Exiles Read online

  Except Optimus Prime did not feel like going along with Ransack’s plan.

  He strode away from Override across the expanse of ferrocrete between the Ark and the edge of the staging area nearest the hangar, where Ransack’s followers were arrayed.

  “Optimus Prime,” Override said behind him. “All is under control.”

  “I will make sure of it,” he said, and kept walking. Flanking him, he could sense his most battle-tested Autobots—Jazz, Bumblebee, and Bulkhead—coming with him.

  “Ransack, Megatron’s ideas have corrupted you,” he said, squaring off with the Velocitronian as the assembled crowd shifted and redefined itself. In a moment two opposing formations appeared, and if Optimus Prime was any judge of numbers, the larger force belonged to Override.

  Just barely.

  But Optimus Prime thought he might tilt the odds a bit before he and the Autobots took their leave. He flipped out his ax and said, “Velocitron is not yours to claim.”

  “Oh, is it yours, then?” Ransack mocked him, taking in all of his followers with a sweep of his rifle arm. “Override, did you hear that? Optimus Prime thinks Velocitron is his.”

  “I heard nothing of the kind,” Override said. “All I hear is the ravings of a failed comedian.”

  “You’ll think it’s funny when I’m using you for parts!” Ransack snarled, and fired.

  The shot struck Override in the shoulder, ricocheting away from her armor into the sky as she spun around from the impact. Optimus Prime charged Ransack and belted him to the ground with a blow of his ax. For the moment, the assembled rank and file on both sides waited for orders from their respective commanders. One thing about a society that emphasized winning was that those who did not win were slow to take the initiative for themselves.

  Ransack sprang up. Hightail came to his side. Optimus Prime and Bumblebee strode to meet them. Hightail leaped forward, fist cocked and blaster firing. Bumblebee chirped and whistled a challenge, dodging the first shot from the blaster and meeting Hightail’s wild punch with a straight right to the face. Hightail’s head snapped back, and he dropped to his knees. He got to his feet quickly, but Ransack held up a hand to stop him. “Hightail!”

  “Lost your appetite for the fight now that it’s a fight?” Jazz taunted him.

  Ransack laughed. “You were leaving, weren’t you? Override and I have much to discuss once you have boarded your Ark and run away again. Keep running. Megatron will love the chase.”

  “He might not love it so much when he catches us,” Jazz said.

  Override stepped between them. “Ransack, you’re picking a fight you can’t win.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” Ransack grated. “Whatever happens today, I can’t lose. This is not over. It won’t be over until Megatron arrives.”

  “It will be sooner than that,” Override countered. “Optimus Prime, Velocitron bids you farewell. We will hold against this usurper, and we will hold against Megatron should he arrive on your trail. Go now and know that you have awakened us!”

  A booming cheer arose from the assembled ranks of Velocitronians on Override’s side. Then came the tipping point, as from within Override’s formation came the scream of redlining engines. Several of her followers had assumed alt-form and were burning through tight circles, raising smoke that wafted over the opposing positions. Override cried out, “Bot-form!” But it was too late. This insult, born on the racetracks where winners revved mockery at their vanquished competition, goaded Ransack’s forces into fury. Knowing they had come too far to turn back, they charged, and the vast staging area between speedway and hangar exploded into a battlefield. At first the sides looked even, but then the hangar door rolled open with a sound like thunder, and reinforcements on Override’s side poured out into Ransack’s overcommitted flank. Optimus Prime and the Autobots found themselves spectators. The Velocitronians only wanted to fight one another.

  “Prime,” Jazz said over the tumult. “We should get out of here while we can.”

  “I do not like leaving a battle undecided,” Optimus Prime said.

  “Oh, I think this one’s decided,” Jazz said. “Ransack came here looking to put on a show, and instead he got a real fight.”

  Optimus Prime nodded. Jazz’s sense of the situation matched his own. Today the victory would belong to Override. Tomorrow, who knew? This has been a long time coming, Optimus Prime thought. We provided a catalyst, but the elements of the reaction were already in place when we arrived.

  Quickly the battle focused on key areas: the hangar entrance, the main access road, and the gaping entrances into the speedway itself. Override’s bots were sealing off the exits, and Ransack led his followers in a charge against the defenders of the access road. The air was thick with energy fire, the squeal of engines, and the clang of weapons against armor.

  From the heart of the battlefield Override raised one arm in a salute. “Go, Autobots! Velocitron will fight with you!”

  Optimus Prime beat a passing rebel to the ground and then raised his ax in answer. “Autobots!” he cried. “Roll out!”

  He boarded the Ark without looking back, although if the Space Bridge wasn’t working, he thought, it was going to be a short trip.

  On the bridge, the command team already had settled into their roles and were most of the way through pre-departure checks.

  “Everything looks good,” Silverbolt said. “Fuel reservoir’s holding together.”

  “Easy bringing it up to speed,” Optimus Prime said. “Let’s not test those new welds just yet.”

  “You sure we should be going, Prime?” Jazz asked. He was watching the battle.

  “Is Override holding?”

  “She’s more than holding. It’s going to be a rout. For now, anyway.”

  Silverbolt, positioned at the command console, added, “I think Ransack played his hand too soon.”

  So might we have, Optimus Prime thought. Much depended on whether the Space Bridge would work.

  The powerful thrum of the Ark’s engines grew slowly louder, and the great ship lifted away from the surface. Below them, the battle was turning decisively in Override’s favor. Ransack’s followers were retreating through the only avenue available to them: into the speedway, where smoke already was billowing as fighting spilled onto the infield. Outside the speedway, the assembled bots fighting for Override waved and cheered, consolidating their position and capturing Ransack’s stragglers. The sound did not penetrate the Ark’s hull, but the sentiment did, and it gladdened Optimus Prime. There would be trouble here, but for now, Velocitron belonged with the Autobots.

  For confirmation of this assessment Optimus Prime asked Prowl, who had spent most of his time on Velocitron gathering intelligence, “Will Override survive?”

  “My guess is yes,” Prowl said. “Her position is stronger than his, and she has most of the planet’s fastest racers on her side. That will be important because of the way Velocitronians revere speed. It’s her war to lose.”

  Optimus Prime nodded. There were no certainties. He did not like leaving a battle, but they could risk no further damage to the Ark.

  He turned his attention to the crew members, who were watching from the side of the bridge. There was little for him to do until the time came to give the order to traverse the Space Bridge. The Autobots were calm and focused, in marked contrast to Clocker and Mainspring, who seemed to be experiencing space-travel for the first time. They marveled at the Ark’s size, its great age, the immense power implied by the scale of its thrusters. The fuel reservoir was holding together for the moment, and both Velocitronians took pride in knowing that the Autobot quest now rested in some small part on the work of Velocitronian mechanics.

  Looking out the main viewport, Mainspring asked, “This is the first time any bot has used a Space Bridge in … how long?”

  “Technically, we used a Space Bridge when we left Cybertron,” Silverbolt said.

  “Then how long has it been since a bot used a Space Bridge th
at didn’t blow up?”

  None of them knew. It struck them that perhaps no living bot knew the answer to that. Who would have thought to keep track at the time? Who would have known, on that last trip, that it would be the final journey along one of those great spans for uncounted millions of cycles?

  “A long time,” Optimus Prime said. He considered the question, thinking back to the great wealth of Iacon’s Hall of Records. The shipping manifests and customs logs of Cybertron’s Space Bridges were all dated millions of cycles before the coming of the civil war. He could not remember the exact date, but the scholar within him suddenly wanted to dig into those records and see if that date could be recovered.

  But it would be a long time before Optimus Prime could be a scholar again. Sometime in the distant future lay the moment when he could bequeath the mantle of Prime to a worthy successor. Until then, he would wear it with pride and resolve. And until then, his wish to bury himself in records and research would take a backseat to the overriding imperative to bring the AllSpark home and restore Cybertron to its long-lost state of peace and prosperity.

  “We reset that clock now,” he said with finality. “Let’s go.”

  “Here’s a question, though,” Jazz asked, unable to help himself: “Where does this Space Bridge go?”

  “Now you ask,” Silverbolt said. “Little too late for that now.”

  Jazz looked at Optimus and then at the Velocitronians who had decided to come along. “Does anyone know?”

  Clocker shrugged. “Forgot. It’s been a long time since any ship came through. A real long time.”

  “It’s true,” Mainspring said. “Nobody knows.”

  “I asked Override about that, too,” Optimus Prime said. “She said there were once a number of Space Bridges here, but they broke them down for scrap over the eons. Apparently no one here knows where this Bridge leads.”

  “Then let’s go,” Mainspring said.

  “Yeah,” Ratchet added. “I didn’t fix this Bridge for nothing.”

  He entered a command sequence into the Ark’s navigation system, and the two immense half circles of the Space Bridge’s containment field generator lit up with the vortex energy that created a teleportation gateway. The lights spread along the perimeter and met in the command structure that bridged the gap between them on the side facing away from Velocitron—“up” from a ground perspective. Slowly, for the first time in uncounted cycles, the Space Bridge at Velocitron came to life.

  “Looks good from here,” Ratchet said from the command console.

  “Hope this one doesn’t blow up, too,” Jazz muttered as if he hadn’t heard.

  “It won’t,” Optimus Prime said.

  The Ark nosed forward onto the Bridge, and the Autobots felt space heave and rumble around them. The displacement energy at the edge of the vortex manifested as a thrum almost too deep to hear, a counterpoint to the Ark’s engine noise, created from the subatomic materials of space-time itself. The vibrations intensified as the Ark entered the field, and it shook hard enough that bots on the bridge reached for something to hold on to.

  “Are we sure about this?” Jazz asked.

  There was no time to answer. Fully within the vortex, the Ark vanished from Velocitron. Behind it, the Space Bridge went dark once more. Below, in the aftermath of the first battle between Override and the grasping Ransack, Velocitron went back to normal.

  For the moment.

  It wasn’t until they had gone through the Space Bridge and come out the other side that Optimus Prime and the other Autobots realized how nervous they had been about the attempt. The vista of space beyond the Ark’s bridge windows was unexpected, Optimus thought. In a way, he had never expected to see it because he had not expected the Space Bridge to work.

  “Congratulations, Bridge Team,” he said quietly as everyone on the Ark’s bridge grappled with their own surprise. “You got it working.”

  “I guess we did.” Ratchet looked at the stars. “But I’m not sure where it took us. There’s another Space Bridge here, sure enough, but according to its records, it hasn’t been used … hm. Its records don’t go back that far.”

  “But it’s sending out a coherent signal?”

  “It sure is,” Ratchet said.

  Optimus Prime realized that this meant the galaxy could be full of working Space Bridges that had been cut off by the collapse of the bridges nearest Cybertron. He couldn’t help thinking yet again how little any Cybertronian knew about the vastness of the galaxy and what it contained. The thought of working Space Bridges, waiting millions and millions of cycles for traffic to use them, gave him a feeling he couldn’t describe.

  He ignored it. “Silverbolt. Where are we?”

  “Not sure yet,” Silverbolt said. “I’m running the Ark’s star map and updating it to include the mapping Hound did on Velocitron. That should give us current stellar positions, and then we can do a reverse parallax to get our position.”

  “Position is good,” Optimus Prime said. “Knowing why there’s a Space Bridge here would be better. Who built it?”

  “Bots,” Jazz said.

  “I would never have guessed,” Ratchet said.

  Optimus let the team joke around, but he couldn’t share the humor. Not right then. Where were they? He watched the Ark’s displays and listened to the banter on the bridge, trying to make sense of it all. Just as Optimus Prime was coming to the conclusion that the original reason for this Space Bridge had long since been destroyed, the Ark’s sensors locked on a planet. Not a big planet, which had made it hard to find, and not a rocky planet, which had put it outside the normal search parameters.

  This, apparently, was a planet made—mostly—of metal and plastic.

  It had no tectonic activity, no magnetic field of its own, no visible star to have created it … What was it? How had it come to exist? When had it been important enough to warrant the construction and maintenance of a Space Bridge?

  “I’ve heard stories about this place, but I never thought it was real,” Jazz said.

  Optimus was surprised. It wasn’t often that Jazz knew stories that Optimus had not seen during his years in the archives at Iacon. “You have?”

  Jazz nodded. “Junkion, they call it. Back when all of the Space Bridges still worked, this was a dumping ground. Eventually all of the junk collapsed together and became a planetoid.”

  Optimus Prime had seen references to Junkion back when he was still Orion Pax. He also had read that some Cybertronians, scavengers, and outlaws had gone there to pick over the jetsam and never returned. Other stories held that Junkion had its origins as a dumping ground for the carcasses of interstellar ships attacked and stripped by pirates, the planet eventually accreting as those wrecks floated together and acquired gravity. Speculations from long before the collapse of the Space Bridges ran rampant. Were there permanent inhabitants? No one could know.

  Until now.

  “If this is Junkion, we might be in luck,” Ratchet said. “The Ark’s fuel reservoir is leaking and getting worse. Most of what we got from Override bled right back out. We can’t keep it full, and the way things are going, we’re going to lose the rest of its fuel soon. So if there are a thousand old shipwrecks here, maybe we can find another reservoir.”

  Ultra Magnus has just been in to update me on recent developments. Partly his gruff resolve bolsters me and gives me reason to believe that the Autobot cause is not yet lost. Also, his reminders of Shockwave’s strength and depravity depress me and—though I would never say this to Ultra Magnus or any other warring Autobot—sometimes make me wonder if soon we will see the time approaching when it will be time to give up the fight.

  But of course, no. Again, I write things down to purge them from my mind. The act of making the symbols with the Quill in the Covenant eases my anxieties.

  We will prevail.

  I have no words that can adequately express my admiration for Ultra Magnus and his leadership of the guerrilla resistance band that has come to call t
hemselves the Wreckers. On their own, this indomitable group has harried the Decepticons from the moment of Optimus Prime’s departure. One can only speculate with horror at what the state of affairs here would be without their exploits. They have at various times destroyed Shockwave’s laboratories, fought off Decepticon raiding parties that could have choked off crucial supplies of Energon to Iacon, undertaken daring missions to disrupt enemy communications networks … to go on would be to elaborate needlessly. The Wreckers have been magnificent. It is perhaps not an overstatement to suggest that the war would be over without them.

  Ultra Magnus arrived here with Springer, as always, at his side. No Autobot has ever had a more trustworthy and valiant lieutenant. With them was Wheeljack, and the presence of this renegade scientist and reckless experimenter at first puzzled me. He has provided gadgets and prototype weaponry to various members of the Autobot resistance, but he is a scientist before he is an Autobot, and I fear his loyalties are not to be taken for granted. Even so, there he stood in my study.

  And with him, a proposition I could not stop thinking about.

  Was it possible to do it? Could the transporting mechanism of the Space Bridge be re-created on a smaller scale? Was it possible to read the signature of the residual energies from the destroyed Space Bridge that catapulted the Ark and the Nemesis away from Cybertron and use that information to determine their location? It seemed a fantasy. Yet Wheeljack is brilliant.

  There is only one way to find out for certain whether he can do it. That is, of course, to try. And that attempt will require a volunteer. We can scarcely spare any able-bodied bot in these desperate times, but it would be a great boon for those left behind to know that Optimus Prime survives and continues his quest. Of late I have been preoccupied with thoughts—some might call them fancies—regarding the return of Optimus Prime. I find myself thinking of the great works of Solus Prime—now why, after all this time, should that be?

  The Star Saber.

  The Chimera Stone.

  The Apex Armor.