Exiles Read online

  Now, it appeared, he had decided that it was time to act in his own self-interest above the goals of the Decepticons. Either he had some leverage he had not yet divulged, thought Megatron, or he was in the process of going over to the Autobot side.

  Either way, Megatron decided to take Axer’s advice and pay close attention to which self-proclaimed Decepticons were more trouble than they were worth.

  In fact, he decided to do it right now.

  Before Axer could move, Megatron had deployed his fusion cannon and jammed it under the smaller bot’s chin, using it as leverage to topple Axer and smash him into the ground. Bits of trash and rubble fell around them, disturbed by the impact. “You told me something of value a long time ago,” Megatron said.

  “Urk,” Axer said.

  Megatron eased up on the barrel of the fusion cannon just enough to let Axer speak. “You are lying to me, Axer, and I know because it was you who taught me much about how to recognize a lie. Remember our question-and-answer sessions down below the pits? You were very persuasive.”

  Now he leaned on the barrel again, and strange panicked noises came from Axer’s throat. “I don’t know if I want to be persuaded,” Megatron said. But he eased up on the barrel again because he could see Axer’s resistance crumbling already. No one is an easier victim of coercion than the trained torturer.

  “You want to live?” Megatron said. “To save yourself? There is something in this junk heap Optimus Prime wants. What is it? If you don’t know, at least tell me a good story before I kill you.”

  “The Requiem Blaster!” Axer said. “I know where it is.”

  Megatron leaned harder, and Axer’s jaw groaned from the pressure. Something snapped inside him. “Where?” Megatron growled.

  But Axer was never so stupid as to let emotions—even fear—get in the way of his instinct for self-preservation. “I’ll show you,” he said. “But no way am I going to tell you. Not when you’re in this kind of mood.”

  Starscream chuckled. “Better let him live a while, Megatron. We do want the Requiem Blaster, don’t we?”

  I do, Megatron corrected to himself. But he was also thinking that if ever there was a time when he needed Axer’s interrogation skills, it was right now. But even he—even Megatron, with his famed powers of persuasion—probably could not force Axer to torture himself.

  “Show me,” he said. “Then we will have the conversation about whether you live or die.”

  Axer got up, and only then did Megatron let himself think about how all of Cybertronian history had just changed if Axer was telling the truth. “Optimus Prime was looking for it, I think,” Axer said. “Just recently. I’ll go scout out the way to get it and make sure there’s no Autobot surveillance. You can watch me if you want but don’t let yourselves be seen. I think the Autobots would rather go down fighting.”

  That was how Megatron wanted them to go down, but he had no problem with playing things calmly for the moment if that meant gaining possession of the fabled Requiem Blaster. “Do not fail me, Axer,” he said. “And when you come back, tell me the truth about Makeshift.”

  I fear I must tax your patience with a story of the Thirteen. It seems that they lived during the youth of time itself, and their separation and scattering came as the first signal that the universe was beginning to grow old. This is a trick of the mind, to think of reality as somehow keyed to the stories we tell about ourselves. But the mind will play its tricks, and time will march on, and old bots will tell stories about forgotten events. It is Solus Prime I am thinking of.

  She was the great artificer of the Thirteen, the Maker. With her forge at her service and her towering intelligence and endless ingenuity, she could be counted on to bring any imagined object to life. At the request of other members of the Thirteen, she constructed artifacts and tools of extraordinary power and nearly infinite durability. The other members of the Thirteen came to her seeking symbols of their essential nature, signature weapons, or other objects whose function has long since been forgotten. Some of these artifacts, I am sure, still survive. Her forge, if it exists, would be a powerful ally in the Autobot cause. So, too, would the Star Saber … or the Requiem Blaster.

  It was the Fallen who first asked Solus to create the Requiem Blaster. He came to her having exhausted all of his own creative powers, which it must be said were considerable when it came to armaments. AllSpark only knows how many of his lost creations litter the galaxy, extraordinary dangers to any bot—or creature yet unknown—who might discover them. Yet the Fallen desired still more. He had created weapons that siphoned energy from his immediate surroundings, channeling it with enough power to bring down starships with a single discharge; he had constructed bombs that could destroy stars; he wielded a blade that could sever the bonds between atoms. Even this was not enough for him.

  To Solus Prime he said: I have stood at the event horizon of a black hole and felt the infinite surge of gravity. I have listened to the thunder of the fusion reaction at the center of a star. I have tuned my audio sensors to the savage sonic wind of a pulsar. And in all of those phenomena I have seen the potential for a weapon unlike any the universe has ever seen.

  Solus, at her forge, replied that she did not see the need for such a weapon. The Fallen—who had not yet, understand, taken this name—persisted. The Thirteen have enemies, he said. Unicron seeks to destroy us, and even if we are victorious in our stuggle against him, the universe is vast. If something comes to destroy us and this weapon alone would have made a difference …?

  Unmoved, Solus Prime said, it would be too powerful. The only thing such a powerful weapon can do, in the end, is corrupt the being who possesses it. What if Unicron should capture it for himself?

  Perhaps the history of Cybertron would have been different if the Fallen had accepted Solus Prime’s reluctance. But he did not. He rallied support among some of the other Thirteen, and as a group they came back to her to state their belief that the fight against Unicron required every possible weapon, no matter how dangerous. The fate of the universe itself was at stake. The Thirteen needed this weapon, and Solus Prime had an obligation to create it.

  At last she relented and went into a tense consultation with the Fallen, exchanging ideas with him and working for endless cycles on prototypes. When this process had gone as far as it could, she banished him from her workshop and shut the door. The Fallen waited outside, speaking to no one and allowing no one to contact Solus Prime. He was too close to getting what he wanted; he would let nothing interfere now.

  The stars spun overhead, and Solus Prime did not come out. The Fallen waited. Singly and in pairs, reflecting their allegiances of the moment, the other members of the Thirteen gathered around the entrance to Solus’s workshop. All of them waited, each envisioning something different but all understanding that something unprecedented was about to occur.

  And then she emerged.

  The Fallen noted that she carried nothing with her. “You failed,” he accused her. “Or you never meant to succeed.”

  Solus’s temper was always even. She ignored the Fallen’s provocations and said simply, “Come in.”

  The Thirteen, with her in the lead, filed through her workshop, coming to an enormous space carved into the side of a mountain. This was Solus Prime’s testing area. On a scaffold at the center of the space sat a great weapon, large enough that only the mightiest of the Thirteen might have wielded it. “I have not yet tested it,” Solus Prime said. “But it will work. I wanted all of you to see the result. Then I will ask you a question.”

  “Ask the question now!” demanded Amalgamous Prime, who was irritated because Solus had devoted so much time to a single project when she might have created a hundred other marvels. Solus declined.

  “Watch,” she said, and for the first time the Requiem Blaster was fired.

  Its discharge utterly destroyed the portion of the mountain behind the wall of the testing area. The sound and the visual blast of energy in the confined space left every bot
there stunned as the chamber echoed with the rumble of landslides on the devastated mountain slope. Each of the Thirteen privately imagined what might have happened had the weapon been turned on them, and each of them was afraid.

  Except the Fallen.

  Gleeful, he went to the Requiem Blaster and laid one hand on its barrel as if it was his to claim. “Never more, as long as we possess this weapon,” he said, “will we have anything to fear.”

  In the silence that followed Solus Prime said quietly, “Except each other.”

  More silence. Finally, she asked her question. “Shall we permit such a weapon to exist? If it is the will of the Thirteen, I will destroy it, and only I could ever create it again.”

  Argument erupted immediately and went on for some time. When the dispute threatened to become violent, Prima himself ended it and brought the question to a vote. The tally, as recorded in the Covenant of Primus, was seven to six. The Requiem Blaster was preserved.

  After the defeat of Unicron it was lost, and it remained lost for these millions of cycles, yet now the Covenant suggests that it may soon be found. It would be the end of the Autobots if Megatron were to be the bot that finds it.

  What, you are asking, does this have to do with Cybertron and you? The answer is that you must find Optimus Prime and warn him of the imminent rediscovery of the Requiem Blaster. I will give you a device that you may use to track the Matrix of Leadership and thereby Optimus Prime himself. And I will provide you the means to undertake the journey. Yes, the Space Bridges are destroyed, but there is another way to travel the vast distances between stars. It is a way reserved only for a selected few bots, one of whom is you.

  This, you see, is why I have selected you for this mission.

  I cannot answer all the questions you must have. All that circumstance permits me to say is that there is something within you that remains to be discovered. All bots have a Spark; some bots carry within them something else as well, a trace of Cybertron’s former greatness. I detect this in you, and I believe that when you make contact with Optimus Prime, this quality will reveal itself. I cannot tell you more and would not even if I could. Such matters as this are best left to the process of self-discovery, guided only by the destiny available to each and every bot ever gifted with a Spark.

  You will pardon the brief excursion into metaphysics, I hope. I wish only to alert you that you have not been selected for this mission because of the strength of your weapons or even the powers of your mind. You are a necessary component of Optimus Prime’s quest—although he does not yet know this and I do not yet know what it is you will contribute.

  You must leave immediately. Come. I will show you the way.

  Axer knew that he was being followed, but he also knew that no one alive could tail him if he did not want to be tailed. He went through his entire repertoire of antisurveillance moves, ducking hither and yon across the dumpscape of Junkion, even daring to head down into the pit at the risk of being spotted by Wreck-Gar. These were the final stages of the game, and Axer was exhilarated to be playing it. He cut into a side tunnel from one of the middle layers of the big pit and followed it as far as it went. Then he blasted a hole in the side of the tunnel—the most risky thing he’d done in a long time, given the possibility of the tunnel’s collapsing on him—and found that just as he’d thought, it nearly intersected one of the vertical exploratory shafts.

  He started to climb. At the top of the shaft he found Megatron and Starscream. “Look at you standing there in plain sight,” he said. “Do you want a fight with the Autobots already, or do you want the Blaster first?”

  “I’ll take it either way,” Megatron said.

  “But it would be more fun with the Blaster,” Starscream added.

  Axer had, for the fifth or sixth time, changed his original plan. “This is what you’re looking for, I think,” he said, and handed something to Megatron. It was a component that looked as if it might once have belonged in the bridge console of a planetary-class ship, an orbital station or ore carrier that never operated beyond the highest stationary orbits. As he let Megatron take it, the light of avarice gleamed in Axer’s eyes. He was a scavenger and trader and gave nothing away without the understanding that he would get something—something better unless he could not force the bargain—in return.

  “I believe you are correct. Cybertron’s influence here will be a good one, after all, despite the meddling of the Autobots.” Megatron examined the component, running his fingertips along the tracing of its circuitry. Something sparked orange at one end of it, and the Decepticon leader chuckled. “The librarian’s going to have a surprise in store for him.”

  Axer, edging closer to Megatron, said, “I of course will not be surprised at the munificence of your reward.”

  Megatron knocked him sprawling with a casual backhand. “Indirect flattery is the worst kind,” he said. Looking at Starscream as the two of them walked back toward the Nemesis, he said, “Remember that.”

  “I always knew,” Starscream said. “When was the last time I flattered you indirectly?”

  Megatron was thinking that it was best to keep your rivals and enemies close, the better to extinguish them when the time came. That time was not yet near for Starscream, but Megatron thought that he could see it coming.

  What would he lose with the potential death of Starscream? A highly skilled fighter, a popular leader, and an enormous headache. It was a difficult problem. Sometimes one aspect of Starscream’s existence seemed to outweigh the other, but most of the time the Seeker was maddeningly close to the perfect balance of asset and hindrance. Often Megatron considered it surprising that he had not killed Starscream megacycles before. At other times he was satisfied to have Starscream still available to execute his difficult tasks with his signature skill and aplomb, with the one blot on this otherwise stellar record, in Megatron’s mind, being Starscream’s failure to ground the Autobot Jetfire during the battle at Tyger Pax. This chase wouldn’t have been necessary if Starscream and the other Seekers had not been outmaneuvered by a single ragged Autobot flier.

  The urge again rose in Megatron to end Starscream’s existence once and for all. He controlled it. Once the librarian was caught and the Autobot problem solved, that would be the time to make some final decisions about Starscream. But until then, Megatron could let the delusional Seeker think he was inching ever closer to a takeover of the Decepticons for himself. This, of course, was what Starscream wanted. But his desire to lead the Decepticons also played into Megatron’s hands. Nothing kept a leader sharp like an ambitious lieutenant.

  “Thanks to Axer, we have what we need to gain possession of the Requiem Blaster,” he said. “Now let us go put an end to this once and for all. But before we raise up the Blaster itself, we need to make sure we have prepared a suitable welcome for when the librarian comes back. We wouldn’t want him to interrupt us.”

  He turned his back on Axer and walked away toward where Starscream stood waiting. “Stay where I can find you, Axer,” he called back over his shoulder. “But also, beware. When I come back, it’s going to be with the Nemesis, and no bot is going to want to be anywhere nearby when the Nemesis makes its appearance.”

  Ordinarily the threat of being annihilated by the Nemesis would have rattled Axer just a little. But the circumstances were far from ordinary, and Axer had assets that no bot knew about. He already had come to the conclusion that it was time to hedge some bets. Before, he’d fooled Prowl by getting away without telling him where the Requiem Blaster was, but Prowl wouldn’t stay fooled forever. Axer had, after his first meeting with Megatron and Starscream, figured out that he was going to have to put that knowledge to use before it became worthless.

  He had taken advantage of Megatron’s letting him go to do two things. First, he had scouted the exploratory shaft again and found it still stable. Second, he had touched base with the Autobots, making nice even though every single one of them would just as soon kill him as look at him. Megatron knew where the
Requiem Blaster was, and Axer had decided that it was time for Optimus Prime to have that little bit of information as well. But Optimus Prime wasn’t around, and Prowl wouldn’t say a thing about where he had gone or when he might be back. The Space Bridge the Autobots had used might lead anywhere.

  This development was frustrating because it prevented Axer from executing the classic escape maneuver of pitting two adversaries against each other. And he didn’t want to tell Prowl now because he had already lied to Prowl’s face once on a similar topic. There was no telling what would provoke Prowl to hand him over to Wreck-Gar, a situation Axer planned to avoid unless and until he got his hands on the Requiem Blaster or made sure that he had a way off-planet. Off-planet was preferable, but Wreck-Gar wouldn’t be in quite such a hurry to feed him into a furnace if he had the Requiem Blaster, now, would he?

  “Stupid Autobots,” Axer muttered to himself as he sped away from the meeting with Megatron.

  It was not always a life-extending practice to lie to Megatron. Axer had not seen the Decepticon leader in millions of cycles, but still he knew that. But Makeshift was out of the way right now, imprisoned by the Autobots, and that was right where Axer wanted him. Because when Makeshift came out, Megatron was going to see that either he or Axer was lying about what Makeshift had been doing, and Axer was fairly confident that he could displace enough uncertainty onto Makeshift to preserve himself and simultaneously get rid of the troublesome shapeshifter.

  But that meant he was also going to have to get the Requiem Blaster himself, since Makeshift’s prison was buried deep below the bottom of the main pit. If Axer was going to dare that trip again, it could only be once more. His self-preservation instinct was telling him that Junkion’s end was coming faster than anyone anticipated.

  The homing component he had given Megatron was real enough. It would lead the Decepticons—or perhaps just the Nemesis—directly to the Blaster’s location. That did not, however, mean that the Blaster would still be there when the Nemesis arrived.