Exiles (14 page)

“It won’t,” Optimus Prime said.

The Ark nosed forward onto the Bridge, and the Autobots felt space heave and rumble around them. The displacement energy at the edge of the vortex manifested as a thrum almost too deep to hear, a counterpoint to the Ark’s engine noise, created from the subatomic materials of space-time itself. The vibrations intensified as the Ark entered the field, and it shook hard enough that bots on the bridge reached for something to hold on to.

“Are we sure about this?” Jazz asked.

There was no time to answer. Fully within the vortex, the Ark vanished from Velocitron. Behind it, the Space Bridge went dark once more. Below, in the aftermath of the first battle between Override and the grasping Ransack, Velocitron went back to normal.

For the moment.

It wasn’t until they had gone through the Space Bridge and come out the other side that Optimus Prime and the other Autobots realized how nervous they had been about the attempt. The vista of space beyond the Ark’s bridge windows was unexpected, Optimus thought. In a way, he had never expected to see it because he had not expected the Space Bridge to work.

“Congratulations, Bridge Team,” he said quietly as everyone on the Ark’s bridge grappled with their own surprise. “You got it working.”

“I guess we did.” Ratchet looked at the stars. “But I’m not sure where it took us. There’s another Space Bridge here, sure enough, but according to its records, it hasn’t been used … hm. Its records don’t go back that far.”

“But it’s sending out a coherent signal?”

“It sure is,” Ratchet said.

Optimus Prime realized that this meant the galaxy could be full of working Space Bridges that had been cut off by the collapse of the bridges nearest Cybertron. He couldn’t help thinking yet again how little any Cybertronian knew about the vastness of the galaxy and what it contained. The thought of working Space Bridges, waiting millions and millions of cycles for traffic to use them, gave him a feeling he couldn’t describe.

He ignored it. “Silverbolt. Where are we?”

“Not sure yet,” Silverbolt said. “I’m running the Ark’s star map and updating it to include the mapping Hound did on Velocitron. That should give us current stellar positions, and then we can do a reverse parallax to get our position.”

“Position is good,” Optimus Prime said. “Knowing why there’s a Space Bridge here would be better. Who built it?”

“Bots,” Jazz said.

“I would never have guessed,” Ratchet said.

Optimus let the team joke around, but he couldn’t share the humor. Not right then. Where were they? He watched the Ark’s displays and listened to the banter on the bridge, trying to make sense of it all. Just as Optimus Prime was coming to the conclusion that the original reason for this Space Bridge had long since been destroyed, the Ark’s sensors locked on a planet. Not a big planet, which had made it hard to find, and not a rocky planet, which had put it outside the normal search parameters.

This, apparently, was a planet made—mostly—of metal and plastic.

It had no tectonic activity, no magnetic field of its own, no visible star to have created it … What was it? How had it come to exist? When had it been important enough to warrant the construction and maintenance of a Space Bridge?

“I’ve heard stories about this place, but I never thought it was real,” Jazz said.

Optimus was surprised. It wasn’t often that Jazz knew stories that Optimus had not seen during his years in the archives at Iacon. “You have?”

Jazz nodded. “Junkion, they call it. Back when all of the Space Bridges still worked, this was a dumping
ground. Eventually all of the junk collapsed together and became a planetoid.”

Optimus Prime had seen references to Junkion back when he was still Orion Pax. He also had read that some Cybertronians, scavengers, and outlaws had gone there to pick over the jetsam and never returned. Other stories held that Junkion had its origins as a dumping ground for the carcasses of interstellar ships attacked and stripped by pirates, the planet eventually accreting as those wrecks floated together and acquired gravity. Speculations from long before the collapse of the Space Bridges ran rampant. Were there permanent inhabitants? No one could know.

Until now.

“If this is Junkion, we might be in luck,” Ratchet said. “The Ark’s fuel reservoir is leaking and getting worse. Most of what we got from Override bled right back out. We can’t keep it full, and the way things are going, we’re going to lose the rest of its fuel soon. So if there are a thousand old shipwrecks here, maybe we can find another reservoir.”

Ultra Magnus has just been in to update me on recent developments. Partly his gruff resolve bolsters me and gives me reason to believe that the Autobot cause is not yet lost. Also, his reminders of Shockwave’s strength and depravity depress me and—though I would never say this to Ultra Magnus or any other warring Autobot—sometimes make me wonder if soon we will see the time approaching when it will be time to give up the fight
.

But of course, no. Again, I write things down to purge them from my mind. The act of making the symbols with the Quill in the Covenant eases my anxieties
.

We will prevail
.

I have no words that can adequately express my admiration for Ultra Magnus and his leadership of the guerrilla resistance band that has come to call themselves the Wreckers. On their own, this indomitable group has harried the Decepticons from the moment of Optimus Prime’s departure. One can only speculate with horror at what the state of affairs here would be without their exploits. They have at various times destroyed Shockwave’s laboratories, fought off Decepticon raiding parties that could have choked off crucial supplies of Energon to Iacon, undertaken daring missions to disrupt enemy communications networks … to go on
would be to elaborate needlessly. The Wreckers have been magnificent. It is perhaps not an overstatement to suggest that the war would be over without them
.

Ultra Magnus arrived here with Springer, as always, at his side. No Autobot has ever had a more trustworthy and valiant lieutenant. With them was Wheeljack, and the presence of this renegade scientist and reckless experimenter at first puzzled me. He has provided gadgets and prototype weaponry to various members of the Autobot resistance, but he is a scientist before he is an Autobot, and I fear his loyalties are not to be taken for granted. Even so, there he stood in my study
.

And with him, a proposition I could not stop thinking about
.

Was it possible to do it? Could the transporting mechanism of the Space Bridge be re-created on a smaller scale? Was it possible to read the signature of the residual energies from the destroyed Space Bridge that catapulted the Ark and the
Nemesis
away from Cybertron and use that information to determine their location? It seemed a fantasy. Yet Wheeljack is brilliant
.

There is only one way to find out for certain whether he can do it. That is, of course, to try. And that attempt will require a volunteer. We can scarcely spare any able-bodied bot in these desperate times, but it would be a great boon for those left behind to know that Optimus Prime survives and continues his quest. Of late I have been preoccupied with thoughts—some might call them fancies—regarding the return of Optimus Prime. I find myself thinking of the great works of Solus Prime—now why, after all this time, should that be?

The Star Saber
.

The Chimera Stone
.

The Apex Armor
.

The Requiem Blaster
.

There are times when I imagine Optimus Prime bearing
the fruits of his quest—the AllSpark and all the mighty weapons of the Thirteen—back to Cybertron. I must resist such fantasies, since it is far too easy for them to become enemies of the true state of things that my rational mind must encounter. I do the warriors such as Ultra Magnus no favors if I dream away the cycles over old books in the confines of my study
.

Yet it is in my nature to do exactly that
.

So I will make of my nature something useful. This is what both Optimus Prime and Megatron have done, to diametrically opposite ends. It is something I can do as well
.

Why do I keep thinking of the Star Saber, of the Requiem Blaster, of the Infinite Combinatoric? All long lost, all artifacts of a time so far gone that to speak of it is to invent it anew for any listener
.

Except, perhaps, to another of the Thirteen. But do any still exist? I wonder if there might be a way to find out
.

There is a bot called Chaindrive. He has been a spirited defender of the Autobot cause and an able soldier in the field. There is something about him, some mark of greatness, that I cannot interpret but also cannot ignore. I would hate to lose him, but I have felt more and more lately as if he has been chosen by a force greater than myself for a mission. I must speak to him, though I know not—and the Covenant does not reveal—what it is I am to say
.

The Star Saber … the Star Saber! Only Nexus Prime could have conceived of and executed his plan to hide it away. Recovering its shattered pieces from the aftermath of Liege Maximo’s defeat, he realized that the Fallen would try to put it back together and dominate the other members of the Thirteen—and the universe itself. Nexus Prime, that wild and chaotic magician of combinations and puzzles, shattered himself into an
equal number of pieces and spun his five components away to different parts of the universe, each with a piece of the Star Saber attached. Did he destroy himself?

I think not. I think that his consciousness abides, that when he is put back together, he will bring back into existence the Star Saber … and that this weapon, reassembled and wielded by a worthy bot, will be a powerful tool in the war against the darkness that threatens to consume us all
.

Imagine the ruins of a long-lost civilization.

Strafe and bomb and invade and mine and destroy it for maybe a thousand orbital cycles without pause.

Layer over the top of this a stratum of shipwrecks and random interstellar flotsam.

Envision, through these ruins, a hardy group of bots, keeping themselves alive by raising the art of scavenging to unheard-of heights.

That, thought Optimus Prime, might begin to come close to explaining the experience of Junkion. He had never seen anything remotely like it, not even in the middle of the most hellish battles of the civil war, when the Cybertronian sky rained ordnance and the great cities had been hammered and melted and exploded and churned into so much cooling slag. Even there, some bots had managed to survive, and it was the same here. Optimus Prime could only marvel through his revulsion.
How did they do it?

The Autobots put the Ark in a parking orbit over what appeared to be some kind of population center at a point on the planetoid’s surface that was indistinguishable from any other point on that surface save for the larger concentration of Spark signals that the Ark’s sensors identified there.