Exiles (20 page)

“You’re Prime,” Jazz reminded him. “You do what’s needed. Wreck-Gar might not like it, but he’s got to understand it.”

“Like Ransack had to understand it?” Optimus Prime countered. Into the silence that followed, he added, “I’m not going to lead by force and by fiat. I’m going to lead by example.”

Turning back to Prowl, he said, “I want regular reports on Axer. If you happen to see Shearbolt doing something interesting, don’t hide that from me, either. Right?”

“Understood, Optimus,” Prowl said. He rolled out on the next stage of his mission, and Optimus Prime was left to consider something he had been reluctant to face.

Life and civilizations developed in the absence of the AllSpark. It was incredible to conceive, but Velocitron had grown and stabilized in the absence of the AllSpark and after the collapse of the Space Bridges. The same could be said, although in much different fashion, for Junkion. Optimus Prime never would have thought that such a thing was possible. Did not all things flow ultimately from the AllSpark? And did it not follow that in the absence of the AllSpark, civilizations and cultures would decay?

Yet they had not. Something, some deep principle, was at work here, and Optimus Prime was just becoming conscious of its existence.

He wondered what else—what other wonders, what other terrors—the universe might be hiding from him.

In the first cycles after the
Nemesis
had emerged from the energy field created by the dissolution of the Space Bridge at Cybertron, there was little motion aboard the enormous ship. It drifted with the momentum left over from its drive away from the surface of Cybertron, in the aftermath of the climactic on-planet confrontation between the overwhelming numerical strength of the Decepticons and the indomitable will of the Autobots. The Space Bridge exploding had blown a wave front of energy through the
Nemesis
that barely was lessened by the ship’s thick hull. All the Decepticons aboard it were overwhelmed where they stood, and when some of them began to stir again, at first none of them knew how long it had been since they had been conscious. The
Nemesis
itself had become stasis-locked after its final transformation out of Trypticon mode, and whatever sentience it once had possessed was now permanently subsumed into its ship function.

That was regrettable, because at that moment Starscream would have liked very much to ask the ship what exactly had happened to them on their way through the Space Bridge. The way things stood, they were going to have to figure that out for themselves and also figure out whether the fleeing Autobots had emerged in the same
region of space. Starscream looked around and saw Megatron getting to his feet. His first thought was to wonder if Megatron’s recovery period was a time to take the action he had always wanted to take: deposing Megatron and assuming control of the Decepticons for himself.

Then Megatron locked optics with Starscream, and the Seeker saw that Megatron’s first action was to locate Starscream and determine whether he was planning anything.

We understand each other
, Starscream thought.

Around them, the other Decepticons stirred. The bridge area of the
Nemesis
was dark, but some of its command-console displays began to come to life again as the ship regained awareness. The Seeker trio of Skywarp, Thundercracker, and Slipstream were next to regain awareness, followed by Soundwave and the rest of the
Nemesis
’s complement of Decepticons and Vehicons. All of them looked to Megatron except the Seekers, who kept an eye on both Megatron and Starscream, befitting their divided loyalties.

“Status report,” Megatron commanded.

Thundercracker ran through a diagnostic array with the
Nemesis
, interacting with the various automated routines that had replaced Trypticon’s consciousness during the process of stasis locking. Some of those routines were sophisticated enough to border on sentience, but in the end, Megatron thought, it did not matter whether the consciousness of Trypticon ever manifested itself again. What the Decepticons needed the
Nemesis
for was battle, and in battle it was a formidable ally. If it could obey commands and operate autonomously, that was enough for him, because another thing the
Nemesis
could do was survive the destruction of a Space Bridge more or less unscathed.

That, in essence, was how the diagnostic results came
back. Thundercracker noted a few errors and shorts in some peripheral systems and investigated them one after another carefully, knowing that there were two ways for a mistake to kill him. Not only were the eyes of Megatron and Starscream on him, he was aware that if he made a mistake, it easily could prove fatal to all of them. It was a highly pressurized situation, and Thundercracker made absolutely certain he checked everything just the way it was supposed to be checked. He had the documentation and manuals supplied by Shockwave from when the scientist had worked on the
Nemesis
’s Trypticon incarnation in the later stages of the war, and he used all of it.

When he was done, he put together a report as quickly as he could without being careless and brought it to the bridge. Starscream took it from him, glanced over it, and passed it on to Megatron.

“Don’t waste my time,” Megatron said. “What does it say?”

Turning from Megatron to Thundercracker, Starscream said, “What does it say?”

Thundercracker ran through every system: propulsion, climate, energy, sensors, command and control, armaments, artificial gravity, all the way down to the self-reported impacts of motes of space dust on the
Nemesis
’s hull. “On the whole,” he said, “the ship’s in good shape. But it doesn’t know where we are and keeps asking. The crew are also asking questions. Where are we?”

This was the question.

Megatron looked at a field of stars, then at Starscream, then back at the field of stars. The
Nemesis
drifted in space. No planetary body was nearby. No star was nearby. Megatron turned to Soundwave, who was buried in an intense interaction with the command console.
“What has happened?” Megatron demanded. “Where are we? And where is Optimus Prime?”

The bridge contingent of Decepticons got to work trying to ascertain their location and their distance from the nearest known Space Bridge. They collated a number of ancient maps and more recent astronomical observations. They combed minutely through every record of Space Bridge accidents they could find on the chance that the accidents held a pattern that could shed some light on their current circumstance.

“I don’t care about history,” Megatron growled all the while. “I care about finding Optimus Prime. Now. Sooner than now.”

Skywarp surprised everyone by speaking. He was ordinarily the last of the Seekers to offer an opinion about anything if Starscream was there to speak for them. But in this case what he said left every Decepticon on the
Nemesis
’s bridge momentarily speechless.

“That Ark of theirs will leave a trail,” he said. “Every flying bot or ship leaves a trail, doesn’t it? Instead of looking around at the stars, why don’t we start scanning for the ion signature of the Ark?”

“Do it,” Megatron commanded. The bridge was immediately alive with activity. Instruments were recalibrated, and the
Nemesis
’s command routines tweaked to be alert for different energy signatures against the background radiation of the universe. Megatron seethed, wanting it to be done, furious at the delay. Furious above all at Optimus Prime—Prime!—who had escaped from him and ejected the AllSpark so far beyond his reach.

For now. He would find the Autobots and exterminate them. Then he would find the AllSpark and bring it back to Cybertron, and then there would not be a bot in the universe who would be able to stand in his way.

“Megatron,” Starscream said. “We’ve got something.”

“Go,” Megatron said. “Do not speak. Go.”

“Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”

“Are the Autobots there?”

“We’ve got a track on the Ark’s exhaust,” Starscream said. “I wouldn’t want to say any more than that. I know how you hate to be disappointed.”

“What I don’t need right now is wit, Starscream. What I do need are results. Are the Autobots at the end of this trail you’ve found?”

“My guess is yes, they are,” Starscream said.

“Then let’s get ready to greet them,” Megatron said. “Maximum acceleration.”

They felt the thrum of the
Nemesis
’s massive engines and the press of acceleration as the ship’s artificial gravity adjusted. Megatron watched the stars begin to move around them slowly, slowly … but moving. “Maximum subluminal in one cycle, counting down … point nine nine, point nine eight,” Thundercracker began to count. He leaned back against an acceleration buffer at the back wall of the bridge. The
Nemesis
could pilot itself from here.

What remained to be seen was what they would encounter on the other end of the trip, when they had run the Autobots to ground. How many of them had survived? Where were they going? Did they already have the AllSpark? Thundercracker hoped so. He wanted to go back to Cybertron. He wasn’t cut out for endless wandering among the stars. He also wasn’t cut out, he thought sometimes, for the things that were necessary in fighting a war. Thundercracker had no desire to be part of massacres or the kind of torture Shockwave preferred to interrogation. He liked a square fight for a cause a bot could believe in. Sometimes he wasn’t sure that Megatron understood that, and he was absolutely certain
that he did not subscribe to Megatron’s slogan of peace through tyranny. Neither was he sure that he could support Optimus Prime. What kind of leader came out of the archives at Iacon? A weak one. Whatever Megatron’s flaws might be, Thundercracker thought, weakness wasn’t one of them.

Plus, it was because of Megatron that they had the war. On the whole, Thundercracker liked the war. He had gone to the Decepticons when Starscream had declared his allegiance, and he intended to keep faith with his decision. But although he liked the fight well enough, Thundercracker didn’t like being stuck on board the
Nemesis
. He wished all the contending bots would turn around and settle things at home.

But the fight had moved off-planet, so the Decepticons had followed it. Thundercracker would stay with them … at least as long as Starscream did, he thought. Because it didn’t seem to him that Starscream would wait forever before making his move.

“Point zero three,” he said. “Point zero two, point zero one …”

The
Nemesis
fired its superluminal accelerator and blasted through the barrier betwen space and time. It wasn’t as fast as Space Bridge travel, which was instantaneous, but it would get them places quickly. Especially since it seemed that the Autobots had not gotten too far ahead of them.

While space-time folded around them, Soundwave and Starscream and Megatron examined the tracking reports. “Tell me if I’m wrong,” Starscream said, “but it looks like this energy signature from the Autobot Ark is fresh. Which means it can’t be that far away, correct?”

“That’s how I’m reading it, too,” Soundwave said.

“Keep a close eye on this, Starscream,” Megatron said. “If we overshoot them and then lose them because
they’re going in another direction by the time we decelerate, it’s your head.”

“It’s always my head,” Starscream said. “And yet somehow I still have my head.” He looked over at Thundercracker. “Think he means it?”

“I think we should all take bets,” Slipstream chimed in. “We all know that sooner or later Megatron’s going to take your head, Starscream. There’s no point even betting on that. But we could—hey, Thundercracker, Skywarp, what do you think?—take bets on which one of us Megatron taps to replace you.”

This was a new wrinkle, Starscream thought. He knew Skywarp was reliable. Thundercracker he wasn’t so sure about, because that bot had more of a conscience than was useful in a Decepticon. But Slipstream … she was sheerly unpredictable. The one thing a bot could count on from Slipstream was biting insults given a thin veneer of humor.

He had spent so much time thinking about and planning for the eventuality of replacing Megatron that he had neglected one natural consequence of that possibility, which was that his own subordinates would have their own plans to unseat him. “Place all the bets you want,” he said. “You’ll never collect.”

With a look over at Megatron, he couldn’t resist adding, “Because none of you will ever challenge me.”

Silence fell.
If I made the move right now
, Starscream thought,
how many of my Seekers would fight at my side and how many would defect to Megatron?
Not that it would make any difference in the close quarters aboard the
Nemesis
. The time to move would be out on a planetary surface, in a time of chaos or battle, when the Decepticon victory was assured but Megatron was still occupied.

Such a time would come. Starscream would be ready.