Exiles Read online

  Velocitronian tradition demanded a planetwide celebration after the race, particularly, as Optimus had learned, if no political outcome was at stake. On the infield, apparently the party was already starting. Cans of various intoxicating beverages were visible in many hands, and Silverbolt was being treated as a curiosity. The mass of spectators still in the grandstand headed off to the hangar, where the main celebration would happen, and all seemed well. The only sour note was that Ransack had disappeared with his cadre of hangers-on. Once he had gone, Optimus and the other Autobots met Override, Silverbolt, and Blurr in the middle of the postrace chaos on the infield. From there Override led them to the hangar, where Blurr began going through his own set of postrace diagnostics. Once that was done, Blurr broke away from the repair bots and came right up to Silverbolt.

  “I remember you said I was fast,” he said. “I am. But there’s wheel fast and then there’s wing fast.”

  “Air has a lot less friction than ground, that’s for sure,” Silverbolt agreed.

  “We’ve heard of the Seekers,” Blurr said. “But you’re the first one we’ve ever seen. Isn’t that right, Override?”

  She nodded. “They have always been just stories here. I don’t believe there were ever any Seekers here. We believe in the wheel and the road.”

  “I am not a Seeker,” Silverbolt said. “Megatron turned them, with Starscream, to the Decepticon cause.”

  “I don’t know those names, either,” Override said.

  Optimus Prime hated to worsen the mood, but he had Ransack very much on his mind. “You will soon enough,” he said, but nobody appeared to hear him. It was a strange sensation for Optimus Prime not to be listened to. He was glad in a way; having every bot within auditory range hanging on his every word was a burden. Here, in the middle of a large and noisy gathering of bots for whom Cybertron and the war were just stories, he had a fleeting chance to blend in and let go of the strain of leadership.

  One of Blurr’s team, hanging around the edge of the group, said, “You, Silverbolt. Are you the fastest flier where you come from?”

  Silverbolt thought about it. “Never seen one faster,” he said. “But on the other hand, we never had a straight-up race.”

  “Mainspring here is obsessed with who’s the fastest and the best and the biggest. He likes to measure everything.” Blurr laughed.

  “Well, maybe I’ll get a chance to race Starscream next time I see him,” Silverbolt said, full of bravado. Optimus wondered what the outcome of such a race would be in noncombat circumstances.

  The mention of Starscream reminded him that he could not avoid his responsibilities any longer, that the moment for being anonymous was long past for Optimus Prime. Time was short. “Override,” he said. “May I speak with you?”

  She nodded, and they broke away from the group to consult in a quiet corner of the hangar.

  “I should apologize,” he said.

  “Yes, you should,” she agreed. “You had no idea what you were doing.”

  “I did, in fact. But it is true that I did not anticipate all of the consequences. Such as,” Optimus said, watching Override closely, “Ransack’s desire to take over Velocitron for himself.”

  Override was silent for some time. “I could have managed him if you had not arrived,” she said.

  “I’m sure you still can,” Optimus said. “You seem stronger than he is.”

  Looking him in the eye, Override said, “Do you think you are stronger than Megatron?”

  Optimus Prime had no answer for this.

  “We must leave soon to continue our search for the AllSpark,” he said. “If Megatron comes, will you fight him?”

  “What you’re really asking is if Ransack will,” Override said. Optimus nodded. “Then the answer is, I don’t know. We are desperate, Prime. Desperate bots turn to strong leaders, and they mistake tyranny for strength. I have feared this turn on our planet for some time. The race can only preoccupy us for so many cycles before we must confront the problem that we cannot live here much longer without aid.”

  “This is one reason why I wanted Velocitronians to know the strength of the Autobots. You may rely on us.”

  “Until you leave,” Override said.

  “Before we leave, I believe we can get your Space Bridge working again,” Optimus Prime said.

  Taken aback, Override paused as if replaying his words in her head. “You can?”

  “I do not wish to make promises, but yes. I think we can.”

  Override nodded thoughtfully, looking at the array of her citizens going about their business in the vast hangar. “If that’s true, you’ll leave a better impression than you could ever have anticipated,” she said. “But I still can’t promise what will happen if Megatron comes.”

  Optimus Prime thought he could. Wherever Megatron went, there was only one outcome.

  War.

  In the following cycles, they got to work doing necessary repairs on the Ark and, as Optimus had promised, seeing what could be done about the defunct Space Bridge. Optimus also had a third goal on Velocitron, one that he had told no one about. The Matrix was murmuring to him, and he felt the tug of its orders. There was something on Velocitron that it wanted him to see. Override, wanting Optimus to be careful about antagonizing any more Velocitronians than he already had, assigned him a local escort named Clocker. Impetuous and jumpy, Clocker seemed to Optimus Prime like a Velocitronian version of Bumblebee. As a favor to Override, he allowed Clocker to accompany him wherever he went except for a few command meetings that only Ratchet, Silverbolt, and Jazz attended.

  Optimus Prime found that he didn’t mind Clocker’s company. The Velocitronian talked nonstop, but that reminded Optimus Prime of Bumblebee’s onetime loquacity. In turn, this strengthened his resolve that Clocker and the other Velocitronians not suffer under Megatron the way that so many Cybertronians had. Clocker, for his part, was full of questions about Cybertron and about the war. Optimus Prime answered them, but reluctantly. He was more interested in the history of Velocitron. “How did you all get so interested in speed?” he asked once while Clocker was following him from the hangar to the barracks where Override had allowed the Cybertronians to stay.

  Optimus Prime had sent the second landing team, under Hound’s leadership, out to map the terrain of Velocitron. Whatever material the Ark’s archives carried was megacycles out of date, and it didn’t make sense to spend time on a planet and not leave with a good map. Override had offered one, but the Velocitronians didn’t much care about cartography, it turned out; what she gave him was a finely detailed matrix of roads, with Delta dead center, but it said nothing about other topography. So Optimus did what explorers do: He sent out his own team, careful to make sure that Hound took along representatives from both Ransack’s and Override’s administrative operations.

  Thinking of the tension between those two bots, Optimus remembered something. “Jazz,” he said. “Want to hear a joke?”

  “Always.”

  “One time I thought that if I was going to be Prime, maybe Megatron and I could share the power and end the war that way.”

  “Shared power?” Jazz laughed loud and long. “Good one!”

  It wasn’t just a joke. Looking back, Optimus Prime knew that he had been almost fatally naive to consider the possibility. Looking around him now, he saw that the coleadership of Override and Ransack was fraught with sublimated rivalry that would lead to open conflict sooner or later. He had a feeling it would be sooner.

  When it came to intelligence gathering, there was one Autobot Optimus Prime knew he could rely on. He sent for Prowl.

  “You have probably had this thought already,” he said when Prowl appeared and they found a reasonably private place to meet. It was a dead-end side street hemmed in by workshops and small factories, every one of them empty and gradually filling with Velocitron’s ever-present dust. “But I am concerned that there might be a serious schism developing here between Override and Ransack.”

 
“You can bet on it,” Prowl said. “This place is about to explode.”

  Normally, Optimus Prime would have thought this might be overstating the case a little. The effect of Cybertron’s civil war on Prowl had been to take his ingrained suspicion and develop it to a nearly full-blown paranoia. He saw conspiracies and budding revolutions everywhere there were three bots together.

  In this case, however, Optimus Prime thought he might be right. “Look around,” he said. “See what you can hear about who is allied to whom and whether the citizens in general seem to lean toward Override or Ransack. While we are getting the Space Bridge online, we are also going to need to make sure that Velocitron does not erupt around us.”

  He hated saying it that way, but Optimus Prime could already tell that the Autobots’ arrival had been extremely disruptive to Velocitron. It was now his responsibility to keep that disruption to a minimum—and to make sure that the Velocitronian leadership understood what was at stake in the conflict between Autobot and Decepticon.

  “Optimus Prime,” Prowl said. “I can observe, I can report. Under what circumstances should I act?”

  “Only if confronted with a direct threat,” Optimus Prime said.

  “To myself or to others?”

  After a moment’s consideration Optimus Prime said, “Either. But Prowl, try to avoid getting into difficult situations. Gather intelligence. Let that imperative guide you for now.”

  “Understood,” Prowl said, and the two of them walked back toward the central hangar adjacent to the speedway, making innocuous conversation along the way for the benefit of whoever might be listening.

  Already Velocitron was no longer a welcome oasis, but a place rife with possible threats. Or at least, Optimus Prime thought, it was prudent to regard it as such.

  The next cycles passed uneventfully. Prowl looked around. Optimus Prime consulted with Override and to a lesser degree Ransack on Velocitron’s situation, which appeared to be at least as dire as Override initially had characterized it. Perceptor and the other scientists aboard the Ark undertook an extensive analysis of Velocitron’s sun and the planet’s mineral deposits, demonstrating that Override’s concerns were fully justified. On a galactic time scale, Velocitron did not have long to live.

  Already they were taking action. Jazz had assembled a team of Velocitronians, led by Blurr’s crew chief, Mainspring, who had agreed to direct their engineering expertise toward the reconstruction of Velocitron’s Space Bridge. Since it was just after Speedia, there was nothing for them to do right away, and as one of them said, “Gets a little monotonous making bots go faster all the time.” Ratchet, Jazz and the Velocitronian team were spending a lot of time at the Space Bridge or consulting the Ark’s archives about it, and according to Jazz, they were making progress.

  Word of that progress spread, and the Velocitronians began to understand that the Autobots would not be staying. Soon after Jazz had given his most recent report on the Space Bridge, one of the Velocitronians approached Optimus Prime and said something that took him completely by surprise.

  “I want to come with you,” Mainspring said. “I might not be Cybertronian, but I’ve sure never fit in here.”

  “Have you asked Override if you can leave?”

  Mainspring laughed. “This isn’t that kind of place. I can leave if I want to, and Override won’t care. Only problem is, until you came along there was never any place to go.”

  “There still might not be,” Optimus Prime told him. “If you come with us, you might never come back.”

  “Fine with me,” Mainspring said. “I don’t know if you noticed this, but if you’re not interested in racing, there’s not much here for you.”

  “What are you interested in?” Jazz cut in.

  Mainspring shrugged. “Other kinds of machines. Building them, taking them apart. I like to measure things. Especially time. I like to measure time.”

  “Then I guess the Ark will have lots of clocks,” Jazz joked. Nobody laughed. “Fine,” he said. “I’m just going to …”

  “Right,” said Optimus. “Keep working on that Space Bridge.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  Optimus Prime tapped the center of his torso, where the Matrix of Leadership was calling him to move. Where, he wasn’t sure, and he didn’t know why, either, but the Matrix would reveal its reasons to him in due time. “Before we go, I have a little exploring to do,” he said. “Mainspring, I will talk to Override. And Clocker, if you have no other obligations, I would appreciate a local guide.”

  “Let’s go,” Clocker said. Optimus Prime nodded and shifted to alt-form. Clocker did the same, and together they rolled out from Delta, heading south across equatorial Velocitron’s flat expanse of desert plain.

  The Matrix was talking to him. Not in words or even in any identifiable pattern of electric impulses along his motor pathways, but communicating somehow, via the medium—thought Optimus Prime, though he had never told anyone this—of the Energon that gave Cybertronians life. He reached the south magnetic pole of Velocitron, a region of jumbled hills and narrow slot canyons. It was one of the few areas on the planet that the Velocitronians had not reconfigured to suit their racing obsession. Optimus wondered why. Surely there had been time to pave and tame this part of the world as well. Had they shied away from it out of some superstition? If so, he wanted to know the story. When he returned to the great tangle of roads at the equator, he would ask. But now he would search.

  The search did not last long. At the pole itself Optimus discovered a monolith, pentangular in cross section and towering five times his height. At its base was a group of sigils he recognized from the cover of the Covenant of Primus, though he did not know what they meant. Perhaps only Alpha Trion did. He had no idea why the Matrix had brought him here, and save for the sigils at its base, the monolith’s surface was blank. It was an artifact of the Thirteen, its mystery ageless and impenetrable. Optimus Prime stood before it and waited for a sign.

  “Don’t like it here,” Clocker said. “Slow.”

  “Slow,” Optimus repeated thoughtfully. It was slow. When all your sensors weren’t being assaulted by the sounds of engines, the world seemed like a different place.

  He had not said much to Clocker on the trip, and he knew that his reticence had frustrated the Velocitronian, who like most of his fellow speedsters talked more or less nonstop. He wanted to know about Cybertron, about the Space Bridges, about other lost colony planets … and about the war. Optimus Prime didn’t particularly want to talk about any of those things to this young bot, but he tried. And now that they had come to this place, this slow place where the manic pace of Velocitron was held at bay, he tried again.

  “The Matrix of Leadership led me here,” he said. “There is something we must find. Something I must find.”

  “Can I see it?” Clocker asked as if the Matrix were something Optimus Prime carried around in a storage compartment.

  Optimus shook his head. “It reveals itself when it chooses to reveal itself,” he said. “Sometimes I can display it, but even then it must permit the display.”

  Clocker thought about that for what must have seemed to him a long time but to Optimus seemed almost like interrupting. “What are we looking for?”

  “I don’t know,” Optimus Prime said. “That’s another thing the Matrix has to decide to show.”

  “What’s Cybertron like?” was Clocker’s next question, again on the heels of Optimus’s last word.

  Optimus Prime started to tell the truth. Then he looked at this young bot, full of ambition and vigor and optimism—excited to be in the presence of a near legendary Cybertronian—and he realized that there was a place for shadings of the truth. “Cybertron is still the heart of our civilization,” he said. “All bots came from there, and it’s the place all bots look to for their identity.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Clocker said. “I’m pretty much a Velocitronian.”

  “You’ve been here a long time,
” Optimus Prime said. “But there’s only one Well of the AllSpark, and it’s on Cybertron.”

  But as he spoke he realized that he wasn’t sure he believed this anymore. Too many of the Velocitronians were too different. They had arisen, evolved, without the presence of the AllSpark.

  Clocker unknowingly echoed Optimus Prime’s new questions. “But if the AllSpark isn’t there anymore …” Clocker trailed off, and they continued in silence, heading up a plateau on a course that would lead them to Velocitron’s south pole.

  “The AllSpark will come back,” Optimus Prime said. “I’m going to go get it and bring it back. That will end the war and restore Cybertron. He paused. “You know what else I’m going to do?”

  Clocker raced ahead, then slowed down to pace Optimus Prime again. “What?”

  “I’m going to get the Space Bridges working again. And I’m going to build new ones where they have been destroyed,” said Optimus. “Then you’ll be able to go to Cybertron yourself.”

  “I can’t wait!” Clocker said. He raced off ahead again. This time, Optimus Prime accelerated to catch up. There was something about Velocitronians, their aerodynamic builds, their manic and contagious obsession with speed … or maybe it was just being on Velocitron that made you want to go fast.

  In the shadowed emptiness of the speedway, as celebrations rang out across Velocitron, a group of bots met surreptitiously. Three of them were envoys from Ransack, who earlier had made tentative inquiries to the Cybertronian visitors: What was the real story? Who was this Optimus Prime, and why did they follow him? What could Velocitron expect now that its ancient isolation had been broken? Eventually, one of the visitors in the group had stepped forward and suggested that a conversation was in order but that it should perhaps take place beyond the watchful eyes of either Autobot or Velocitronian authority. Hence the current gathering.