Exiles Read online

“Axer’s a Cybertronian,” he said, pointing across the empty space between two drifting bits of Junkion. “He’s been here for a long time, but he’s Cybertronian.”

  Wreck-Gar kept silent. There was no proof to corroborate Detritus’s story, but he was grateful that the decision had been taken out of his hands. Because Detritus did not lie. Ever. If he said Axer was Cybertronian, it was true.

  And if a Cybertronian had to be sacrificed so that the Junkions might live, well, Wreck-Gar figured, that was another problem that could be laid at Optimus Prime’s feet. Nobody had asked the Autobots to come to Junkion, and the Junkions had no reason to love them after what had happened to their planet with the excavation of the Requiem Blaster.

  Plus, he had no love for Axer, who even if he was not Cybertronian was almost certainly a murderer.

  The pirate leader followed Detritus’s pointing arm. “If we do not find this Cybertronian there,” he said, “we will be back. And we will be angry.”

  “You’ll find him,” Detritus said. “Now leave us.”

  They did, and as the invaders poured back into their landing craft, Wreck-Gar noticed that there were two of Detritus.

  No, he thought, but why should he have been surprised that Makeshift had escaped during the upheavals that had practically destroyed Junkion? “You, Makeshift,” he said, and the shifter flickered out of Detritus’s form into his own: a plain, unburnished gray.

  “At your service,” Makeshift said.

  “I don’t want your service, junk!” Wreck-Gar said. “You I want dead! Junkions, destroy him!”

  “Aw, come on, Wreck-Gar,” Makeshift said, his form already beginning to shift. “You’re not still holding a grudge about Shearbolt when you have all of these other problems?”

  He vanished into a flickering succession of forms, running through the Junkions, who kept searching for a good shot and passing it up because Makeshift kept assuming the form of the nearest Junkion. He disappeared into the rubble and was gone.

  Wreck-Gar felt sick. “Junkions,” he said, speaking slowly so he would not be misunderstood, “when these Autobots and Decepticons are gone, remind me to destroy the Space Bridges after them.”

  They looked down at the decapitated body of Arclight. Then an explosion sounded from the drifting fragment that Makeshift had sent the invaders to. Across the narrow void, Wreck-Gar and the other Junkions watched as a brief fight erupted. Then the landing ship lifted off the large bit of flotsam. They expected it to return to the larger ship, which loomed over the Junkion debris, blotting out fifteen degrees of starfield, but instead it looped back toward the recovery site where Wreck-Gar and his crew had returned to their work. Almost before it had braked to a landing, the pirate’s minions were among them, fighting nonlethally but irresistibly. Wreck-Gar tried to fight, but surprise and superior numbers were too much. Before they could muster any real resistance, Wreck-Gar and several other Junkions were magnetically bound and thrust together into a group for the pirate leader’s inspection. Detritus was closest to him, on his left.

  At the rear of the pirates—increasingly, that was what Wreck-Gar was sure they were—flapped a winged bot unlike the Autobot or Decepticon Seekers. From its steel talons dangled Axer.

  “I have the Cybertronian,” the pirate leader said. “But that’s not all I need.”

  He pointed up toward the ruins of the Space Bridge that hung glimmering in the middle distance, near the original site of Junkion. “How long has it been since that Space Bridge functioned?”

  Wreck-Gar shrugged, unwilling to give this pirate even the semblance of cooperation. “A long time.” He did not mention that one of the other ones worked. The way Wreck-Gar had it figured, he was issuing information to pirates on a strictly as-requested basis.

  “You will make it work again,” the pirate leader said. “But not the way it originally did.” He motioned to his minions, who roughly dragged the Junkions onto the landing craft. It wasn’t until they were all aboard the ship that Wreck-Gar found out what the pirate captain wanted them to do.

  Slipstream’s first attack very nearly knocked Optimus Prime loose from the death grip he had on the base of the Requiem Blaster’s barrel. A piece of the barrel housing came loose in Optimus Prime’s hand, and he broke it again over Slipstream’s head as he scrambled to get his feet planted. In bot-form, Slipstream fought hand to hand with the occasional aid of a short-range energy cannon that fired so fast that its individual bolts almost became a white-hot plasma curtain. She brought that cannon to bear, and Optimus Prime slammed it aside with the last piece of the Requiem Blaster’s barrel housing.

  He looked over his shoulder and saw the Nemesis was swinging around, taking a course that would miss the Space Bridge by a long way but put the ship on a direct intercept course for the central remnant of Junkion.

  Where the Ark, too, was returning, its engines barely flickering and crystalline puffs of escaping gas trailing behind it. Sideswipe was executing the plan perfectly.

  Megatron, thought Optimus Prime. You just can’t resist the idea that you can put this ship down and finish things face to face.

  One shall stand, Optimus thought. And one shall fall.

  Slipstream came at him again, grappling him up against the makeshift turret the Nemesis had created to hold on to the Blaster. Optimus Prime deflected a punch from Slipstream that left a dent in that turret instead; counterpunching, he caught Slipstream flush in the face. The dazed Seeker slipped along the outside of the Nemesis’s hull but caught herself. Once again she came after Optimus Prime, this time firing a barrage of energy bolts on her approach. Optimus felt the burn and the sting of them, but he put his head down and charged right into Slipstream’s attack.

  They met head-on with a crash that boomed through the hull of the Nemesis and was undoubtedly audible to the Decepticons inside. Optimus Prime, bouncing back from the impact, caught the Requiem Blaster’s barrel again. With his other arm, he caught the unconscious Slipstream, giving her another couple of taps to make sure she stayed unconscious.

  Then he heaved Slipstream upward so she would pass in front of the Nemesis’s bridge.

  Come and get me, brother, he thought. Either here or when we get back to Junkion. I will meet you either place.

  One shall stand. One shall fall.

  Junkion—what was left of it—loomed ahead. The Autobots’ Ark—seemingly flying on its own but still visibly in the final stages of repairs that seemed as if they could never be completed—drifted near the remnant planetoid, having given up its pursuit of the Nemesis. It limped back toward Junkion, fighting the tug of the Requiem Blaster all the way. Megatron hoped that not too many of the Autobots had perished in the disintegration of Junkion.

  He wanted them all to see what was coming.

  Some of the drifting wrecks that littered the near space between Junkion and the line of Space Bridges would be fine additions to the Decepticon fleet, particularly the great black wedge of a ship that hung on the far side of the debris field. Megatron could see Junkions crawling over its surface, torches flaring as they did what Junkions did: They worked. Farther out, one of the Space Bridges—and this surprised even Megatron, who prided himself on never being surprised by anything—appeared to be in the grip of a tractor beam and was being drawn in slowly toward another waiting crew of Junkions. Its lights glittered; Megatron wondered where it led. It had been on one end of the string of Space Bridges arrayed at the edge of Junkion’s gravitational influence. Now the other three were beginning to drift apart.

  If the Junkions were trying to get that monster into fighting form, it would be a formidable opponent. But the Nemesis would be a match for it. Megatron was confident that the Nemesis would be a match for any ship yet built.

  What they would want a Space Bridge for, Megatron had no idea. Once he had settled things with Optimus Prime, he would find out. And then the battleship would be the first addition to that new Decepticon fleet he envisioned.

  Except once he had destroyed
Optimus Prime, the Nemesis could return to Cybertron and mop up the rest of the doomed Autobots, and there would be no immediate need for a Decepticon fleet. Not that lack of immediate need would stop Megatron from wanting a fleet. Or building one. Or using one as soon as he could find another world to use it on.

  All of that was getting ever so slightly ahead of things, however, given the fact that the librarian was still grappling with Slipstream on the external hull of the Nemesis, right under the barrel of the Requiem Blaster. First things first. He could dream of a fleet once he had news that Optimus had been disposed of.

  Except, apparently Optimus wasn’t willing to go along with that plan. Slipstream, battered and limp, drifted past the portals at the side of the Nemesis’s bridge.

  “Get us back to Junkion, now!” Megatron ordered.

  First things first, indeed.

  There is much that even I do not know about my companions among the Thirteen. I would not be surprised if more of them than I had guessed still travel among the stars, waiting for history’s great wheel to bring them back together in some combination that only the great Wizard of Forms, Nexus Prime, could have predicted.

  Nexus Prime was always a difficult ally because he was a difficult bot to predict. Proud and enormously powerful, he could also be humorous and even a bit of a prankster, although I confess I do not remember any of his jokes and in all likelihood did not find them funny. The times of the Thirteen did not permit of much levity.

  Vector Prime was very different.

  Of the Fallen and Liege Maximo, there is little I wish to say. And of Solus Prime, I have said all I care to. The others … there are too many stories. I cannot tell them all at once and cannot inscribe them all in the Covenant. How many pages would it take to do justice to the lives of one of the Thirteen? Sometimes I think there are not that many pages in the entirety of the Covenant, and yet there are great numbers of bots who think the age of the Thirteen is passed or that they (that we, I should say) never existed at all.

  History is a great winnower, but what is winnowed out sometimes is the truth.

  Vector Prime, of all of us, most believed in the supremacy of ideals. He had at the core of his being an understanding of the immutability of natural law, the essence of time and space and existence. He held us Thirteen together—it now, so many cycles later, seems to me—by the sheer force of his belief.

  But no belief survives forever. The passage of time destroys all things. Even, if we are to believe the scientists who theorize on the nature of our universe and others, time itself. The great creator, the great destroyer, time annihilates even the idea of time in the end. First, however, it gradually erodes the memories of even the greatest of ideas. And ideals.

  Vector Prime saw this happening in the aftermath of the wars we fought among ourselves. When the Fallen murdered Solus Prime and another conflict erupted around the ambitions of Liege Maximo, Vector Prime saw that he could no longer act as our exemplar because we had lost our ability to follow any example. We had become too enamored of ourselves as the Thirteen, the mighty avatars of all bots who were to follow; we no longer knew how to view ourselves honestly or speak to each other without the hostility and condescension that comes from thinking that only you—only I—am really worthy.

  More even than Solus Prime’s death, it was the revelation of Liege Maximo’s treachery that ended Vector Prime’s desire to be part of us. He could understand a moment of fury such as overtook the Fallen when he killed Solus Prime. But Vector Prime was unable to tolerate living in a universe where bot would plot against bot.

  He was ready to escape to his own universe, and so he did.

  It may be that Optimus Prime can find him. I tried, long ago. Then, with Alchemist Prime, I began to oversee the beginnings of civilization on this planet, and I lost track of the search for Vector Prime. Once Cybertron began to grow, there was enough to do here. Alchemist Prime, seeing that this civilization was running and would survive, disappeared to hunt for Liege Maximo, who had fled to a distant vastness, galaxies away. Eventually he was caught, and I believe—although who can know, with the Space Bridges collapsed and the archives devastated by war—that Liege Maximo is imprisoned still. Only Alchemist Prime knows for certain, and he has not been seen since well before the Age of Wrath.

  Alchemist Prime was the last of the Thirteen I saw. But right before that, I saw Nexus Prime for the last time as well.

  He, you must understand, was almost exactly the polar opposite to Vector Prime. A lover of change, of mutability, Nexus Prime had this in common with the trickster Amalgamous Prime. He differed in temperament, however, and in the nature of his mutability. Nexus Prime could bring a number of bots together and mold them into a single form. He was the first and greatest of the combiners. Even when he stood by himself, he seemed overlaid with the forms of possible combinations.

  He was fascinated by the transformations of matter: phase change, the creation of new elements in the mighty forges of stars. He vexed some of the other Thirteen, but I believe Solus Prime was a little bit in love with him. She, who also had all of her soul invested in creation, could not help but see a kindred spirit in Nexus Prime.

  This, of course, made the Fallen and Liege Maximo hate him all the more.

  These stories are old, older than the dust under the feet of Shockwave’s Insecticon soldiers, who are doubtless coming here even now to drag this bot away. I will fight them, and the Wreckers will fight them with me, and whether we live or die, our resolve will be known. That truth, I hope, will not be among those winnowed away in the great arc of history.

  I have been experiencing visions of the Cyber Caliber. This is why Nexus Prime is on my mind. It was he who collected the pieces of the Cyber Caliber after the terrible battle with Liege Maximo, and he who hit upon a scheme to make sure that time and circumstance would only grant the return of the Cyber Caliber when it was necessary, when its loss could no longer be acceptable.

  Only Nexus Prime could have conceived of the expedient of shattering himself into five bots and concealing one of the pieces of the Cyber Caliber within each. And even if another of the Thirteen had conceived of it, only Nexus Prime would have been willing to do it. He was our mad experimenter, our bot who could envision anything and try to make it happen, our member who could see himself in any bot and any bot in himself. When the Cyber Caliber needed to be hidden, he simply envisioned his single body as five … and so it was.

  That was the last time any of the remaining Thirteen ever saw him.

  It is a different universe, a different history, now. I am the last of the Thirteen who still exists among the bots whose worlds we created, whose culture and civilization we set in motion. I am a holdover from ancient times, hunkered down amid relics of a past that only I experienced or can remember …

  Unless some of the rest of us still survive.

  Perhaps the Fallen lives. Liege Maximo, as I said, is imprisoned or perhaps has died. Vector Prime vanished into a pocket universe of his own creation so long ago that his creation might well have wound down into a heat death of its own by now; Nexus Prime’s five constituent parts have never been heard from again, but how would we know if they had?

  The rest … of them I know nothing.

  You must have understood some of this before I sent you, Chaindrive. For I believe there is something of the Thirteen in you …

  But those musings are for another time.

  Shockwave is coming.

  When the Nemesis came unexpectedly around to angle itself for deployment of the Decepticon ground forces, Optimus Prime realized they had been gone longer than he had thought. He had been busy fighting off the sorties of the Seekers, who harried him constantly on his way back until he figured out that they would not shoot at the Requiem Blaster. He hunkered down in his original spot, just below the base of the Blaster’s barrel, and grappled with Slipstream and Thundercracker when they came in to pry him out manually. Slipstream possessed remarkable powers of recovery, Opti
mus Prime noted, almost as remarkable as the constant stream of insult and invective that poured out of her mouth while they battled. He had fought them off, but they were still swooping around the Nemesis, and Optimus Prime could not get away from the Blaster without exposing himself to a barrage of missiles. The stalemate was fine with him, as it gave him time to regroup and undoubtedly gave the rest of the Autobots time to marshal their limited resources in anticipation of the Decepticon landing.

  Optimus Prime took stock of the situation. He was under fire on the cowling of a ship whose entire crew bore him implacable ill will. That crew—and their immensely powerful leader who had once been his friend—was charged with killing him and destroying everything he stood for. They were barreling through a hail of drifting debris to a final confrontation on the remains of a planet that only recently had been torn into pieces, and the ship he was counting on to carry him forward on his quest was damaged and barely able to keep itself from crashing into larger bits of debris.

  In a situation like this, careful prioritization was almost as important as firepower. There would be plenty of time to complete repairs on the Ark once the Decepticon threat had been dealt with. First he would handle the impending rendezous on the central remnant of Junkion itself, where Megatron no doubt would attempt to end the Autobot resistance once and for all.

  Where were the Autobots? Optimus craned around, but he could not see the Ark and could not move far from his position without exposing himself to fire from the Seekers. The Nemesis made its final approach to the central fragment of Junkion, with the shattered pit still at its center. Optimus Prime also saw Wreck-Gar’s improvised Energon reactor drifting free, emitting occasional sparks as other, smaller pieces of debris deflected off it. If it collided more forcefully with a larger bit of junk, it could well detonate with enough force to destroy a ship. Optimus filed that away, thinking that a floating bomb might come in handy in the battle to come.