Exiles Page 13

  Both of the bot worlds they had seen since leaving Cybertron, Optimus Prime reflected, were extremely challenged for resources. But they were not challenged for resourcefulness, that was sure. More and more he was realizing that the struggle happening on Cybertron was an expression of bot resolve. Cybertronians—and their various descendants scattered throughout the universe—simply did not give up.

  It made him proud.

  And it clarified for him just what was at stake on the Autobots’ quest and just how much determination and resolve was expected of Optimus Prime if he was to prove himself worthy of the title of Prime. The Matrix had expressed its faith in him, and he had led his bots in a war … but the next stage in the grand struggle with Megatron would be more difficult yet.

  No one knew he was there, but Axer saw the entire exchange. Interesting, he thought. Who could have guessed that of all the rocks floating through all the limitless reaches of space, Optimus Prime would land on this one? It wasn’t really a rock, but Axer guessed the Autobots were flying blind, using Space Bridges as they could put them back together without knowing where they would lead.

  Axer wondered what was happening on Cybertron.

  He looked more closely at the Autobot team. Prowl and Ironhide he knew, of course, from their prewar prominence. But the fourth bot, Hound, had been unfamiliar to him before their brief recent collision. It had been a long time since Axer had left Cybertron, but even so, he had been there when the war was about to break out and he thought he knew most of the prominent bots on both sides. More recognizable Autobots followed: Silverbolt, Sideswipe, Ratchet. Most of Optimus Prime’s inner circle appeared to have survived the war … at least long enough to flee from it. With them were several bots Axer did not know, including an energetic black-and-yellow bot who seemed to be one of the Autobots’ favorites. They were a loose, easy group, working efficiently together to get settled on Junkion until they could go on.

  Where, Axer asked himself, was Megatron?

  He could not believe that Megatron, who had fought to the death in every gladiator match he had ever started, would let as formidable a foe as Optimus Prime continue to live. Following that chain of reasoning, Axer thought he could assume that Megatron would be in pursuit. The only way this logic didn’t hold together was if Megatron had been defeated, but if that was the case, Axer imagined that the Autobots would be traveling in a bit more style than that afforded by the simple accommodations aboard the Ark.

  These were refugees, Axer thought. Vagabonds at best. This was not a triumphant force.

  With that thought came an absolute certainty in Axer’s mind that he would be meeting Megatron again before long. He was glad he had broken off the scrap with the bot calling himself Hound before things had gotten too serious. It was bad enough that Wreck-Gar had singled him out. To be branded the killer of an Autobot would have been a serious obstacle to the plan that even then was forming in Axer’s mind. Luckily, he still had the run of Junkion, and he could still make preparations for the inevitable coming of the Decepticons.

  After establishing the beginnings of a rapport with Wreck-Gar, Optimus Prime returned to the crash site to get the rest of the details on the postcrash diagnostics on the Ark. Led by Sideswipe, the Autobots—along with Clocker and Mainspring, who had been involved with the repairs after the bombing on Velocitron—began a visual inspection of the Ark’s exterior in conjunction with the damage analysis of the explosion that had knocked out the engines and orbital stabilizers. It was an arduous and painstaking process but necessary. Together with the previous damage from the collapsing Space Bridge at Cybertron and the first bomb on Velocitron, this most recent sabotage was going to necessitate extensive repairs, which would take much time.

  And time was precious. Megatron was coming.

  In addition to the other problems, Optimus Prime was discovering that not all of the Junkions were as sympathetic to their plight as Wreck-Gar appeared to be. One of them, which apparently had been isolating rare metals from debris when the Ark’s crash annihilated his excavation and smelter, was ranting at Sideswipe when Optimus Prime reached the ship to get what he assumed would be more bad news.

  “You know what we’re doing here? We’re building a new planet from scratch. From junk! We, no one else! No one ever came to help! Junkions don’t need help!” the Junkion shouted. All Junkions, it seemed, had a tendency to shout. The entire planetoid was a cacophony of shouting bots, screaming machinery, roaring furnaces … No wonder they all seemed a little unbalanced, Optimus Prime thought as the shambling bot turned away from them and resumed picking through the debris where the Ark’s landing had plowed it up.

  Sideswipe looked to Optimus Prime for some guidance. “Do we apologize?” he asked. “I don’t know how to deal with these Junkions.”

  “We just got here,” Optimus Prime said. “It’s going to take a bit for us to get to know each other. Don’t do anything rash before I get back.”

  “Get back?”

  “Tell the others to stay with the ship unless they have an urgent reason not to,” Optimus Prime said. He already was moving toward the location where he first had met Wreck-Gar. Something there had set off an alarm in his mind, and he abruptly felt compelled to investigate it. He didn’t ask any questions, he just went. The Matrix guided him, as it always had.

  Something about the great pit drew him. The collapse of two of its walls had exposed strata of ancient debris that the Junkions were busy harvesting as they terraced the uneven slopes to match the other sides of the rectangular dig. Set back in a slightly larger rectangle, as viewed from above, a perimter of exploratory shafts went straight and deep into the heart of Junkion. They were largely unworked now that efforts were focused on that central pit, and that caused Optimus Prime to wonder why the Junkions were focused so singularly on that dig.

  It was a question for the next moment of leisure he had, which was not right now. He stood at the edge of one of the exploratory shafts, feeling the atmosphere shift at the rim, falling at one corner, swirling at another. Across the pit, the collapse had partially exposed other shafts. If he could have chosen one of them, his progress would have been easier. It seemed, however, that the Matrix did not wish Optimus Prime to take the easy way. The shaft at his feet was the one the Matrix was directing him to explore. So be it, he thought. He would trust the Matrix. The shaft was too wide for Optimus, to reach across it, but its walls were rough. He swung himself over the rim and started to climb down.

  On the way down, Optimus Prime was careful to keep track of his location not because he was worried about getting lost but because he wanted to be able to reconstruct his path another time if, as he expected, he found something at the bottom of the shaft and had to bring it up. Possibly he would need to commandeer Junkion resources, an action that no doubt would put an end to whatever tentative friendship might grow between Autobot and Junkion.

  Reaching the bottom of the shaft, Optimus Prime still felt the tug downward. He got his hands around a long, gently curving steel pipe partially buried in the shaft floor. Pulling upward, he saw that he had broken through into a space below the floor. Amazing, he thought. If the Junkions had drilled their shaft just a bit deeper, they would have discovered …

  What would they have discovered, exactly?

  “Time to find out,” Optimus Prime said in the echoing solitude of the shaft.

  When he worked his way down into the subfloor space, he found that it was roughly the shape of a flattened cylinder. The interiors of its walls were smooth, which Optimus Prime found incredible until he realized that he had just broken into a ship buried so deep below the surface of Junkion that it must have been one of the first bits of debris that accreted to form the beginnings of the planetoid. He felt that he had traveled back in time.

  Along the wall of this cylinder—the side nearer to the Junkions’ main excavation—was a door, jammed into a frame but immovable because of the immense planetary pressures placed on the frame. Optimus Prime lea
ned against the door just to be sure his initial assessment of its functionality hadn’t been wrong.

  It hadn’t. He paused, weighing the imperative radiating from the Matrix against the possibility that if he took any kind of vigorous action here, a large part of Junkion might collapse on him.

  Trust the Matrix, he told himself. Just as he was always telling the Autobots. If he couldn’t follow his own dictum, what kind of a leader was he?

  Since the door was jammed, Optimus Prime tore the entire bent frame loose and listened to the sound echoing back down the tunnel on the other side of the doorway. From far above him—or was it in the other direction, below or through one part of the smoothly curved chamber’s wall?—came the rising and falling roar of Wreck-Gar’s furnaces, with their smelting crews pouring and molding and machining without pause. Optimus dropped the frame and ducked his head under the hanging beam. He was inside an ancient crashed spacecraft of some kind, there was no doubt about that. How it had gotten here, who had piloted it, whether it had been sentient itself—those questions remained to be answered. From ahead, down a gently curving stretch of passage, came the faintest glow. He followed it.

  After a short walk in the darkness Optimus Prime registered a pattern of small lights so dim that had there been more ambient light, he never would have seen them. Coming closer, he saw that they were a sensor bank. He flicked on one of his lights long enough to see that he was in a ruined bridge. What had once been a wall of windows was now caved in, eons of junk spilling in to form drifts on the deck. How long had the ship been there? Optimus wondered. He ran back a three-axis simulation of his movements from the surface of Junkion to here and found that he was nearly far enough down that no matter which direction he went, it was technically up.

  Something was here. He could feel it. But he could also feel that something else had been here, too, and was now gone. Optimus Prime was not sure which one he was supposed to pursue. He listened for instructions, guidance, any kind of hint … and got none.

  Then the Matrix poured a great hologram forth into the crumpled space where the wrecked ship’s fuselage had created an overhang, deflecting higher layers of debris. Optimus Prime saw a view of Junkion as if from far in space, with four Space Bridges like burned-out photo-receptors above it. Only one of them showed any light. Near it, faintly and nearly transparently, shone a simple sign, a directional indicator like the one any automated cargo transport used on the roads of any bot planet.

  Sometimes, Optimus Prime thought drily, the Matrix spoke with a kind of majestic indirection. And sometimes it was so plain that it almost seemed impatient that Optimus Prime had not figured out its message before it had to speak. This was one of those times.

  He turned back toward the surface, nagged by a sense that although the Matrix had spoken clearly, he was walking away from another, possibly equally important, artifact. But if he could not trust the Matrix, what could he trust?

  And if the other bots could not trust his judgment, what was there for any bot to trust?

  He spoke to the space around him, and to the lingering spirits of the bots who once had piloted the great ship between the stars. “This is not the last time,” Optimus Prime said. “Whatever you carry, I will discover. Count on it.”

  Then he turned back to the surface, feeling that a great destiny lay both before and behind him. To make either or both of them, he was going to have to talk to Wreck-Gar.

  When he reached the surface, the first thing Optimus Prime did was locate Wreck-Gar and ask a simple question. “Are there any spaceworthy ships here?”

  “For what?” Wreck-Gar roared. “Spaceworthy, junk-worthy, spare parts! It’s all worth the space! We use it!”

  “I need to make a short voyage, just as far as one of the Space Bridges,” Optimus Prime said, persevering in the face of Wreck-Gar’s incomprehensibility. He was starting to understand that Wreck-Gar’s mind was perfectly acute despite his unusual speech and that if you could isolate the occasional nuggets of sense in his ravings, it was possible to have a conversation with him.

  “Plenty of ships up there,” Wreck-Gar said, pointing up. That was of course true. Optimus Prime had noted the number of drifting wrecks when the Ark first had arrived over Junkion.

  “I mean ships that can be flown,” he said.

  “Find one!” Wreck-Gar shouted. “You fly it, we’ll junk it!”

  That sounded like an offer of a deal. “Very well,” Optimus Prime said. “The first ship we find that we can fly, we will land it to be junked when we bring it back.”

  “Mighty smooth!” Wreck-Gar said. He shifted into alt-form and rumbled away in search of cargo for his compactor.

  That settled, Optimus Prime gathered the other Autobot leaders and officers near the Ark, telling them of the place he had found at the center of Junkion and the instruction he had received from the Matrix. “Something is here,” he said. “We have come here for a reason. Yet I also think we need to pursue the course the Matrix has laid out to this Space Bridge.”

  “One of them works?” Silverbolt sounded skeptical.

  “The Matrix pointed me toward one of them,” Optimus Prime said. “Either it still works, or it can be fixed, or something about the Space Bridge itself is what the Matrix wants us to see.”

  “That’s what I meant before about not assuming we know what the Matrix is saying,” Jazz said. “Yeah.”

  “Problem is, if we don’t know what the Matrix really means, we don’t know what to do,” Silverbolt said as Bumblebee simultaneously emitted a series of beeps and bleats.

  “Hey, Bumblebee, you sounded like Silverbolt,” Jazz said, comically surprised. “I could understand you and everything.”

  “Let us be serious just for a cycle or two. We need to go in search of whatever this artifact is,” Optimus Prime said. He believed it to be the rest of the Star Saber, but he also was feeling from the Matrix that another power was involved. “The trip will not, I think, be a long one, but I don’t want to leave the Junkions entirely to themselves while we are gone. Wreck-Gar has provided us access to a ship, assuming we can find one in the drift zone between here and the Space Bridges. There are near-surface craft available to shuttle us up to that zone. So Sideswipe and Silverbolt, go to Wreck-Gar. Get that shuttle and find us something that will make it to the Space Bridge. I believe one of them still functions. Ratchet and Ironhide, you stand in for me if command decisions become necessary. Hound and Prowl, you will be in charge of interacting with the Junkions. Talk to them, keep them on our side, explain to them that my absence will be brief and that when I get back we will be in a much better position to defend against Megatron.”

  “What about the pirates?” Hound asked.

  “Pirates?”

  “Some of the Junkions have already told me that this whole place started off as a dumping ground for ships after pirates were done with them. Some of them were marooned on the ships, and eventually it all got stuck together. I don’t know if it’s true or even if they all believe it,” Hound said, “but some of them sure do.”

  Pirates, thought Optimus Prime. What next?

  “There’s another problem, too, Optimus,” Sideswipe said. “I’ve been looking over the fuel-reservoir repairs we did back on Velocitron, and the latest sabotage blew them apart.” He added some details about Clocker and Mainspring’s reports, but Optimus Prime wasn’t interested in the details.

  He was interested in solutions.

  “What do we do? Recommendations,” he said.

  “I think we ought to dig around on Junkion until we find a fuel reservoir that’s about the right size,” Sideswipe said. “And as much as I felt at home on Velocitron and think those were some skilled mechanics, we need to recognize that maybe they weren’t the best at working on starships. Especially ships the size of the Ark.”

  “You think the Junkions will be?” Silverbolt asked.

  “Don’t know,” Sideswipe said. “But if we know one thing didn’t work, we probably shouldn’
t do that same thing again.”

  “Makes sense to me,” Jazz said. “Prime?”

  A damaged ship and the specter of pirates. Unclear visions from the Matrix and an uncertain welcome on Junkion. And the ever-present shadow of Megatron looming over them. This was one of the situations that had so many variables that the only way forward was to ignore them and make a decision based solely on the desired result.

  “Jazz, Sideswipe,” Optimus Prime said. “Go find Wreck-Gar and get a shuttle. Then find us a ship that will get to the Space Bridges and back. The rest of you, get working on the Ark.”

  Axer came to Wreck-Gar soon after his first interaction with the Cybertronians, which left him nervous and feeling that he needed to take immediate action to shore up his position and make sure Wreck-Gar knew the Autobots did not speak for all bots or even all Cybertronians. “Leader,” he said with a worried tone, “I’m not sure about these Autobots.”

  Wreck-Gar was just getting a load together and preparing to take it on his route of forges and furnaces. Before he had completed his shift into alt-form, he said, “Lies are junk! Not worth junk even when you tell them! Tell them better so they’re better junk!”

  Burning at the insult, Axer persevered nevertheless. He followed Wreck-Gar down the central road from the current focus of excavating operations. “How do we know they are who they say they are?” he said. “I came from Cybertron when the war they speak of was about to break out, and much of what this Optimus Prime says does not match up with what I understood to be the case when I was there. Not every Cybertronian believes Optimus Prime is Prime at all.”