Exiles (24 page)

“It is time, Blueshift,” she said.

But the scientist was shaking his head. He had out a portable viewer with its lenses heavily angled and polarized. “Something huge is passing in front of the sun,” he said. “It is on its way here, and the reason it looks so huge is because …” He paused, then lowered the viewer and pointed. “Because it is very close, you see?”

Override looked. A ship larger than any she had ever seen came out of the sun. It passed over their heads, and they craned their necks to follow it. “It is on its way to Delta,” Blueshift said.

“Then that’s where we need to go, too,” Override said. “And fast.”

“Is there any other way?”

Outside the great hangar where Velocitron’s finest racers were preparing for the heavy circuit of qualifying rounds that would determine the field for the next Speedia, Hightail also was looking at the sky. He saw the ship as well and watched as it decelerated toward the surface and then came to a hovering halt a half klik above the speedway. A door dropped open from underneath the immense craft, and a smaller ship emerged. It landed not
far from Hightail, at the edge of the staging area where race teams made their final preparations.

Decepticons
, was Hightail’s first thought.
They are here
. So that would make the enormous figure looming over the rest of the landing party Megatron.

He debated what to do. Best not to let on immediately that he had talked to 777. In fact, the best course of action was probably to keep quiet and stay out of the way. So that was what he did. He went back into the hangar and busied himself there until the landing bots strode in. They had all manifested weapons. Hightail took a closer look at them. A motley assortment of bots, bearing signs of old wounds and nonstandard customizations.

The largest of them, which Hightail originally had taken to be Megatron, stepped forward out of the group.
“Bah-weep-graaaahnah wheep ni ni bong.”
The assembled Velocitronians answered with the same. Even as isolated as they had been, they had not forgotten the universal greeting. After this courtesy, the Velocitronians waited. The giant bot at the head of the visitors’ group took another step forward and looked them over closely.

“Are there Cybertronians here?” he growled.

Override, on the far side of the hangar, watched through the silence that fell after that question. She almost answered him but held herself back. She did not like answering questions when she did not know the reason they were being asked.

“ARE THERE CYBERTRONIANS HERE?” the bot bellowed.

His aggression spurred Override into action. She came to meet him from the far side of the hangar. “This is Velocitron, not Cybertron,” she said. “I’m in charge here.”

“Is that right?” The leader of the visitors stepped up close to her, towering over her and bending to put his
face right in hers. “If you want to stay that way, you’ll bring out your Cybertronians. Now.”

“She is a Cybertronian!” came a voice thundering from the other side of the hangar, the corner nearest to where Override had been. Ransack emerged from the shadows there, one arm extended directly at Override. “And anyone who stands with her!”

“You lie,” Override spit. “But even if it was true, what shame is there in being a Cybertronian?”

She felt herself seized and spun around, and before she could fully register her reaction—shock, indignation, anger, and a little pain—she found herself face to face with the gargantuan leader of the … “Who are you?” she demanded.

“Are you Cybertonian?”

“No,” she said firmly.

“Cybertronians were here, though,” the huge bot said. “I tracked them here. Their ship leaves a special energy trail from an isotope of the fuel. I have reasons. I have evidence. And I assure you I have a legitimate grievance against Cybertron. I will have my satisfaction.”

“I told you!” Ransack shouted. “She’s Cybertronian!”

One of Override’s most trusted bots—later she would learn that it was Blurr, but in the chaos of the moment she didn’t know—blasted Ransack off his feet with an electro-laser pulse.

Ransack’s thugs immediately deployed weapons and began shooting at any target that presented itself. The invaders brought their own weapons to bear. Over the sounds of explosions and energy discharges, their leader roared again,
“Give no quarter!”

On Velocitron, that was how the war began in earnest.

I am unable to stop considering the possibility that we can send word to Optimus Prime. Wheeljack assures me that he has found a way—using remnant energies that still abound in the Well of the AllSpark and the devastated partial consciousness of Vector Sigma —to break open a brief passageway through the continuum of space and time. It could be used, he suggests, to send either a message of some sort … or a bot
.

We have talked at great length about which is the more desirable course, Wheeljack and I. He advocates for a message, and I find myself in the unaccustomed position of articulating a more radical position
.

Of course, I have the glimmerings of a plan whose entire outline I cannot yet divulge to Wheeljack. This frustrates him. It frustrates me as well. Ideally, I would want lines of communication to be completely open, but in wartime this is of course not possible. Still, I understand how Wheeljack must feel knowing that I have decided there are things he must not know. If our communications are compromised, the consequences could be disastrous. Wheeljack’s innovation, if it works as he believes it will, could also be put to nefarious use by Shockwave
.

And there lies the real reason for both my reluctance
to communicate openly and my advocacy of the radical step of sending a bot over this untested and dangerous channel: We may only get to do this once
.

If Wheeljack has discovered this delivery system, we must assume that Shockwave has as well. And if it is possible to communicate with those who have left—in however rudimentary a fashion—then it will not be long before Megatron, learning of this method, uses it to pick up the trail of the Ark
.

Should that happen, we must do whatever we can to make sure that Optimus Prime knows that pursuit is coming
.

No. It is time to be more decisive than that. We must assume the worst, that Megatron is already on the Autobots’ trail. Wheeljack’s innovation must be tested, and the only way to test it is to use it. A courageous volunteer from among the depleted ranks of the Autobots will ride between the dimensions and, if all goes well, emerge wherever the Matrix of Leadership is currently located
.

It occurs to me that if this does not work—if it goes wrong in any of the myriad of ways it could go wrong—I will, in all likelihood, never know. Perhaps I will never know even if it works perfectly. I must consult Wheeljack about this and see if there are ways for the device to return information along the same path it has traversed with a physical passenger
.

It cuts strongly against my instincts to undertake so speculative a course of action. Yet in a battle whose sides are so asymmetrical in strength, every fleeting advantage must be seized and deployed the moment its worth is understood. This discovery of Wheeljack’s might only work once … but work once it must
.

This decision in hand, I turn now to considering which of the Autobots would be best suited to this mission. I dare not send any of the seasoned officers and leaders. There are too few, and the loss of any of them
would demoralize our rank and file, already stretched to the breaking point. For millions of solar cycles, they have been a micron away from losing their resolve, but just at the point of snapping they discover that last extra resilience that keeps them going through one more battle, one more campaign, one more orbit
.

I, too, must keep my resolve. Recent events have made this both more necessary and more difficult as I feel the attention of the Decepticons beginning to focus more intently on me
.

Shockwave has been here. Here, in my study, he sat in the chair where once Orion Pax came to me for consultation on difficult points of cataloging and the minutiae of archival work. I do not know how he found his way past security. I heard nothing, and no alarm went off. After his visit I discovered that the two Autobots set to guard the door that leads from the public areas of the Hall of Records to the inner chambers had seen nothing. This, perhaps, unsettles me more than the fact of the visit itself
.

But I am getting ahead of myself. I was researching the locations of Space Bridges when I looked up to see Shockwave present, just inside the door of my study
.

“Alpha Trion,” this mad destroyer of bots said, “I observe you.”

I acknowledged this statement but did not respond, since no useful response presented itself
.

“You are a traitor,” Shockwave said
.

“I preexist your Decepticon ideal by some millions of cycles,” I said. “It is hard for me to understand how I can be a traitor to ideals that I neither subscribed to nor promulgated but opposed from the beginning. Call me enemy if you wish. But do not call me traitor.”

Shockwave is not used to being opposed. He runs his affairs on Cybertron the way he always ran his laboratories: with madness and brilliance, shocking cruelty coexisting
with exhilarating discoveries. No matter what, though, the only voice of control is always his own. Even Megatron largely left him alone. He regularly denounces bots and on the strength of those denunciations has them destroyed or consigned to his experimental facilities in the ruins below Crystal City. From that dark place no bot returns unchanged. The ruined surface of Cybertron more and more is home to Shockwave’s failed experiments—what he prefers to call his “intermediate subjects.”

Some of them, it must be said, have come over to the Autobot side and made valuable contributions. Like any other zealot with aspirations toward despotism, Shockwave finds the sight of his own misakes repellent. They have thus become invisible. Referring to them in any way is strongly discouraged, and woe betide the bot who attempts to help one of these unfortunates
.

This outcast status makes them perfect spies and perpetrators of acts of espionage. Shockwave is quick to label those acts terrorist, but no thinking bots can take that seriously when they see the remorseless machinery of his show trials and his horrific experimental dungeons
.

All of this knowledge and experience made me a bit nervous when I was talking to him, but I am one of the Thirteen. I do not show fear, whether I feel it or not
.

“Enemy, then,” he said
.

“Yes, enemy. Are you here to parley, then, or have you come on a more violent errand?” A part of me I had thought long dead—the part that gloried in the battles among the Thirteen and the first great wars in the early days of Cybertron—that part of me almost wished that Shockwave had come to arrest or destroy me. I was ready for battle
.

Yet I did not wish to remove myself from the Autobots’ fight. I was never the mightiest warrior, though I
was mightier than many of my enemies supposed; I found my true value to any side in a conflict was the marshaling of knowledge and information. Strength of arm and accuracy of optic are not what wins wars. Putting soldiers in the right place at the right time is what wins wars. Will win wars
.

Shockwave came to the Hall of Records at Iacon expecting my will to fail. Instead, I watched as his own resolve—whatever it had been—crumbled, revealing him for the petty dictator he was
.

“I came only to warn you,” he said. “Your current course of action is most unhealthy.”

“It has served me well these billions of solar cycles,” I said. “I would be a fool to change now.”

Shockwave took his leave then, since I would not back down before him and he is not, in the end, possessed of courage when his opponent is not either greatly outnumbered or physically restrained. But he will be back. Of that I have no doubt. He will in all likelihood bring Decepticon militia
.

It is time, I expect, to bring the Wreckers in for a consultation about how to repel an assault on the Hall of Records
.

It is also time to see if this invention of Wheeljack’s will work. I have a volunteer in mind. I expect he will be ready and willing; it remains to be seen whether he or Wheeljack is able
.

Optimus Prime has been gone a short time, but it feels like much longer. I wonder if, when he has been gone for a long time, he will recede into that nebulous territory of story that is the final destination of all real things. If so, what kind of Cybertron will he return to find?

It is times like these when I wish I could read the pages of the Covenant that spell out the future. I understand why this is not possible, however; to know the future is to imprison yourself in it—or to create a new
one, in which case your initial knowledge was not knowledge, after all. Would we really want a future we could change? Or is it better to not know the future and to create it from an endless succession of present moments?