Exiles (21 page)

Prowl had his hands full during the following orbital cycles—even in deep space the Autobots’ clocks were still keyed to the integral time measurements of Cybertron—following Axer around and trying to keep a lookout for the Junkion Shearbolt, who was unexpectedly difficult to locate.

“Junkion’s not that big,” Prowl complained to Hound and Ironhide when they had been on the planetoid long enough to have found a fuel reservoir that could be used as a replacement for the Ark’s. Wreck-Gar had devoted a number of his bots to the effort, and Optimus Prime made a point of telling the Autobots to treat him with the respect and deference due a local commander.

“It’s big enough,” Hound said. “Have you asked Wreck-Gar?”

Prowl shook his head. “I don’t think he’d take it well. He won’t think it’s up to us to perform surveillance on Junkions.”

“Then ask him,” Ironhide suggested.

“No,” Hound said quickly. “That won’t work, either. Wreck-Gar will see that as you trying to get his Junkions to do our work.”

“What, then?” Prowl wondered out loud.

“Keep looking. If this Axer character was meeting
with him before, they’ll meet again.” Ironhide punched Prowl in the shoulder. “Follow your instincts. They’re probably right.”

That was heartening, and Prowl went back to the task. He kept Axer under surveillance and saw that suspicious bot following his routines of trade and barter, pausing to talk to various bots on various topics, but not once did he see Axer with Shearbolt. In fact, not once did he see Shearbolt at all.

Prowl decided that even when he wasn’t following Axer, he would keep a lookout for Shearbolt under the guise of looking for Ark materials in various secluded and out-of-the-way locations on Junkion. Along the way, he thought, he might find any number of other interesting things that could assist in the Autobot quest or shed some light on the history of Junkion, which even the Junkions didn’t appear to know all that much about. If there was one thing Prowl disliked, it was gaps in knowledge, not knowing simple and basic things that ought to have been known.

He found ships that he could trace to a number of different lost colony planets. There were more Quintesson craft than he would have expected. There was a single ship that had signs of Velocitronian origin, particularly in the remnants of its cargo of rubber. Prowl saw a great deal of wreckage that was surely Cybertronian, dating from before the collapse of the Space Bridges and the entrenchment of the caste system—except, puzzlingly, one that seemed much more recent. Prowl assumed this one to be Axer’s ship, but the next time he saw Axer, that Cybertronian become Junkion would say nothing about it.

It nagged at Prowl, though. Almost every other ship he had found, no matter what its origin or age, had been picked clean. The ship in question, much newer and Cybertronian,
with the marks of the since-destroyed shipyards at Altihex, had not been looted or stripped.

“You’re not an archaeologist, Prowl,” Ironhide reminded him after Optimus Prime had called all the senior Autobots together to get status reports on the Ark repairs and the Axer question.

“I am gathering information, Ironhide,” Prowl said. “What information I gather is up to me. Did you not just a few orbits ago tell me to trust my instincts?”

“Oh, no,” Jazz said. “Your own words, turned against you. That’ll teach you to talk, Ironhide.”

“I am serious,” Prowl said. Ironhide ignored the back-and-forth, waiting for something actionable to be said.

Optimus Prime redirected the conversation before it could become an argument. “We have one priority,” he said, “and that is to get the Ark moving again so we can continue our search for the AllSpark. While we are doing that, those who are not required for that repair task are able to contribute in other ways. Including the gathering of information about the history of Junkion and the origins of its bots. All right?”

“If you say so,” Jazz said.

“I do.”

And so Prowl went back to what he was doing. He planned to observe Axer’s interactions with all members of the Autobots, reasoning that Axer, if his intentions were impure, would be more likely to meet with the saboteur the Autobots carried in their midst. But Axer avoided the Autobots, apparently not wanting to talk to any of them. He spoke only to Junkions, and Prowl still had not located Shearbolt again.

Finally he decided, after a long session of digging through junk and setting up remote surveillance equipment at locations Axer was known to frequent, to go back to the Cybertronian ship he suspected of being Axer’s.

He would have done it sooner, but like all of the other Autobots, Prowl was stretched thin. He was charged with both finding the spy aboard the Ark and discovering why Wreck-Gar had reason to mistrust the recent arrival Axer. And incidentally, he was supposed to keep a lens out for parts that might be useful for the Ark.

That was why it took him so long to get back to Axer’s ship, or what he had been thinking of as Axer’s ship, anyway. On his first visit he had not entered the craft. Now he did, using a set of codes from his security library that predated the civil war on Cybertron. One of them worked, and Prowl slipped into the ship, alert to the possibility that Axer might be there waiting for him.

But what was waiting for him was both the last thing he had expected and—he thought immediately as the initial shock dissipated—exactly the thing he should have expected.

Shearbolt.

“I found him doing something interesting,” Prowl said when he announced this discovery to Silverbolt, who was the first senior Autobot officer he could find.

“What’s that?”

“Being dead,” Prowl said. “You should come and see before we decide what to tell Wreck-Gar.”

Standing over the body, Silverbolt said, “He’s dead, all right.”

“Glad you agree,” Prowl said. “Now let’s tell Optimus.”

Optimus Prime, standing with the two of them a short time later, looked grim. “Report to Wreck-Gar,” he said. “But tell no one else. Especially do not let Axer hear of this. Our status here just changed, and we must be very alert and careful from this moment forward.”

All three of them looked down at the body of Shearbolt, somber and mindful of what his killing meant. Optimus Prime in particular was wrestling with a doomed sense that wherever the Autobots went, there conflict was sure to follow. The budding civil war on Velocitron was heavy in his mind.

Yet there was no going back, and just as there was no going back, there was no avoiding the costs of going forward. Megatron desired war and destruction, and it was one of the sad truths of the universe that those who wanted war usually got it. Optimus Prime, if he was honest with himself, had to acknowledge that he thrilled to the moment of combat, but he regretted every death he had caused, and every one who had died in the long war, and every one who would die. By the time the war was over and the Decepticons vanquished, the list of victims would be too long even for the Covenant of Primus.

Thinking of Alpha Trion didn’t quite bring a smile to Optimus Prime’s face, but it did make him feel slightly better about this ominous turn of events. Alpha Trion would tell him to keep his counsel, take the time to make clear decisions based on rational assessments. “Prowl, Silverbolt,” Optimus said. “I am no scientist. I know you are not, either, but at least Prowl has some experience with law enforcement and with crime. Do you have any ideas about how long it has been since he was killed?”

Prowl and Silverbolt bent over Shearbolt’s inert form. Murder had not been common on Cybertron, but neither had it been unknown. Prowl had investigated his share, and Silverbolt had been a dedicated consumer of popular entertainment on murderous themes. Both of them would have ideas about what to look for, whereas to Optimus Prime, Shearbolt just looked nonfunctional.

Prowl stood up. “Can you bring Ratchet here? I mean, is it all right if he knows?”

“Why?” Optimus Prime asked.

“He’s got … the Energon signature of a dead bot, the Energon decays. It’s like …” Prowl looked at Silverbolt for help. “I didn’t do the forensics. What’s it called?”

“You’re on the right track,” Silverbolt said. “Ratchet will have something that measures how much the Energon has decayed out of Shearbolt’s body. From that we’ll be able to figure out how long ago he was killed.”

“Go get him, then,” Optimus Prime said. “Both of you. I’ll stay here.”

From the other side of a rise that the Junkions had long since mined and exhausted, Axer watched Prowl and Silverbolt leave and Optimus Prime stand sentinel at the ship. They had seen Shearbolt, Axer assumed. Now they would be looking for some answers. He couldn’t be sure whether they had connected the ship to him, although he thought it likely.

It was just his luck, Axer thought. He’d figured on getting out of the war on Cybertron the minute he saw it coming, when Megatron was still just a gladiator gaining a following outside the pits. That was before anyone had ever heard of Orion Pax and well before the break that came when the High Council named the clerk Optimus Prime. By then, Axer was already off Cybertron, figuring on two things. One, he knew which side would win—the Decepticons, of course—and two, he didn’t want to be around while the two sides sorted everything out.

He had figured on prospecting around the nearer reaches of space past the orbit of Space Station 424 and the two Moonbase installations and beyond the drifting wrecks of Cybertron’s once-plentiful Space Bridges. Few
ventured even that far from Cybertron, but Axer was on the lookout for an advantage. He didn’t think he’d find it on Cybertron itself, where now that the caste system was self-destructing, each and every bot would have an equal shot at mediocrity.

The smart operator, Axer remembered thinking, would find a way to profit from the war without being involved in the war. His prospecting missions were geared toward that purpose. They would keep him high off-planet and put him in possession of things that were difficult or impossible to find on the surface … or below if the stories about the impending scarcity of Energon were true. This near-space exploration would be a new thing for the ambitious Axer. He had spent his time on Cybertron bringing in those unfortunate bots who had run afoul of the criminal hierarchies of Kaon or Blaster City … or the quieter criminal elements in Crystal City, Altihex, and Iacon.

He was one of Cybertron’s finest bounty hunters. But bounty hunting on the eve of civil war didn’t seem like a growth industry. The war itself, when it happened, would make bounty hunting much more difficult, not to mention dangerous.

The first thing he had decided to do was to let it be known, through his contacts in Kaon, that he was a proud supporter of Megatron and the burgeoning Decepticon cause. Word had come filtering back that the Decepticons could certainly find use for Axer’s skills in both hunting and, as Shockwave put it, persuasion. Axer had in the past found it necessary to ask certain bots, after he had caught them, questions. He had developed some skill at extracting answers.

But he had also kept up his part-time prospecting, figuring that in a war, certain resources would skyrocket in value. Also, the more time he spent in low orbit looking for valuable junk, the less time he spent on the surface,
where he could catch a stray plasma bolt. In the early years of the war, while the Autobots and Decepticons were deadlocked in the Tagan Heights, Axer had ventured a little beyond the Space Bridges and the halo of cannibalized wrecks that trailed after them. There he had discovered a powered-down shipwreck that bore all the marks of having suffered a Space Bridge portal failure. One of the things that happened during an unsuccessful transit of a Space Bridge was that part of the energy dedicated to moving ships and bots across vast reaches of space got bottled up, often inside the ship in question. The consequences, unsurprisingly, were disastrous for that ship and its crew. A secondary effect of portal failure was that ships took much longer to emerge from the Space Bridge. The folklore of bot space abounded with stories of ships being suspended in transit for thousands or even millions of solar cycles before reappearing—sometimes at their destinations and sometimes not—as shattered wrecks, their hulls and interiors scarred and slagged by the misdirected transit energies.

This was one of those ships. Axer couldn’t believe his luck. How long had it been here? Could have been a few cycles, could have been since the distant time when the Space Bridges first began to fail. The records of their use immediately had grown spotty, and for as long as Axer could remember—and he had come out of the Well fairly recently compared with some of Cybertron’s older bots—nobody had known whether any remnants of unfortunate vessels were still drifting occasionally out of the crumbling Space Bridges.

But one thing he could tell right away: Nobody had gotten to this ship yet.

Axer had no training in engineering or astrophysics or starship piloting. He had no combat experience. The one skill he possessed was an innate sense of how to
seek and use the advantages that might be found in any given situation. Here he saw the possibility of trading or selling materials from this ship. He did not consider that most Cybertronian authorities considered ships damaged by portal failure highly unstable because of the unpredictable ways in which the energy of the Space Bridges was conducted through the different materials used in ship construction.

He also did not consider that when these energies were released, as they sometimes were, one occasional consequence was nearly instantaneous transportation to somewhere else. Space Bridges were designed to eliminate distance. Even in the aftershocks of a malfunction, they often did just that, but the bot adventurous enough to be in close proximity to such a discharge often found himself at a set of coordinates quite far from where he had been a nanoklik before.

Axer had heard those stories but had never investigated the mechanics of how it happened. He figured they were spacers’ tales, like the myriad stories of ghostly subroutines or cursed vessels. He did a thorough scan for life and dangerous parasites such as cosmic rust, but when he found no threats via his ship’s automated scanner arrays, he tethered himself to his ship and then floated across the short distance to the drifting wreck.