Exiles Read online

  “We need to get to the Ark!” Optimus shouted.

  “Well, that’s one good thing about this place falling apart,” Jazz said. “Look.”

  He pointed, and Optimus Prime saw that Junkion’s dissolution had freed the Ark from where it had crashed. Autobots swarmed over its surface, some of them still firing at the Decepticons, who clung to nearby pieces of Junkion and fired back. The Ark’s main door was open, and those Autobots who could were working their way over to it and escaping into the safety of its interior.

  “Is it repaired?” Optimus Prime asked. He got on the commlink and raised Perceptor. “Perceptor, the Ark needs to be repaired. Tell me it is.”

  “It is!” answered Perceptor. “Mostly.”

  He scrambled across the surface of his own little piece of Junkion, a motley and irregular polygon welded together from pieces of starship and honeycombed with tunnels and living spaces. From inside it he heard the confused and angry shouts of the Junkions. Abruptly, JunkNet cut out as its physical connections and energy sources tore apart. Optimus could still feel some of the cries as vibrations coming up through his feet, but he now tumbled silently in the wake of the Requiem Blaster.

  The Nemesis had swung around to face the Requiem Blaster, which was now being drawn in toward a makeshift emplacement just below the ship’s nose. Simultaneously the Nemesis deployed a number of tractor beams, gathering in those Decepticons who had been dislodged into space by the disintegration of Junkion. The Seekers flew recovery missions to capture Decepticons that had tumbled some distance away, and along the way they strafed and blasted helpless Junkions.

  Optimus Prime started to work out the basics of a plan. He let the Requiem Blaster draw him along, and while the ship was in the middle of a complex recovery operation, he leaped away from the bit of wreckage he’d ridden that far and landed as quietly and unobtrusively as he could on the exterior of the Nemesis.

  Working his way over to the Requiem Blaster’s emplacement, he crouched right below the barrel, which extended over his head back in the direction of the central surviving piece of Junkion. Above it, the Nemesis’s bridge viewports glowed. Below Optimus Prime was the remains of Junkion, now mixing into the halo of drifting shipwrecks. The four Space Bridges were off to his left, one of them still lit up and awaiting its next transit.

  He took in the situation and realized that the Autobots could turn the chaos to their advantage—but only if he could get Megatron back onto something like firm ground. As long as it was a ship-to-ship battle, the Decepticons surely would win.

  He looked around and spotted the Ark, which was performing its own repair operations. Optimus Prime could not tell how many Autobots had been recovered and how many still might be trapped in the debris field.

  Silverbolt’s voice crackled in the commlink. “Optimus Prime!” he called, streaking toward the Nemesis and dodging automated defensive fire. “Free yourself and I can pick you up!”

  “Stay clear for now,” Optimus Prime ordered. “Perceptor, can you bring the Ark around to pick up Junkions?” He hoped the Ark had not been too badly damaged by the Seekers’ barrage. If repairs were necessary, they would have to happen in the dangerous midst of a field of floating space junk while the Autobots made sure that all the Junkions survived and had a way to keep themselves alive, which probably meant more bots on the Ark. How many could they take?

  It appeared that a large chunk of Junkion was holding together, perhaps because there was enough mass in the fragment to maintain enough gravity to keep itself together … or because the millions of cycles of digging and welding and smelting had stuck its constituent bits of junk into an indestructible agglomeration. Optimus didn’t know which. The fragment was irregular in shape, looking roughly ovoid except for a giant divot out of the larger end of the oval, where the remains of the great pit could still be seen.

  Around this central remnant planetoid, the rest of what had formerly been Junkion drifted in a long and ragged trail after the hyperdense Requiem Blaster. The Ark fired its thrusters to keep distant, but even it was being drawn in the Blaster’s wake.

  Yes, thought Optimus Prime. He saw Silverbolt dodging through the debris in his direction and waved him away.

  “Optimus?” the Silverbolt’s voice came through the commlink.

  “Go back to the Ark,” Optimus Prime commanded. “Is Sideswipe aboard the Ark?”

  “I’m here, Prime,” Sideswipe said.

  “Good. Bring the Ark back to that big piece of Junkion that’s left.”

  “But Optimus—”

  “Do it,” Optimus Prime said.

  When the Requiem Blaster was attached to the front of the Decepticon vessel but not fully integrated into it—Wreck-Gar could tell that through his scopes—the debris of Junkion stabilized. Still there was a large central piece of the planetoid, and it was near there that the Decepticons kept their ship. They could have the Requiem Blaster as far as Wreck-Gar was concerned. He liked Optimus Prime and particularly Jazz, who kept him laughing, but the Junkions had been getting along just fine until all these bots from Cybertron had shown up with their grievances and their quests and their wars. The sooner they all got going wherever it was they were going, the better.

  The resilient and innovative Junkions, long used to making do in difficult circumstances, had already begun to build links between the larger pieces that had remained close together. Search parties were sent out to the fringes of the debris field to recover bots who had been marooned on smaller pieces of the planetoid that had traveled farther and faster in the Requiem Blaster’s wake.

  “Well!” Wreck-Gar proclaimed. “Now we have an asteroid field! Let’s get working it! Break it down! Let’s make some junk!”

  If there was anything Junkions had, it was a can-do spirit. They threw themselves into the task at hand with a minimum of grumbling about the passage of Autobots and Decepticons that had caused the whole problem in the first place. There was no bot so stoic as a Junkion.

  When another ship appeared at the edges of the debris field not fifty cycles into the reclamation project, the Junkions looked up, took notice, and then went back to what they did best. They salvaged, they rebuilt, they made do. Wreck-Gar would handle it. He always did.

  Looking up, he saw that the Decepticon ship—or bot or whichever—had stopped and still hung in near space, linked to Junkion by a long stream of little pieces of what had once been his planet. Must be hard to pilot that ship, Wreck-Gar thought. Got all that drag on the front, plus it brings every little bit of space junk right into your path.

  It was me, he thought, I’d get rid of it. Doubt there’s a weapon worth risking your ship to have.

  The Autobots’ Ark had fired away from the surface when Junkion had started to break apart, but now Wreck-Gar saw it returning. “Great fiery furnace!” he roared. “These Cybertronians need to leave us alone.”

  But of course he knew they wouldn’t. Even now the Ark was touching down again. Wreck-Gar stood by as Detritus welded a cable into a pulley fixture. At the other end of the cable was an electromagnet, one of Wreck-Gar’s—and the Junkions’—prize possessions. It was turned off because Junkion’s power grid and JunkNet were in pieces, but Wreck-Gar was not going to lose it.

  He looked up from Detritus’s work, and as his optics readjusted, he saw one of the Autobots there: Jazz. “You messed up my junk!” Wreck-Gar shouted. “You Cybertronians, what a mess!”

  “Agreed,” said Jazz. “It’s a mess, all right. Maybe you can help us clean it up.”

  It was the damaged Skywarp, half-delirious and rolling around in one corner of the Nemesis’s bridge, who suddenly sat up and said, “Megatron. Something’s going on with the Blaster.” Then he started screaming again as the diagnostic drone went back to work on him.

  Megatron couldn’t help but laugh. It was always the sadists who couldn’t take pain.

  Around him on the bridge, the Seekers were struggling to keep control of the Nemesis, which in ship mode was balky a
nd stubborn even when it didn’t have a Requiem Blaster hastily grafted onto its front. When its thrusters fired, they no longer created drive along its central axis because of the hefty weapon. When it ran sensor sweeps, the Blaster interfered with them. They were piloting through a field of millions of pieces of junk using bare bot optics and unenhanced bot reflexes.

  “I don’t believe it,” Slipstream said when she had run an external scan. “It’s Optimus Prime!”

  “Go,” Megatron commanded. “Get him loose so we can use the Blaster. If he wrecks it or takes it off the hull, don’t come back.”

  Slipstream was gone in a flash. Ahead of them hung the Space Bridge that led back to Velocitron. Megatron was thinking of what Velocitron would look like after he had taken a couple of shots at the speedway with the Requiem Blaster. Override wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss him then. Of course, by then it would be too late for her, anyway. Ransack, too, in all likelihood. Megatron didn’t trust him. He would install his own bots to run Velocitron. Then he would get these Junkions working to repair the Space Bridges, and the might of the Decepticons would overspread the galaxy.

  As soon, of course, as Slipstream pried Optimus Prime off the front of the Nemesis and Megatron got to test the Requiem Blaster on his hated adversary.

  “If we try to go through a Space Bridge like this, there’s no telling what’s going to happen,” Starscream said. “I mean, go ahead if you want to, but we might all come out a billion cycles from now turned into rubber. Or just melted. Or dead.”

  “Silence,” Megatron said. “Once we get Optimus off the Nemesis, we can either test the Requiem Blaster on him or leave him drifting here. Then we can come back to finish him off.”

  “As you command, Megatron,” Starscream said. “But we can’t hit him with the Blaster when he’s tearing its barrel off, and I don’t see anyone other than Slipstream in a big hurry to go out there and fight him.”

  Megatron stepped up close to Starscream. “Maybe that’s a job for you, my trusted lieutenant.”

  “Order refused, sir,” Starscream said with an ironic salute.

  “Then maybe I ought to just dispose of you.”

  “Maybe you should,” Starscream said. “On the other hand, while you’re distracted doing that, the Nemesis could be hit by a big piece of Junkion.”

  It was a standoff. Megatron looked around the bridge and saw that all the Seekers were looking back at him. Once again he realized that as a group, the Seekers would always stick with each other. “You want to go back?”

  “We need to make planetfall again,” Starscream said. “The quicker we do it, the quicker we’ll be able to bring the Requiem Blaster to bear.”

  Megatron had the desire to kill so badly that he couldn’t think about anything else. It was worse than anything he had ever wanted since his first kill in the ring, and now that Starscream had gotten him thinking about a final battle, just he and Optimus Prime, that compulsion was almost enough to make him do something crazy.

  Almost.

  “Very well, Starscream,” he said. “We go back, and you make sure you bring me the heads of the Autobots. And nobody disposes of Optimus but me. Understood?”

  “A race,” Starscream said. “With Optimus Prime’s head as the finish line. I like it.”.

  Megatron locked optics with him. “You’re not going to like it when you lose.”

  “Let’s get to it,” Starscream said.

  “Yes,” Megatron said. “Thundercracker, bring the Nemesis back down to that central piece of Junkion. Lock it in place with a tractor beam and let’s finish this.”

  “One shot,” Skywarp was babbling. “One shot and we’d be rid of the Ark and Optimus Prime once and for all.”

  “Not while he is still on our hull, you fool,” Megatron said. “Much as I hate to say it, Starscream is right. So do it.”

  The Nemesis turned, shuddering under the impacts of debris, including unfortunate Junkions that had followed the Requiem Blaster and now were an obstacle course in the Nemesis’s path back to Junkion. “Take that, librarian,” Megatron muttered. Perhaps, he mused, they would get a stroke of luck and Optimus Prime—as well as Slipstream—would be scraped off the Nemesis by a fortuitously placed bit of Junkion. What an ignoble ending that would be for a bot whose life had been defined by dedication to ideals. Even Megatron could acknowledge that.

  Once he had allowed himself to imagine ruling with Optimus Prime at his side. Of course, Optimus Prime had been Orion Pax, trusted adviser to the true Prime.

  Megatron Prime.

  But that was never going to happen. What was going to happen now was that the Nemesis was going to turn around and bring the Requiem Blaster back to the biggest piece left of the interstellar trash heap that was Junkion, and when the Nemesis was landed and Optimus Prime was ready to display his courage in the full view of the other Autobots and the Junkions—that was when Megatron was going to put an end to the librarian once and for all.

  Peace through tyranny demanded that occasionally a courageous member of the opposition be made an example of. Megatron should have done it a long time ago, before the war had really started, back when the Decepticons were still setting off explosions at Six Lasers and the industrial complexes of the Hydrax Plateau. Much might have been different.

  But it was not different. It was as it was, and Optimus Prime would simply have to die now, instead.

  The Autobots had a lot to answer for, was Wreck-Gar’s opinion. He wanted to know why they hadn’t told him what they were looking for. He wanted to know why Optimus Prime had disappeared right when the Decepticon ship had, and he wanted to know how exactly the Junkions were supposed to do their work when the entire planet had fallen apart. If Wreck-Gar had wanted to mine asteroids, he would have found asteroids to mine.

  All those questions would wait for the next time Wreck-Gar could slow Optimus Prime down long enough to get some answers. Right now, in the middle of salvaging the electromagnet, he also wanted to know who had piloted the immense battle cruiser that only recently had entered just above the debris field’s ecliptic. It was a kind of ship Wreck-Gar had never seen before, but its purpose was clear from its design: Wedge-shaped with an energy-harvesting foil extending down from its keel, the ship bristled with armaments, from heavy cannon to the spiky clusters of needlebeam emplacements. Wreck-Gar could see ports on either side of it that, if he was any judge of military ship design, would open to disgorge smaller one- and two-bot craft for the purpose of close attack or space-to-ground assault. On its stern, he could see a glyph: an armored face and what could be crossed swords.

  Coming in a cluster from the great black arrowhead of a ship, smaller landing ships touched down in a circle around Wreck-Gar and his crew where they were still tethering the cable to hold the immense electromagnet. He ignored the ships—there was work to be done—until their leader, a king-size silver and blue bot with one normal foot and the other leg ending just below the knee in a long unadorned steel strut, strode from one of the ships. He was larger than Wreck-Gar, his plating accented with yellow spikes and claws that were not all ornamental. From the center of his torso glowed the menacing red eyes and mouth of a stylized leonine face, and his head was adorned with brow plates and spiky blue protrusions. The entire effect was a bit overdetermined for Wreck-Gar’s taste, but then again, he preferred an understated, workmanlike look.

  “Bah-weep-graaaahnah wheep ni ni bong.”

  Wreck-Gar had not heard the universal greeting in a long time. He gave it right back. “Welcome to Junkion!” he added. “Need something broken down, junked, un-junked, we do it!”

  The big blue bot reached out and seized Wreck-Gar by the throat, lifting him off the ground. Wreck-Gar was pretty big himself, and even in the middle of his shock he was thinking that there weren’t many bots out there who could do what this one was doing. “Gurk,” he said. “Junk!”

  “Are you the leader of these bots?” the invader growled.

  Now, how did he know that?
Wreck-Gar wondered. “I am Wreck-Gar!” he said, getting his composure back even if his feet weren’t touching the ground. If this bot thought he was going to intimdate Wreck-Gar, he was in for a surprise. “Who’s asking?”

  “Tell me where the Cybertronians are,” the one-legged bot said.

  “Look around,” Wreck-Gar said. “We got junk here!”

  “Tell me where they are!”

  Now Wreck-Gar was angry and didn’t bother to hide it. “This is Junkion. No time for this! Too much to build!” He really didn’t have time for this. There were machine shops, foundries, furnaces, and the spaceport to put back together.

  The leader looked left and right. “Cannonball, Brimstone. Convince them,” he said. At this cue, two of his henchmen—one-wheeled and one-legged but both larger than Wreck-Gar—converged on the nearest Junkion, who happened to be Arclight. Before any of the Junkions knew what was happening, one of the bots seized Arclight’s arms and the other tore his head from his shoulders in a burst of sparks. Arclight’s legs shot out straight, and the bot holding his arms let his decapitated body go. There was dead silence.

  “Tell me where the Cybertronians are,” the one-legged bot said again after the last sparks had stopped jumping from Arclight’s severed head.

  In the shocked silence, Wreck-Gar said, “Now, hold on.” He thought furiously, knowing that the Junkions stood no chance in a fight against these invaders. Could he sacrifice one of his Junkions? Who? Or could … He glanced up at the sky and saw that in the distance, almost as far as the Space Bridge the Autobots had used to come from Velocitron, the Nemesis and the Ark had stopped.

  Were they coming back? Or …?

  “My patience is limited,” said the one-legged bot, his voice low but ominous.

  Then Wreck-Gar’s old friend Detritus, who had barely made it out of the wreckage of the furnace at the bottom of the pit, stepped forward to rescue Wreck-Gar from the dilemma of leadership.