Exiles Read online

  They would need all the help they could get.

  Over the edge of pit where the Decepticons had made their discovery, crossing a deep-cut canyon that snaked away into the broken horizon, stood a bridge erected eons ago for purposes long since forgotten by the Junkions who excavated beneath it. Perhaps it once had led to one of their innumerable machine shops or smelters, or perhaps a Junkion had built it simply because he had seen a gorge and reasoned that any gorge needed a bridge to span it. It was made from scavenged girders and beams, pieces of ship hulls, and other bits of metal whose original function was impossible to determine.

  That gorge grew shallower the farther away from the pit it ran, and at the shallow end of it lay the ship of the now-imprisoned Decepticon Axer, who was at that moment scheming to find ways to make himself indispensable to the pirate captain; that was the only way he could envision not being killed by the bot’s mad hatred of all things Cybertronian.

  From the tumbled wreckage just downhill from Axer’s ship, another bot stood up and looked around as if in confusion. That wreckage once had been the ship that Axer was looting when the delayed release of Space Bridge energy had catapulted him to Junkion. This drifting wreck had come, too, and so had its sole crew member, who now appeared to get its bearings and head straight for the pit, where Clocker, Mainspring, Chaindrive, and Pinion waited.

  The Junkions worked at an incredible pace. Megatron would not have thought it possible for them to do everything that they had. “When I have enslaved these Junkions,” he said to Starscream, who, to Megatron’s irritation, still refused to take part in the harassment of Optimus Prime outside, “they will do great work for us.”

  “Without a doubt, yes,” Starscream said. “Nobody works with pride and commitment like a slave.”

  Megatron let that slide, so fixated was he on the transformation of the ship. The sides of the immense battle cruiser, with its improvised and customized weapons emplacements and its fixtures cannibalized from a thousand different cultures, now were adorned with the two halves of the Space Bridge nearest to the center of the Junkion debris field. Held to the main body of the vessel by long struts welded together from the longer and straighter pieces of steel found floating near the ship, the Space Bridge halves began to glow as if charged by some unknown source.

  Megatron almost hated to tear himself away. But the Nemesis had reached the main remaining part of Junkion, and it was time for that face-to-face killing he’d been so anxious to start. Later he would add that ship to his fleet.

  “Optimus Prime is out!” crackled Thundercracker’s voice over the command commlink.

  “After him,” Megatron commanded. “Harry, but do not kill.”

  Leaving the Nemesis to hold its position, he charged toward the drop doors, spoiling for a fight.

  When the Nemesis got close to Junkion, the surviving Autobots on Junkion’s central remnant watched in awe as several things happened simultaneously. The great ship came in low over the edge of the pit opposite the Ark’s initial crash site. Behind it, the Ark drifted in, barely able to move itself but now drawn again back toward Junkion by the pull of the Requiem Blaster. As it reached an altitude from which Prowl could almost have hit it with a thrown knife, it held and drop doors on its underside opened.

  At the same time, Optimus Prime, dangling from the barrel housing of the Requiem Blaster, jumped.

  “Optimus!” Silverbolt yelled, and took off even as a stream of Decepticons began pouring from the Nemesis. Two of them—Thundercracker and Slipstream—had been outside it already and dived after the falling Optimus Prime.

  Silverbolt got there first, swooping alongside Optimus Prime and offering a wing for Prime to hold on to. But this slowed him down, and missile bursts began to track them in their descending path toward the Autobot encampment along the rim of the pit. The Ark had drifted within the gravitational influence of the Requiem Blaster again, and Sideswipe was barely able to keep it from another hard landing. Optimus Prime looked down, concerned for the well-being of the other bots on board, but he could do nothing about that now.

  The Nemesis completed its deployment of Decepticon forces and hovered near the bottom of the pit, which after the upheavals from the excavation of the Requiem Blaster was much shallower.

  “We have no time,” Optimus Prime said to Silverbolt. “You must get me as close as you can to Megatron.”

  “You got it,” Silverbolt said, but Skywarp and Thundercracker at that moment blasted them with a missile salvo and Optimus Prime lost his grip. “Optimus!” called Silverbolt, but Optimus Prime was falling, and the impact of the Seeker missiles had knocked Silverbolt off course. There was nothing either of them could do.

  Optimus Prime crashed into a steep slope of wreckage collapsed out of some of the terraces destroyed in the Blaster-quake. He caused a further collapse and rode the churning path of junk down to the pit floor, where, when he got to his feet and looked around, he found Autobots rushing to help him. “Get back to the Ark,” Optimus said. “It’s defenseless without you to protect it.”

  At least they were at the shallow end, he thought, looking up at a bridge that spanned a wide crack in the planetoid’s surface.

  “That might be true,” Ironhide said. “But we can’t leave you here.”

  “Maybe so …” Optimus Prime said. He felt a strange tingle in the air, an almost tangible crackle of connection as, for the first time, all four of them—Mainspring, Clocker, Chaindrive, and Pinion—stood next to one another.

  “What’s going on?” Jazz said, looking at the four suspiciously. He could feel it, too.

  None of them knew.

  From the crack in the pit’s wall stepped a bot, dull gray in color with black spiral markings running up his arms and legs. Every Autobot present aimed a weapon at him. He did not look worried.

  “Are you—” he began, but Jazz cut him off.

  “Never mind who we are, bot,” Jazz said. “Who are you?”

  “I was called Cannonspring in my time,” he said. “But from the looks of things, my time was very far in the past.”

  “You were—” Optimus Prime began to speak, then stopped as he saw that the crackle in the air had intensified and visible radiance was beginning to link Cannonspring with Pinion, Clocker, Chaindrive, and Mainspring. What connection could there be among these bots? Pinion was a Junkion, Clocker and Mainspring Velocitronian, Chaindrive from Cybertron, and Cannonspring’s origins were still a mystery.

  “I was entrusted by two of the Thirteen with critical roles,” Cannonspring said as energy began to bleed among the five bots. “You have already seen what Vector Prime required of me.”

  Optimus Prime understood. Cannonspring once had carried the piece of the Blades of Time that had fallen into Axer’s hands. “I failed in that mission,” Cannonspring said.

  “Are you an engineer of Space Bridges?” Optimus Prime asked. Then he answered his own question. “No. Do not assume guilt for the errors of others.”

  “You correct me, Prime,” Cannonspring said with a slight bow. “My thanks.”

  Then he turned to the other four bots grouped together by the curls and tendrils of plasma: Pinion closest, then Chaindrive, then Clocker and Mainspring standing shoulder to shoulder as always. “My brothers,” Cannonspring said. “I was as near to dead as a bot can be, but the four of you together reinvigorated my Spark. Now the world will see why we were separated.”

  “Separated?” Jazz echoed.

  The swirl of plasma among the five bots grew thicker and, it seemed to Optimus Prime, hotter. Their forms began to merge together, incredibly, and for a moment Optimus Prime thought that all five of them were shifters. He wondered if Makeshift was nearby, but the thought was blown out of his head by a powerful chord struck in the fabric of the universe, as if something had been fundamentally altered …

  Or restored.

  Where there had been five bots now stood one. His was a difficult form to keep an eye on or describe, and his face constant
ly changed. A shifter, yes, thought Optimus Prime. But the sense of power flowing from this bot told him that what he was looking at was no ordinary shifter.

  As if in answer to that torrent of power, the Matrix spoke within Optimus Prime’s mind. It did not form language, but it granted understanding.

  Nexus Prime.

  The Wizard of Forms. Optimus Prime thought he surely must have fallen into a whirlpool of time in which the ancient history of Cybertron was merging with these dark days and bringing together the greatest bots in history with those who struggled after the might of their example.

  He bowed. “Nexus Prime,” he said.

  “Do not bow to me, Optimus Prime,” Nexus Prime said. “We are of a brotherhood, you and I.”

  Optimus Prime was not sure how to take this. He waited, since Nexus Prime was still speaking, and drawing forth—from his body!—a great weapon. It was as long as his arm, a shining steel blade with no hilt and seemingly nothing to it but edge and light, as if Solus Prime had forged it from the ideal of sharpness and the densest, most perfect material at the heart of the universe’s oldest stars.

  It was the Cyber Caliber.

  “Take it, Optimus Prime,” Nexus Prime said. “I have carried it within the five pieces of myself, across stars in their living and dying, across civilizations and worlds, across roads made from the dust of dead planets and through skies alight with the blaze of unimagined discoveries. I have seen change! And through it, I was change, and my one constancy was that I carried this blade. Now I relinquish it to the Prime whose weapon it should be.”

  Optimus Prime held his hands out to receive the blade, overwhelmed at what seemed like the sudden appearance of myths come to life around him. The blade lay flat across his palms, magnificent and brilliant.

  He raised the Cyber Caliber and saw the gleam of starlight on its blade, felt its ancient power resonating with the Matrix of Leadership within him. He felt as if he had taken a step toward realizing a destiny he had never known was his … and the stirrings of a deeper knowledge came to him. He had held this sword before.

  “A marvelous toy, librarian,” came a voice from above.

  Optimus Prime looked up to see Megatron standing on the bridge.

  “But you will never get to use it unless you use it right now,” Megatron went on, “because I, too, have found a marvelous toy.”

  Optimus Prime looked back into the pit and saw the Nemesis rising and turning now that it had released its complement of Decepticon foot soldiers. In a flash he understood that there was only one chance to even out this fatal imbalance in armaments. “Autobots,” he said. “Hold the Nemesis as long as you can.”

  Then he leaped to the nearest bridge support and began to climb.

  “Is it online?” the pirate leader asked.

  Wreck-Gar nodded. “It will work.”

  “You have saved your own life and the lives of your Junkions,” said the one-legged bot. “But I will keep you to work.”

  “You do not have that right,” Wreck-Gar said. “I am a free bot and determine my own fate.”

  The pirate leader laughed. “You go ahead and try to determine your own fate around here, bot. You’ll find out how fast I can determine it for you. Now let’s go have us some revenge on Cybertronians.”

  “Why do you hate them?” Wreck-Gar asked.

  “The same reason you should!” the pirate captain exploded. “They sent us out into the universe over their Space Bridges, then they let the Space Bridges collapse into junk and left us out in black space to die. Only a fool would not hate them.”

  He turned away from Wreck-Gar and watched Junkion grow in the ship’s viewport. “And I am no fool,” he concluded. To his pilot Sandstorm he said, “First we take their ships. Then we take them.”

  As the Decepticons marched around the edge of the pit, Prowl, Ironhide, Jazz, and Bumblebee met them with a hail of missiles, plasma bolts, solid slugs, and—once they had closed the distance—the strength of their arms. They tore through the Decepticons. But they were not taking a toll fast enough.

  Silverbolt came in, trailed by Skywarp and Thundercracker. He jinked and dodged close to the Nemesis, hoping to confuse the pursuing Seekers into hitting the Nemesis with their own fire and keep them away from the Autobots on the ground. That, too, was a desperate ploy, and Optimus Prime knew it. The Nemesis was more than able to withstand attacks from individual bots.

  Below, in the shadow of the Nemesis, Nexus Prime manifested a great blade from the material of his body. It was black as space, and reflected no light: the Omni Saber. Alone he faced down the advancing Decepticons on the pit floor and on the lower part of its walls. He could have killed them but did not. But neither would he let them pass. Optimus Prime climbed the bridge support, his view of the surface and sky blocked by the Nemesis and the pit wall above him. He saw the Requiem Blaster slowly swinging around to come to bear, and he knew he had to confront Megatron before it could be used.

  Desperation, thought Optimus Prime. From the beginning it has been our only constant companion. The Autobots had turned desperation into victory countless times since the beginning of the war. Now they would have to do it again.

  * * *

  The Requiem Blaster functioned by drawing energy through the very fabric of space-time from the enormous reservoirs of nearby stars and black holes. Heat, light, gravity—all forms of energy could fuel it, and it synthesized them into a discharge of such violence that no bot had ever been known to survive it. Now the Nemesis, under the direction of Megatron, brought the Blaster slowly to bear as its other weapons systems blasted away the floating junk that rose into its field of fire, attracted by the Blaster’s powerful gravity. The attacks of smaller Autobots had a minimal effect on the immense Nemesis, as the Decepticons who had traveled there with Megatron rallied to it and took the fight to the Autobots.

  Optimus Prime knew that there was one chance—and one chance only—to alter the course of the battle. The Nemesis on its own would use the Requiem Blaster to scour the field of Autobots, saving Optimus Prime for last because it knew even a Prime could not stand against the entire Decepticon force.

  But Megatron … Megatron might be swayed if his emotions could be made to overrule his tactical sense. It had happened before. The Autobots had relied on Megatron’s temper as one of their hidden advantages in the past. And had he not left the safety of the Nemesis? He could have sat by and watched as the Requiem Blaster destroyed the Autobots. Instead, his gladiator’s arrogance once again had driven him to a direct confrontation. That was the lever Optimus Prime must use against him. Megatron wanted a fight, and Optimus Prime would give it to him, and it was possible—just possible—that the rest of the Autobots, led by Nexus Prime, could hold off the Nemesis long enough to make good their escape. If they were not able to do this right now, the quest for the AllSpark would come to an end before it had really begun.

  If that was going to happen, Optimus resolved, it would not be here, amid the accreted garbage of Cybertron’s ancient history. The Autobots were the new Cybertron. They would not die in the detritus of the old.

  He raised the Cyber Caliber and felt it draw in the light from every visible star, amplifying it and throwing off a radiance that fell stark and blinding over the Decepticons. As the Nemesis angled into its firing position, Optimus Prime reached the solid slope of the canyon wall underneath one end of the bridge. Covering the broken terrain in great leaps, he launched himself from the upthrust engine cones of a long-wrecked starship, Cyber Caliber poised for a decisive strike. From the other end of the bridge, Megatron strode to meet him.

  Optimus landed on the surface of the bridge and saw before him Megatron, coming at him. He raised the Cyber Caliber, and Megatron paused. Optimus looked away from the blade and into Megatron’s face. Jealousy burned there, and avarice, lust for power. Whatever had once existed of the crusading bot determined to better the circumstances of Cybertron’s forgotten and downtrodden castes was gone and had been for a lon
g, long time.

  “I’m waiting, librarian,” Megatron said. “For you and your toy.”

  “You might find out it’s more than a toy,” Optimus Prime said. He settled into a ready posture as Megatron deployed his mighty ax. There was one vestige of the old gladiator’s code, Optimus Prime thought, remembering the might of Megatron’s fusion cannon. He will not fight an esteemed opponent with unequal weaponry.

  Megatron charged, and Optimus Prime met the crushing arc of his ax with the blaze of the Cyber Caliber. The impact struck sparks that burned in the broken pieces of junkscape that littered the bridge. Above them loomed the monstrous ship with its Space Bridge retrofit, mysterious and menacing. Below them, the Nemesis approached. Around them surged the battle between Autobots and Decepticons. But on the bridge, Optimus Prime and Megatron fought as only brothers can fight.

  From the surface of Junkion’s largest remaining fragment, looking down into the pit that had yielded the Requiem Blaster and up into the black sky littered with debris and cut through with the traces of energy blasts and missile contrails, Nexus Prime gloried in the destruction, creation, disruption, and reformation around him. Soon the final battle would be joined, and he thrilled to his sense of its approach. He took no pleasure in death, but Nexus Prime was the walking incarnation of mutability and knew that only from the death of forms could new forms be born.

  The sadness of death came when it occurred unnecessarily, in the service of hatred or spite.

  That appeared to be happening quite a bit in Nexus Prime’s close proximity now that he had taken the time to sense it. This was not something he should glory in or endorse. He set out to do something about it. He had not yet taken part in the battle, and he would not bring the Chaos Edge to bear on these soldiers. Even he had that much honor. Yet there was one here whom he would confront.

  Megatron, he thought. The gladiator, the namesake. That’s the place to start. And finish.

  Perhaps it always had been.