Exiles Page 20

  Optimus Prime thought about it and let Makeshift think about it. Then he began to repeat his previous question. “Did you—”

  “Yes,” Makeshift cut him off. “I spoke to some Velocitronians about Megatron. They knew me as 777. That was my gladiator name in the pits of Kaon. I have known Megatron longer than you, librarian. Say about him what you will, you will never understand him without having been in the pits.”

  “I have spent altogether too much time trying to understand Megatron,” Optimus Prime said. “Which Velocitronians did you speak to?”

  “If you were there, you would know. If you ever return, the question will answer itself.”

  “Have you done the same here on Junkion?”

  “Yes,” Makeshift said, and a tiny alarm went off in Optimus Prime’s head. Makeshift was lying. But the phrasing of the question, Optimus reflected, might have left him enough wiggle room to tell the truth and still mislead his interrogator. He let it slide for the moment, his mind on other things, specifically, the pieces of the Star Saber … Something about them constantly pricked and nagged at him, his consciousness of the problem obscuring his sense that the solution was right there if only he could get a nanoklik of clarity to see it.

  Still Makeshift did not answer, but Optimus Prime found his silence instructive.

  He shifted from questions to accusations. “You led a plot to destroy the Ark. You betrayed the principles of the Autobots and seeded a rebellion on Velocitron. Your actions have caused damage to numerous individual bots and to the cause of Cybertronian liberty. And perhaps worst of all, you have broadcast our position to Megatron, as the recent distress signal from Velocitron indicates.”

  “Megatron can find you himself, and you don’t know that signal had anything to do with Megatron,” Makeshift said.

  The same tiny alarm that previously had made Optimus Prime believe Makeshift was lying now told him that the captive Decepticon spy was, against all expectations, telling the truth. The Matrix was speaking. “Even if I believe that,” Optimus Prime said, “your crimes are still many and serious. As Prime, I sentence you to confinement until I deem it time to release you.”

  “Wait,” Makeshift said. “You can’t just leave me in this stasis field.”

  “I sure can,” Optimus Prime said.

  “No!” Makeshift looked genuinely afraid. “I can’t stay in one shape forever! It—you don’t understand. I …” His expression changed, became a little more calculating. “I’ll trade you. You need to know something that I know. I’ll trade it for being let out of the stasis field.”

  Optimus Prime thought about it.

  “Don’t,” said Prowl.

  “Let’s hear it,” Optimus Prime said.

  “Prime, we don’t know what he’s capable of,” Prowl protested.

  “I promise nothing,” said Optimus Prime. “But I will tell you this: If you don’t tell me what you’re holding back, I will absolutely leave you in the stasis field.”

  Makeshift tried to struggle. Waves propagated through the stasis field, but Makeshift’s body did not move. “All right!” he cried out. “Those pieces of metal you’re looking for, the slivers with the hooks on one end.”

  “What about them?” Optimus Prime demanded.

  Makeshift paused, wrestled with something internally, then gave up. “Axer has one,” he said. “He knows you want them, and he’s holding one back in case he gets caught and …” He saw Optimus Prime and Prowl looking at each other. “Optimus, please,” he said. “This stasis field will kill me.”

  That would make four, if it was true … or five, if the stories were correct and the Matrix itself was part of the Saber. Optimus Prime kept his demeanor calm, not wanting to give Makeshift any cause to pander to what he thought he might want. “At last we are getting somewhere,” he said. “Axer has a piece? You have seen it?”

  “Yes! Let me out!”

  Now was the time for the question that had been bothering Optimus Prime since they had pinned down Makeshift’s existence. “What did you do with Hound?”

  Makeshift cried out in panic. “I didn’t kill him! He’s fine!”

  “I did not ask what you didn’t do,” Optimus Prime said. “I asked what you did do.”

  “Before the evacuation I caught him on sentry duty,” Makeshift said, speaking fast. “I jumped him, knocked him out, and dragged him off down a maintenance tunnel that led away from the well. It’s true. I didn’t kill him. I’m not a killer.”

  “Shearbolt would be interested to hear that,” Prowl said.

  Makeshift stopped talking. Optimus Prime wondered whether Hound was still alive. Had Makeshift in fact left him alive? Had he survived the war to this point? Optimus Prime remembered those last chaotic moments before the Ark had lifted off away from Cybertron. He thought he remembered seeing Hound guiding a last group of stragglers onto the Ark. Makeshift’s story fit, but that did not mean it was true.

  “You will stay in the stasis field until we can confirm the truth of your story about Hound,” Optimus Prime said.

  “No!” Makeshift screamed. “It’ll kill me, Prime, you can’t—”

  “Now you want to call him Prime,” Jazz observed. “Interesting.”

  Optimus Prime left the room, bringing Jazz and Prowl out with him to wait for Wreck-Gar, who was standing by to remove Makeshift and the entire stasis field apparatus to the closest thing Junkion had to a jail. It was, in an irony all the Autobots could appreciate, the abandoned fuel reservoir of an ancient spacegoing vessel, five times as large as the Ark’s reservoir and with only one opening. Junkions bundled Makeshift into it and welded it shut.

  “Where should we put this junk?” Wreck-Gar asked. “Space is the place, you ask me! Break him down!”

  “No, we’re not going to do that,” Optimus Prime said. “Keep it here and turn off the stasis field as soon as you’ve got it sealed up.”

  “Prime, you can’t be serious,” Prowl said.

  “It’s the fair thing to do,” Optimus Prime said. “Wreck-Gar, do me a favor. Don’t put this tank in one of your furnaces or lose track of it in the rest of the junk. I’ll be back for it whenever I can.”

  “Done!” Wreck-Gar roared, before he stomped off to roar more orders at the Junkions positioning the reservoir in the way of some reclamation project of his involving pockets of halogen gas once used for interior illumination in passenger staterooms. Junkion was literally made of such flotsam and jetsam. A creative and ambitious bot like Wreck-Gar, even stuck on an artificial planetoid in the deepest reaches of interstellar space, could find a way to put his time to good use. Optimus Prime admired him.

  The reservoir containing Makeshift came to rest in a far corner of the great dig, over a series of large conduits that led up from Junkion’s central power source. In the interior of the planet, across the pit from the shaft Optimus Prime had descended and below the shafts partially exposed by the collapse caused by the Ark’s crash, Wreck-Gar had placed a huge cluster of Energon reservoirs scavenged from various hulks. The remaining supplies in those reservoirs powered Junkion’s innumerable furnaces, smelters, and mechanical rendering works.

  “You know that jail isn’t going to hold him forever,” Jazz said a few cycles later. The command team had reconvened near the Ark to fine-tune their plan in light of the recent developments.

  Optimus Prime nodded. “It doesn’t have to. If it holds him until we get back and can confront Megatron, that will be good enough.”

  Jazz shook his head, clearly uncertain even about that. “We’ll see,” he said. “But first let’s see where the Matrix is telling you to go now.”

  “Yes, let’s see that,” Silverbolt said.

  “It’s not far,” Optimus Prime said. He looked up at the four Space Bridges strung out across the black sky of Junkion. “Wreck-Gar said the one on the right is the one that works, and since we have a spaceworthy ship, we should go soon, before we have to explain everything to every bot on the Ark. Makeshift might not be th
e only traitor in our midst.”

  It hurt him to have to say that, but what gave him greater pain was that none of these, his closest confidants and most trusted soldiers, said anything to contradict him.

  Optimus would have gone, and quickly. He would have liked nothing better than to get the side missions over, get the Ark and his bots ready again, thank the Junkions for their limited hospitality, and reassume the central mission of recovering the AllSpark. Nothing was ever so linear, however. There were a number of things to make sure of before he made such a trip. “All right,” he said. “Ratchet, Sideswipe, get ready. One of you go tell Bumblebee the same. You, too, Jazz, now that we don’t have to look for Makeshift anymore. And if any of you do not wish to be selected, I will not think less of you. Take some time and think about it. You don’t know where we’ll end up, what might be waiting for us there, or whether you’ll be able to get back. Junkion’s no paradise, but there are plenty of worse places.”

  “We’re with you, Prime,” Jazz said.

  Optimus Prime was touched. Of all the Autobots, Jazz gave Optimus Prime the hardest time, the most static. At times he seemed borderline insubordinate. Yet, when it came time to dive through a Space Bridge into the unknown, Jazz was as loyal as space was black.

  “Good. We will depart soon. But first we need to go talk to Axer again,” Optimus Prime said.

  “Here’s the thing, Axer,” Prowl said from the other side of the cell door. “Megatron is going to kill you. He hates it when his operatives get caught. You know that, right? How many of Megatron’s punishments have you had the good luck to witness?”

  The answer to that question, which Axer did not intend to give to Prowl or any other Autobot, was quite a few.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” Axer said. “You can have the piece of metal. I don’t care about it; it’s just something I found on a ship, and it was shiny. But if you want Megatron to know something is wrong the minute he sets foot on Junkion, you go right ahead and keep me in here.”

  “You’ve talked to him?” Prowl pressed. “You’re admitting that?”

  “I’m not admitting anything,” Axer said. “I’m just telling you that if I’m not around when Megatron gets here, he’s going to notice and he’s going to assume that it’s because you knew he was coming. So it’s up to you. You want the element of surprise or not?”

  He produced the shiny worked piece of ancient alloy. “Here it is, Prowl. All yours. You leave me alone, we’ll forget about the whole thing. But you don’t want to tip Megatron off. Trust me.”

  Prowl took the Star Saber fragment. “I’ll talk to Optimus Prime,” he said.

  “We should let him go,” Optimus Prime said. “He’s working another angle, and we’re never going to find out what it is if we don’t let him go to try to work it.”

  “Little bit like saying you should let a bomber light the fuse so you know where the bomb is, isn’t it?” Jazz said, feigning disinterest the way he did when he was trying to hide deep uncertainty.

  “Axer has one principle and only one: protect Axer. That’s why he gave Makeshift up,” Prowl said.

  “So if he wants out, he must have some benefit,” Silverbolt said. “But that doesn’t mean he isn’t telling the truth about Megatron.”

  There were times when a poison truth was worth more to an enemy than a successful lie, Optimus Prime thought.

  “Here is what we will do,” he said. “Let him go. But first put a locator on him. And Silverbolt, it may be time to put your aerial abilities to use.”

  “He came here, Megatron. We know that much.” Skywarp sounded certain as the Nemesis drew close to a dusty reddish planet orbiting a reddish star that any bot could see was in its last stages before a quick expansion, quicker collapse, and supernova. This system was a graveyard whether the bots who lived here knew it or not.

  “How long ago?” Megatron asked.

  “We can’t be certain until we touch down on the planet.”

  “What planet is this?”

  “If our charts are still correct, it’s Velocitron,” Skywarp said. “But there’s been no contact with it for tens of thousands of solar cycles. No telling whether it’s anything like the Velocitron from the old accounts.”

  Starscream chuckled. “I guess not. But what do the old accounts say?”

  “That Velocitronians are obsessed with speed. That they do nothing but figure out ways to go faster. That they have no other interests.”

  “Then there should be no obstacle to them declaring for the Decepticons,” Megatron said. “I will make sure of it. Since all other things are apparently equal, I will go down first myself. Bring the Nemesis low enough that the good citizens of this planet will not be able to miss it. But do not approach until I give a signal.”

  “Understood.” Skywarp stood as Megatron turned to leave the bridge. The other Seekers did, too.

  “Starscream, you come with me,” Megatron said. “I’m not leaving you up here and trusting you with my ship.”

  It was a calculated insult, since the Seekers were charged with operations and control of the Nemesis. They needed reminding of who was in charge, Seekers did. Especially Starscream.

  What a pleasure it would be to maroon him, Megatron thought. Some day. Some day when outside threats were not quite so present, Starscream would suddenly find that his insolence would be the death of him.

  That day, however, would not be today. Just ahead of Starscream on Megatron’s list of bots who needed a quick one-way trip to the reclamation heap was Optimus Prime.

  Falling away from the Nemesis, Starscream flanking him, Megatron took in the surface of Velocitron. From this height, he saw brown. There appeared to be very little variation in the surface terrain. Some of it was darker brown, some lighter, but he saw no great cities, no surface features of the scale of the Well of the AllSpark or the Hydrax Plateau. Before he had even touched down on its surface, he felt that it was alien to him and could not wait to leave.

  The only reason for this detour was that Megatron had a feeling Optimus Prime had been on-planet. His spy aboard the Autobot vessel would have left word if that was true. As soon as Megatron had found out one way or another, he and the Nemesis would be off again. The galaxy was not large enough to contain both him and Optimus Prime. Not anymore.

  He watched the bots in their low-slung alt-forms scream past on the roads that crossed the planet’s surface like the mesh of a net and wondered what use those speed-obsessed bots would be in a fight. He would find out, of that he had no doubt. War would find every planet populated by bots before he and the librarian had ended their dispute the only way it could end, with the librarian’s capitulation and death. But for now he could only scorn these mindless bots.

  Of what use was it to be simply fast?

  He had landed near the largest settlement on the planet, apparently called Delta, and he walked toward it now. He noted that parts of it were in flames and that there were visible signs that some kind of conflict was ongoing.

  “Starscream,” he said. “Have we stepped into the middle of a war here?”

  Starscream said, “I’ll find out.” He alt-formed and took off, thundering away in the direction of Delta.

  A signal reached Megatron, automated and broadcasting in idiot determination for how many cycles he did not know. He decrypted the message within it:

  DECEPTICON SYMPATHIZERS DEVELOPED AT HIGHEST LEVELS OF VELOCITRON LEADERSHIP. THEY AWAIT THEIR LEADER. AUTO-PING RECEIPT OF THIS MESSAGE AND YOU WILL BE CONTACTED. DO NOT SPEAK TO RANSACK UNTIL YOU HAVE MADE RENDEZVOUS WITH BACKFIRE.

  The message was tagged with the unmistakable signature of Makeshift, his spy in the Autobot ranks. Interesting, thought Megatron, and sent out the requested auto-response notification. The Autobots had been here, and Makeshift had been undiscovered at least long enough to send this message.

  He did not know how sophisticated Velocitronian homing and tracking technology was, so he stayed where he was until a single bot in the blur
of passing traffic pulled off the road, assuming bot-form as it came to a halt.

  “Megatron,” the bot said.

  “If you are not Backfire, bot, you are starting your last conversation,” Megatron said. “What is the sign?”

  “I am Backfire. The sign is 777, the number of your emissary when he was a gladiator with you.” Megatron signaled that Backfire should continue. “Welcome! It is time for new leadership on Velocitron. It is time for us to return to the place we once had in the civilization of bots, when we were intrepid explorers aboard Ogygia, before we descended into this state where all we care about is the sport of speed.” The whole speech sounded rehearsed to Megatron, but it also sounded sincere. He did not particularly like this Backfire, but clearly there was something worthwhile happening on Velocitron.

  Before he continued his pursuit of the librarian, Megatron decided, he would cultivate this emergent Decepticon sentiment. Why should the Autobots be the only Cybertronians spreading a philosophy?

  “Why is Delta burning?” Megatron asked. Backfire started to tell him.

  Starscream flew over Delta partly to perform the reconnaissance he had suggested to Megatron, partly just to make an impression apart from Megatron. From the air, the city was laid out in an oval shape that was almost perfectly concentric to the great racetrack at its center. A race was even then going on, and Starscream could see that the stands were packed.

  Some war, he thought. If they’re all stopping to watch a race, they must not be too anxious to fight.

  As he had the thought, a building at the other end of Delta from the direction he had begun his overflight blew up in a spectacular fireball, blooming upward and blackening as it reached the height of the city’s tallest buildings. Starscream headed in that direction but did a brief roll to get a look back at the speedway. Sure enough, the explosion had not stopped the race.

  Coming closer to the location of the explosion, Starscream saw two small groups of bots fighting. He was not impressed by their training or discipline, but they certainly had enthusiasm. He banked away from them and headed over the center of the city once more, noting the sights of recent battles: rubble, scorch marks, even a destroyed bot or two lying where they had fallen in a neighborhood that looked largely abandoned. The hangar near the speedway, too, looked as if it had taken some serious damage. He could see the wreckage of sophisticated equipment inside; the hangar was clearly central to race preparation, which made it central to Velocitronian life.