Exiles (25 page)

I had better put the philosophizing on a secondary circuit. If Shockwave is getting ready to move against me, there are a number of preparations I must make
.

And if, as I fear, Megatron will soon pick up the Autobots’ trail, I must set in motion some …

I was about to say desperate plans. But perhaps I should characterize them as bold
.

“We have a signal from Velocitron, Optimus,” Ratchet said. “A distress signal. It’s—”

“Let me hear it,” Optimus Prime said.

Ratchet reset the file on the Ark’s media systems and restarted it. The voice that came out was immediately recognizable as Blurr. “Optimus Prime! Autobots! Jazz! We need help, we need help, they came all of a sudden and now Override and Ransack are at war. Not just the fight in the hangar like before. It’s
war
here, and all because of—”

The transmission cut out.

“Run it again,” Optimus Prime commanded.

Ratchet did.

“Can you cut out Blurr’s voice and run it one more time with just the background noises?”

“Give me just a klik,” Ratchet said. He leaned over to ask Sideswipe something, then ran the entire harvested signal through a filter. “Okay. This should be it.”

The file ran again. Every bot on the Ark’s bridge except Optimus Prime listened closely to try to hear what had made him want to run the whole thing again. Optimus Prime listened for confirmation of something he thought he had heard.

There. In the background, close to the end of the message, a roar:

… Cybertronians!

The signal ended. Into the silence that followed, Optimus Prime said, “Sound familiar?”

“Megatron,” Jazz said. “He’s on our trail.”

“That’s what it sounds like,” Optimus Prime said. “If he tracked us to Velocitron, he’ll probably be able to track us here as well. We’ll need to be ready.”

“Or we need to go back,” Silverbolt said.

Optimus considered this. “Perhaps,” he said. “Is it more important to do that or to make sure we get the Star Saber put together?”

“I don’t know,” Jazz said. “Are you leading all bots, or are you leading a resistance against Decepticons?”

This was the crux. Optimus had no good answer. “We will return to Velocitron,” he said. “But not until we have figured out the Star Saber puzzle. It won’t do anyone any good if we sacrifice ourselves without removing the Decepticon threat.”

There was silence around the room. Optimus Prime knew that some of his closest friends disagreed with the decision. They wanted to go back to Velocitron immediately and square off with Megatron where they could be sure that Override would fight with them. Optimus Prime also knew that they were keeping their disagreements to themselves out of respect for him as Prime. There was a gulf between him and them. The responsibility was his, the decision was his, and they would all have to live with the consequences.

He had three pieces of the Star Saber—if indeed that was what the fragments would form once they were assembled. “We don’t know for certain that was Megatron,” he said. “Are any of you sure?”

He waited, but none of the Autobots present could answer in the affirmative. “Our choice is to head back
to Velocitron on the strength of a garbled signal that may or may not contain a voiceprint that may or may not be Megatron’s … or move ahead with the quest the Matrix has given us. It seems to me the choice is clear.”

There was no dissent, at least none spoken out loud. “It is decided, then. Now we must get our next step figured out,” he said.

“And how do we do that?” Ironhide asked.

“If I was looking for answers about a broken sword,” Optimus Prime said, “I might look for the place that sword was made.”

“So you want to go find Solus Prime’s forge,” Jazz said. “Great. Why didn’t you just say so?”

“It may not be as hard as you think. As any of you might think,” Optimus Prime said. “In fact, I’m starting to think that we’re going to find more of Cybertron’s history out here than we ever could have imagined.”

“Here’s hoping,” Jazz said. “Long as we don’t just find more junk.”

Optimus Prime kept on with his optimistic demeanor until he was alone again, and only then did he give full vent to his misgivings. What if he couldn’t find Solus Prime’s tomb? What if he couldn’t find all the pieces of the Star Saber? What if he
did
find all of the Star Saber’s pieces but then couldn’t use the forge to reassemble them?

Too many ifs.
Remember
, Optimus Prime told himself,
when there are too many variables, decide on the outcome you want and act to make it happen
.

He wanted to find the rest of the Star Saber. With one hand over the Matrix of Leadership, his palm tingling ever so slightly from its constant emission of powerful and ancient energy, Optimus Prime asked himself:
Where might that last piece be?

He could not figure out what the existing three pieces
had in common apart from their being practically indistinguishable. The stories said there were five, though. And some of the stories spoke of guardians, each charged with guarding a particular piece of the Saber. If Optimus Prime’s recent experience was any indication, those guards no longer were performing their functions.

Which meant … what, exactly? That the pieces of the Saber had lost whatever power they once might have possessed? Or simply that the guardians, like the universe, had aged?

I will go forward, Optimus Prime resolved. I have spoken to one of the Thirteen, I have seen some of the great artifacts of Cybertronian civilization. I cannot stop believing now. There are five pieces of the Star Saber until I find out definitively otherwise. And there is a way to put them back together.

The answer, he felt certain—and here the Matrix, Optimus Prime could tell, agreed—was on the other side of that Space Bridge.

So that was where he would go.

Prowl had kept up nearly constant surveillance of Axer since the discovery of the ship with Shearbolt’s body in it, but Axer was a difficult bot to track. His bounty-hunting experience had given him a keen sensitivity to pursuit as both pursuer and quarry. At first Prowl tried trolling through Axer’s known haunts, the various places around the rim of the main pit where he was known to broker deals and occasionally provide services for gullible or desperate Junkions.

That did not work, so Prowl fell back on another old investigator’s technique: examining the movements of the suspect’s known associates.

Problem was, Axer had no known associates on Junkion. The only bots Prowl had ever seen him speak to were the disguised traitor and Prowl himself. So who else’s actions could Axer be expected to monitor or duplicate?

Optimus Prime, of course.

On the Ark, Prowl checked in to see if Optimus would permit him to backtrack his locations since he had arrived on Junkion.

“I’ve told you everywhere I’ve gone,” Optimus Prime said.

“It would help to have a visual representation,” Prowl
said apologetically. He did not like pressing his leader for details. It felt disloyal.

“Fine,” Optimus Prime said, and fed from his personal records a moment-by-moment six-axis datastream of every place he had been on Junkion.

“Thank you, Optimus,” Prowl said. “You are not a suspect.”

“Good to know,” said Optimus Prime.

Running the locations, Prowl found more or less what he would have expected: numerous trips back and forth between the Ark and the great pit where Wreck-Gar spent most of his time. There were also a few brief excursions to the location of Axer’s ship, which Prowl also had visited extensively. No help there. Then he found one side trip that caught his attention right away.

“Down,” said Prowl as if it had never occurred to him before. Which it hadn’t, not in this way. He had thought Axer might hide among the machinery at the bottom of the pit or in the side caves dug out of its terraces. But he had not anticipated the possibility that Axer would hide down in a vertical exploratory shaft that reached, apparently, most of the way to the center of Junkion.

Prowl transformed and rolled out along the Rim Road, feeling suddenly as if time was very, very short.

Prowl caught Axer coming up out of the same shaft Optimus Prime had explored two orbital cycles before. “Axer,” he said. “We need to talk.”

Axer’s answer was a fusillade from his blaster and a screeching getaway, his tires spinning even before he had fully occupied alt-form. Prowl transformed, too, and took off after him, but Axer’s heavy two-wheel setup was much better suited to the broken landscape around the shafts than was Prowl’s city-designed alt-from. And Prowl didn’t have time to scan anything else, aside from
the fact that he hated the idea of scanning. He’d had the same alt-form since he came out of the Well, and he didn’t feel like changing it to suit the demands of an interstellar trash heap and the trashy traitorous bots who inhabited it.

Instead he stayed as close as he could to Axer and then, when Axer was just about to get away, risked a shot from what he called his Investigator Special.

The Investigator Special fired a single low-velocity slug that splattered a hyperconductive gel over the target on impact. Generally, the effect of the hyperconductivity was twofold: One, electrical signals from the target’s immediate environment interfered with the target’s internal signals; two, the target’s internal signals started to go places they weren’t supposed to go.

Prowl was a pretty good shot, and scored a hit squarely on Axer’s frame, just behind the front wheel.

Axer shot straight up in the air, front wheel suddenly locked and back wheel revved into a screaming spin almost too fast for Prowl to track the rotational motion of its spokes. Crashing back down into a shallow conical pit of rubber hoses, Axer got halfway back to bot-form before Prowl had tackled him and, taking full advantage of the disabling effect of the Investigator Special, pounded him into complete submission.

Then Prowl put him in stasis cuffs and stood up to wait for the Investigator Special to wear off. It would take a while.

He debated letting Optimus Prime know but decided to put it off for the moment. Prime had enough to worry about in getting the Ark put back together and figuring out how to go about traversing a Space Bridge that apparently went nowhere. Prowl could handle this interrogation for now. “Axer,” he said.

Axer responded with something incomprehensible
that sounded a bit like the beep-and-whistle codes semisentient mechas used to avoid collisions.

“Axer,” Prowl said again a little while later.

“Get slagged,” Axer said.

Prowl grinned. “Ah, you’re back.” He squatted next to Axer, who was lying on his side with his wrists bound behind him and another set of stasis cuffs binding him at midshin. “Let’s talk.”

“Nothing to talk about,” Axer said.

“Oh, I think there is,” Prowl said. “Or maybe I should go down into that shaft, find whatever it is you found, and then come back and ask you about it.”

Axer was silent for a long time.

“Work it out quick, whatever it is,” Prowl said. “I can always turn you over to Wreck-Gar.”

That was something Prowl was sure Axer would not want. Wreck-Gar already had convicted Axer for Shearbolt’s murder. There had never been a murder on Junkion, according to Wreck-Gar, but now that there had been, he was going to make sure that there was never another. Axer’s life would end very shortly if he was placed in Wreck-Gar’s custody, and Prowl had a feeling Axer knew it.

“How about this?” Axer said. “We make a trade.”

“What do you have to trade?”

“More than you might think,” Axer said.

Prowl waited. And kept waiting. They were far enough away from the Rim Road that they were not immediately apparent against the jumble of the landscape, but it would not be long before some curious bot noticed their energy signatures, or motion, or light and came out to investigate. At that point, Prowl thought, he would have no choice but to hand Axer over to Wreck-Gar.

When he had counted to a thousand and Axer still had not said anything, Prowl explained his thinking.