Exiles Read online

  That did not work, so Prowl fell back on another old investigator’s technique: examining the movements of the suspect’s known associates.

  Problem was, Axer had no known associates on Junkion. The only bots Prowl had ever seen him speak to were the disguised traitor and Prowl himself. So who else’s actions could Axer be expected to monitor or duplicate?

  Optimus Prime, of course.

  On the Ark, Prowl checked in to see if Optimus would permit him to backtrack his locations since he had arrived on Junkion.

  “I’ve told you everywhere I’ve gone,” Optimus Prime said.

  “It would help to have a visual representation,” Prowl said apologetically. He did not like pressing his leader for details. It felt disloyal.

  “Fine,” Optimus Prime said, and fed from his personal records a moment-by-moment six-axis datastream of every place he had been on Junkion.

  “Thank you, Optimus,” Prowl said. “You are not a suspect.”

  “Good to know,” said Optimus Prime.

  Running the locations, Prowl found more or less what he would have expected: numerous trips back and forth between the Ark and the great pit where Wreck-Gar spent most of his time. There were also a few brief excursions to the location of Axer’s ship, which Prowl also had visited extensively. No help there. Then he found one side trip that caught his attention right away.

  “Down,” said Prowl as if it had never occurred to him before. Which it hadn’t, not in this way. He had thought Axer might hide among the machinery at the bottom of the pit or in the side caves dug out of its terraces. But he had not anticipated the possibility that Axer would hide down in a vertical exploratory shaft that reached, apparently, most of the way to the center of Junkion.

  Prowl transformed and rolled out along the Rim Road, feeling suddenly as if time was very, very short.

  Prowl caught Axer coming up out of the same shaft Optimus Prime had explored two orbital cycles before. “Axer,” he said. “We need to talk.”

  Axer’s answer was a fusillade from his blaster and a screeching getaway, his tires spinning even before he had fully occupied alt-form. Prowl transformed, too, and took off after him, but Axer’s heavy two-wheel setup was much better suited to the broken landscape around the shafts than was Prowl’s city-designed alt-from. And Prowl didn’t have time to scan anything else, aside from the fact that he hated the idea of scanning. He’d had the same alt-form since he came out of the Well, and he didn’t feel like changing it to suit the demands of an interstellar trash heap and the trashy traitorous bots who inhabited it.

  Instead he stayed as close as he could to Axer and then, when Axer was just about to get away, risked a shot from what he called his Investigator Special.

  The Investigator Special fired a single low-velocity slug that splattered a hyperconductive gel over the target on impact. Generally, the effect of the hyperconductivity was twofold: One, electrical signals from the target’s immediate environment interfered with the target’s internal signals; two, the target’s internal signals started to go places they weren’t supposed to go.

  Prowl was a pretty good shot, and scored a hit squarely on Axer’s frame, just behind the front wheel.

  Axer shot straight up in the air, front wheel suddenly locked and back wheel revved into a screaming spin almost too fast for Prowl to track the rotational motion of its spokes. Crashing back down into a shallow conical pit of rubber hoses, Axer got halfway back to bot-form before Prowl had tackled him and, taking full advantage of the disabling effect of the Investigator Special, pounded him into complete submission.

  Then Prowl put him in stasis cuffs and stood up to wait for the Investigator Special to wear off. It would take a while.

  He debated letting Optimus Prime know but decided to put it off for the moment. Prime had enough to worry about in getting the Ark put back together and figuring out how to go about traversing a Space Bridge that apparently went nowhere. Prowl could handle this interrogation for now. “Axer,” he said.

  Axer responded with something incomprehensible that sounded a bit like the beep-and-whistle codes semisentient mechas used to avoid collisions.

  “Axer,” Prowl said again a little while later.

  “Get slagged,” Axer said.

  Prowl grinned. “Ah, you’re back.” He squatted next to Axer, who was lying on his side with his wrists bound behind him and another set of stasis cuffs binding him at midshin. “Let’s talk.”

  “Nothing to talk about,” Axer said.

  “Oh, I think there is,” Prowl said. “Or maybe I should go down into that shaft, find whatever it is you found, and then come back and ask you about it.”

  Axer was silent for a long time.

  “Work it out quick, whatever it is,” Prowl said. “I can always turn you over to Wreck-Gar.”

  That was something Prowl was sure Axer would not want. Wreck-Gar already had convicted Axer for Shearbolt’s murder. There had never been a murder on Junkion, according to Wreck-Gar, but now that there had been, he was going to make sure that there was never another. Axer’s life would end very shortly if he was placed in Wreck-Gar’s custody, and Prowl had a feeling Axer knew it.

  “How about this?” Axer said. “We make a trade.”

  “What do you have to trade?”

  “More than you might think,” Axer said.

  Prowl waited. And kept waiting. They were far enough away from the Rim Road that they were not immediately apparent against the jumble of the landscape, but it would not be long before some curious bot noticed their energy signatures, or motion, or light and came out to investigate. At that point, Prowl thought, he would have no choice but to hand Axer over to Wreck-Gar.

  When he had counted to a thousand and Axer still had not said anything, Prowl explained his thinking.

  “Your traitor is Makeshift,” Axer said right away. “But he’s pretending to be Hound.”

  “That’s a start,” Prowl said. “Now give me the rest.”

  “Prowl, you and me are the same. You know I’m not just going to tell you.”

  “Axer, you’re a bounty hunter with a sadism problem. I am an intelligence operative and law enforcement officer who has never deliberately inflicted pain on anyone in the course of an interrogation,” Prowl said. “We are nothing alike.”

  “Suit yourself, Autobot,” Axer said.

  “If we were anything alike, Wreck-Gar would already have you and you’d probably be going into one of the furnaces,” Prowl said. “Feet first.”

  “Makeshift? Really?” Silverbolt couldn’t believe it and Optimus Prime couldn’t, either. “Hound is Makeshift?”

  “Hound and Shearbolt,” said Prowl. “And how many other bots, we don’t know. Someone on Velocitron, no doubt, either to plant the bomb or to spread Decepticon ideas.”

  “Prowl,” said Optimus Prime. “How do we catch him and hold him?”

  “Catching him shouldn’t be hard at all if he doesn’t know we’re coming,” said Prowl.

  Jazz chuckled. “Notice he didn’t say anything about holding him.”

  “That’s going to be the hard part,” Prowl said. “Shifters—I’ve never seen one, but I researched them when Axer told me about Makeshift. From what I read, they can assume any shape that’s about the same mass as they are. So Makeshift could in theory change himself into a shape that would get out of any kind of prison except for a completely sealed bubble of some kind.”

  “Easy enough to make one of those,” Wreck-Gar said. “But why prison? Junk like that doesn’t deserve to live!”

  Optimus Prime shook his head. “Autobots are not executioners. Find me a prison that will hold him. If you can’t find one, make one.”

  “I have an idea,” Sideswipe said.

  They all turned to him, and he began to explain.

  “Hound, report to Ark bridge for debrief. Hound, report—”

  “Oh, there you are,” Jazz said, coming up next to Hound. “Hear the call? Optimus wants to ask you something a
bout the electronics. He asked me, but I couldn’t figure it out. Something about internal communications conduits not making frequency transfers. Oh, and I think he wants you to come on our little jaunt through the Space Bridge.”

  “No kidding? That would be great!” Hound said. He and Jazz followed the arched central access passage up the spine of the Ark from the engine room where Hound apparently had been running reports on the progress of the fuel-system repairs. Jazz made a mental note to look over those reports later and reexamine everything.

  “Oh, hang on,” he said, touching a hand to his ear as if receiving a private communication. “We’re in here.”

  He led Hound down a side passage that branched toward the Ark’s main engineering lab. Off the lab research floor were several smaller compartments used as research or meeting spaces. Jazz saw Optimus Prime in one of them. “Here we go,” he said. “I guess Optimus’s got some kind of plan laid out he wants us to see and some new gadgets, too. I know Silverbolt’s been working with the Junkions on a couple of things that will make sure we get through the Space Bridge, so maybe that’s it.”

  “Good, glad you could make it,” Optimus Prime said as the two bots entered. “Jazz, let’s shut the door. If there’s a traitor among us, better that we keep certain things private.”

  “You got it, Optimus,” Jazz said.

  When the door was shut, Optimus Prime turned to Hound and patted him on the shoulder. “You’ve done very well,” he said. “Well enough that I think it’s time you took on some new responsibilities.”

  “Your faith is gratifying, Prime,” Hound said.

  “There is a special mission that the three of us must go on,” Optimus Prime said. “It is critical to the success of the Autobot cause. And it involves going across a Space Bridge that has been unused in so long that no bot can be sure what will happen the next time it is crossed.”

  “Understood. I am ready,” Hound said.

  “Silverbolt, Sideswipe, and the engineering team have put together fail-safes,” Optimus Prime said, holding up three oblong black components with a single liquid display field glowing a dark orange. “If something goes wrong with the Space Bridge, these will pull us out and return us to space near Junkion.”

  “We think,” Jazz muttered.

  “Right. We think.” Optimus Prime buckled his component around his left wrist, then handed one to Jazz. “It’s better than anything else we have.”

  “Especially since we’ve got to worry about whether the traitor on the Ark might have laid a trap in the Space Bridge. This thing might also be able to trace whoever it is that’s been sabotaging the Ark,” Jazz said, strapping his own component on.

  “Here you go, Makeshift,” Optimus Prime said, tossing the third component to him.

  Makeshift reached for it, then froze as he registered the use of his true name simultaneously with his parsing of Jazz’s comment about tracing the saboteur, then jerked his hand away from the component as if it were a bomb. The component hit the floor. The Hound-form racked its weapons and filled the small space with the concussions of its autorifle. Jazz somersaulted away, and Optimus Prime dodged laterally in the other direction; even in such a confined space, it paid to move two potential targets farther apart.

  “Took you long enough!” Makeshift said over the din of his weapons. Then Jazz shut him up with a photon-rifle blast that caught him square in the center of his mass, dropping him to his knees.

  Optimus Prime catapulted himself over the conference table to deliver a smashing kick to the side of Makeshift’s head. The shifter spun on one knee, tried to get up, and crashed into the ground.

  Something started to happen to Makeshift even as he hit the floor, and when he began to get to his feet again, it became more apperent.

  Or less, as it were.

  His form grew fluid, his features indistinct. Colors washed across him, and with spasmodic motions he began to flicker through shapes faster than any watching bot’s optics could track. He could have been any of them at any moment; at one point Optimus Prime was sure he saw himself. All the while a rush of incomprehensible sounds poured from him, imitated voices and overheard bits of conversation merging together into a sonic avalanche that began to overwhelm Optimus Prime’s audio arrays.

  Optimus stepped forward and touched a stud on the command console just inside the doorway. “Stasis field,” he said.

  Nothing happened to him or to Jazz because they both were equipped with components identical to the one Optimus had tossed to Makeshift. They were stasis-field bafflers, used by loading and unloading crews to facilitate the handling of cargo that had to be transported within such fields. Not having one, Makeshift froze, features of a dozen or more different bots blending into one another across various parts of his limbs and torso. But his face was Hound.

  “That face isn’t going to fool us anymore,” Optimus Prime said.

  “Everything always fools you,” Makeshift said. “Megatron was right about a lot of things, but he especially knew you. Naive, he said. Vulnerable because you keep on insisting that the best in bots might show through even when all the evidence is to the contrary. You don’t get it, Prime.” He sneered as he said the last word. “You’re not just fighting Megatron; you’re fighting the natural law of the universe. Kill or be killed. Use resources or become a resource. Conservation of energy demands it.”

  “Conservation of energy is for molecules,” said Optimus Prime. “Which makes it a perfect way for Megatron to get his point across, since he thinks all Decepticons are worthless motes. When he says ‘peace through tyranny,’ you think he means for everyone execpt Makeshift? Who’s fooling who?”

  Frozen in the stasis field, Makeshift couldn’t move or change expression. The only reason his voice worked was that his vocoder could transmit without physical motion. “The difference between Autobots and Decepticons is that a billion cycles from now, or ten billion, Megatron will still be around. You and the rest of the Autobots won’t.”

  “I don’t care about a billion cycles from now,” Optimus Prime said. “I care about the present, when you’re in a stasis field on my ship and I’m asking the questions.”

  “And whatever you do to me, librarian, I’m not answering them.”

  Optimus Prime laughed. Librarian? That had always been Megatron’s favorite pejorative for him. Apparently it had spread to his Decepticon acolytes, too. “I’ll keep asking them until you answer. And you will. I’m not worried about that.”

  “Think again,” Makeshift said. “My abilities make me highly resistant to pain.”

  “But not, apparently, to melodrama,” said Optimus Prime. “Torture is not the way Autobots work. You’ve been around Decepticons too long. As a matter of fact, if you’re worried about torture, you’re lucky Shockwave never got you into his laboratory. He would have done just about anything to find out how you’re able to do what you do.”

  He let Makeshift take it as a threat and watched the implications settle into the trapped bot’s face. The stasis field thrummed, and iridescent colors flowed across its surface, visible manifestations of its damping effect on Makeshift’s shape-changing ability. “That never occurred to you, did it?” Optimus Prime went on. “It’s not Autobots you need to worry about when it comes to torture and tyranny.”

  Makeshift did not answer. Optimus Prime poked a finger at the edge of the stasis field, feeling it resist his fingertip, yielding but pushing back when he withdrew the finger. “So why did Megatron send you?” he asked. “He’s got a lot of Decepticons, but you’re the one he decided to send off on a death mission with a bunch of doomed Autobots on a ship that is having trouble holding together. Doesn’t sound like he thinks you’re all that valuable.”

  “What do we care about why he did it?” Jazz said. “He did it. That’s all we need to know.”

  “There is much still to learn,” Optimus Prime said. Prowl entered with Ironhide. They stood quietly observing.

  “What was your charge?” Optimus
asked. “Were you ordered to sabotage us or destroy us?”

  Makeshift was silent.

  “Did Megatron tell you he would come and find you wherever you were stranded once we had been destroyed? Or were you waiting for him to catch up?” Still silence from Makeshift. “If you don’t answer me, Makeshift, I do not know how to sentence you.”

  Interrogations took time. Optimus Prime knew this. He had over the course of the war on Cybertron become a patient interrogator, but he did not have the leisure to conduct a good interrogation now. If Makeshift was going to resist him, Optimus would have to abandon the interrogation and go on as they had before, except with the additional burden and complication of a prisoner, a shapeshifting prisoner with experience infiltrating the Autobots and intimate knowledge of their vessel and the habits of many of its passengers and crew.

  That was not acceptable. Yet it might, mused Optimus Prime, be the case whether or not he found it acceptable. “Makeshift,” he said. “Do you know where you come from?”

  “The same place everyone else comes from.”

  “Maybe. But everyone else can’t do what you do. Does that mean that maybe you came from somewhere else? Or does it mean that you should be letting an exgladiator boss you around and waste your unique abilities on missions like this one?”

  “If you’re going to give me short-circuited metaphysics about why I’m different,” Makeshift said, “please just go ahead and torture me to death.”

  “Did you convert some Velocitronians to the Decepticon side?” Optimus Prime asked.

  Silence again. “Seems like maybe we ought to turn him over to the Junkions,” Prowl said. “Their jurisdiction, after all. I mean the Shearbolt killing.”

  Wreck-Gar no doubt would have Makeshift rendered to his basic elements, thought Optimus Prime, so of course they could not do that. At times it was mightily inconvenient to believe in a code of ethics and individual rights.

  “Not a bad idea,” Jazz said. “And legally consistent, even.”

  “What do you think, Optimus?” Prowl asked. “Truth is, the Shearbolt case is Wreck-Gar’s. We shouldn’t be dealing with it.”