Exiles Read online

  Life and civilizations developed in the absence of the AllSpark. It was incredible to conceive, but Velocitron had grown and stabilized in the absence of the AllSpark and after the collapse of the Space Bridges. The same could be said, although in much different fashion, for Junkion. Optimus Prime never would have thought that such a thing was possible. Did not all things flow ultimately from the AllSpark? And did it not follow that in the absence of the AllSpark, civilizations and cultures would decay?

  Yet they had not. Something, some deep principle, was at work here, and Optimus Prime was just becoming conscious of its existence.

  He wondered what else—what other wonders, what other terrors—the universe might be hiding from him.

  In the first cycles after the Nemesis had emerged from the energy field created by the dissolution of the Space Bridge at Cybertron, there was little motion aboard the enormous ship. It drifted with the momentum left over from its drive away from the surface of Cybertron, in the aftermath of the climactic on-planet confrontation between the overwhelming numerical strength of the Decepticons and the indomitable will of the Autobots. The Space Bridge exploding had blown a wave front of energy through the Nemesis that barely was lessened by the ship’s thick hull. All the Decepticons aboard it were overwhelmed where they stood, and when some of them began to stir again, at first none of them knew how long it had been since they had been conscious. The Nemesis itself had become stasis-locked after its final transformation out of Trypticon mode, and whatever sentience it once had possessed was now permanently subsumed into its ship function.

  That was regrettable, because at that moment Starscream would have liked very much to ask the ship what exactly had happened to them on their way through the Space Bridge. The way things stood, they were going to have to figure that out for themselves and also figure out whether the fleeing Autobots had emerged in the same region of space. Starscream looked around and saw Megatron getting to his feet. His first thought was to wonder if Megatron’s recovery period was a time to take the action he had always wanted to take: deposing Megatron and assuming control of the Decepticons for himself.

  Then Megatron locked optics with Starscream, and the Seeker saw that Megatron’s first action was to locate Starscream and determine whether he was planning anything.

  We understand each other, Starscream thought.

  Around them, the other Decepticons stirred. The bridge area of the Nemesis was dark, but some of its command-console displays began to come to life again as the ship regained awareness. The Seeker trio of Skywarp, Thundercracker, and Slipstream were next to regain awareness, followed by Soundwave and the rest of the Nemesis’s complement of Decepticons and Vehicons. All of them looked to Megatron except the Seekers, who kept an eye on both Megatron and Starscream, befitting their divided loyalties.

  “Status report,” Megatron commanded.

  Thundercracker ran through a diagnostic array with the Nemesis, interacting with the various automated routines that had replaced Trypticon’s consciousness during the process of stasis locking. Some of those routines were sophisticated enough to border on sentience, but in the end, Megatron thought, it did not matter whether the consciousness of Trypticon ever manifested itself again. What the Decepticons needed the Nemesis for was battle, and in battle it was a formidable ally. If it could obey commands and operate autonomously, that was enough for him, because another thing the Nemesis could do was survive the destruction of a Space Bridge more or less unscathed.

  That, in essence, was how the diagnostic results came back. Thundercracker noted a few errors and shorts in some peripheral systems and investigated them one after another carefully, knowing that there were two ways for a mistake to kill him. Not only were the eyes of Megatron and Starscream on him, he was aware that if he made a mistake, it easily could prove fatal to all of them. It was a highly pressurized situation, and Thundercracker made absolutely certain he checked everything just the way it was supposed to be checked. He had the documentation and manuals supplied by Shockwave from when the scientist had worked on the Nemesis’s Trypticon incarnation in the later stages of the war, and he used all of it.

  When he was done, he put together a report as quickly as he could without being careless and brought it to the bridge. Starscream took it from him, glanced over it, and passed it on to Megatron.

  “Don’t waste my time,” Megatron said. “What does it say?”

  Turning from Megatron to Thundercracker, Starscream said, “What does it say?”

  Thundercracker ran through every system: propulsion, climate, energy, sensors, command and control, armaments, artificial gravity, all the way down to the self-reported impacts of motes of space dust on the Nemesis’s hull. “On the whole,” he said, “the ship’s in good shape. But it doesn’t know where we are and keeps asking. The crew are also asking questions. Where are we?”

  This was the question.

  Megatron looked at a field of stars, then at Starscream, then back at the field of stars. The Nemesis drifted in space. No planetary body was nearby. No star was nearby. Megatron turned to Soundwave, who was buried in an intense interaction with the command console. “What has happened?” Megatron demanded. “Where are we? And where is Optimus Prime?”

  The bridge contingent of Decepticons got to work trying to ascertain their location and their distance from the nearest known Space Bridge. They collated a number of ancient maps and more recent astronomical observations. They combed minutely through every record of Space Bridge accidents they could find on the chance that the accidents held a pattern that could shed some light on their current circumstance.

  “I don’t care about history,” Megatron growled all the while. “I care about finding Optimus Prime. Now. Sooner than now.”

  Skywarp surprised everyone by speaking. He was ordinarily the last of the Seekers to offer an opinion about anything if Starscream was there to speak for them. But in this case what he said left every Decepticon on the Nemesis’s bridge momentarily speechless.

  “That Ark of theirs will leave a trail,” he said. “Every flying bot or ship leaves a trail, doesn’t it? Instead of looking around at the stars, why don’t we start scanning for the ion signature of the Ark?”

  “Do it,” Megatron commanded. The bridge was immediately alive with activity. Instruments were recalibrated, and the Nemesis’s command routines tweaked to be alert for different energy signatures against the background radiation of the universe. Megatron seethed, wanting it to be done, furious at the delay. Furious above all at Optimus Prime—Prime!—who had escaped from him and ejected the AllSpark so far beyond his reach.

  For now. He would find the Autobots and exterminate them. Then he would find the AllSpark and bring it back to Cybertron, and then there would not be a bot in the universe who would be able to stand in his way.

  “Megatron,” Starscream said. “We’ve got something.”

  “Go,” Megatron said. “Do not speak. Go.”

  “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”

  “Are the Autobots there?”

  “We’ve got a track on the Ark’s exhaust,” Starscream said. “I wouldn’t want to say any more than that. I know how you hate to be disappointed.”

  “What I don’t need right now is wit, Starscream. What I do need are results. Are the Autobots at the end of this trail you’ve found?”

  “My guess is yes, they are,” Starscream said.

  “Then let’s get ready to greet them,” Megatron said. “Maximum acceleration.”

  They felt the thrum of the Nemesis’s massive engines and the press of acceleration as the ship’s artificial gravity adjusted. Megatron watched the stars begin to move around them slowly, slowly … but moving. “Maximum subluminal in one cycle, counting down … point nine nine, point nine eight,” Thundercracker began to count. He leaned back against an acceleration buffer at the back wall of the bridge. The Nemesis could pilot itself from here.

  What remained to be seen was what they w
ould encounter on the other end of the trip, when they had run the Autobots to ground. How many of them had survived? Where were they going? Did they already have the AllSpark? Thundercracker hoped so. He wanted to go back to Cybertron. He wasn’t cut out for endless wandering among the stars. He also wasn’t cut out, he thought sometimes, for the things that were necessary in fighting a war. Thundercracker had no desire to be part of massacres or the kind of torture Shockwave preferred to interrogation. He liked a square fight for a cause a bot could believe in. Sometimes he wasn’t sure that Megatron understood that, and he was absolutely certain that he did not subscribe to Megatron’s slogan of peace through tyranny. Neither was he sure that he could support Optimus Prime. What kind of leader came out of the archives at Iacon? A weak one. Whatever Megatron’s flaws might be, Thundercracker thought, weakness wasn’t one of them.

  Plus, it was because of Megatron that they had the war. On the whole, Thundercracker liked the war. He had gone to the Decepticons when Starscream had declared his allegiance, and he intended to keep faith with his decision. But although he liked the fight well enough, Thundercracker didn’t like being stuck on board the Nemesis. He wished all the contending bots would turn around and settle things at home.

  But the fight had moved off-planet, so the Decepticons had followed it. Thundercracker would stay with them … at least as long as Starscream did, he thought. Because it didn’t seem to him that Starscream would wait forever before making his move.

  “Point zero three,” he said. “Point zero two, point zero one …”

  The Nemesis fired its superluminal accelerator and blasted through the barrier betwen space and time. It wasn’t as fast as Space Bridge travel, which was instantaneous, but it would get them places quickly. Especially since it seemed that the Autobots had not gotten too far ahead of them.

  While space-time folded around them, Soundwave and Starscream and Megatron examined the tracking reports. “Tell me if I’m wrong,” Starscream said, “but it looks like this energy signature from the Autobot Ark is fresh. Which means it can’t be that far away, correct?”

  “That’s how I’m reading it, too,” Soundwave said.

  “Keep a close eye on this, Starscream,” Megatron said. “If we overshoot them and then lose them because they’re going in another direction by the time we decelerate, it’s your head.”

  “It’s always my head,” Starscream said. “And yet somehow I still have my head.” He looked over at Thundercracker. “Think he means it?”

  “I think we should all take bets,” Slipstream chimed in. “We all know that sooner or later Megatron’s going to take your head, Starscream. There’s no point even betting on that. But we could—hey, Thundercracker, Skywarp, what do you think?—take bets on which one of us Megatron taps to replace you.”

  This was a new wrinkle, Starscream thought. He knew Skywarp was reliable. Thundercracker he wasn’t so sure about, because that bot had more of a conscience than was useful in a Decepticon. But Slipstream … she was sheerly unpredictable. The one thing a bot could count on from Slipstream was biting insults given a thin veneer of humor.

  He had spent so much time thinking about and planning for the eventuality of replacing Megatron that he had neglected one natural consequence of that possibility, which was that his own subordinates would have their own plans to unseat him. “Place all the bets you want,” he said. “You’ll never collect.”

  With a look over at Megatron, he couldn’t resist adding, “Because none of you will ever challenge me.”

  Silence fell. If I made the move right now, Starscream thought, how many of my Seekers would fight at my side and how many would defect to Megatron? Not that it would make any difference in the close quarters aboard the Nemesis. The time to move would be out on a planetary surface, in a time of chaos or battle, when the Decepticon victory was assured but Megatron was still occupied.

  Such a time would come. Starscream would be ready.

  Prowl had his hands full during the following orbital cycles—even in deep space the Autobots’ clocks were still keyed to the integral time measurements of Cybertron—following Axer around and trying to keep a lookout for the Junkion Shearbolt, who was unexpectedly difficult to locate.

  “Junkion’s not that big,” Prowl complained to Hound and Ironhide when they had been on the planetoid long enough to have found a fuel reservoir that could be used as a replacement for the Ark’s. Wreck-Gar had devoted a number of his bots to the effort, and Optimus Prime made a point of telling the Autobots to treat him with the respect and deference due a local commander.

  “It’s big enough,” Hound said. “Have you asked Wreck-Gar?”

  Prowl shook his head. “I don’t think he’d take it well. He won’t think it’s up to us to perform surveillance on Junkions.”

  “Then ask him,” Ironhide suggested.

  “No,” Hound said quickly. “That won’t work, either. Wreck-Gar will see that as you trying to get his Junkions to do our work.”

  “What, then?” Prowl wondered out loud.

  “Keep looking. If this Axer character was meeting with him before, they’ll meet again.” Ironhide punched Prowl in the shoulder. “Follow your instincts. They’re probably right.”

  That was heartening, and Prowl went back to the task. He kept Axer under surveillance and saw that suspicious bot following his routines of trade and barter, pausing to talk to various bots on various topics, but not once did he see Axer with Shearbolt. In fact, not once did he see Shearbolt at all.

  Prowl decided that even when he wasn’t following Axer, he would keep a lookout for Shearbolt under the guise of looking for Ark materials in various secluded and out-of-the-way locations on Junkion. Along the way, he thought, he might find any number of other interesting things that could assist in the Autobot quest or shed some light on the history of Junkion, which even the Junkions didn’t appear to know all that much about. If there was one thing Prowl disliked, it was gaps in knowledge, not knowing simple and basic things that ought to have been known.

  He found ships that he could trace to a number of different lost colony planets. There were more Quintesson craft than he would have expected. There was a single ship that had signs of Velocitronian origin, particularly in the remnants of its cargo of rubber. Prowl saw a great deal of wreckage that was surely Cybertronian, dating from before the collapse of the Space Bridges and the entrenchment of the caste system—except, puzzlingly, one that seemed much more recent. Prowl assumed this one to be Axer’s ship, but the next time he saw Axer, that Cybertronian become Junkion would say nothing about it.

  It nagged at Prowl, though. Almost every other ship he had found, no matter what its origin or age, had been picked clean. The ship in question, much newer and Cybertronian, with the marks of the since-destroyed shipyards at Altihex, had not been looted or stripped.

  “You’re not an archaeologist, Prowl,” Ironhide reminded him after Optimus Prime had called all the senior Autobots together to get status reports on the Ark repairs and the Axer question.

  “I am gathering information, Ironhide,” Prowl said. “What information I gather is up to me. Did you not just a few orbits ago tell me to trust my instincts?”

  “Oh, no,” Jazz said. “Your own words, turned against you. That’ll teach you to talk, Ironhide.”

  “I am serious,” Prowl said. Ironhide ignored the back-and-forth, waiting for something actionable to be said.

  Optimus Prime redirected the conversation before it could become an argument. “We have one priority,” he said, “and that is to get the Ark moving again so we can continue our search for the AllSpark. While we are doing that, those who are not required for that repair task are able to contribute in other ways. Including the gathering of information about the history of Junkion and the origins of its bots. All right?”

  “If you say so,” Jazz said.

  “I do.”

  And so Prowl went back to what he was doing. He planned to observe Axer’s interactions
with all members of the Autobots, reasoning that Axer, if his intentions were impure, would be more likely to meet with the saboteur the Autobots carried in their midst. But Axer avoided the Autobots, apparently not wanting to talk to any of them. He spoke only to Junkions, and Prowl still had not located Shearbolt again.

  Finally he decided, after a long session of digging through junk and setting up remote surveillance equipment at locations Axer was known to frequent, to go back to the Cybertronian ship he suspected of being Axer’s.

  He would have done it sooner, but like all of the other Autobots, Prowl was stretched thin. He was charged with both finding the spy aboard the Ark and discovering why Wreck-Gar had reason to mistrust the recent arrival Axer. And incidentally, he was supposed to keep a lens out for parts that might be useful for the Ark.

  That was why it took him so long to get back to Axer’s ship, or what he had been thinking of as Axer’s ship, anyway. On his first visit he had not entered the craft. Now he did, using a set of codes from his security library that predated the civil war on Cybertron. One of them worked, and Prowl slipped into the ship, alert to the possibility that Axer might be there waiting for him.

  But what was waiting for him was both the last thing he had expected and—he thought immediately as the initial shock dissipated—exactly the thing he should have expected.

  Shearbolt.

  “I found him doing something interesting,” Prowl said when he announced this discovery to Silverbolt, who was the first senior Autobot officer he could find.

  “What’s that?”

  “Being dead,” Prowl said. “You should come and see before we decide what to tell Wreck-Gar.”

  Standing over the body, Silverbolt said, “He’s dead, all right.”

  “Glad you agree,” Prowl said. “Now let’s tell Optimus.”

  Optimus Prime, standing with the two of them a short time later, looked grim. “Report to Wreck-Gar,” he said. “But tell no one else. Especially do not let Axer hear of this. Our status here just changed, and we must be very alert and careful from this moment forward.”