Exiles (18 page)

What would they have discovered, exactly?

“Time to find out,” Optimus Prime said in the echoing solitude of the shaft.

When he worked his way down into the subfloor space, he found that it was roughly the shape of a flattened cylinder. The interiors of its walls were smooth, which Optimus Prime found incredible until he realized that he had just broken into a ship buried so deep below the surface of Junkion that it must have been one of the first bits of debris that accreted to form the beginnings of the planetoid. He felt that he had traveled back in time.

Along the wall of this cylinder—the side nearer to the Junkions’ main excavation—was a door, jammed into a frame but immovable because of the immense planetary pressures placed on the frame. Optimus Prime leaned against the door just to be sure his initial assessment of its functionality hadn’t been wrong.

It hadn’t. He paused, weighing the imperative radiating from the Matrix against the possibility that if he took any kind of vigorous action here, a large part of Junkion might collapse on him.

Trust the Matrix, he told himself. Just as he was always telling the Autobots. If he couldn’t follow his own dictum, what kind of a leader was he?

Since the door was jammed, Optimus Prime tore the entire bent frame loose and listened to the sound echoing back down the tunnel on the other side of the doorway. From far above him—or was it in the other
direction, below or through one part of the smoothly curved chamber’s wall?—came the rising and falling roar of Wreck-Gar’s furnaces, with their smelting crews pouring and molding and machining without pause. Optimus dropped the frame and ducked his head under the hanging beam. He was inside an ancient crashed spacecraft of some kind, there was no doubt about that. How it had gotten here, who had piloted it, whether it had been sentient itself—those questions remained to be answered. From ahead, down a gently curving stretch of passage, came the faintest glow. He followed it.

After a short walk in the darkness Optimus Prime registered a pattern of small lights so dim that had there been more ambient light, he never would have seen them. Coming closer, he saw that they were a sensor bank. He flicked on one of his lights long enough to see that he was in a ruined bridge. What had once been a wall of windows was now caved in, eons of junk spilling in to form drifts on the deck. How long had the ship been there? Optimus wondered. He ran back a three-axis simulation of his movements from the surface of Junkion to here and found that he was nearly far enough down that no matter which direction he went, it was technically up.

Something was here. He could feel it. But he could also feel that something else had been here, too, and was now gone. Optimus Prime was not sure which one he was supposed to pursue. He listened for instructions, guidance, any kind of hint … and got none.

Then the Matrix poured a great hologram forth into the crumpled space where the wrecked ship’s fuselage had created an overhang, deflecting higher layers of debris. Optimus Prime saw a view of Junkion as if from far in space, with four Space Bridges like burned-out photo-receptors above it. Only one of them showed any light. Near it, faintly and nearly transparently, shone a simple
sign, a directional indicator like the one any automated cargo transport used on the roads of any bot planet.

Sometimes, Optimus Prime thought drily, the Matrix spoke with a kind of majestic indirection. And sometimes it was so plain that it almost seemed impatient that Optimus Prime had not figured out its message before it had to speak. This was one of those times.

He turned back toward the surface, nagged by a sense that although the Matrix had spoken clearly, he was walking away from another, possibly equally important, artifact. But if he could not trust the Matrix, what could he trust?

And if the other bots could not trust his judgment, what was there for any bot to trust?

He spoke to the space around him, and to the lingering spirits of the bots who once had piloted the great ship between the stars. “This is not the last time,” Optimus Prime said. “Whatever you carry, I will discover. Count on it.”

Then he turned back to the surface, feeling that a great destiny lay both before and behind him. To make either or both of them, he was going to have to talk to Wreck-Gar.

When he reached the surface, the first thing Optimus Prime did was locate Wreck-Gar and ask a simple question. “Are there any spaceworthy ships here?”

“For what?” Wreck-Gar roared. “Spaceworthy, junk-worthy, spare parts! It’s all worth the space! We use it!”

“I need to make a short voyage, just as far as one of the Space Bridges,” Optimus Prime said, persevering in the face of Wreck-Gar’s incomprehensibility. He was starting to understand that Wreck-Gar’s mind was perfectly acute despite his unusual speech and that if you could isolate the occasional nuggets of sense in his ravings, it was possible to have a conversation with him.

“Plenty of ships up there,” Wreck-Gar said, pointing
up. That was of course true. Optimus Prime had noted the number of drifting wrecks when the Ark first had arrived over Junkion.

“I mean ships that can be flown,” he said.

“Find one!” Wreck-Gar shouted. “You fly it, we’ll junk it!”

That sounded like an offer of a deal. “Very well,” Optimus Prime said. “The first ship we find that we can fly, we will land it to be junked when we bring it back.”

“Mighty smooth!” Wreck-Gar said. He shifted into alt-form and rumbled away in search of cargo for his compactor.

That settled, Optimus Prime gathered the other Autobot leaders and officers near the Ark, telling them of the place he had found at the center of Junkion and the instruction he had received from the Matrix. “Something is here,” he said. “We have come here for a reason. Yet I also think we need to pursue the course the Matrix has laid out to this Space Bridge.”

“One of them works?” Silverbolt sounded skeptical.

“The Matrix pointed me toward one of them,” Optimus Prime said. “Either it still works, or it can be fixed, or something about the Space Bridge itself is what the Matrix wants us to see.”

“That’s what I meant before about not assuming we know what the Matrix is saying,” Jazz said. “Yeah.”

“Problem is, if we don’t know what the Matrix really means, we don’t know what to do,” Silverbolt said as Bumblebee simultaneously emitted a series of beeps and bleats.

“Hey, Bumblebee, you sounded like Silverbolt,” Jazz said, comically surprised. “I could understand you and everything.”

“Let us be serious just for a cycle or two. We need to go in search of whatever this artifact is,” Optimus Prime said. He believed it to be the rest of the Star Saber, but
he also was feeling from the Matrix that another power was involved. “The trip will not, I think, be a long one, but I don’t want to leave the Junkions entirely to themselves while we are gone. Wreck-Gar has provided us access to a ship, assuming we can find one in the drift zone between here and the Space Bridges. There are near-surface craft available to shuttle us up to that zone. So Sideswipe and Silverbolt, go to Wreck-Gar. Get that shuttle and find us something that will make it to the Space Bridge. I believe one of them still functions. Ratchet and Ironhide, you stand in for me if command decisions become necessary. Hound and Prowl, you will be in charge of interacting with the Junkions. Talk to them, keep them on our side, explain to them that my absence will be brief and that when I get back we will be in a much better position to defend against Megatron.”

“What about the pirates?” Hound asked.

“Pirates?”

“Some of the Junkions have already told me that this whole place started off as a dumping ground for ships after pirates were done with them. Some of them were marooned on the ships, and eventually it all got stuck together. I don’t know if it’s true or even if they all believe it,” Hound said, “but some of them sure do.”

Pirates
, thought Optimus Prime.
What next?

“There’s another problem, too, Optimus,” Sideswipe said. “I’ve been looking over the fuel-reservoir repairs we did back on Velocitron, and the latest sabotage blew them apart.” He added some details about Clocker and Mainspring’s reports, but Optimus Prime wasn’t interested in the details.

He was interested in solutions.

“What do we do? Recommendations,” he said.

“I think we ought to dig around on Junkion until we find a fuel reservoir that’s about the right size,” Sideswipe said. “And as much as I felt at home on Velocitron
and think those were some skilled mechanics, we need to recognize that maybe they weren’t the best at working on starships. Especially ships the size of the Ark.”

“You think the Junkions will be?” Silverbolt asked.

“Don’t know,” Sideswipe said. “But if we know one thing didn’t work, we probably shouldn’t do that same thing again.”

“Makes sense to me,” Jazz said. “Prime?”

A damaged ship and the specter of pirates. Unclear visions from the Matrix and an uncertain welcome on Junkion. And the ever-present shadow of Megatron looming over them. This was one of the situations that had so many variables that the only way forward was to ignore them and make a decision based solely on the desired result.

“Jazz, Sideswipe,” Optimus Prime said. “Go find Wreck-Gar and get a shuttle. Then find us a ship that will get to the Space Bridges and back. The rest of you, get working on the Ark.”

Axer came to Wreck-Gar soon after his first interaction with the Cybertronians, which left him nervous and feeling that he needed to take immediate action to shore up his position and make sure Wreck-Gar knew the Autobots did not speak for all bots or even all Cybertronians. “Leader,” he said with a worried tone, “I’m not sure about these Autobots.”

Wreck-Gar was just getting a load together and preparing to take it on his route of forges and furnaces. Before he had completed his shift into alt-form, he said, “Lies are junk! Not worth junk even when you tell them! Tell them better so they’re better junk!”

Burning at the insult, Axer persevered nevertheless. He followed Wreck-Gar down the central road from the current focus of excavating operations. “How do we know they are who they say they are?” he said. “I came from Cybertron when the war they speak of was about to break out, and much of what this Optimus Prime says does not match up with what I understood to be the case when I was there. Not every Cybertronian believes Optimus Prime is Prime at all.”

Wreck-Gar stopped and spilled a small heap of glittering spools of wire at the base of a larger heap of the same material. The bot charged with melting and respinning
the wire said, “Thanks, Leader,” and kept working without a pause. Axer followed Wreck-Gar down the road.

“The High Council might have named him, but lots of bots were on the side of Megatron. That’s just the truth,” Axer said.

At Wreck-Gar’s next stop, a Junkion emerged from a complicated network of pipes and nozzles fueled by a small furnace. It held out a hopper, and Wreck-Gar dumped a load of shattered glass, the patterns of its breakage indicating that it was starship-class hardened material. “We’ll get a ship built yet, Leader,” the glass-working bot said, and Wreck-Gar went on.

Axer picked up where he had left off. “Orion Pax was a data clerk, Leader,” he said. “A minor official. By what right does he lead any bot? Especially here, where you have earned your role and our trust?”

“Flattery is junk!” Wreck-Gar boomed. “Break it down, melt it! I like it!”

Taking this as encouragement, Axer went on. “We have no way to know whether we can trust him. What has he done other than beg? What kind of a leader is that?”

“Build!” Raw materials from an electromagnet processor poured into Wreck-Gar’s hopper.

“The truth is that Optimus Prime could have faked what he calls the Matrix,” Axer continued. “Any bot could work up a visual effect like that. The Matrix could be just a myth.”

“Felt like junk!” Wreck-Gar said. Axer didn’t know what that meant but decided to interpret it as agreement.

And so it went through the rest of Wreck-Gar’s routine path toward the great furnace at the other end of the pit. As they approached that pit, Axer toned down
his rhetoric, because he saw Optimus Prime and some of the other Autobots waiting near the furnace, presumably, he thought, for Wreck-Gar’s approach so that they could ask him for something else. That was all they seemed to do, ask favors.

Megatron did not have that problem.

Optimus Prime watched Wreck-Gar and Axer come closer and saw that Axer—in his bot-form—was carrying on a one-sided conversation with the alt-formed Wreck-Gar. About what, he did not know, but he fully expected the conversation to be detrimental to the Autobot cause.

Wreck-Gar, of course, was not reacting visibly. He backed toward the great hopper that funneled into the blast furnace where Junkions constantly created new alloys. Wreck-Gar’s main compartment angled up and out on its hydraulic lift, and pieces of metal—a few at first, then a cascade—began to ring and clatter into the hopper, disappearing through the funnel into the white-hot roar of the furnace.

Optimus Prime had never grown tired of this sight despite having seen it a million times on Cybertron and more times since. The re-creation, the destruction and renewal, the way that in the furnace you could watch something be broken down to its fundamental elements in preparation to being rebuilt … it filled Optimus Prime with belief, with certainty, with a feeling almost like faith.