Exiles Read online

  “What are you talking about?” Prowl said incredulously. “What are the odds that he was dumped in Axer’s ship and Axer didn’t know anything about it?”

  “We haven’t established conclusively that this is Axer’s ship,” Ratchet said.

  “It is,” Prowl said. “Unless you can show me another Junkion who isn’t really a Junkion and has been here a much shorter period than the rest of them. That’s the bot who belongs to this ship. Is there one other than Axer?”

  “That’s the thing,” Ratchet said. “There might be. Well, that’s not exactly what I mean, but I will tell you this: Someone around here isn’t who we think.”

  “This is killing me,” Silverbolt said. “Tell it.”

  “Well, I’ve measured the Energon decay out of this bot according to well-established rates that Prowl, at least, will know all about … right, Prowl?”

  “Right.”

  Ratchet nodded and went on. “I did some brief scans to see if there was anything in the local atmosphere or conditions that would affect the rate of decay. I didn’t find anything, so it can be assumed that the rate of decay is roughly the same as it would have been on Cybertron.”

  “And?” Optimus Prime prompted, hoping to get Ratchet to condense the next part of the explanation.

  “And,” Ratchet said without looking at Optimus Prime, “what I found is that this bot was killed very shortly after our arrival. I’ll have to examine all of the logs first, but based on what I remember of how and when we left the Ark and presented ourselves to Wreck-Gar, I think this bot was dead almost—”

  “Ratchet!” Prowl said in exasperation. “Get to the point! Was he or was he not alive when I talked to him on our first day here?”

  Ratchet paused as if running through his evidence one more time before answering. “No. He was not.”

  Prowl already had put together a follow-up, but having expected Ratchet to give the opposite answer, he was choking on his unspoken words. “Wha—” he began.

  “This bot was dead when you spoke to whoever presented himself as Shearbolt,” Ratchet said. “I am one hundred percent certain of this. It is backed up by analysis. It is true.”

  There was a silence as each of them reached the inevitable conclusion at his own pace. Even after understanding the truth of the situation, Optimus Prime could not quite bring himself to believe it. “Does that mean …?” He shook his head. “Can’t be.”

  “What can’t be?” Silverbolt asked.

  “A shapeshifter. There are stories,” Optimus Prime said.

  Prowl regained his voice. “You always know the stories.”

  “The shifters are supposed to be descended from Amalgamous Prime,” Optimus Prime said. “The trickster of the Thirteen. I did not think any still survived, but …”

  “Is there someone who looked like Shearbolt? Is that who you talked to, Prowl?” Silverbolt cut in.

  “It’s possible,” Prowl said grudgingly. “How would I know?”

  “You wouldn’t, that’s the point,” Jazz said. “Prime, if we’ve got a shifter around … I mean, come on, Prime, they’re just stories, right?”

  “Remember when the Thirteen were just stories, too?” Optimus Prime said. “Turns out more and more of those old stories are true. Maybe shifters …” He couldn’t quite bring himself to say it, but he was thinking it. He could tell the other Autobots were, too.

  If there was a shifter among them, how would they know who it was?

  Wreck-Gar arrived and looked down at the broken chassis of Shearbolt. Then he looked up at Optimus Prime. “How did you find him? What were you doing down here?”

  “It’s a complicated story,” Optimus Prime said. “This is Axer’s ship, yes?”

  “It is a very new ship,” Wreck-Gar said.

  “Does that make it Axer’s?”

  Wreck-Gar nodded. “It does. We have not discovered anything else so new around here. Only through one of the Space Bridges, and we almost never go through there because sometimes it’s dangerous and bots die! Too few Junkions to waste!”

  Before Wreck-Gar could get too worked up, Optimus Prime redirected him. “Wreck-Gar. You can go through one of those Space Bridges?”

  “Yes! But we don’t. Dangerous.”

  “Which one?”

  “Three of them don’t go anywhere,” Wreck-Gar said. “The other one, that one there?” He pointed at the one farthest away from where they stood. “It goes to a spot in the middle of empty space. We’ve been out there a few times to strip the wrecks and brought a couple of them back, but I don’t know why anybody would have built a Space Bridge that goes there. Lot of wasted effort. Plus dangerous!”

  “What’s dangerous about it?” Silverbolt asked. The rest of the Autobots noted Wreck-Gar’s surprising lucidity. It worried them a little.

  “You go there and then come back and tell me if I’m wrong,” Wreck-Gar said. He looked back at the broken body of Shearbolt. “But before that tell me which one of you did this.”

  It was a dangerous moment. Wreck-Gar was not the most sophisticated bot in the universe, but he was big and angry and feeling keenly the responsibilities of being the leading Junkion. Optimus Prime knew all too well what might happen if he started to see the Autobots as an enemy; it could easily turn into a repeat of the situation on Velocitron.

  Civil war, he thought. It happens wherever we go.

  “Wreck-Gar,” Optimus Prime said. “We had reason to believe that there was a traitor in our midst before we left Velocitron.”

  “Don’t care about Velocitron!” Wreck-Gar shouted. “Don’t even know what a Velocitron is! Tell me which bot did this! That bot is junk!”

  “That’s the problem,” Optimus Prime said.

  Ratchet stepped in and picked up the explanation. “Wreck-Gar, you see, the bot who did this then went around pretending to be Shearbolt.”

  Wreck-Gar struggled with this, but he figured it out. “A robot in disguise?”

  “No,” Ratchet said. “A shifter.”

  “You expect me to believe shifters!?” Wreck-Gar raged. “You think I’m stupid junk?”

  “No, we don’t think you’re stupid, Wreck-Gar. We didn’t believe it either until we found him,” Optimus Prime said. “Ratchet, explain the rest.”

  Ratchet explained the decay rates of Energon leaving a dead Cybertronian and how the calculation of those rates led him inevitably to the conclusion that Shearbolt had been seen talking to Axer—and Prowl had talked to Shearbolt—after Shearbolt had been killed. “The only explanation is that a shifter took Shearbolt’s place,” he said. “And even given this evidence, we would be nervous about believing that if it were not for some strange events that took place on Velocitron.”

  “Junk! Keep going,” Wreck-Gar demanded. “I want to hear.”

  This was startling lucidity from Wreck-Gar, and Optimus Prime took full advantage. He picked up the story again, telling Wreck-Gar of the attempt to destroy the Ark and how their brief investigation had led them to the conclusion that there was a traitor. “At the time we thought the traitor was just clever and avoiding detection,” Optimus Prime said. “We have since reasoned that he must be a shifter as well because we have seen a bot looking like Shearbolt after Shearbolt himself was already dead. I am sorry that we did not make this discovery sooner.”

  “I am sorry about that, too,” Wreck-Gar said.

  After a cycle’s thought he said, “But past is junk! Who is this shifter? We must find him and punish him. If Megatron is coming, we must find him before that.”

  After another cycle’s thought, Wreck-Gar continued. “Axer is to blame for this. I will break him down!”

  “How do you know?” Ratchet said.

  Prowl made a scoffing noise at Ratchet. “How much more evidence do you need?”

  “I need no more evidence,” Wreck-Gar said. “I will go find Axer. You will talk to him. We will restore order to Junkion.”

  “Good,” said Optimus Prime. “Then there is one mor
e thing I would ask.”

  The Ark was still being repaired, and the repairs were delayed because some of the resources that would have been devoted to it were being redirected toward the search for Axer, who had gone into hiding.

  “He can’t stay hidden long,” said one of Wreck-Gar’s aides, a hauler named Detritus. “We’ll find him. And we’ll find him faster if you Autobots help.”

  Optimus Prime added three Autobots to the hunt: Jazz, Prowl, and Silverbolt. He could trust them absolutely, he knew, and he also trusted any of the three to fight off an attempted ambush by the shapeshifter in whatever guise he might assume. While the search for Axer went on, Optimus Prime wrestled with some difficult decisions.

  The Matrix was spurring him onward, telling him that he had to keep moving, that there was something to be found on the other side of one of the Space Bridges that hung in a shallow arc in the black sky over Junkion. Wreck-Gar had said only one of them worked, so Optimus Prime assumed that was the one he was supposed to traverse unless Wreck-Gar was wrong or the Matrix of Leadership unexpectedly had developed a sense of humor.

  The Junkion leader had said that there was a ship graveyard on the other side of the bridge but nothing else. Did one of those wrecks contain something the Autobots needed, another part of the Star Saber or something else that would assist their quest? Optimus Prime could not imagine what it might be, but the lore of Cybertron was fertile on the topic of artifacts and the Matrix rarely spelled out the exact meaning of the directions it gave out.

  To be Prime, Optimus thought, meant to be constantly in touch with forces that could not be entirely controlled or understood. Yet controlled and understood they must be, because the lives of every bot in the universe ultimately might depend on the Prime’s ability to make the correct decision about what to do and how.

  It was not an ideal situation for peace of mind.

  Sideswipe and Silverbolt had powered up one of the drifting wrecks in low orbit over Junkion. There was no reason to delay any longer. In fact, the discovery of Shearbolt’s murder and the accompanying revelation that there was a shifter somewhere on Junkion made it all the more urgent that Optimus Prime find out why the Matrix was pressing him with such urgency to traverse this nearby Space Bridge. He would go, of course. He could no more refuse the Matrix of Leadership than he could undo the ejection of the AllSpark. But he would go with a small team, and with any luck he would sort out the mystery of what exactly was drawing him to this graveyard among the stars. When he returned, if all went according to plan, the Ark would be repaired and the Autobots could resume the quest for the AllSpark itself.

  Sideswipe and Ratchet. They would be his accompanying team. He would have liked to take Bumblebee and might yet decide to do that, but Bumblebee’s vocoder issues were very difficult to adjust to in situations in which instantaneous and clear communications might make the difference between life and death.

  He decided to check in with Bumblebee, who was working on the Ark’s ancient weapons systems and trying to retrofit them into something approaching useful defensive ordnance. The young bot would get too frustrated to be a useful member of the team if Optimus Prime kept holding him back from the most interesting missions and assignments without explanation. On his way back to the Ark, Optimus instructed the team of Junkions guarding Axer’s ship to let no one pass without giving a password. To one of them he said quietly, “The password is ‘Iacon.’ No exceptions.” He moved on.

  He found Bumblebee deep inside an access shaft between the inner bulkheads of the Ark’s passenger area and the hardened outer plating of its hull. The cramped space was a tangle of conduits and cables. Optimus Prime called to Bumblebee and led him onto the Ark’s bridge, where they could talk without the sounds of repairs echoing around. Like the rest of Junkion, the interior of the damaged section of the Ark was a cacophony. The crackle of arc welders and the echoing booms of huge pieces of alloy being maneuvered into position rang down the corridors and ricocheted around the rooms. The bridge of the Ark, insulated against external stimuli to provide better for clearheaded command decisions, was a most welcome oasis.

  “Bumblebee,” Optimus Prime said. “How is your vocoder?”

  Bumblebee chirped and beeped. Ratchet had worked hard on his vocoder but had not been able to recover Bumblebee’s powers of speech, and Optimus Prime had not yet learned to decipher the new language Bumblebee was capable of making. He could only guess at what Bumblebee meant most of the time.

  “I wanted to let you know that I have had to keep you out of certain assignments because of difficulty communicating,” Optimus Prime said. Bumblebee clicked and whistled mournfully. “I know,” Optimus said. “You still have my trust. In fact, I would like you to accompany me on what might be a dangerous mission.”

  Or might not be, he said to himself. But he could not relegate a valiant Autobot to permanent maintenance duty solely because there were communications obstacles. They needed Bumblebee, who had perked up considerably at Optimus Prime’s last words.

  Optimus Prime laughed, but in a kindly way. “It will get you out of the ship for a while,” he said. “You want to take a trip over a Space Bridge?”

  Bumblebee buried his face in his hands. Then he spread his arms wide and nodded emphatically.

  Optimus Prime laughed again. He definitely needed Bumblebee around, just to lighten things up once in a while.

  Especially if the alternative was Jazz’s jokes.

  On Velocitron, an uneasy peace was holding in the aftermath of the pitched battle whose damage was still evident in the area surrounding the hangar and nearby buildings. Override had won, but she knew she had not seen the last of Ransack’s subversion. She kept a close eye on Ransack, and he did the same to her. He was not yet powerful enough to challenge her, and both of them knew it. They both also knew that he soon would be. The coming and going of the Autobots had broken open the simmering resentments and feuds between different factions of Velocitronians, and Override knew that the worsening resource shortages would only accelerate the rate at which her bots became Ransack’s bots.

  She looked up at the sun, which was looming reddish and huge over the mountains. How much longer did they have? Her scientists—torn away from the most recent refinements in frictionless bearings and high-efficiency heat-kinesis converters—said that the star might exist for another solar cycle or another thousand. Or, they said with a collective shrug, it might begin its final expansion right now.

  Velocitronians had never turned much of their attention to astronomy.

  “Blueshift,” she said to one of the scientists whom she had asked to accompany her on one of her daily mind-clearing sojourns into one of the flat, dusty expanses not yet paved over. They were preserved for off-road races and other recreational activities. Blueshift had come willingly, not just out of a sense of duty but because he was one of the few Velocitronians she knew who had big ideas about speed. He wanted to see if he could make Velocitronians fly like the Autobot Silverbolt. He had even speculated on possible ways to move the planet of Velocitron itself, turning it into a vehicle that all Velocitronians could ride to a better star that would last more than the next few solar cycles.

  Velocitron needed big ideas, and Blueshift had them. “Blueshift,” she said. “If Cybertron cannot save us and we are about to be dragged into a war because Ransack is a fool, what should we do?”

  “That is a question for a philosopher or a general, Override,” Blueshift said carefully. “Not a scientist. I am of a more engineering bent.”

  “I know. Treat it as a problem,” she said. “Work the problem. What are some possible elements of a solution?”

  Blueshift thought about this as they drew farther and farther away from Delta. “Some possible elements of a solution,” he repeated some time later. “Evacuate the planet. Rely on Autobot success. Kill Ransack.”

  None of those sounded like good ideas to Override, but she had to confess that all three had crossed her mind with more and more re
gularity these past orbital cycles. The time might be coming, she thought, when Velocitron had to confront the fact that there was more to existence than going fast.

  She had just formed the thought and was about to put it into words for Blueshift to gauge his reaction when something appeared against the face of the sun.

  “Override,” Blueshift said, pointing.

  She nodded. “I see it, too.”

  For a long, long moment that in reality was probably no longer than a nanoklik she stood contemplating the expansion of Velocitron’s sun and the death of everything she had ever known. Including, of course, herself. She found herself at peace. Override did not want to die and did not want those Velocitronians who relied on her to die, either. She did not want her planet destroyed. But seeing one’s sun in its death throes … Either you grew fatalistic in the face of such inevitability or you spent the rest of your short life span raging against that which could not be changed.

  “It is time, Blueshift,” she said.

  But the scientist was shaking his head. He had out a portable viewer with its lenses heavily angled and polarized. “Something huge is passing in front of the sun,” he said. “It is on its way here, and the reason it looks so huge is because …” He paused, then lowered the viewer and pointed. “Because it is very close, you see?”

  Override looked. A ship larger than any she had ever seen came out of the sun. It passed over their heads, and they craned their necks to follow it. “It is on its way to Delta,” Blueshift said.

  “Then that’s where we need to go, too,” Override said. “And fast.”

  “Is there any other way?”

  Outside the great hangar where Velocitron’s finest racers were preparing for the heavy circuit of qualifying rounds that would determine the field for the next Speedia, Hightail also was looking at the sky. He saw the ship as well and watched as it decelerated toward the surface and then came to a hovering halt a half klik above the speedway. A door dropped open from underneath the immense craft, and a smaller ship emerged. It landed not far from Hightail, at the edge of the staging area where race teams made their final preparations.