Exiles Read online

  All three of them looked down at the body of Shearbolt, somber and mindful of what his killing meant. Optimus Prime in particular was wrestling with a doomed sense that wherever the Autobots went, there conflict was sure to follow. The budding civil war on Velocitron was heavy in his mind.

  Yet there was no going back, and just as there was no going back, there was no avoiding the costs of going forward. Megatron desired war and destruction, and it was one of the sad truths of the universe that those who wanted war usually got it. Optimus Prime, if he was honest with himself, had to acknowledge that he thrilled to the moment of combat, but he regretted every death he had caused, and every one who had died in the long war, and every one who would die. By the time the war was over and the Decepticons vanquished, the list of victims would be too long even for the Covenant of Primus.

  Thinking of Alpha Trion didn’t quite bring a smile to Optimus Prime’s face, but it did make him feel slightly better about this ominous turn of events. Alpha Trion would tell him to keep his counsel, take the time to make clear decisions based on rational assessments. “Prowl, Silverbolt,” Optimus said. “I am no scientist. I know you are not, either, but at least Prowl has some experience with law enforcement and with crime. Do you have any ideas about how long it has been since he was killed?”

  Prowl and Silverbolt bent over Shearbolt’s inert form. Murder had not been common on Cybertron, but neither had it been unknown. Prowl had investigated his share, and Silverbolt had been a dedicated consumer of popular entertainment on murderous themes. Both of them would have ideas about what to look for, whereas to Optimus Prime, Shearbolt just looked nonfunctional.

  Prowl stood up. “Can you bring Ratchet here? I mean, is it all right if he knows?”

  “Why?” Optimus Prime asked.

  “He’s got … the Energon signature of a dead bot, the Energon decays. It’s like …” Prowl looked at Silverbolt for help. “I didn’t do the forensics. What’s it called?”

  “You’re on the right track,” Silverbolt said. “Ratchet will have something that measures how much the Energon has decayed out of Shearbolt’s body. From that we’ll be able to figure out how long ago he was killed.”

  “Go get him, then,” Optimus Prime said. “Both of you. I’ll stay here.”

  From the other side of a rise that the Junkions had long since mined and exhausted, Axer watched Prowl and Silverbolt leave and Optimus Prime stand sentinel at the ship. They had seen Shearbolt, Axer assumed. Now they would be looking for some answers. He couldn’t be sure whether they had connected the ship to him, although he thought it likely.

  It was just his luck, Axer thought. He’d figured on getting out of the war on Cybertron the minute he saw it coming, when Megatron was still just a gladiator gaining a following outside the pits. That was before anyone had ever heard of Orion Pax and well before the break that came when the High Council named the clerk Optimus Prime. By then, Axer was already off Cybertron, figuring on two things. One, he knew which side would win—the Decepticons, of course—and two, he didn’t want to be around while the two sides sorted everything out.

  He had figured on prospecting around the nearer reaches of space past the orbit of Space Station 424 and the two Moonbase installations and beyond the drifting wrecks of Cybertron’s once-plentiful Space Bridges. Few ventured even that far from Cybertron, but Axer was on the lookout for an advantage. He didn’t think he’d find it on Cybertron itself, where now that the caste system was self-destructing, each and every bot would have an equal shot at mediocrity.

  The smart operator, Axer remembered thinking, would find a way to profit from the war without being involved in the war. His prospecting missions were geared toward that purpose. They would keep him high off-planet and put him in possession of things that were difficult or impossible to find on the surface … or below if the stories about the impending scarcity of Energon were true. This near-space exploration would be a new thing for the ambitious Axer. He had spent his time on Cybertron bringing in those unfortunate bots who had run afoul of the criminal hierarchies of Kaon or Blaster City … or the quieter criminal elements in Crystal City, Altihex, and Iacon.

  He was one of Cybertron’s finest bounty hunters. But bounty hunting on the eve of civil war didn’t seem like a growth industry. The war itself, when it happened, would make bounty hunting much more difficult, not to mention dangerous.

  The first thing he had decided to do was to let it be known, through his contacts in Kaon, that he was a proud supporter of Megatron and the burgeoning Decepticon cause. Word had come filtering back that the Decepticons could certainly find use for Axer’s skills in both hunting and, as Shockwave put it, persuasion. Axer had in the past found it necessary to ask certain bots, after he had caught them, questions. He had developed some skill at extracting answers.

  But he had also kept up his part-time prospecting, figuring that in a war, certain resources would skyrocket in value. Also, the more time he spent in low orbit looking for valuable junk, the less time he spent on the surface, where he could catch a stray plasma bolt. In the early years of the war, while the Autobots and Decepticons were deadlocked in the Tagan Heights, Axer had ventured a little beyond the Space Bridges and the halo of cannibalized wrecks that trailed after them. There he had discovered a powered-down shipwreck that bore all the marks of having suffered a Space Bridge portal failure. One of the things that happened during an unsuccessful transit of a Space Bridge was that part of the energy dedicated to moving ships and bots across vast reaches of space got bottled up, often inside the ship in question. The consequences, unsurprisingly, were disastrous for that ship and its crew. A secondary effect of portal failure was that ships took much longer to emerge from the Space Bridge. The folklore of bot space abounded with stories of ships being suspended in transit for thousands or even millions of solar cycles before reappearing—sometimes at their destinations and sometimes not—as shattered wrecks, their hulls and interiors scarred and slagged by the misdirected transit energies.

  This was one of those ships. Axer couldn’t believe his luck. How long had it been here? Could have been a few cycles, could have been since the distant time when the Space Bridges first began to fail. The records of their use immediately had grown spotty, and for as long as Axer could remember—and he had come out of the Well fairly recently compared with some of Cybertron’s older bots—nobody had known whether any remnants of unfortunate vessels were still drifting occasionally out of the crumbling Space Bridges.

  But one thing he could tell right away: Nobody had gotten to this ship yet.

  Axer had no training in engineering or astrophysics or starship piloting. He had no combat experience. The one skill he possessed was an innate sense of how to seek and use the advantages that might be found in any given situation. Here he saw the possibility of trading or selling materials from this ship. He did not consider that most Cybertronian authorities considered ships damaged by portal failure highly unstable because of the unpredictable ways in which the energy of the Space Bridges was conducted through the different materials used in ship construction.

  He also did not consider that when these energies were released, as they sometimes were, one occasional consequence was nearly instantaneous transportation to somewhere else. Space Bridges were designed to eliminate distance. Even in the aftershocks of a malfunction, they often did just that, but the bot adventurous enough to be in close proximity to such a discharge often found himself at a set of coordinates quite far from where he had been a nanoklik before.

  Axer had heard those stories but had never investigated the mechanics of how it happened. He figured they were spacers’ tales, like the myriad stories of ghostly subroutines or cursed vessels. He did a thorough scan for life and dangerous parasites such as cosmic rust, but when he found no threats via his ship’s automated scanner arrays, he tethered himself to his ship and then floated across the short distance to the drifting wreck.

  If he had taken a closer look at the sh
ip, he would have seen that it was not of Cybertronian origin. He also would have seen that it was so old that there was not a single facet of its hull that was not utterly cross-hatched with scratches from the impact of micrometeorites and cosmic dust. This ship did not gleam in the starlight; it caught the light and diffused it into a quiet glow. Old spacefaring bots said that the ship that glowed was always the one that was haunted.

  Axer did not listen to old spacefaring bots.

  He had the presence of mind to give the ship another visual examination before making physical contact with it. To Axer, it looked as if the ship had been in a battle. There were clear marks of energy impacts streaking from amidships all the way back to its thruster cowling. Where they began, near the amidships air lock, they were so intense that the ship’s hull was buckled and wavy. The bridge’s viewports, which should have been transparent, were black and pitted with what looked like bubble rings, as if the ports had melted and then cooled again.

  Axer thought that he had found a wreck, perhaps the victim of a pirate attack. The shipping lanes had always abounded with stories of pirates. Axer believed them, though none of the pirates had ever come close to Cybertron. If they had, he would have known it—he and pirates, after all, took part in different facets of the same profession: hunting. Pirates put bounties out on ships; Axer’s masters put bounties out on bots. Prospecting was a sideline for him, though often a profitable one.

  Even as he touched the ship’s hull, Axer never took seriously the idea that portal failure was a problem. His greed was talking to him, and when greed talked, Axer listened.

  The air lock opened with a heavy shove, aided by a blast from Axer’s hand cannon. He pulled himself inside, the tether connecting him to his ship spiraling out behind him across the short expanse of vacuum. Inside the ship, he found a near vacuum. Some crystalline fog, once a trace atmosphere, drifted out past him as he drifted in. A member of the ship’s crew, he guessed, floated dead in the air lock at roughly the center of a nimbus of tiny bits of debris. There was nothing interesting about any of it … except there, near one of the dead bot’s outstretched hands, floated the only thing in sight that gleamed smoothly even in the minimal light. It was a piece of some kind of metal, about half as long as Axer’s arm, with a hook at one end. The other end was pointed and marked with what looked like a series of runes or sigils.

  Axer didn’t know what it was, but he knew someone somewhere would find it interesting. He touched it, held it, brought it closer so he could get a better look at it. Then he paused as more of the drifting crystals floated near him. He reached up and caught one of the crystals between finger and thumb, curious about what it was.

  When he rubbed it between his fingers, it sparked.

  When it sparked, it released a tiny bit of heat near the interior air lock door. That little bit of heat agitated a few molecules, and invisibly a threshold was reached.

  Around Axer, the world exploded.

  Later he would figure out that some latent energy from the portal failure had become crystallized by some process during the unthinkable pressures and dimensional stresses present in the interior of a Space Bridge. All it had taken was that little addition of pressure and heat from the compression of Axer’s thumb and forefinger, and all that energy had been released again.

  He had drifted back to consciousness near a Space Bridge that obviously was not functioning well, the arcing energy between the two semicircular halves of its portal just a fizzle and the rest of it dark and splotched with cosmic rust. At first Axer had been convinced that one of his enemies—there were many—had set a trap for him on this shipwreck. Quickly, though, he recovered his senses and learned a little more about his surroundings. He soon abandoned that theory on the basis that no Cybertronian could have set such a trap without setting it off himself. Also, when he spun slowly around and saw that he was still tethered to his ship and that his ship was still intact, Axer realized that he had not been the victim of any real physical or kinetic discharge at all. He was unharmed. His ship was intact. The wreck even floated nearby, with the dead bot half in and half out of its open air lock.

  But the world below him was not Cybertron.

  Axer had many megacycles ago lost track of how long he had been on Junkion. He had worked hard to ingratiate himself into the Junkions’ odd culture, finding a place for himself as a trader and middleman. They had no use for a bounty hunter, it turned out, having virtually no crime—because they had virtually no wealth. Axer had discovered over millions of cycles that he did not mind this new role, but he did mind being away from Cybertron. He was curious what the Decepticons had done once Megatron had gotten the war he wanted. And, more to the point, if the Decepticons had won, Axer wanted in on the spoils.

  He recently had gotten news from Cybertron via the spy hidden away in the complement of Autobots aboard the Ark, but not as much as he had wanted. There were too many gaps in his knowledge, and the brief conversation after the Ark’s arrival had whetted his appetite rather than satisfying it. “You don’t like it, fine,” the Autobot spy had said. “Go to Velocitron and wait for Megatron there. It won’t be long.”

  Axer didn’t like that plan very much, but he had figured out that if Megatron could follow the Ark to Velocitron, he could follow it to Junkion. So Axer would have his meeting with the big bot, and sooner rather than later, from the sound of it.

  Until then, there was the Shearbolt problem to deal with. Axer mentally ran through his leverage. Even if the killing was attributed to him, he thought he had enough chips in the pile to make the problem go away.

  He kept watch on Optimus Prime as the Autobot leader, the leader, he realized, of all his enemies. He was looking at his own mortal enemy, the former data clerk. Axer had left Cybertron on his fateful prospecting mission on the very day the High Council had declared Orion Pax to be the new Prime. When he looked at this bot, he did not see the mighty leader of the Autobot resistance. He saw a pretender. How could this bot stand up to Megatron?

  Axer was half convinced that he could surprise and eliminate this Optimus Prime all by himself. But he had not survived as long as he had in such a treacherous business as bounty hunting by choosing challenges rashly. He waited, and he watched. And he hoped Megatron would show up before this problem came to its inevitable crux.

  When Ratchet returned with Jazz and Silverbolt, Sideswipe and Hound were there, too.

  “We all thought this was big enough that we wanted to take a look,” Hound said. “Hope you don’t mind a bigger crowd.”

  “Let’s not call too much attention to this yet,” Optimus Prime said. “Where’s Prowl?”

  “He said he’d gotten a lead about Axer from another one of the Junkions and he was going to go run it down,” Jazz said.

  Optimus Prime nodded. “Okay. Sideswipe, you and Jazz take a spin up along the ridge to see if any of the Junkions are watching us.”

  “On our way,” Jazz said. “Let’s go.”

  The terrain of Junkion was so rough that Cybertronians could go only in alt-form along the roads gouged out for the transport of raw materials and salvage. The two Autobots walked up to the crest of the ridge and turned to walk away from their landing site, toward where they first had encountered Wreck-Gar.

  “Isn’t that Axer?” Hound said suddenly.

  Optimus Prime looked. Jouncing down the slope from the ridgetop was a heavy-wheeled off-road cycle, blue and gray with red highlights.

  “Looks like him,” Silverbolt said. “Wonder what he’s doing.”

  “Find Prowl,” Optimus Prime said. “Hound. Go find Prowl right now.”

  “Quick as I can,” Hound said.

  Optimus Prime and Silverbolt watched him skirt the area around what they all now considered Axer’s ship and head back toward the landing site. The heavy cycle didn’t change its pace, and when it got to the roadbed, sure enough, it took Axer’s form again, and the suspicious bot moved quickly away in the direction Sideswipe had gone.

 
; “You don’t think he’s following Sideswipe, do you?” Optimus Prime asked.

  “Might be,” Silverbolt said. “But why?”

  “There’s a lot of whys when it comes to this Axer,” said Optimus Prime.

  “That’s true enough,” Silverbolt said. He looked down and watched as Ratchet worked through a careful examination of Shearbolt’s body. “Soon as Prowl is back, we should move this bot and tell Wreck-Gar.”

  “Don’t rush me,” Ratchet said.

  “Nobody’s rushing anyone,” Silverbolt said.

  “Don’t talk to me,” Ratchet said.

  “Then quit … never mind,” Silverbolt said. “Prime. You want me to follow Axer?”

  “I don’t think so. I want to keep this low-profile,” Optimus Prime said. He didn’t want Silverbolt’s flight abilities to be remarked on. The Junkions didn’t seem hostile—they seemed, in fact, completely indifferent to the Autobot quest—but with a dead body at his feet, Optimus Prime thought that it was probably best to give away as little as possible to whoever on Junkion might have bad intentions.

  “You’re not going to like this,” Ratchet said, returning Optimus Prime’s attention to the situation immediately at hand.

  “What am I not going to like about it?” Optimus asked. Prowl arrived, and Optimus waved him in. “We’re about to get Ratchet’s report. Then you can go chase Axer,” he said. “We just spotted him.”

  Prowl nodded, and Ratchet stood up. “I’ll cut to the important part,” he said. “This bot was killed violently and by surprise, by physical impact on the back of his head and neck. He was killed somewhere else and brought here; there are drag marks on his heels and the backs of his arms. My guess is he was working up on the rise over there, was ambushed, and then was dumped here. Axer may or may not have had anything to do with it directly.”