Exiles (23 page)

“What’s dangerous about it?” Silverbolt asked. The rest of the Autobots noted Wreck-Gar’s surprising lucidity. It worried them a little.

“You go there and then come back and tell me if I’m wrong,” Wreck-Gar said. He looked back at the broken body of Shearbolt. “But before that tell me which one of you did this.”

It was a dangerous moment. Wreck-Gar was not the most sophisticated bot in the universe, but he was big and angry and feeling keenly the responsibilities of being the leading Junkion. Optimus Prime knew all too well what might happen if he started to see the Autobots as an enemy; it could easily turn into a repeat of the situation on Velocitron.

Civil war
, he thought.
It happens wherever we go
.

“Wreck-Gar,” Optimus Prime said. “We had reason to believe that there was a traitor in our midst before we left Velocitron.”

“Don’t care about Velocitron!” Wreck-Gar shouted. “Don’t even know what a Velocitron is! Tell me which bot did this! That bot is junk!”

“That’s the problem,” Optimus Prime said.

Ratchet stepped in and picked up the explanation. “Wreck-Gar, you see, the bot who did this then went around pretending to be Shearbolt.”

Wreck-Gar struggled with this, but he figured it out. “A robot in disguise?”

“No,” Ratchet said. “A shifter.”

“You expect me to believe shifters!?” Wreck-Gar raged. “You think I’m stupid junk?”

“No, we don’t think you’re stupid, Wreck-Gar. We didn’t believe it either until we found him,” Optimus Prime said. “Ratchet, explain the rest.”

Ratchet explained the decay rates of Energon leaving a dead Cybertronian and how the calculation of those rates led him inevitably to the conclusion that Shearbolt had been seen talking to Axer—and Prowl had talked to Shearbolt—after Shearbolt had been killed. “The only explanation is that a shifter took Shearbolt’s place,” he said. “And even given this evidence, we would be nervous about believing that if it were not for some strange events that took place on Velocitron.”

“Junk! Keep going,” Wreck-Gar demanded. “I want to hear.”

This was startling lucidity from Wreck-Gar, and Optimus Prime took full advantage. He picked up the story again, telling Wreck-Gar of the attempt to destroy the Ark and how their brief investigation had led them to the conclusion that there was a traitor. “At the time we thought the traitor was just clever and avoiding detection,” Optimus Prime said. “We have since reasoned that he must be a shifter as well because we have seen a bot looking like Shearbolt after Shearbolt himself was already dead. I am sorry that we did not make this discovery sooner.”

“I am sorry about that, too,” Wreck-Gar said.

After a cycle’s thought he said, “But past is junk! Who is this shifter? We must find him and punish him. If Megatron is coming, we must find him before that.”

After another cycle’s thought, Wreck-Gar continued. “Axer is to blame for this. I will break him down!”

“How do you know?” Ratchet said.

Prowl made a scoffing noise at Ratchet. “How much more evidence do you need?”

“I need no more evidence,” Wreck-Gar said. “I will go find Axer. You will talk to him. We will restore order to Junkion.”

“Good,” said Optimus Prime. “Then there is one more thing I would ask.”

The Ark was still being repaired, and the repairs were delayed because some of the resources that would have been devoted to it were being redirected toward the search for Axer, who had gone into hiding.

“He can’t stay hidden long,” said one of Wreck-Gar’s aides, a hauler named Detritus. “We’ll find him. And we’ll find him faster if you Autobots help.”

Optimus Prime added three Autobots to the hunt: Jazz, Prowl, and Silverbolt. He could trust them absolutely, he knew, and he also trusted any of the three to fight off an attempted ambush by the shapeshifter in whatever guise he might assume. While the search for Axer went on, Optimus Prime wrestled with some difficult decisions.

The Matrix was spurring him onward, telling him that he had to keep moving, that there was something to be found on the other side of one of the Space Bridges that hung in a shallow arc in the black sky over Junkion. Wreck-Gar had said only one of them worked, so Optimus Prime assumed that was the one he was supposed to traverse unless Wreck-Gar was wrong or the Matrix of Leadership unexpectedly had developed a sense of humor.

The Junkion leader had said that there was a ship
graveyard on the other side of the bridge but nothing else. Did one of those wrecks contain something the Autobots needed, another part of the Star Saber or something else that would assist their quest? Optimus Prime could not imagine what it might be, but the lore of Cybertron was fertile on the topic of artifacts and the Matrix rarely spelled out the exact meaning of the directions it gave out.

To be Prime, Optimus thought, meant to be constantly in touch with forces that could not be entirely controlled or understood. Yet controlled and understood they must be, because the lives of every bot in the universe ultimately might depend on the Prime’s ability to make the correct decision about what to do and how.

It was not an ideal situation for peace of mind.

Sideswipe and Silverbolt had powered up one of the drifting wrecks in low orbit over Junkion. There was no reason to delay any longer. In fact, the discovery of Shearbolt’s murder and the accompanying revelation that there was a shifter somewhere on Junkion made it all the more urgent that Optimus Prime find out why the Matrix was pressing him with such urgency to traverse this nearby Space Bridge. He would go, of course. He could no more refuse the Matrix of Leadership than he could undo the ejection of the AllSpark. But he would go with a small team, and with any luck he would sort out the mystery of what exactly was drawing him to this graveyard among the stars. When he returned, if all went according to plan, the Ark would be repaired and the Autobots could resume the quest for the AllSpark itself.

Sideswipe and Ratchet. They would be his accompanying team. He would have liked to take Bumblebee and might yet decide to do that, but Bumblebee’s vocoder issues were very difficult to adjust to in situations in
which instantaneous and clear communications might make the difference between life and death.

He decided to check in with Bumblebee, who was working on the Ark’s ancient weapons systems and trying to retrofit them into something approaching useful defensive ordnance. The young bot would get too frustrated to be a useful member of the team if Optimus Prime kept holding him back from the most interesting missions and assignments without explanation. On his way back to the Ark, Optimus instructed the team of Junkions guarding Axer’s ship to let no one pass without giving a password. To one of them he said quietly, “The password is ‘Iacon.’ No exceptions.” He moved on.

He found Bumblebee deep inside an access shaft between the inner bulkheads of the Ark’s passenger area and the hardened outer plating of its hull. The cramped space was a tangle of conduits and cables. Optimus Prime called to Bumblebee and led him onto the Ark’s bridge, where they could talk without the sounds of repairs echoing around. Like the rest of Junkion, the interior of the damaged section of the Ark was a cacophony. The crackle of arc welders and the echoing booms of huge pieces of alloy being maneuvered into position rang down the corridors and ricocheted around the rooms. The bridge of the Ark, insulated against external stimuli to provide better for clearheaded command decisions, was a most welcome oasis.

“Bumblebee,” Optimus Prime said. “How is your vocoder?”

Bumblebee chirped and beeped. Ratchet had worked hard on his vocoder but had not been able to recover Bumblebee’s powers of speech, and Optimus Prime had not yet learned to decipher the new language Bumblebee was capable of making. He could only guess at what Bumblebee meant most of the time.

“I wanted to let you know that I have had to keep you
out of certain assignments because of difficulty communicating,” Optimus Prime said. Bumblebee clicked and whistled mournfully. “I know,” Optimus said. “You still have my trust. In fact, I would like you to accompany me on what might be a dangerous mission.”

Or might not be, he said to himself. But he could not relegate a valiant Autobot to permanent maintenance duty solely because there were communications obstacles. They needed Bumblebee, who had perked up considerably at Optimus Prime’s last words.

Optimus Prime laughed, but in a kindly way. “It will get you out of the ship for a while,” he said. “You want to take a trip over a Space Bridge?”

Bumblebee buried his face in his hands. Then he spread his arms wide and nodded emphatically.

Optimus Prime laughed again. He definitely needed Bumblebee around, just to lighten things up once in a while.

Especially if the alternative was Jazz’s jokes.

On Velocitron, an uneasy peace was holding in the aftermath of the pitched battle whose damage was still evident in the area surrounding the hangar and nearby buildings. Override had won, but she knew she had not seen the last of Ransack’s subversion. She kept a close eye on Ransack, and he did the same to her. He was not yet powerful enough to challenge her, and both of them knew it. They both also knew that he soon would be. The coming and going of the Autobots had broken open the simmering resentments and feuds between different factions of Velocitronians, and Override knew that the worsening resource shortages would only accelerate the rate at which her bots became Ransack’s bots.

She looked up at the sun, which was looming reddish and huge over the mountains. How much longer did they have? Her scientists—torn away from the most recent refinements in frictionless bearings and high-efficiency heat-kinesis converters—said that the star might exist for another solar cycle or another thousand. Or, they said with a collective shrug, it might begin its final expansion right now.

Velocitronians had never turned much of their attention to astronomy.

“Blueshift,” she said to one of the scientists whom she
had asked to accompany her on one of her daily mind-clearing sojourns into one of the flat, dusty expanses not yet paved over. They were preserved for off-road races and other recreational activities. Blueshift had come willingly, not just out of a sense of duty but because he was one of the few Velocitronians she knew who had big ideas about speed. He wanted to see if he could make Velocitronians fly like the Autobot Silverbolt. He had even speculated on possible ways to move the planet of Velocitron itself, turning it into a vehicle that all Velocitronians could ride to a better star that would last more than the next few solar cycles.

Velocitron needed big ideas, and Blueshift had them. “Blueshift,” she said. “If Cybertron cannot save us and we are about to be dragged into a war because Ransack is a fool, what should we do?”

“That is a question for a philosopher or a general, Override,” Blueshift said carefully. “Not a scientist. I am of a more engineering bent.”

“I know. Treat it as a problem,” she said. “Work the problem. What are some possible elements of a solution?”

Blueshift thought about this as they drew farther and farther away from Delta. “Some possible elements of a solution,” he repeated some time later. “Evacuate the planet. Rely on Autobot success. Kill Ransack.”

None of those sounded like good ideas to Override, but she had to confess that all three had crossed her mind with more and more regularity these past orbital cycles. The time might be coming, she thought, when Velocitron had to confront the fact that there was more to existence than going fast.

She had just formed the thought and was about to put it into words for Blueshift to gauge his reaction when something appeared against the face of the sun.

“Override,” Blueshift said, pointing.

She nodded. “I see it, too.”

For a long, long moment that in reality was probably no longer than a nanoklik she stood contemplating the expansion of Velocitron’s sun and the death of everything she had ever known. Including, of course, herself. She found herself at peace. Override did not want to die and did not want those Velocitronians who relied on her to die, either. She did not want her planet destroyed. But seeing one’s sun in its death throes … Either you grew fatalistic in the face of such inevitability or you spent the rest of your short life span raging against that which could not be changed.