Exiles (22 page)

If he had taken a closer look at the ship, he would have seen that it was not of Cybertronian origin. He also would have seen that it was so old that there was not a single facet of its hull that was not utterly cross-hatched with scratches from the impact of micrometeorites and cosmic dust. This ship did not gleam in the starlight; it caught the light and diffused it into a quiet glow. Old spacefaring bots said that the ship that glowed was always the one that was haunted.

Axer did not listen to old spacefaring bots.

He had the presence of mind to give the ship another visual examination before making physical contact with it. To Axer, it looked as if the ship had been in a battle. There were clear marks of energy impacts streaking from amidships all the way back to its thruster cowling. Where they began, near the amidships air lock, they were so intense that the ship’s hull was buckled and wavy. The bridge’s viewports, which should have been transparent, were black and pitted with what looked like bubble rings, as if the ports had melted and then cooled again.

Axer thought that he had found a wreck, perhaps the victim of a pirate attack. The shipping lanes had always abounded with stories of pirates. Axer believed them, though none of the pirates had ever come close to Cybertron. If they had, he would have known it—he and pirates, after all, took part in different facets of the same profession: hunting. Pirates put bounties out on ships; Axer’s masters put bounties out on bots. Prospecting was a sideline for him, though often a profitable one.

Even as he touched the ship’s hull, Axer never took seriously the idea that portal failure was a problem. His greed was talking to him, and when greed talked, Axer listened.

The air lock opened with a heavy shove, aided by a blast from Axer’s hand cannon. He pulled himself inside, the tether connecting him to his ship spiraling out behind him across the short expanse of vacuum. Inside the ship, he found a near vacuum. Some crystalline fog, once a trace atmosphere, drifted out past him as he drifted in. A member of the ship’s crew, he guessed, floated dead in the air lock at roughly the center of a nimbus of tiny bits of debris. There was nothing interesting about any of it … except there, near one of the dead bot’s outstretched hands, floated the only thing in
sight that gleamed smoothly even in the minimal light. It was a piece of some kind of metal, about half as long as Axer’s arm, with a hook at one end. The other end was pointed and marked with what looked like a series of runes or sigils.

Axer didn’t know what it was, but he knew someone somewhere would find it interesting. He touched it, held it, brought it closer so he could get a better look at it. Then he paused as more of the drifting crystals floated near him. He reached up and caught one of the crystals between finger and thumb, curious about what it was.

When he rubbed it between his fingers, it sparked.

When it sparked, it released a tiny bit of heat near the interior air lock door. That little bit of heat agitated a few molecules, and invisibly a threshold was reached.

Around Axer, the world exploded.

Later he would figure out that some latent energy from the portal failure had become crystallized by some process during the unthinkable pressures and dimensional stresses present in the interior of a Space Bridge. All it had taken was that little addition of pressure and heat from the compression of Axer’s thumb and forefinger, and all that energy had been released again.

He had drifted back to consciousness near a Space Bridge that obviously was not functioning well, the arcing energy between the two semicircular halves of its portal just a fizzle and the rest of it dark and splotched with cosmic rust. At first Axer had been convinced that one of his enemies—there were many—had set a trap for him on this shipwreck. Quickly, though, he recovered his senses and learned a little more about his surroundings. He soon abandoned that theory on the basis that no Cybertronian could have set such a trap without setting it off himself. Also, when he spun slowly around and saw that he was still tethered to his ship and that his ship was still intact, Axer realized that he had not been
the victim of any real physical or kinetic discharge at all. He was unharmed. His ship was intact. The wreck even floated nearby, with the dead bot half in and half out of its open air lock.

But the world below him was not Cybertron.

Axer had many megacycles ago lost track of how long he had been on Junkion. He had worked hard to ingratiate himself into the Junkions’ odd culture, finding a place for himself as a trader and middleman. They had no use for a bounty hunter, it turned out, having virtually no crime—because they had virtually no wealth. Axer had discovered over millions of cycles that he did not mind this new role, but he did mind being away from Cybertron. He was curious what the Decepticons had done once Megatron had gotten the war he wanted. And, more to the point, if the Decepticons had won, Axer wanted in on the spoils.

He recently had gotten news from Cybertron via the spy hidden away in the complement of Autobots aboard the Ark, but not as much as he had wanted. There were too many gaps in his knowledge, and the brief conversation after the Ark’s arrival had whetted his appetite rather than satisfying it. “You don’t like it, fine,” the Autobot spy had said. “Go to Velocitron and wait for Megatron there. It won’t be long.”

Axer didn’t like that plan very much, but he had figured out that if Megatron could follow the Ark to Velocitron, he could follow it to Junkion. So Axer would have his meeting with the big bot, and sooner rather than later, from the sound of it.

Until then, there was the Shearbolt problem to deal with. Axer mentally ran through his leverage. Even if the killing was attributed to him, he thought he had enough chips in the pile to make the problem go away.

He kept watch on Optimus Prime as the Autobot leader, the leader, he realized, of all his enemies. He was
looking at his own mortal enemy, the former data clerk. Axer had left Cybertron on his fateful prospecting mission on the very day the High Council had declared Orion Pax to be the new Prime. When he looked at this bot, he did not see the mighty leader of the Autobot resistance. He saw a pretender. How could this bot stand up to Megatron?

Axer was half convinced that he could surprise and eliminate this Optimus Prime all by himself. But he had not survived as long as he had in such a treacherous business as bounty hunting by choosing challenges rashly. He waited, and he watched. And he hoped Megatron would show up before this problem came to its inevitable crux.

When Ratchet returned with Jazz and Silverbolt, Sideswipe and Hound were there, too.

“We all thought this was big enough that we wanted to take a look,” Hound said. “Hope you don’t mind a bigger crowd.”

“Let’s not call too much attention to this yet,” Optimus Prime said. “Where’s Prowl?”

“He said he’d gotten a lead about Axer from another one of the Junkions and he was going to go run it down,” Jazz said.

Optimus Prime nodded. “Okay. Sideswipe, you and Jazz take a spin up along the ridge to see if any of the Junkions are watching us.”

“On our way,” Jazz said. “Let’s go.”

The terrain of Junkion was so rough that Cybertronians could go only in alt-form along the roads gouged out for the transport of raw materials and salvage. The two Autobots walked up to the crest of the ridge and turned to walk away from their landing site, toward where they first had encountered Wreck-Gar.

“Isn’t that Axer?” Hound said suddenly.

Optimus Prime looked. Jouncing down the slope from the ridgetop was a heavy-wheeled off-road cycle, blue and gray with red highlights.

“Looks like him,” Silverbolt said. “Wonder what he’s doing.”

“Find Prowl,” Optimus Prime said. “Hound. Go find Prowl right now.”

“Quick as I can,” Hound said.

Optimus Prime and Silverbolt watched him skirt the area around what they all now considered Axer’s ship and head back toward the landing site. The heavy cycle didn’t change its pace, and when it got to the roadbed, sure enough, it took Axer’s form again, and the suspicious bot moved quickly away in the direction Sideswipe had gone.

“You don’t think he’s following Sideswipe, do you?” Optimus Prime asked.

“Might be,” Silverbolt said. “But why?”

“There’s a lot of whys when it comes to this Axer,” said Optimus Prime.

“That’s true enough,” Silverbolt said. He looked down and watched as Ratchet worked through a careful examination of Shearbolt’s body. “Soon as Prowl is back, we should move this bot and tell Wreck-Gar.”

“Don’t rush me,” Ratchet said.

“Nobody’s rushing anyone,” Silverbolt said.

“Don’t talk to me,” Ratchet said.

“Then quit … never mind,” Silverbolt said. “Prime. You want me to follow Axer?”

“I don’t think so. I want to keep this low-profile,” Optimus Prime said. He didn’t want Silverbolt’s flight abilities to be remarked on. The Junkions didn’t seem hostile—they seemed, in fact, completely indifferent to the Autobot quest—but with a dead body at his feet, Optimus Prime thought that it was probably best to give
away as little as possible to whoever on Junkion might have bad intentions.

“You’re not going to like this,” Ratchet said, returning Optimus Prime’s attention to the situation immediately at hand.

“What am I not going to like about it?” Optimus asked. Prowl arrived, and Optimus waved him in. “We’re about to get Ratchet’s report. Then you can go chase Axer,” he said. “We just spotted him.”

Prowl nodded, and Ratchet stood up. “I’ll cut to the important part,” he said. “This bot was killed violently and by surprise, by physical impact on the back of his head and neck. He was killed somewhere else and brought here; there are drag marks on his heels and the backs of his arms. My guess is he was working up on the rise over there, was ambushed, and then was dumped here. Axer may or may not have had anything to do with it directly.”

“What are you talking about?” Prowl said incredulously. “What are the odds that he was dumped in Axer’s ship and Axer didn’t know anything about it?”

“We haven’t established conclusively that this is Axer’s ship,” Ratchet said.

“It is,” Prowl said. “Unless you can show me another Junkion who isn’t really a Junkion and has been here a much shorter period than the rest of them. That’s the bot who belongs to this ship. Is there one other than Axer?”

“That’s the thing,” Ratchet said. “There might be. Well, that’s not exactly what I mean, but I will tell you this: Someone around here isn’t who we think.”

“This is killing me,” Silverbolt said. “Tell it.”

“Well, I’ve measured the Energon decay out of this bot according to well-established rates that Prowl, at least, will know all about … right, Prowl?”

“Right.”

Ratchet nodded and went on. “I did some brief scans to see if there was anything in the local atmosphere or conditions that would affect the rate of decay. I didn’t find anything, so it can be assumed that the rate of decay is roughly the same as it would have been on Cybertron.”

“And?” Optimus Prime prompted, hoping to get Ratchet to condense the next part of the explanation.

“And,” Ratchet said without looking at Optimus Prime, “what I found is that this bot was killed very shortly after our arrival. I’ll have to examine all of the logs first, but based on what I remember of how and when we left the Ark and presented ourselves to Wreck-Gar, I think this bot was dead almost—”

“Ratchet!” Prowl said in exasperation. “Get to the point! Was he or was he not alive when I talked to him on our first day here?”

Ratchet paused as if running through his evidence one more time before answering. “No. He was not.”

Prowl already had put together a follow-up, but having expected Ratchet to give the opposite answer, he was choking on his unspoken words. “Wha—” he began.

“This bot was dead when you spoke to whoever presented himself as Shearbolt,” Ratchet said. “I am one hundred percent certain of this. It is backed up by analysis. It is true.”

There was a silence as each of them reached the inevitable conclusion at his own pace. Even after understanding the truth of the situation, Optimus Prime could not quite bring himself to believe it. “Does that mean …?” He shook his head. “Can’t be.”

“What can’t be?” Silverbolt asked.

“A shapeshifter. There are stories,” Optimus Prime said.

Prowl regained his voice. “You always know the stories.”

“The shifters are supposed to be descended from Amalgamous Prime,” Optimus Prime said. “The trickster of the Thirteen. I did not think any still survived, but …”

“Is there someone who looked like Shearbolt? Is that who you talked to, Prowl?” Silverbolt cut in.

“It’s possible,” Prowl said grudgingly. “How would I know?”

“You wouldn’t, that’s the point,” Jazz said. “Prime, if we’ve got a shifter around … I mean, come on, Prime, they’re just stories, right?”

“Remember when the Thirteen were just stories, too?” Optimus Prime said. “Turns out more and more of those old stories are true. Maybe shifters …” He couldn’t quite bring himself to say it, but he was thinking it. He could tell the other Autobots were, too.

If there was a shifter among them, how would they know who it was?

Wreck-Gar arrived and looked down at the broken chassis of Shearbolt. Then he looked up at Optimus Prime. “How did you find him? What were you doing down here?”

“It’s a complicated story,” Optimus Prime said. “This is Axer’s ship, yes?”

“It is a very new ship,” Wreck-Gar said.

“Does that make it Axer’s?”

Wreck-Gar nodded. “It does. We have not discovered anything else so new around here. Only through one of the Space Bridges, and we almost never go through there because sometimes it’s dangerous and bots die! Too few Junkions to waste!”

Before Wreck-Gar could get too worked up, Optimus Prime redirected him. “Wreck-Gar. You can go through one of those Space Bridges?”

“Yes! But we don’t. Dangerous.”

“Which one?”

“Three of them don’t go anywhere,” Wreck-Gar said. “The other one, that one there?” He pointed at the one farthest away from where they stood. “It goes to a spot in the middle of empty space. We’ve been out there a few times to strip the wrecks and brought a couple of them back, but I don’t know why anybody would have built a Space Bridge that goes there. Lot of wasted effort. Plus dangerous!”