Exiles Read online

  One of Ransack’s envoys was called Hightail, though once, he thought, certainty having long ago fallen victim to the passage of time, he had been called something else. The Cybertronian in the foursome would not give a name. “You can call me 777,” he said. “That was once my name, when I was a bounty hunter in the slag swamps between the Hydrax Plateau and the city of Kaon. You’ve heard of those places?”

  None of the others assembled could remember. Hightail surely couldn’t.

  “See?” 777 said. “You’re not Cybertronians, but rather Velocitronians, all of you! Yes, the AllSpark gave you life. But that life is your own—not tied to Cybertron.” After a pause, he added, “Especially once Optimus Prime threw the AllSpark into space.”

  “Why’d he do that?” Hightail wanted to know.

  “Because he didn’t trust regular Cybertronians to make their own decisions,” 777 said. “Once he was part of a revolution, but the High Council on Cybertron gave him too much power. They named him Prime, and he forgot the regular bots. Once the war started, he didn’t want to free bots anymore. He wanted to lead them.”

  Another silence followed. Eventually, 777 broke it. “And if he couldn’t lead them—or if they didn’t want to be led—he decided he would destroy them. That’s why Cybertron is still at war. That’s why Optimus Prime is running across the galaxy. Because he let power go to his head.”

  “What do we care about Cybertron?” Hightail said. “We’re here.”

  “And I got here, right?” 777 answered. “Optimus Prime got here. You can’t ignore what’s happening on Cybertron any longer. The Space Bridges are going to be rebuilt. You’re going to have to choose sides. Optimus Prime is not the only voice on Cybertron. There are plenty of bots who think differently than he does.”

  “How many cycles has it been since you saw Cybertron?” one of the Velocitronians asked. Hightail honked at him to shut up. He was jittery, anxious to hear more, revving his engine to burn off some excess energy.

  “I’ve been there more recently than you have, bot,” 777 said.

  “How do we know?” Hightail said. “You won’t even tell us your name.”

  “Why would I? How do I know I can trust you? How do I know you won’t roll right back to Optimus Prime and tell him everything I said?”

  The rumble of engines was the only sound for several cycles. Hightail would have left it there, would have forgotten about the whole thing and gone back to the life he had—going fast, looking for ways to go faster, and building better roads so they could go faster yet. But there were three other bots there, and one of them said, just when it looked like 777 might give up and leave them there, “Tell us more.”

  That other bot was a malcontent pit crew chief who had spent his entire life working on the racers without ever being able to race himself. Not every Velocitronian could be the fastest, and only one could be Blurr, but every Velocitronian had the dream. Backfire’s dream had died a long time ago as he watched other bots retool themselves or get sponsored by one of the big racing teams. Those bots became Velocitronian celebrities while bots like Backfire labored in the shadows of the hangars and watched their work be celebrated without anyone ever paying attention to who did it.

  Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. On a planet like Velocitron, being a good mechanic was respected and admired. Backfire couldn’t contest that. But he knew he would never get a chance to race, not because he wouldn’t have been a good racer but because he never knew the right bots. He had raced out in the wastes, along the smaller feeder tracks, and had even won some of those races. But it had become clear a long time ago that he would never make it as a racer. He had known Blurr then, and even then Blurr had the mark of a star. Backfire wasn’t that fast and never would be no matter what tweaks and retoolings were applied to his alt-form chassis.

  So he had become a crew chief, and a respected one, gradually climbing the ladder until he was second to Mainspring in Blurr’s pit, which was the one all Velocitronian mechanics angled to work in. But that kind of respect was the respect a general had for a useful junior officer. It was condescending, wasn’t real. Backfire wanted the real thing.

  That was why he asked the question of 777 even though 777 was wrong about them all being Cybertronian. He wanted to hear more about this Megatron.

  Prowl listened. He couldn’t tell exactly what was being said, but he heard enough to understand that the topic at hand was Megatron. Had the Decepticons somehow found a way to get to Velocitron before the Autobot escape from Cybertron? That didn’t seem possible. Not even Shockwave had the kind of scientific acumen needed to teleport bots across time and space.

  The only other possibility was that there was a turncoat on board the Ark.

  Prowl had been a part of a lot of clandestine missions, and he had infiltrated more secret sites than just about any living Autobot. Even so, he was stunned to think of the possibility that one of the Autobots was a traitor and, even more so, that one of the bots Optimus Prime had chosen to come with him on the Ark was a traitor.

  Optimus Prime had tried to get as many bots as possible on the Ark, knowing what those left behind would face, but even so, he had made some choices. Not being able to take every bot, he had tried to construct a combination exploratory mission, fighting force, and sampling of Cybertronian civilization. Some resolute Autobots had elected to stay behind and continue the fight, such as Ultra Magnus and the mighty Wreckers, but by and large the crew members of the Ark were there because Optimus Prime had made sure they were there. At least that was how Prowl understood it.

  And now, listening to the conversation under the speedway grandstand, he understood that Optimus had taken a Decepticon on board the Ark, too.

  But who? Prowl didn’t recognize the voice and couldn’t give away his position to get a visual of the traitor. He recorded the voice for processing through the Ark’s scientific facilities, and then he quietly got away from the unfolding plot. It made him feel dirty and furiously angry. Traitors would pay.

  First, though, they must be identified. When he got clear of the speedway, Prowl headed straight for the Ark, hoping to catch Sideswipe between maintenance tasks so the two of them could put their heads together over a tricky but crucial problem of voiceprint identification.

  The third Velocitronian at the meeting was a track engineer called Armco. He wasn’t sure what to think about the Cybertronian calling himself 777, and what genuinely unsettled him about the whole setup was that he had seen every Cybertronian who had come down from the Ark, since he’d been working on a balky welder in the hangar when Optimus Prime had presented each member of his team to Override.

  777 wasn’t any of those bots.

  This made Armco wonder why he was disguising himself or, if he wasn’t, why he hadn’t been presented to Override. Another possibility was that 777 was just one of a number of Autobots who were on Velocitron without the knowledge of either Override or Ransack.

  So he had a problem. He should report this, whatever was going on. Hightail and Backfire wouldn’t do it for their own reasons. Backfire was already curious about this Megatron, whoever he was, so he wouldn’t say anything about 777 until he knew more or had a chance to see Megatron for himself … or until 777 asked him to say something to Ransack. Hightail, in contrast, wasn’t particularly loyal to either of Velocitron’s leaders. Neither was Armco. What Armco wanted was for the Autobots—or Cybertronians or whatever they wanted to call themselves—to leave and let Velocitron figure out its own problems.

  “Not bad enough that our sun is dying,” he grumbled to the tools in his workshop when he’d gotten back to the hangar much later. “We’ve got to be dragged into Cybertron’s wars, too.” The main hangar was deserted, with all the various crews and groups of Velocitronians gone back to the garages where they spent their nights. The hangar was a work space. Armco did not feel like resting, so he was working.

  “That didn’t take long,” came a voice from nearby, startling him.

  He l
ooked up. His workshop was in a small annex walled off from the central hangar space, near the wall that faced the track complex itself. If you weren’t looking for Armco, you had no reason to be there. He held up the welder, and it sparked to life, its pure white tongue of plasma casting a harsh glare over the speaker.

  It was one of the Cybertronians. “You’re the one they call Prowl, right?” Armco said.

  “That’s my name. And you’re Armco.”

  “That’s my name.”

  “Armco, there are going to be problems here. You know that, right?”

  “Everywhere has problems. Sounds like Cybertron has plenty,” Armco said.

  Prowl nodded. “You can put the torch down,” he said. Armco did. “I need to ask you a favor.”

  “Ask Override.”

  “Well,” Prowl said, “there’s a problem there. If I ask Override, then she’s going to figure out a bunch of things that I’d rather she didn’t figure out just yet. There’s such a thing as knowing too much.”

  Armco thought this over. He sure never felt like he knew too much about anything. “You want me to be a spy for you,” he said.

  “No,” Prowl said.

  “Then what?”

  “I just want you to come and tell me if this 777—that’s what he called himself, right?—if he starts talking specifics on when Megatron or the Decepticons might arrive here.” He paused to let this sink in. “That is very important information to your survival as well as ours. You understand?”

  “Yeah,” Armco said even though he didn’t. He understood what Prowl wanted but not why he wanted Armco to do it.

  Prowl started moving back into the darkness of the main hangar space. “Don’t come looking for me. I’ll find you.”

  I bet you will, Armco thought. He realized he hadn’t put out the torch and did so, scolding himself for wasting the fuel. Resources were scarce enough without him adding to the problem.

  And things were tense enough between Override and Ransack without these Cybertronians coming in and making everything even hotter. That was racing, though: Sometimes everyone’s bunched up coming out of the final turn. Then you find out who’s got what coming down the straightaway.

  Armco sat there in the darkness, half expecting someone else to appear and ask him to become a double agent. When no one did, he fired up the welder again and got to work.

  One of the gifts bestowed by the Matrix of Leadership was patience and meditative focus beyond the ordinary. Optimus Prime waited, perfectly still. He felt a gradually intensifying transformation in the landscape around him, as if all of Velocitronian time had been superimposed on the lived moment of the present. Optimus opened his eyes. The monolith was before him. On his right, a long heaving slope fell away to Velocitron’s southern plain, crisscrossed by roads. On his left was the untouched natural landscape of a planet before it had been given the name Velocitron. Immediately behind him, Clocker waited, trying to stand still but suffering from the impatience seemingly built into the nature of every Velocitronian.

  “This feels … I don’t like it,” Clocker said.

  “You are not used to it,” said Optimus Prime.

  Clocker ticked and jittered in place. “I don’t want to get used to it. Let’s go back to Delta.”

  “Clocker, what are you afraid of?” Optimus Prime could see that the Velocitronian was on the verge of flight but was too embarrassed to say that he was frightened.

  “There are stories about this place,” Clocker said. “If I’d known we were coming here, I would have stayed home.”

  “What kinds of stories?”

  “It’s haunted. No Velocitronian will come here because of the stories.”

  Haunted. Optimus Prime was not superstitious and did not understand superstition. The real universe was strange enough without layering myths over it. Still, he once had considered the Thirteen at least semimythical, so who was he to render judgment on the myths of other worlds?

  “What haunts it?” he asked.

  “The story is that something fell from the sky here and that any bot who comes close will be destroyed,” Clocker said. “That’s it, plain and simple. Whatever is in there doesn’t want you going in with it. Can I go?”

  “No. Stay here,” Optimus Prime said.

  Clocker backed up a step. Small plates along his shoulders and legs flipped up and then back down, as if he were barely resisting the impulse to assume alt-form and roll out of there as fast as his wheels would carry him. “Why?”

  “Because I do not know what will happen when I do this. If it goes wrong, I will need someone to report back to the Ark and bring help.”

  “What are you going to do?” Clocker asked, backing away another step.

  “This.” Optimus Prime took a step closer to the monolith, drawn by an unspoken imperative from the Matrix of Leadership.

  At the third step, Optimus Prime crossed an invisible barrier and felt everything … slow … down, as if the entire planet of Velocitron were pausing for a long moment of reflection. The imperative to speed left him even as he looked back through the barrier and saw the blurs and dusty plumes of the Velocitronians’ passage along the excellent roads just on the other side. None of them stopped. None of them slowed down. It was not in the nature of Velocitronians to do either. Closer, just on the other side of the barrier, Clocker spun through a series of tension-relieving circles. He had exerted enormous self-control, staying calm as long as he had at the edges of this field, where everything seemed so slow to him. Where Optimus Prime now stood, it would have seemed to Clocker as if time had frozen entirely. Mythical guardians or not, it was a good thing he had not come along. The languid pace of time in this isolated zone would have driven a Velocitronian crazy. Perhaps that was the origin of the myth, Optimus Prime speculated. He looked around, curious to see whether any entrapped Velocitronians might have left their physical remains at the site, but all he saw was gravel and sand and the monument itself, around which time became distorted. Optimus Prime’s sensory apparatus began to return unusual data.

  The unusual nature of the site became clearer as Optimus understood what it once had been: a great beacon, fallen into malfunction and disrepair gigacycles ago when the Space Bridges’ collapse meant that every Velocitronian suddenly was cut off from the source of Cybertronian identity. These beacons, Optimus Prime had read in the archives, existed on every colony planet, guiding ships in from the area of Space Bridges, which did not always return ships to normal space at exactly the same coordinates.

  Errors had been recorded of as much as half a light-year. Hence the beacons. But this one … it had not given off a signal since well before Megatron had entered the gladiatorial pits for the first time, uncountable cycles before this moment. Optimus Prime envisioned it functioning again, bringing in a steady flow of traffic, commerce, ideas …

  I fight for this, too, he realized. For the rebirth of not just Cybertronian civilization but the great matrix of colony worlds that once looked to Cybertron for inspiration, guidance … and, of course, trade.

  It would be that way again.

  But not until he returned to Cybertron with the AllSpark, and there was much yet to do before he could imagine that happening.

  The first of the many things that needed accomplishing was to figure out why the Matrix had drawn him here, and why now. In this bubble of slowed and clarified space-time, Optimus Prime looked around and found himself reaching for a metallic gleam that showed itself through the sand and gravel around the monolith’s base. He brushed the grit away and saw a long, narrow piece of some kind of alloy. One edge was sharp, as if it once might have been used as a weapon. The other edges were irregular, as if it had been shattered, but in examining it he could find no obvious point of breakage, no clear dents or damage. The artifact looked almost ornamental, as if it had been designed to evoke the idea of a weapon without ever fulfilling the function of one. He liked it. Normally art was not one of Optimus Prime’s primary interests, but he decided that
if all art looked like this piece—martial, strong, aesthetically pleasing but evocative of power—he might like more of it.

  His artistic preferences, however, were of no use in reasoning out why the Matrix of Leadership had led him to this long-silent beacon and disclosed to him the presence of this artifact buried in the soil. Optimus looked it over again, forcing himself to ask different questions this time. If it had been made like that, what was its purpose? How could it have survived millions or billions of cycles in the windblown, sandy heights of polar Velocitron and still have a sharp edge and an un-pitted surface? He did not have answers to those questions, but framing them and confronting their mystery confirmed in him the initial belief that this was no abandoned bit of junk. And why had it …?

  There.

  A shifting in the sandy ground where he had pulled the artifact free opened a shallow pit as sand poured into an invisible space below. Not a large space as far as Optimus Prime could see, but whatever shift he had caused was in the slow process of exposing the ancient chassis of a bot.

  He could see only its hand and arm, the rest still invisible under millions of cycles’ worth of sand. But the hand was about the size of his own, flecks of color still clinging to it. Once this traveling bot had been green and gold. Its remains were slightly smaller than Optimus Prime, and the styling of its armor put him in mind of ancient records from the archives that dated from before the Age of Wrath. Striking to think of how old the civilization of Cybertron really was and how much of it lay scattered across worlds known and unknown. Who had this bot been? Why had he come here with this piece of broken metal?

  Or was it broken at all?

  A glimmering of speculation made Optimus Prime think of the lost weapons that were so much a part of the stories of the Thirteen. Could this have been a piece of one such weapon? From a particular angle … no, he thought. It is one single thing. Powerful, perhaps, but there was no way to know what its true function was or what it once had been a part of. He took a brief tour through the mythical lost weapons of pre-Wrath history: the Star Saber, the Blades of Time, the Proton Spear …