Exiles Read online

  “I am Optimus Prime,” said Optimus. “Free us from these nets and let us speak someplace a little quieter than your blast furnace.”

  “If you say so!” Wreck-Gar said, as quietly as he could. At a gesture from him, the other Junkions swarmed over the nets, loosening them and helping the Autobots get untangled.

  “Where’s Hound?” Ratchet asked as he limped over to a place where he could sit down and get a good look at his leg.

  One of the Junkions, watching his progress, said, “I can take that off for you, put it to use.”

  “No, thanks,” Ratchet said. “I’ll fix it myself.”

  The Junkion stomped away in search of something else to scavenge. Where was Hound?

  “Wreck-Gar,” Optimus Prime said. “There was a fourth in our party. Have you seen him?”

  “Spare parts all around!” Wreck-Gar said. “No telling!”

  Optimus Prime very much hoped he didn’t mean that Hound had been taken apart for reuse. There were a number of ways to interpret most of what Wreck-Gar said. “Is he alive?” Optimus Prime asked.

  “Don’t know! Haven’t seen him!” That was about as clear as Wreck-Gar could get, apparently. “You want to talk or stand around here?”

  Optimus Prime gestured for Wreck-Gar to lead the way. The Junkion leader took off down the length of an ancient starship, Quintesson by the looks of the design. It had patches of discoloration that put Optimus Prime in mind of cosmic rust. Ratchet had supplies of corro-stop, but even so, the last thing the Autobots needed right then was a rust outbreak. He looked Wreck-Gar over more carefully as they picked their way down a slope of discarded molded-polymer cowlings and covers. The Junkion didn’t look sick. In fact he looked healthier than most of the Autobots.

  “This is the quietest place I know!” Wreck-Gar thundered when he and the four Autobots had reached the bottom of the polymer slope and turned into a shallow cave created by the nose of the Quintesson wreck. “What are you doing here? Haven’t seen other bots in …”

  Wreck-Gar thought for long enough that it became clear to the Autobots that he didn’t have any idea how long it had been since he had seen other bots. “A long time,” Optimus Prime finished for him.

  Nodding, Wreck-Gar said, “Mighty long!” As he spoke, he was picking small bits of something out of the junk that drifted around their feet. Optimus Prime decided not to ask what it was, but just as he had made that decision, Ironhide said, “What are you looking for?”

  Wreck-Gar held up tiny slivers and curlicues of some kind of clear filament. “Fiber optic!” he said. “Good stuff, lots of uses. Tell me about the Matrix of Leadership!”

  “That was him,” Ironhide said, pointing at Optimus Prime.

  “Oh!” Wreck-Gar pivoted with a grinding sound and faced Optimus Prime. “Tell me!”

  “The Matrix of Leadership revealed itself to me during the civil war on Cybertron,” Optimus Prime said. “The High Council at Iacon had already declared me Prime, but the Matrix made it real. Now I lead the Autobots on a quest to recover the AllSpark.”

  “Where did it go? And what’s an Autobot?” Wreck-Gar crushed the fiber-optic filaments in one hand. Optimus Prime thought he had just destroyed them, but when Wreck-Gar’s hand relaxed again, the various pieces were melded into a single coil. They look like retread sanitation drones, thought Optimus Prime, but these Junkions, they’ve had a lot of time to get good at what they do.

  “An Autobot has pledged to resist the tyranny of the Decepticons.”

  “Decepticons?”

  “They are led by Megatron. He believes in war and tyranny, and he pursues us to prevent us from recovering the AllSpark.”

  “Right! AllSpark! Where did you say it had gone!?”

  “I ejected it from Cybertron to protect it from the Decepticons, who were trying to infect it with Dark Energon. It’s now somewhere deep in space, far away. I can sense its direction, but I don’t have a good fix on its distance. However far it is, that’s how far we’ll go.”

  “What do you need from us?” Wreck-Gar shouted. “All we have is junk! That’s what I’m good for, garbage!”

  “We need some repair assistance and parts,” Optimus Prime said. “I have a feeling we have found ourselves among the best mechanics in the galaxy.”

  “You got that right! Show me your ship! But don’t give me any scrap about Matrix of Leadership and Prime! Junkion doesn’t have time for stories when there’s work to do!”

  Ratchet leaned in close to Optimus Prime and said, “I was wondering about this. He thinks the Matrix and the AllSpark are just stories and you’re telling him all this so he’ll feel bad for us and help.”

  “Sounds like that to me, too,” Optimus Prime said. To Wreck-Gar he said, “The old stories are true, you know.”

  “Ha! Next you’ll tell me that the Fallen and Solus Prime are coming on the next ship!” Wreck-Gar shook his head. “Junkion will help you, spare parts, but we didn’t get stupid just because we got stuck in the junk.”

  “Hold on,” Optimus Prime said, adding a note of command to his voice. Wreck-Gar spun around, reacting to a perceived challenge to his authority; Optimus Prime could see it in his posture and in the speed of his reaction. Before things could escalate, the Matrix shone again, this time in a single flash without Optimus doing anything to activate it. The wave front of the flash washed over Wreck-Gar and reflected off the million pieces of broken glass and bent steel around them, creating a dazzling prismatic spray that for a nanoklik overwhelmed all of their optical arrays.

  Wreck-Gar was the first to speak, and his tone was subdued. “That’s the Matrix,” he said. From his inflection it might have been a statement or a question. A million shards of color danced and faded from the wreckage that surrounded them. It was quite a scene, thought Optimus Prime. He would not have thought Junkion capable, even accidentally, of such beauty.

  “It was granted to me by Vector Sigma,” Optimus Prime said. “I carry it within me, and its authority rallies the Autobots to my leadership. These are the times when the old stories come back to life, Wreck-Gar. And another bot pursues us, Megatron. If he catches up with us and we are not prepared, the AllSpark might be forever lost.”

  Still gazing incredulously at the Matrix as it disappeared into Optimus Prime’s chassis again, Wreck-Gar said, “Junkion will help. What do you need?”

  Amazing, thought Optimus Prime. The Matrix had cleared Wreck-Gar’s head, brought him out of his demented raving. How long would it last?

  That question was forming itself in Optimus Prime’s head when suddenly the Ark heeled over out of its parking orbit and angled down to crash into the surface of Junkion.

  The impact sent a shock wave through the entire planet, knocking both Autobots and Junkions sprawling and causing landslides of wreckage that buried many of the workers near the bottom of the excavated canyon. An entire ridgeline subsided slowly, puzzling the stunned Autobots until they saw that it was in fact collapsing into a much larger and deeper pit than the one where they stood. This yawning scar was large enough that it could have contained one of Cybertron’s smaller cities or Altihex Station. The Ark’s collision with Junkion was causing the slow-motion subsidence of two of its sides, and the ship was burying itself deep in the body of the planet. A wave of heat from the contact caused enormous explosions in the wreckage and melted much of what did not explode.

  “The Ark!” Ratchet shouted. He and Ironhide ran in the direction of the crashing ship and then were knocked over again as the shock wave from its impact, having traveled all the way around the planet, hit them from behind.

  Optimus Prime barely kept his feet. “Spare parts!” Wreck-Gar shouted. Ignoring him, Optimus Prime ran, too, caring only for the Ark and the well-being of the valiant Autobots still aboard.

  What saved most of the Autbots on the Ark was the low altitude of the parking orbit. Junkion was a small planet, so stationary orbit was achieved at a relatively short distance from its center of gravity. Thus, the
crash, though devastating, did not destroy the Ark. As Optimus Prime got to the crash site, hard on the heels of Ratchet and Ironhide, he saw Autobots spilling from the Ark’s automatic emergency hatches. Those, at least, had functioned. The next thing he saw was Silverbolt leaping up and achieving alt-form at the apex of his leap, then accelerating in a wide circle around the site as if looking for something. “Silverbolt,” Optimus Prime said via commlink. “Report.”

  “Optimus Prime!” came the response. “Internal explosion near the repair site from the bomb explosion on Velocitron. Destabilized orbit and caused immediate decay into the planet’s surface.”

  “Casualties?” It was too soon for a complete report, but Optimus Prime wanted to know what was known. “Ratchet, scan for Sparks.”

  “Already am,” Ratchet called out. “Counting against the Ark’s passenger manifest … too much interference. Lots of survivors.”

  “Establishing security perimeter,” Silverbolt said.

  “Junkions are not hostile, Silverbolt. Acknowledge.”

  “Understood.”

  “Lots of survivors” was good as far as it went. Optimus Prime spotted Jazz and Prowl together and not far from them Bumblebee, Bulkhead … and Hound. How had he gotten back to the wreck so quickly? Optimus Prime filed that away for later. Right now he had more pressing concerns.

  He caught up with Jazz and Prowl. “Prime!” Jazz said. “I brought everyone else down with the second team.”

  “No time for jokes, Jazz,” Optimus Prime said.

  “Hey, I can joke. We’ve got only minor casualties so far. No dead Autobots.” Clocker and Mainspring arrived at their group, and Jazz added, “Or Velocitronians.”

  “What happened?” Optimus Prime asked. “Silverbolt reported the location of the explosion. What can you add?”

  “Sabotage,” Mainspring said.

  All the Autobots present looked at him. “I was in touch with the diagnostic subroutines as soon as we locked into the orbit,” he said. “I was in the middle of running checks when it happened. The routines never said anything about a problem. I can play the record back for you.”

  “Thank you, Mainspring,” Optimus Prime said. Now all the Autobots were looking at him. The traitor, he thought. “Prowl, I think you know what I would want to say to you.”

  “Yes, Optimus Prime. I do.” It was more important than ever to ascertain the identity of the traitor on board the Ark. Clearly, one of the bots pretending to be an Autobot was escalating its efforts to delay the Ark without destroying it, and the only reason for this tactic would be to keep the Autobots from getting too big a lead over Megatron.

  “Begin immediately,” Optimus Prime said. Prowl nodded and rolled out. Optimus did not know, and in fact preferred not to know, the specifics of how Prowl conducted his intelligence gathering. He trusted him to get results and to abide by the code of ethics common to all Autobots. Beyond that, the details were Prowl’s to decide.

  “Clocker, Mainspring, Jazz, Ratchet,” he said. “You’re the damage assessment team. Go.”

  They went. “Ironhide, you and I will speak to Wreck-Gar. The Autobots and Junkions have begun their alliance in a difficult way. Things can only improve from here.” Optimus Prime and Ironhide turned and began making their way back toward the blast furnace where they had last seen Wreck-Gar, only to find that Wreck-Gar and a contingent of Junkions had in fact followed them and were now approaching.

  “Digging out Junkions!” Wreck-Gar said. “Lot of spare parts! Lot of junk! That’s what we’re good for!” He looked past Optimus Prime and Ironhide at the Ark, approximately a third of which was buried in the surface of Junkion. The crash site made a roughly equilateral triangle with the blast furnace site and the notional middle of the giant excavation that had been partially collapsed by the Ark’s impact.

  “I hope you recover all of your Junkions successfully,” Optimus Prime said. He had seen the size of some of the junkslides and had a hard time imagining that any bot could have survived them.

  “Recover or reuse!” Wreck-Gar said. “All the same! Make ’em, break ’em, take ’em, bake ’em, and remake ’em!”

  That struck Optimus Prime as a fairly callous attitude to take toward the Sparks of Wreck-Gar’s bots, but Junkions were creations of their circumstances as much as any other population. Just as the Velocitronians obsessed over speed, Junkions thought of everything in terms of use and reuse. It could hardly be otherwise, but to Optimus Prime it was hard to understand.

  “I would offer our assistance,” he said, “but first I must make sure of the safety of the Autobots aboard the Ark.”

  “Junkions don’t need help! Junkions are help! Spare parts, we’ll fix ’em!” Wreck-Gar was staring at the Ark with the same kind of greed Optimus Prime had seen on the faces of the Junkions who had started to cut Ratchet apart. The entire universe was a broken machine to them, just waiting to be melted down and remade.

  “Good. We need parts,” Ironhide said. “And time and space for repairs.”

  Optimus Prime was about to jump in and modulate Ironhide’s overbearing approach, but it immediately became apparent that he didn’t need to.

  “Right up our alley! Repairs is what we do!” Wreck-Gar said. Then, after a moment’s consideration, he added, “Also, we junk what can’t be repaired, melt it down, and then make it into new stuff that breaks down later. It’s what we do!”

  Amazing, thought Optimus Prime. These worlds, cut off from the nerve center that once was Cybertron, slowly developed obsessions about a single thing. He was thinking of Velocitron again, but then it occurred to him that Junkions might not have had any choice. The stories of this place were all focused on hardship and disaster from the beginning: marooned explorers, crashed ships, accidents and betrayals, bots inadvertently left here after the ships they had arrived on went on without them. So no wonder, he supposed, they were so fixated on making something out of nothing.

  “Saw you the nanoklik you got here, you know,”

  Wreck-Gar said. “Had Axer follow you around. Axer’s a strange one. Not like us! Even though he’s one of us.”

  “Who did he follow?” Ironhide asked. “Not me. Nobody followed me. I would have known.”

  “No, he followed this one!” Wreck-Gar said, pointing at Hound, who had just arrived and was standing at the edge of the group as if waiting to tell Optimus Prime something. “Then he reported back to me. Then we all came here!” He looked around as if trying to locate the bot called Axer.

  “We thank you for your offer of help,” Optimus Prime said. “Many bots would despair at being marooned this far from other planets.”

  “Not Junkions! We make do! Lots of things to do here!” Wreck-Gar focused intently on Hound again. “Where did you go with Axer?”

  Hound glanced at Optimus Prime, then back to Wreck-Gar. “He must mean the bot who attacked me when the others dropped the net over you, Optimus Prime,” he said. “I fought him off, and he disappeared. I didn’t know where the rest of you had gone, and while I was looking, I saw the Ark crash and rushed back here.”

  “Don’t talk to Axer! I don’t trust him!” Wreck-Gar said.

  “Then why did you send him to follow Hound?” Ironhide asked. It seemed like a reasonable question to Optimus Prime, who had been about to ask it himself.

  “Because I didn’t trust you, either!”

  Hence, thought Optimus Prime, the ambush and attempted cannibalization of the Autobots for parts. He and Ironhide exchanged a glance. “Well, nothing untrustworthy happened from the sound of it,” Optimus Prime said. He was starting to understand that as stalwart and admirable as the Junkions were, the teracycles of isolation had made them … they had become what Alpha Trion would delicately have called “highly individualized.”

  Or were they not displaced Cybertronians at all? Again Optimus Prime saw the possibility that life had found a way to spread in the absence of the AllSpark. This ran counter to everything he had ever been taught, but the evidence—the
se amazingly different bots—was getting harder and harder to ignore.

  The Matrix prodded and goaded him from within. There was a reason it had brought the Autobots to Junkion, and now it was time to begin to find out, although what could it be other than another piece of the Star Saber?

  Careful, he heard Jazz’s voice telling him. The Matrix has its own reasons for doing things, and they don’t always square with any bot’s assumptions. Even if that bot is Prime.

  It was good advice whether Jazz said it or Optimus Prime said it to himself in Jazz’s persona. Be where you are. Keep the quest in front of you but don’t let it prevent you from seeing the moment-to-moment tasks of leadership that will allow you to fulfill it.

  He decided that the best course of action was to get his interaction with Wreck-Gar on a more comfortable footing while they waited for the damage assessment and a list of parts needed for repairs. “How long have you been here?” Optimus Prime asked him.

  “Wreck-Gar has been on Junkion as long as Junkion has been! No Junkion without Wreck-Gar! We’ll fix ’em! Now back to work!” The Junkion leader assumed alt-form, a blocky compactor vehicle. Acting as if they’d been ordered, although Optimus Prime had heard no orders, the other Junkions present quickly loaded Wreck-Gar’s compactor with random junk from the area. Then Wreck-Gar roared off, leaving Ironhide and Optimus Prime to look at each other through a cloud of dust.

  When it cleared, Jazz was joining them. “Where is he taking that stuff?” Jazz said. “This looks like a perfectly good dump to me.”

  “He will probably bring it right back tomorrow, once he has dumped it off there and picked it up again.” Optimus shook his head. “What can you report about the Ark? Come with me.”

  He and Jazz walked back toward the blast furnace as Jazz filled Optimus Prime in on the damage to the Ark. It was extensive but not crippling. “Could be we’re lucky it happened here,” Jazz said. “If there’s any place in the galaxy that has what we need, this’ll be it.”

  Following Wreck-Gar’s progress, the Autobots watched as he made stops at several points along a rough road paved with polymer sheeting over scraps of metal and occasionally stone. At each stop, Wreck-Gar took on more seeming junk. At some stops, he dropped off part of his load and waiting Junkions gathered it up and took it to a local machine facility of some sort. Optimus Prime observed plastics-separation works, at least four different small furnaces and forges, an equal number of chemical laboratories … Everything Wreck-Gar did had a purpose, and every other Junkion appeared also to have a well-defined role in the functioning of this strange society.