame,” Rodimus said as he let the rockets fly. The doors disappeared in a flash of light. The concussion rolled back up the corridor. When the smoke cleared, the doors were still intact, but there was a gaping hole in the center of them.
“Now we’re in,” Rodimus said proudly.
“And now everybody knows it,” Kup said. “So much for a stealth mission.”
“The stealth mission was over the moment we lost the dropship,” Rodimus retorted. “All the better if somebody heard that. Maybe they’ll send a rescue team or something. Now let’s see what’s on the other side of this door.”
The three Autobots stepped through the blast hole.
“Wow,” Rodimus said.
It was the largest chamber they had ever seen on any planet, so colossal that it could have held over a hundred Arks. But it was what the room contained that really got their attention: row upon row of blue-green spiny aquatic robots stretching back as far as the eye could see. They looked like the fish-bots that had accompanied the Curator but with some alarming differences. Each one sported menacing-looking fins and teeth and a veritable arsenal of missiles and guns. All of them were motionless.
“It’s an army,” Kup breathed. “Tens of thousands of them.”
“Okay, this is not good,” Rodimus said.
But what was overhead was even more disturbing. Weird colored patterns flickered and swirled across portions of the ceiling that Rodimus suddenly realized were in fact giant holographic screens. They were so hypnotic that it was all he could do to look away. As he glanced back at the robots, he saw that their optics were tracking every shift in the lights overhead. Kup grabbed Rodimus by the arm and started to pull him back through the breach.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” he said grimly.
But at that moment, the holograms overhead vanished, to be replaced by a single face staring down at them.
And when it spoke, they heard nothing else.
Chapter Sixteen
CYBERTRON
“THEY’RE GOING TO PAY FOR THIS,” WHEELJACK SAID.
Springer followed the direction of his gaze out across the plains of the border regions. From the cliff’s edge on which they were standing they could see fires burning in several places. Smoke billowed up through shattered fissures in the ground. The Iacon skyline loomed in the far distance, all of it dwarfed by Shockwave’s tower.
“They’re going to pay for this,” Wheeljack repeated.
“Well,” Springer said, “we’ve been making them do that.”
That was an understatement. The two of them were members of the Wreckers, the group of renegade Autobots who had been causing as much trouble for the Decepticons as possible. Outnumbered and outgunned, they survived by hiding during the day and moving only by night.
But nothing they did had prevented matters on Cybertron from going from bad to worse. Bodies littered the roads. Refugees roamed the countryside. Most of the cities were little more than wreckage filled with scavenger gangs of industrial bots preying on refugees and one another. The Decepticons recruited the most brutal of those gangs for their mercenary armies, then used the mercenaries up in search-and-destroy missions against the Wreckers. After all, they were just
mercenaries, and the Decepticons could always find more.
“They’re grinding us down,” Wheeljack said.
“I thought it was the reverse,” said Springer.
He would believe that, Wheeljack thought. Springer was a never-say-die type of bot, whereas Wheeljack tended to be more realistic. He had to be; he was an inventor, after all, and he had done much for the Wrecker cause with the devices he had unleashed upon the Decepticons. But such ingenuity came with a price, for it meant that Wheeljack was under no illusions regarding how dire the situation was starting to get.
“Hey,” Springer said, “look who it is.”
Wheeljack turned to see a shape flitting through the air toward them, hugging the cliff’s edge to avoid detection by the Decepticons.
That was ironic, because the bot in question once had been a Decepticon.
Not anymore, though.
“Jetfire,” Wheeljack said.
The tone in his voice suggested that he didn’t appreciate Jetfire one little bit. That was understandable. Jetfire had been a member of Starscream’s aerial command. It had taken Wheeljack a long time to accept that his defection to the Autobot cause was a genuine one.
But that didn’t mean he had to like him.
“Wonder what he wants,” Springer said.
“Must be important,” said Wheeljack.
Jetfire fired his retros and alighted next to them, switching out of his jet-fighter mode to take on bot form
“Been looking for you two everywhere,” he said.
“Well, now you found us,” said Springer.
“We were just taking in the view,” Wheeljack said, gesturing out at the blasted plain. “Admiring the handiwork of your brethren.”
There was a moment’s pause. “You mean my former brethren,” Jetfire said.
“Something we can help you with?” Wheeljack asked.
“The boss wants to see you,” Jetfire said.
WHEELJACK HAD PLENTY OF TIME FOR MISGIVINGS AS he followed Jetfire through winding canyons and narrow valleys. His race-car mode was fast, but even so he could barely keep up. Given the terrain, Springer’s hovercraft form was proving more effective. Wheeljack was starting to wonder if this was all an elaborate trap. Perhaps Jetfire had waited till now to show his true colors. Then again, if that had been the case, it seemed unlikely he’d use the opportunity just to bag two Wreckers. No, what really bothered Wheeljack was something more fundamental: how high Jetfire was rising in the confidences of the leader of the Wreckers. Ultra Magnus kept the location of his underground headquarters secret even from most of the Wreckers. The fact that he was confiding in Jetfire was more than a little galling. But Ultra Magnus was the boss, and it was his decision. No one was about to second-guess him. Besides—
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