Exiles (19 page)

That was the thought on his mind—in parallel with the conversation he intended to have with Wreck-Gar about problems with the Ark—when something in the load, which was pouring down from Wreck-Gar’s compartment and tumbling across the short distance to the furnace funnel, caught his attention.

It was a small piece of alloy, shiny despite its age. It was pointed at one end, and the other end looked as if it had been drawn and twisted before snapping off. And it was about to go into the blast furnace with the rest of Wreck-Gar’s load.

“Stop!” Optimus Prime commanded. The Junkion guiding Wreck-Gar’s load into the blast furnace intake ignored him. Spurred by a single imperative to save the fragment, Optimus Prime lunged forward and hit the loading Junkion with a flying tackle that carried them both onto the conveyor belt that fed the furnace.

Angry and surprised, the Junkion started pounding away at Optimus Prime’s head while Optimus tried to fend it off and reach after the piece of the Star Saber. The roar of the furnace was overwhelming, and the heat was already straddling the line between uncomfortable and agonizing. Optimus Prime stretched out one arm, getting a fingertip on the artifact. The Junkion landed a double-fisted blow on the back of his head, and his optics went dark for a moment. When he snapped back into focus, waves of heat were rippling through the air around him and he could practically feel his fingers melting. The Junkion hit him again.

Then, suddenly, it was gone. With a desperate reach, Optimus Prime locked one hand around the underside of the furnace intake. The conveyor belt kept going, scraping along his side as with his other hand he made a last grab for the receding piece of the Star Saber.

As it tipped off the conveyor belt into the molten mass below, its hooked end raised up and Optimus Prime’s index finger curled into that hook. The artifact burned his finger, but he could not let it go. He pulled himself against the inexorable rolling of the conveyor belt, feeling the rest of Wreck-Gar’s load piling up against his legs. He was holding himself in place, but barely, and
with the artifact in one hand he could not muster enough strength to lift himself against the incline and the weight of junk pressing him down. The heat of the furnace would do him serious and permanent damage if he stayed there much longer, but there was no way to get out.

Optimus Prime kicked away some of the cascade of struts, housings, axles, and other recyclable bits of metal piled up around his legs. He felt his foot make contact with something solid and tried to twist around to get a leg braced on it. Then he felt strong hands grab on to both of his feet and pull him up. Heaving with his one arm, he passed under the intake gate and felt the blast of cool air on his face as he realized he had shuttered his optics against the heat. Opening them, he looked around and saw Bumblebee holding one of his legs and a Junkion the other—the same Junkion, in fact, who moments before had been pounding on the back of his head.

His frame popped and clanged as it cooled slowly back to something resembling a normal temperature. The conveyor belt stopped, some Junkion finally responding to the emergency, and Optimus Prime had the passing thought that if he had been a Junkion, he might well have been fed into the furnace without a second thought. They were a strange bunch of bots, these Junkions. Optimus Prime swung his legs over and back down to the ground as his rescuers let them go.

“So, Prime,” Jazz said. “Did the Matrix tell you to dive into that furnace?”

In a manner of speaking it had, Optimus Prime thought. He held up the Star Saber fragment and said, “Would have been a pity to let this be melted down.”

The conveyor belt started up again, and Optimus Prime hopped off it, looking around to see that Wreck-Gar
once again was emptying his hopper onto it. Back to the business at hand, he thought. That was the Junkion way. Wreck-Gar had not even bothered to come out of alt-form to ask him about the incident.

“Is that—?” Jazz began.

Optimus Prime nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“What’s one of them doing here?” Jazz wondered. “I figured they were all on Velocitron and we’d just missed some of them.”

“As you said before,” Optimus Prime told him, “it is not always easy to understand how and why the Matrix does what it does.”

He turned to the Junkion, who was again guiding scrap into the blast furnace’s intake. “Junkion,” he said. “I apologize for the surprise.”

“Forgotten,” the Junkion said.

“And I thank you for helping me get back out,” Optimus Prime went on. “What is your name?”

“Pinion,” the Junkion said. “I got mad when you hit me, but if you wanted that bit of scrap, hey, it’s all yours. Plenty more where that came from.”

Not exactly, thought Optimus Prime. But what he said was, “Again, my thanks, Pinion.”

Then Jazz said, “Maybe Ratchet should give you a checkup, Prime. You look a bit scorched.”

“I feel a bit scorched,” Optimus Prime agreed. He decided the conversation with Wreck-Gar could wait. Now that he had a third part of the Star Saber, he was beginning to believe that the coming trip to the Space Bridge indicated by the Matrix would be decisive in some way. Trust, he thought. He had always trusted Jazz, but now he realized that there were Junkions worthy of trust as well. Pinion kept working as if nothing had happened, but Optimus Prime had the feeling that something great was in store for that Junkion.

*   *   *

Prowl had not originally accompanied Optimus Prime on this visit, but his investigations into the identity of the traitor on board the Ark had reached an interesting point. He wanted to update Optimus Prime and discuss how to proceed. He arrived at the end of the pit near the furnace in time to see Optimus Prime’s legs sticking out of the furnace intake and got to the pit floor just as Bumblebee and a nearby Junkion dragged Optimus back up and out with no visible damage beyond some burn marks on his arm. What was that in his hand? Prowl thought it looked like the two pieces of artifact Optimus Prime had found on Velocitron. Mystical artifacts weren’t his responsibility, though. His responsibility was to observe, judge, and report. And what he had been observing before Optimus Prime dived into the furnace was Axer. That bot’s demeanor as he kept up a running conversation with Wreck-Gar on the way to the furnace pit made Prowl suspicious. Then, when he glanced over in Axer’s direction as Optimus Prime was pulled up out of the furnace intake, Prowl knew right then and there that something was going to have to be done about him. There was a strange combination of hostility, satisfaction, and avarice on Axer’s face. Prowl could understand the hostility, and even the satisfaction, but the avarice puzzled him … unless it had something to do with the piece of metal.

Prowl put that aside. More important at the moment was Axer’s clear—to Prowl, at least—hostility toward Optimus Prime. That alone was reason enough to move against the accidental Junkion. The Decepticon plague had spread to Velocitron already; it must not be allowed to infect Junkion as well.

Not if Prowl could help it.

When Optimus Prime had turned back toward the
Ark, Prowl decided that his consultation with Optimus could wait. He had a feeling about Axer, and it was time to find out if he was right.

Letting Axer get some distance ahead on the circuitous climb up out of the main pit, Prowl kept track of who the shifty bot talked to and who he ignored. That let him keep score by proxy: How many Junkions listened to Axer and therefore might be Decepticon sympathizers, and how many avoided him and could safely be counted as neutral or Autobot allies? Axer reminded Prowl of a bot back on Cybertron, a fixer, a small-time smuggler and crook, someone Prowl had kept an eye on but never bothered to arrest. He had disappeared in the early years of the war, and Prowl had always assumed he’d been a casualty.

He kept up his tally. The count of Axer’s confidants against those Junkions who disliked him was disturbingly even. Prowl had a bad feeling about Junkion’s future if that future could be extrapolated from this set of interactions. But he wasn’t sure he had enough real evidence to accuse Axer to Optimus Prime. For now, he would keep up his surveillance; once Optimus got back from the Space Bridge errand, Prowl would make his case. It was hard to believe that a Cybertronian could have ended up here … but it was also hard to believe that a renegade gladiator had caused a civil war and nearly destroyed Cybertron. Prowl wasn’t sure what to think.

And when he wasn’t sure what to think, he gathered evidence.

Up on the rim of the pit, Prowl could look back down and see layers of excavation, a series of terraces stepping down to the flat bottom, where the current excavations were happening. On the higher levels, Junkion crews followed up on the initial digs at those levels, moving laterally outward and transferring huge amounts of material
to other locations where they could be used more effectively. It was a nearly heroic undertaking, the creation of something from nothing. Prowl admired the Junkions immensely.

Returning his attention to the matter at hand, he saw Axer approach another Junkion and saw the pair get some distance away from other Junkions before having a clandestine conversation. Not for the first time since leaving Cybertron, Prowl wished he had all of his surveillance equipment. He couldn’t listen in, couldn’t tap into the local network to slave surveillance cameras or public audio arrays. All he could do was observe and try to get close enough to see what it was Axer needed to convey so urgently to this other Junkion.

Not that Axer was a Junkion. Prowl was getting more and more convinced of that whatever Wreck-Gar or Axer himself had to say on the topic.

Prowl thought that the Junkion Axer was talking to was called Shearbolt, one of a crew tasked with breaking down large bits of wreckage into pieces that would fit into the furnaces. He waited until Axer had left and then waited some more while Shearbolt busied himself with a torch, cutting segments out of the hull of what could possibly be a spacecraft but was unlike any ship Prowl had ever seen. It was spherical, with a number of snapped-off antenna fixtures and what appeared to be a control area distributed around … its equator, Prowl concluded. The entire structure and purpose of it were confusing to him. He could not imagine it being constructed by bots and wondered what race of aliens had, in fact, built it.

And what had happened to them. And how their ship had gotten here.

But Junkion was built out of a million forgotten stories just like this one. Prowl wasn’t going to get to the bottom of any of them.

“Hey. It’s Shearbolt, right?” he asked, coming up on the Junkion as he cut the torch and levered a piece of the spherical ship’s hull over to a stack he’d already made for transport.

“That’s right. You one of the Cybertronians?”

“Yeah,” Prowl said. “Name’s Prowl. I was looking for Axer, but I couldn’t get here quick enough. Rough terrain. You know where he was going?”

“Axer? To buy something or sell something, probably,” Shearbolt said. “Trade. That’s what he does.”

Prowl wasn’t sure how a bunch of scavengers on a planetoid made out of trash could develop a stable system of exchange, but he went along with the idea. “Is that what he’s always done?”

“Since he got here, yeah,” Shearbolt said.

“So he hasn’t always been here?”

Shearbolt laughed. “None of us have always been here. Wreck-Gar and some of the others, they’ve been here a long, long time, but there isn’t any ‘always’ on Junkion. We all came here with some of the junk at one point or another.”

“Did you get here with Wreck-Gar?”

“Enough with the questions, bot,” Shearbolt said. Suddenly he seemed nervous. Prowl was an experienced enough interrogator that he knew when a question had made a bot feel evasive. He pushed a little.

“Where did you come from?”

Shearbolt looked all around them. So did Prowl. There were no other bots within sight. “Listen, bot,” Shearbolt said. “I came from Cybertron, a long time ago. Okay. Been so long I’ve mostly forgotten what it’s like there, and it’s probably a lot different now that there’s been the war Optimus Prime told Wreck-Gar about. I heard even though I think he was just trying to tell Wreck-Gar. No secrets on Junkion. Anyway, I remember
some of Cybertron. None of the Junkions know I’m from there, or at least I don’t think they do. Or if they do, they don’t say anything about it, and I’d like to keep it that way. So keep it to yourself, okay?”

Prowl listened and said nothing. That was the other thing interrogation experience had taught him: when to shut up.

And sure enough, it worked this time as well. “Axer isn’t a Junkion, either,” Shearbolt said, unprompted. “Most bots here just come from the junk, but some are from somewhere else. They choose new identities when they get stuck or pretend they don’t remember where they come from. He’s one of them. I don’t know what he called himself then, but I’ll tell you one thing: I’d bet my last molecule of Energon that he’s Cybertronian. And he hasn’t been here that long.”

That, thought Prowl, is exactly what I was thinking.

It was something about the way Axer moved and talked, the way he had no stable group of friends among the Junkions. He moved alone from group to group, trading but never quite becoming part of things. Prowl had noticed this as soon as they’d had a little time to observe the Junkion way of life. Now it was starting to make more sense.

And that made the real question more important: If Axer was from Cybertron, had he left before or after the start of the war?

And, regardless, whose side was he on?

Optimus Prime listened to Prowl’s report and, when Prowl was finished, added only a single word. “Recommendation?”

“I think we ought to keep Axer under surveillance and see who else he talks to. And I think we should try to keep a lens on this Shearbolt as well. He’s hiding something.”

Optimus Prime considered this and reached a decision that he didn’t like but thought was probably best for the moment. “Axer yes, Shearbolt no. For now. I don’t want to come across as questioning or usurping Wreck-Gar’s authority. But he’s already told us he doesn’t trust Axer, so he won’t mind if we watch Axer as long as we report back to him. Shearbolt, though, that’s another story. Even if he came from Cybertron, he’s a long-term Junkion, and I don’t think Wreck-Gar is going to like it if we start telling him we don’t trust his bots.”