Exiles Read online

  At the starting line, ten alt-forms idled, revving their engines nervously and rocking back and forth until Override herself ascended a scaffold and raised her arms for quiet. “This is our greatest tradition,” she boomed through the speedway’s audio system. “The Speedia is the ultimate test of Velocitronian speed and determination. These ten racers are the best of the best. They have proved themselves on tracks and in road races since the last Speedia, and now comes the time to crown the newest champion!” The crowd roared, and Override paused to let the waves of approbation wash over her and the assembled racers.

  “Best of the best, my exhaust,” Ransack grumbled. “I’m not running.”

  Optimus Prime decided not to point out that neither was Override. Apparently the Speedia did not always decide the next leader of the Velocitronians, and on those occasions when the race was run purely to determine the fastest bot on the planet, the Speedia was a celebration rather than a political event. Ransack didn’t look happy about that. Optimus Prime had the feeling that he would rather have been racing and would have preferred his most notable opponent to be Override. Ransack’s discontent radiated from him in practically tangible waves.

  None of the other bots nearby appeared to notice, though … or to care. For them, this was the great race of the solar cycle. Politics could be left aside for another day. Override was introducing the racers, each of whom briefly rocked forward over the starting line as his name was called. Last came Blurr, who, if the crowd’s response was any indication, was the most popular.

  “And now,” Override said, “to the starting line!”

  The grandstands rocked with cheering. It was time.

  At a signal from Override, the racers exploded away from the starting line. They accelerated along the first straightaway and bunched together into the ferocious bank of the first turn. Optimus Prime had seen races on Cybertron, but this was something else entirely. At Hydrax, races were a diversion; here, they were the highest expression of Velocitronian identity. To race was to live, to speed was to breathe, and these were the best of the best. He thrilled at the spectacle.

  The race was one hundred laps of the track, a distance calculated from long practice to reward both speed and endurance. No stopping or repairs were permitted during the race, and nothing could interrupt it. If a crash occurred, the remaining racers were required to navigate the debris on the track.

  All ten racers tore through the first laps in a cluster, jockeying for the inside position around the turns and making minute adjustments to draft on those immediately ahead or pinch off those just behind. The first twenty laps passed almost before Optimus had gotten an understanding of the tactics, even though Ransack provided a constant stream of commentary. On the twenty-fourth lap, two of the leading bots, right in front of the third-place Blurr, scraped against each other coming out of the final turn. One of them swerved wildly, nearly losing control and forcing the following racers out of their tight formation. A gasp went up from the crowd, quickly becoming a storm of denunciation as fans of individual bots blamed one or the other for nearly causing a crash.

  The next thirty laps passed without incident beyond a series of passes and maneuvers among the back five in the race. The leaders stayed steady, still feeling one another out and preparing for the second half of the race. “The first fifty,” Ransack said, “are practice. The next thirty are setup. The last twenty are where the race really happens. By then you know who has what it takes.”

  Optimus Prime nodded, but he thought this characterization of the race was unusual coming from someone whose reputation rested on a historic comeback over the last few laps. Ransack did appear to be right about the increasing tension on the track, though. After the halfway point, every racer got more aggressive. There was more bumping and scraping around the turns, and several times one bot or another was flung out of the formation to scramble and force its way back in over the next few laps. From the nearby spectators, Optimus Prime heard an overwhelming amount of commentary, vitriol, cheering, and accidental history. Every Velocitronian, it seemed, was a walking compendium of Speedia history, and everything that happened on the track had historical antecedents. It turned out that one of the bots in the row just below Optimus and the other Autobots had won a Speedia long ago. He was known as Hightail, and everyone around him seemed to defer to his opinions about the race and its history. Optimus Prime decided that he would have to get Hightail alone and sound him out about the situation between Override and Ransack.

  He was thinking about how to do this when, in the race’s final stage, a middle-of-the-pack racer swung a little wide coming out of a turn and collided heavily with its nearest competitor. The first racer overcorrected and hit a third coming up on the inside. All three went out of control, with the outside bot hitting the wall while the other two went into spins that inevitably turned into spectacular rollovers. From the crowd, cheering turned to shocked yells and confused contradictions. The bot coming off the wall spun through the pack, miraculously missing every other racer as they darted around him and coming to rest facing backward at the edge of the infield. His front end was badly crumpled and sparking, but his engine still revved and his wheels moved enough that he could maneuver farther onto the infield.

  The other two racers were not so fortunate. One ended up upside down near the center of the infield, bits of wreckage strewn behind it. Somewhere in its tumbling, it had reflexively reassumed its bot-form, as bots tended to do when seriously injured. It tried to get up and failed, collapsing on the packed earth of the infield. The other one had not rolled as far, ending up on its side against a stanchion supporting the stadium’s audio system. The stanchion rocked at the impact, and a spike of feedback blared across the space, cutting through the unsettled reaction from the crowd.

  A repair crew deployed from the staging area inside the ring of the racetrack, reaching both of the injured racers practically before they had come to rest. Sparks and smoke partially obscured the audio stanchion and the bot below as it, too, reflexively transformed back into its bot-form. The crowd roared, but Optimus Prime didn’t know whether they were cheering the crash or the bots’ survival. In his short time on Velocitron, he had come to understand that their culture was very different from its Cybertronian ancestor.

  The race went on, a pack of seven bots now rather than ten. Optimus Prime had lost track of how many laps the two leading racers had completed, but it was somewhere in the nineties. They ran wheel to wheel, trading the lead back and forth by minuscule amounts, as the other five jockeyed for position in a cluster just behind them. Despite himself Optimus Prime was getting interested. Sport in general had never taken much of his attention, but here with the entire population of a planet riveted to an event he found the enthusiasm infectious.

  Unbidden, a memory arose: the clandestine gladiator pit where Megatron had first shown Orion Pax the brutal glory of combat. Optimus Prime realized with a shock that he had been captivated then as he was captivated now … but in the same moment he could see the difference. There, lives had been at stake, sparks extinguished for the savage pleasure of the crowd. Here …

  He looked again at the infield, where the damaged racers were undergoing treatment. Was it so different? Had Velocitron developed its own version of the pits, and for the same reasons? With the looming crisis over resources and the instability of their sun, Velocitronians had turned to the spectacle of dangerous sport. In the flush of this insight, Optimus Prime grew even more certain that the Autobots had been destined to come here. The Matrix did nothing by accident, and Velocitron was in need.

  Yet the spectators seemed unconscious of their possible doom, or at least uncaring for the moment. The tension in the stands built to an unbearable pitch. The girders shook with the force of the Velocitronians’ roars, punctuated by the rhythmic stomping of their feet. On the track, a signal went up: Three laps to go. One of the leaders was Blurr. Optimus Prime did not know the other one.

  Ransack, in the middle of the
chaos, leaned over and spoke to Optimus Prime, keeping his voice just loud enough for Optimus alone to hear.

  “You see,” Ransack said. “There are no faster bots in the galaxy than us. Maybe Override is counting on you to save us, but me? I don’t think we need saving. Certainly not from a bunch of refugees who destroyed their own planet on the way out. You have nothing for us.”

  Optimus Prime nodded, letting Ransack have his say. But while he was nodding, he fired off a quick subvocalized message. He had heard enough of Ransack’s slander. It could not be allowed to spread. A counterexample was in order.

  An eyeblink after Optimus sent his message, out of the sky came Silverbolt, his alt-form flashing in Velocitron’s bright sunlight, rocketing over the fastest of the Velocitronians as they neared the finish line. Optimus Prime watched with a mixture of satisfaction and dread, knowing that for every Velocitronian impressed by the show, there would be one who saw it as showing up the Velocitronians at what they did best. He had put Silverbolt on standby, anticipating the need to make this flyover as a demonstration to Velocitron that the Autobots had strengths that Velocitronians perhaps had not yet considered. Even if Optimus Prime could not solve the problems of Velocitron’s dying sun or squandered resources, he could leave Velocitronians feeling that the Autobots were something more than refugees. They had power, as represented by Silverbolt’s flight and—lest it be forgotten—Optimus Prime’s carrying the Matrix of Leadership and the mantle of Prime itself. Optimus had long since learned that though a good leader made friends when he could, sometimes the surest way to a durable alliance was a show of strength. When the quest for the AllSpark led them away from Velocitron, as it surely would soon, they would need all the lingering admiration they could create, particularly if Megatron arrived here on their trail.

  Silverbolt screamed over the finish line at the exact moment Blurr and his competitor completed the race’s hundredth and final lap. Fireworks erupted on the track infield, and for a long moment no one knew who had won. Even those whose attention had not been taken by Silverbolt’s display would have been hard pressed to pick a winner; the two leaders had crossed the finish line so close together that the track referee was even now consulting with Override. She listened, spoke briefly back to him, then climbed up onto a podium that overhung the finish line from the infield. In the stands, anticipation built to a frenzy, and a strong countercurrent of anger rumbled as Silverbolt banked in and came to an acrobatic landing, reassuming his bot-form precisely in time for his feet to touch the ground without so much as a stumble.

  “You dare?” Ransack raged at Optimus Prime. “You vagabond mechs!”

  “I do dare,” Optimus Prime said. “I dare to snap you out of your obsessions and the petty rivalries you indulge while your sun dies and a threat like none of you have ever seen looms behind us.”

  He turned to make sure that other nearby Velocitronians were hearing him. Some—those still not thunderstruck by Silverbolt’s appearance or his very existence—were, and on their faces were expressions of anger, confusion … of course. There was no way to make this pleasant, Optimus Prime thought. But he would see it through.

  “You immerse yourselves in the Speedia because you have given up,” he said. “You believe you are going to die, and you have long since abandoned any effort to prevent that death. Well, we have perhaps come for more than assistance.” He paused.

  “We have come to awaken you! Megatron will find you, and when he does, you will be destroyed if you are not ready. You are the fastest bots on the ground that any Cybertronian has ever seen. I salute your excellence in this area. But do not let it absorb you so completely that you let war come upon you in the middle of a race.”

  These last words he directed back toward Ransack, though he saw Override watching him from the winner’s gantry. “We may be vagabonds now, but soon you will be, too. If Megatron lets you live that long. We must join together if we are to fight both the Decepticons and your dying sun.”

  Ransack glared hatred at him, pure and undisguised. Around him, his flunkies and bodyguards put on hard faces as well. But outside of this core of opposition, Optimus Prime could see that his words had taken hold among at least some of the nearer spectators. It remained to be seen how Override would react.

  If you are going to have enemies, Optimus Prime reflected, it is good for those enemies to show themselves. Still he regretted whatever bad feeling he might have provoked among ordinary Velocitronians. It was always unfortunate when jockeying among leaders had negative consequences for broader populations. But what could he have done differently? He had needed Ransack to show his true colors in front of other Velocitronians, not just his lackeys, who already knew him for what he was and had committed themselves to him despite that. That objective had been accomplished. The other consequences could be dealt with over the long term, but any chance that Velocitron would enter the coming war on the Autobot side depended on identifying the Decepticon sympathizers … or those who would be Decepticon sympathizers whenever Megatron arrived.

  That Optimus Prime was increasingly certain, would be sooner rather than later. He had no empirical reason for this intuition, but neither could he shake his belief that it was correct. The war for Cybertron was about to become a war for every planet populated by Cybertronians and their far-flung cousins. Optimus Prime and the Autobots could not allow themselves to be put on the defensive the way they had been back on Cybertron.

  The uproar in the speedway grew more intense. A group of bots from the stands had broken through the trackside barrier and poured onto the infield to surround Silverbolt. Others—the less politically motivated, Optimus guessed—surged around the two leaders, who had just reassumed their bot-forms and were receiving postrace examinations from track mechanics. Elsewhere on the infield, the three victims of the earlier crash were undergoing repairs. One of them was already up and around.

  Through it all, Override’s voice suddenly rang loud and clear. “Velocitronians!” she proclaimed. “In one of the closest races in our planet’s history, the winner is … Blurr!”

  Optimus Prime would not have thought it possible, but the speedway tumult increased yet again. The thunder of approbation seemed like it must be cracking welds all over the grandstand. For a moment Optimus questioned his judgment in ordering Silverbolt’s flyover. He had underestimated the Velocitronians’ devotion to their racers; the Autobot cause would not be served if they were remembered for upstaging the race finish and sowing chaos in the most important event on the Velocitronian calendar.

  Blurr thrust his arms skyward and threw his head back with a triumphant shout. Around him his admirers mimicked the gesture. Even some of the bots who initially had charged toward Silverbolt were distracted by their jubilation at this news. Blurr seemed to be a popular racer. His vanquished opponent shook hands and clapped him on the shoulder. Off to one side of the infield, that racer’s pit crew and mechanical support team stood in a dejected cluster. In the crowd, Optimus heard some bots talking about Silverbolt. He was relieved to note that many of them seemed to be treating the flyover as an added show, but there was also, as he had feared, an undercurrent of resentment. So far, though, the thrilling spectacle of the race seemed to hold sway, which was exactly what Optimus wanted.

  There followed the trophy presentation. Abruptly Silverbolt was all but forgotten, as were the rest of the Autobots. Even Ransack momentarily left off his glaring at Optimus Prime to observe the ceremony. From a compartment built into the track scaffolding, Override removed the trophy itself and held it up. “SPEEDIA!” shouted the assembled bots. “This trophy is our oldest artifact!” Override proclaimed. “It is the symbol of our culture, the emblem of pure velocity!”

  She held it out, and Blurr put his hands on it. As they held it between them and the speedway rumbled with the crowd’s deafening roar, Optimus Prime felt a curious desire to examine it. He was too far away to get a good look, but he could tell that it was constructed of metallic alloys, with fo
ur bars forming its frame and a pyramidal shape topping it, scored with jagged lines akin to lightning. Its square base was of the same material, and within it shone another shape, gleaming brilliantly in the midday sun.

  The archivist in Optimus Prime wondered who had built it and when. But he could tell that he was alone in this curiosity. For the Velocitronians, it was a winner’s trophy. Blurr raised it overhead and basked in the acclaim of his championship.

  Override, having crowned the race’s winner, now worked her way slowly through the crowd that surged around Blurr, pounding him on the back and reaching out to touch the trophy itself. Optimus Prime waited as Override crossed the track and climbed the bleachers to greet him. As she approached, Ransack drew away, consulting with his confidants. Optimus had the feeling that existing divisions on Velocitron had been exacerbated by his actions, if not his initial presence. The more he observed of this world, the more he was starting to think that he had stumbled into a precarious situation rather than creating one. Override’s next action cemented that impression.

  She reached out toward Blurr, beckoning him to follow her out to the infield, where Silverbolt was murmuring over his commlink. “What do I do if things get tense, Prime?” Silverbolt was asking. “There’s some angry people out here.”

  “Take off if you have to,” Optimus Prime answered, “but don’t fight no matter what happens. I think help is on the way.”

  He was right. Taking one of Blurr’s hands and raising it, Override paraded with the victorious racer out onto the infield, meeting Silverbolt as the crowd around the Autobot merged with Blurr’s jubilant followers and the rest of the bots who had come down out of the crowd in the aftermath of the race’s wild finish.