Exiles Read online

  A light flashed forth from the homing device, spearing into a point on the floor. “There it is!” Megatron cried out. “Bring it up!”

  Axer thought he was nearly there.

  His last time down he had gone through the doorway that Optimus Prime apparently had torn open and had continued down and around the sweeping turn in the ancient spacecraft. It amazed him to think that he was inside a craft once inhabited by the Thirteen. Had Solus Prime herself built it? Even so cynical and cruel a bot as Axer could appreciate the uniqueness of this situation. In all likelihood he would never be able to do this again. Megatron, if not simply time and circumstance, would see to that.

  There. Ahead.

  He was starting to get a sense of what this craft must have looked like when it navigated the long-forgotten paths between stars. It would have been a disc, gently curved along its top and bottom surfaces, with a corridor running the entirety of its perimeter and various spoked feeder hallways meeting at a central complex of chambers and facilities. Whose ship had it been? Liege Maximo’s? Nexus Prime’s?

  Even if he never knew, he would always know that he had been here. And once he had the Requiem Blaster, he would be able to tell the story to anyone he wanted. Megatron and Starscream were in for a surprise. Perhaps even Shockwave if Axer ever decided to go back to Cybertron. He could only imagine the expression on Shockwave’s face when he stared down the barrel of the Requiem Blaster in the last moments of his life. A jolt that he could liken only to an asteroid impact rang through the interior of Junkion, knocking Axer flat and partially collapsing the tunnel in front of him. The sound overloaded his auditory array. “No!” he shouted. “No! Not now!” But he could not hear himself, or just barely. There was still a sliver of room in the corridor ahead. He forced himself through it just in time for a second giant impact to pitch him forward as the rest of the corridor collapsed in on itself behind him.

  Incredibly, he thought he saw light. Not the dim ancient light that glowed from near the floors and had for countless cycles but the real living light of bots on the surface—or near the surface—of a planet.

  Digging.

  For what was Axer’s.

  “No!” he screamed again, and drove himself forward through the hail of debris and the pitching, rolling floor. From above, but not nearly far enough above, he heard the groan and clank of a bot that must have been so immense as to beggar the senses. Its footsteps, Axer thought, had caused these collapses.

  I have been stepped on by a giant, he thought, and almost laughed, but nothing was going to be funny again until he had the Requiem Blaster in his hand. Forcing himself forward, Axer realized that at some point he had been damaged by falling debris. His left leg was a long way from optimal functionality. Still he moved on.

  The central chamber of the ancient spacecraft was a perfect sphere. And in the exact center of that perfect sphere hung the Requiem Blaster.

  As Axer took in the size of it, he realized that his plan had contained a fatal flaw. The Thirteen must have been enormous, three or four times the size of a normal bot, because that was the only way any of them could ever have held the Requiem Blaster. It was nearly as large as Axer himself. The shock of this discovery seemed reflected in the booms that rocked Junkion. Axer would never have believed the Thirteen had existed—yet they had. The size of the Requiem Blaster was proof. And in that proof was the destruction of his entire plan. Cursing the Thirteen, Optimus Prime, Megatron, and every circumstance that had led him to Junkion to begin with, he reached up and shoved the Requiem Blaster, rocking it in the field that held it suspended in the center of the chamber. Suddenly furious, he gripped the trigger, thick as his wrist, in one hand. He would fire the Blaster, right here in the depths of Junkion, and blast away with it until the entire planet was reduced to floating space junk. As it had been in the beginning.

  Axer pulled on the trigger, feeling it start to move. He did not know for certain what was going to happen when the Blaster fired, but he was beyond caring. He kept pulling, and when the chamber heaved around him and slung him away from the Requiem Blaster to crash into the wall, for a moment he thought he had actually discharged the ancient weapon. His head rang from hitting the wall, and it took a moment for his optics to reset. He slid down the inner surface of the sphere, coming to rest at the bottom, directly under the Blaster.

  Scrambling to his feet, Axer saw no damage to the chamber. The Blaster had not fired! Then what—?

  Another huge shock knocked him down again, and light from the surface poured in as the top deck of the spacecraft was torn away. Axer’s head spun as gravity suddenly seemed to disappear; he begain to float upward in a field of wreckage at the center of which was the Requiem Blaster, slowly turning to align itself with the center of the tractor beam that he realized must be pulling him up. Tractor beam! He looked through the debris and saw the Nemesis.

  Screaming with incoherent fury, Axer reached after it even though it was large enough that he could never have held it or brought it to bear. Then he felt a jerk and a shift in the field surrounding him. The tractor beam narrowed, focusing solely on the Requiem Blaster itself, which receded beyond Axer’s grasp. Yet he did not fall as fast as he would have expected. Looking around, he saw to his amazement pieces of dislodged debris following the Requiem Blaster, floating up into the air or tearing themselves away from the vertical walls of the pit’s lower levels.

  He hovered at the edge of this stream, roughly level with the pit floor, and watched Junkion begin to tear itself apart.

  Above him he saw the tank that had held Makeshift, once built into one of the lower terrace and now torn open by the stresses of the Nemesis lifting the Requiem Blaster free. Makeshift, as agile as any bot ever created, leaped nimbly from his tilting, burst holding tank and—like much of the rest of the lower levels of the pit—swirled into a vortex in the wake of the Requiem Blaster, which rose higher and higher as the Nemesis’s tractor beam pulled the weapon free.

  Then everything, the entirety of the pit’s terraces and walls and floor, broke up into a storm of debris that swallowed Axer and Makeshift as if they had never existed.

  When it was over, Axer was partially pinned, but he was able to work himself free. Huge and distant noises boomed through the structure of Junkion, and shock waves occasionally knocked him off balance. It was absolutely dark, but Axer’s optics ran into both infrared and ultraviolet, so he could see enough around him to know that he was in real trouble. Everything within his field of vision was a shifting endless deadfall, with uncertain footing and even more uncertain solidity to the ancient spacecraft’s broken upper deck.

  But not all of the motion was settling debris from the upheaval and collapse. “Makeshift!” Axer called out. He caught up to the shifter, who was just reassuming his bot-form, a bot so anonymous that it was practically impossible for anyone who saw him once to describe him accurately. “Hard to believe we made it through.”

  “I don’t know if I’d say we’ve made it through yet,” Makeshift said. “And I sure don’t know if I’d use the word ‘we’ to mean you and me in any situation.”

  “Come on, now, you can’t have hard feelings about that,” Axer said. “Look me in the lens and tell me you would have done something different.”

  “I wouldn’t have, that’s true. But I wouldn’t be telling you not to hold a grudge about it, either. So long, Axer.”

  Axer tried to keep up with him, figuring Makeshift knew the way out—maybe because Axer himself did not—but with his damaged leg, he couldn’t move fast enough, and Makeshift hadn’t been kidding about holding a grudge. Another tremor ran through the subsurface, opening some spaces and closing others off. It seemed Makeshift spotted an opening. Straining his lenses, Axer, too, could see light, pale and washed out from a thousand deflections and reflections down the vertical wall of an exploratory shaft. Yes, he thought. Makeshift ran for the opening, already assuming the shape of another bot. Axer could almost see which one, but then the tunnel betw
een him and Makeshift collapsed, and he was alone.

  He waited, getting his bearings. “All right, Makeshift,” Axer said. “I’d say we’re even, but we’re not. One day I’ll find you, and we’re going to settle things permanently.”

  Pained and slowed by his leg, Axer looked around. Junkion boomed and groaned and shifted around him. He would find a way out. The interior was riddled with tunnels and passages and accidental gaps. Maybe that giant bot had torn Junkion apart. Maybe Megatron had abandoned him. Maybe Makeshift had betrayed him. None of it mattered.

  Axer would find a way out.

  Junkion heaved, and Axer sprawled into darkness. Still, when this latest shock passed, he thought he could see a glimmer of light.

  Nothing could keep a bot going like a grudge, and if there was one bot who was never going to forget a grudge, it was Axer. “Makeshift,” he growled. “You bought yourself an enemy for life.”

  The passage ahead shifted and closed off again, but there was a way forward somewhere. Powered by hate like a furnace, Axer tore through the shattered substrates of Junkion, looking for the way back to the surface that he knew must be there.

  Optimus Prime gathered himself and carried on with his plea to Vector Prime, though inside he was scarcely able to believe he was actually talking to this mysterious hermit of the Thirteen, the monitor of time and space, the enforcer of celestial laws. “We have need of you, Vector Prime. Cybertron is on the verge of destruction. A long period of injustice ended with the beginning of a war. That war has been going on for millions of cycles now. I have been selected by the Matrix of Leadership to resist the domination of Cybertronians who call themselves Decepticons and seek absolute power. Their leader was once a gladiator and is as pitiless as that might lead you to expect.” Optimus paused. There was much more he could say about Megatron, but he was not sure how much should be said.

  In truth, what did it matter?

  “Wars have broken out among our kind before,” Vector Prime said. “I retired from your dimensionality because of war, because I grew exhausted and could no longer see any way for the warring parties to come to peace.”

  “We have not yet come to that point,” Optimus Prime said. “As Prime, I believe in the ideals of Cybertron. I believe that the AllSpark can be recovered and that all Cybertronians can be brought together under the ideals that gave rise to our civilization. Once we spanned the stars,” he said quietly. “Then we turned inward, and abandoned the spirit that fueled our greatness. Now a crisis has come. I have left Cybertron to protect the planet from the worst excesses of Megatron … but I also seek the AllSpark.”

  “ ‘Recovered,’ you said. Where is the AllSpark? Why is it not still in the Well?”

  Optimus Prime considered how to tell the story. The direct approach seemed best. “I ejected it from Cybertron,” he said. “The threat to it was too great. Megatron had gained control of a well of Dark Energon. If it had polluted the AllSpark …”

  Nodding, Vector Prime said, “Megatron. This is the gladiator?”

  “Yes, Vector Prime,” Optimus said.

  “It would require such a one to unleash the corrosive power of Dark Energon,” Vector Prime said. “He would require the indomitable will of a gladiator, but not just that. This Megatron, his name recalls Megatronus. Perhaps he has something of Megatronus’s love of power as well. That, too, would suit him to the pursuit of Dark Energon.”

  “He began with noble intent,” Optimus said. “In the beginning he desired only freedom. But when he saw the power his leadership created, he felt the allure of tyranny too powerfully. I tried to prevent a war. I tried to reconcile with him. We were friends once.”

  Vector Prime was silent, lost in thought. “This is a story I have heard before,” he said eventually. “It is a story we Thirteen lived ourselves in a time long before yours.”

  The scholar in Optimus Prime, the remnant memory of Orion Pax who lived for nothing but knowledge, burned to know what was within Vector Prime’s mind at that moment. So much history, he thought. So much lost because those who could tell it preferred to remain silent. Could he provoke Vector Prime to tell the story? He did not know, nor did he know if he should. Perhaps long-held secrets should remain secret. Releasing them back into a world that had turned its back on them could have unforeseen consequences, and Cybertron had seen enough unforeseen consequences in recent times.

  Still, he could not entirely let go of the desire to know. “I have read some of it, and Alpha Trion told me more,” he said.

  The ancient bot’s head came back up, and he met Optimus Prime’s gaze. “Alpha Trion lives?”

  “He does.”

  “I wonder who else of us remains,” Vector Prime murmured.

  “That I do not know,” Optimus Prime said. “But what I do know—what makes my errand here most urgent—is that Megatron seeks the Requiem Blaster.”

  “Ah,” Vector Prime said.

  Again he fell silent, and Optimus Prime waited respectfully. When he felt he could wait no longer, he said, “Vector Prime. However fast time passes beyond the borders of this space, pass it does. I must act. Will you aid us?”

  Vector Prime nodded. “I will.”

  Optimus Prime took a step back toward the gateway, but Vector Prime raised a hand to halt him. “Prime.”

  To hear one of the Thirteen call him that shocked Optimus. He had long since grown used to hearing the title from other Autobots, but the word in Vector Prime’s voice seemed to carry with it an indescribable weight. I am Prime, he thought. Vector Prime himself has said so.

  “I am not the solution,” Vector Prime said. “The universe has passed me by, has passed all of the Thirteen by. I will be of what assistance I can, but your fight with this Megatron … it is your own and can only be your own. I and the rest of the Thirteen are the past. You are Cybertron’s future. I will aid you. I have already given you aid. But I will not leave with you.”

  “Understood,” Optimus Prime said after a pause. His sense of leadership’s burden returned. Even one of the Thirteen was standing aside for him. I am Cybertron’s future? He could not even be certain what Vector Prime meant by this. Yet if this was the truth of the situation, the course ahead was clear. They could not rely on the Thirteen, could not expect any salvation from the near-mythical depths of the Cybertronian past. The Autobots were on their own and would make their own history.

  Vector Prime stood next to him at the verge of the gateway. “It is a troubling burden to bear,” he said.

  “I took it up a long time ago,” Optimus Prime said. “I will not put it down now.”

  He emerged through the gateway back into … Optimus Prime wasn’t sure what to call it. Real space? The home dimension? The existence of Vector Prime’s pocket universe had unsettled his sense of what was real.

  But he didn’t have long to think about it. All of Junkion was quaking and shuddering around him, and he saw the other Autobots stumbling and sprawled, as if some great impact had knocked them off their feet while he was with Vector Prime. As they got their feet under them amid the rubbish heaps and welded flotsam of Junkion, one of the first things they saw was the Requiem Blaster, hanging in the space below the Nemesis, with a spreading trail of debris slowly falling away from it back to the exploded floor of the great pit.

  “Optimus,” Jazz said. “He’s here. Megatron.”

  “For how long?”

  “Just now,” Jazz said. “I don’t think he knows we’re here.”

  “Then we’ll be able to offer him a little surprise,” Optimus Prime said. He was about to explain to them what he had learned in his consultation with Vector Prime, but at that moment the Nemesis began to lift skyward, the Requiem Blaster going with it, and Junkion began to shake again.

  As the Requiem Blaster lifted away from contact with the surface of Junkion, seismic jolts began to rock the entire planetoid. Bots all over Junkion looked first up and then down, and then the upheavals knocked them flat. Great chunks of Junkion tore away
from the surface, trailing fragments of machinery and rubbish. The Junkions’ communications network, JunkNet, lit up with alarms and warnings, all saying the same thing:

  The planet is tearing itself apart!

  And it was. Optimus Prime, from his position on the edge of the pit looking down on the hole torn by the Requiem Blaster’s removal, saw that the Blaster itself was causing the disturbance. He could not believe his optics; it was as if the Requiem Blaster had provided Junkion’s center of gravity, accreting the entire planetoid around itself and providing the stability that teracycles of Junkions had depended on and taken for granted.

  Now it was all being destroyed as the very shape of Junkion deformed to follow the immense gravity of the Blaster. The picked frames of long-abandoned spacecraft flew again, with neither crew nor engine, spinnning slowly up into the irresistible well of attraction that the Requiem Blaster created. Around them circulated all the rest of Junkion: the modular colony housing that had never reached its destination, the thousands of kliks of cables and wires meant for other colony worlds but repurposed for the JunkNet, and the millions of smaller bits of flotsam that had given Junkion its mass and its citizens their home.

  All of it disintegrated as Optimus Prime watched, and he was part of its disintegration. Around him, the Junkions cried out and flailed helplessly as gravity failed and they floated in the great stream of rubbish, themselves now discarded parts. Closer to Optimus Prime, Jazz and Bumblebee grasped at nearby trash; Silverbolt had assumed his alt-form and was doing his best to keep the six of them together.