Exiles (35 page)

“That I do not know,” Vector Prime said.

Fear struck Optimus Prime. What if he emerged from the gateway to find that a billion cycles had passed, that Megatron had found his Autobots and destroyed them, that the stars of the galaxy had gone supernova and destroyed all life, that the universe itself had sunk into the heat death that was its ultimate doom?

Vector Prime chuckled. “I shared those very thoughts,” he said. “I do not believe that will happen. I have had long cycles here to contemplate, to consider, to attempt an understanding of this place. I created it, after all. It is my duty to understand it. And as far as I know, there is no great difference between the rates at which time passes here and back in the dimensionality you came from.”

“So you
do
have an idea,” Optimus Prime said.

“An idea, yes. But perhaps not a good idea or a clear idea.” Vector Prime looked closely at Optimus Prime. “This is an important distinction.”

Optimus felt that he was being challenged somehow. “I am becoming more and more aware of it,” he said.

“That is one of the things leadership teaches,” Vector Prime said. “Now, tell me why you are here.”

The Junkions, reported Lugnut, were tougher than anticipated. “I don’t know if it’s living here or what,” the bruising Decepticon said. “But they don’t go down easy.”

“As long as they go down,” Megatron said. He had the homing device from Axer in one hand. “Hold them off!”

He jumped down the terraces of the great excavation one after another until he reached the last ledge overlooking the open pit floor. Here were the oldest of the wrecks and jetsam that originally had swirled together, drawn by gravity and inevitable collisions to form a planetoid … which then, however accidentally, came to host life.

Too bad it all had to come to an end, Megatron thought.

He held the beacon from Axer in front of him. Seekers screamed overhead, strafing the valiant but overmatched Junkions on their way back to another strike at the Ark. On the other side of the pit, Megatron saw two Autobots—were they Bulkhead and Ironhide?—rappelling down the pit walls on cables Megatron would not have trusted to hold up a spray can of solvent. There was manic courage everywhere, apparently, which was only appropriate
given the desperate straits in which the Autobot cause found itself.

“Soundwave,” Megatron called. The great ship came closer. “Have the
Nemesis
make its final excavation.”

He did not hear the command, but the great
Nemesis
lowered until it was entirely within the pit. Its mass and the energy of the thrusters that held it steady created screaming turbulence within the pit, tearing loose pieces from the walls and hurling surprised Junkions off the terraces to the floor below. The wind shifted, blew out and then in again. Tremors ran through the pit, resonating with the powerful vibrations emanating from the
Nemesis
as it lowered itself into the pit and extruded the focalizer for its primary tractor beam almost to the level of the pit floor.

Junkion groaned as the tractor beam activated. Close, Megatron thought. So close. He did not yet have a visual lock on the Requiem Blaster, but the more wreckage the
Nemesis
tore from the floor, the better the signal from the homing beacon would be. Until then, his Decepticons would continue their battle against the overmatched Autobots and he would enjoy the delicious anticipation that came from knowing that a decisive advantage was coming ever closer. Junkslides ran down the walls of the pit, crushing away the spiraling pit road in places and creating dangerously unstable overhangs along the pit’s upper rim.

A light flashed forth from the homing device, spearing into a point on the floor. “There it is!” Megatron cried out. “Bring it up!”

Axer thought he was nearly there.

His last time down he had gone through the doorway that Optimus Prime apparently had torn open and had continued down and around the sweeping turn in the ancient spacecraft. It amazed him to think that he was
inside a craft once inhabited by the Thirteen. Had Solus Prime herself built it? Even so cynical and cruel a bot as Axer could appreciate the uniqueness of this situation. In all likelihood he would never be able to do this again. Megatron, if not simply time and circumstance, would see to that.

There. Ahead.

He was starting to get a sense of what this craft must have looked like when it navigated the long-forgotten paths between stars. It would have been a disc, gently curved along its top and bottom surfaces, with a corridor running the entirety of its perimeter and various spoked feeder hallways meeting at a central complex of chambers and facilities. Whose ship had it been? Liege Maximo’s? Nexus Prime’s?

Even if he never knew, he would always know that he had been here. And once he had the Requiem Blaster, he would be able to tell the story to anyone he wanted. Megatron and Starscream were in for a surprise. Perhaps even Shockwave if Axer ever decided to go back to Cybertron. He could only imagine the expression on Shockwave’s face when he stared down the barrel of the Requiem Blaster in the last moments of his life. A jolt that he could liken only to an asteroid impact rang through the interior of Junkion, knocking Axer flat and partially collapsing the tunnel in front of him. The sound overloaded his auditory array. “No!” he shouted. “No! Not now!” But he could not hear himself, or just barely. There was still a sliver of room in the corridor ahead. He forced himself through it just in time for a second giant impact to pitch him forward as the rest of the corridor collapsed in on itself behind him.

Incredibly, he thought he saw light. Not the dim ancient light that glowed from near the floors and had for countless cycles but the real living light of bots on the surface—or near the surface—of a planet.

Digging.

For what was Axer’s.

“No!” he screamed again, and drove himself forward through the hail of debris and the pitching, rolling floor. From above, but not nearly far enough above, he heard the groan and clank of a bot that must have been so immense as to beggar the senses. Its footsteps, Axer thought, had caused these collapses.

I have been stepped on by a giant
, he thought, and almost laughed, but nothing was going to be funny again until he had the Requiem Blaster in his hand. Forcing himself forward, Axer realized that at some point he had been damaged by falling debris. His left leg was a long way from optimal functionality. Still he moved on.

The central chamber of the ancient spacecraft was a perfect sphere. And in the exact center of that perfect sphere hung the Requiem Blaster.

As Axer took in the size of it, he realized that his plan had contained a fatal flaw. The Thirteen must have been enormous, three or four times the size of a normal bot, because that was the only way any of them could ever have held the Requiem Blaster. It was nearly as large as Axer himself. The shock of this discovery seemed reflected in the booms that rocked Junkion. Axer would never have believed the Thirteen had existed—yet they had. The size of the Requiem Blaster was proof. And in that proof was the destruction of his entire plan. Cursing the Thirteen, Optimus Prime, Megatron, and every circumstance that had led him to Junkion to begin with, he reached up and shoved the Requiem Blaster, rocking it in the field that held it suspended in the center of the chamber. Suddenly furious, he gripped the trigger, thick as his wrist, in one hand. He would fire the Blaster, right here in the depths of Junkion, and blast away with it
until the entire planet was reduced to floating space junk. As it had been in the beginning.

Axer pulled on the trigger, feeling it start to move. He did not know for certain what was going to happen when the Blaster fired, but he was beyond caring. He kept pulling, and when the chamber heaved around him and slung him away from the Requiem Blaster to crash into the wall, for a moment he thought he had actually discharged the ancient weapon. His head rang from hitting the wall, and it took a moment for his optics to reset. He slid down the inner surface of the sphere, coming to rest at the bottom, directly under the Blaster.

Scrambling to his feet, Axer saw no damage to the chamber. The Blaster had not fired! Then what—?

Another huge shock knocked him down again, and light from the surface poured in as the top deck of the spacecraft was torn away. Axer’s head spun as gravity suddenly seemed to disappear; he begain to float upward in a field of wreckage at the center of which was the Requiem Blaster, slowly turning to align itself with the center of the tractor beam that he realized must be pulling him up. Tractor beam! He looked through the debris and saw the
Nemesis
.

Screaming with incoherent fury, Axer reached after it even though it was large enough that he could never have held it or brought it to bear. Then he felt a jerk and a shift in the field surrounding him. The tractor beam narrowed, focusing solely on the Requiem Blaster itself, which receded beyond Axer’s grasp. Yet he did not fall as fast as he would have expected. Looking around, he saw to his amazement pieces of dislodged debris following the Requiem Blaster, floating up into the air or tearing themselves away from the vertical walls of the pit’s lower levels.

He hovered at the edge of this stream, roughly level
with the pit floor, and watched Junkion begin to tear itself apart.

Above him he saw the tank that had held Makeshift, once built into one of the lower terrace and now torn open by the stresses of the
Nemesis
lifting the Requiem Blaster free. Makeshift, as agile as any bot ever created, leaped nimbly from his tilting, burst holding tank and—like much of the rest of the lower levels of the pit—swirled into a vortex in the wake of the Requiem Blaster, which rose higher and higher as the
Nemesis
’s tractor beam pulled the weapon free.

Then everything, the entirety of the pit’s terraces and walls and floor, broke up into a storm of debris that swallowed Axer and Makeshift as if they had never existed.

When it was over, Axer was partially pinned, but he was able to work himself free. Huge and distant noises boomed through the structure of Junkion, and shock waves occasionally knocked him off balance. It was absolutely dark, but Axer’s optics ran into both infrared and ultraviolet, so he could see enough around him to know that he was in real trouble. Everything within his field of vision was a shifting endless deadfall, with uncertain footing and even more uncertain solidity to the ancient spacecraft’s broken upper deck.

But not all of the motion was settling debris from the upheaval and collapse. “Makeshift!” Axer called out. He caught up to the shifter, who was just reassuming his bot-form, a bot so anonymous that it was practically impossible for anyone who saw him once to describe him accurately. “Hard to believe we made it through.”

“I don’t know if I’d say we’ve made it through yet,” Makeshift said. “And I sure don’t know if I’d use the word ‘we’ to mean you and me in any situation.”

“Come on, now, you can’t have hard feelings about
that,” Axer said. “Look me in the lens and tell me you would have done something different.”

“I wouldn’t have, that’s true. But I wouldn’t be telling you not to hold a grudge about it, either. So long, Axer.”

Axer tried to keep up with him, figuring Makeshift knew the way out—maybe because Axer himself did not—but with his damaged leg, he couldn’t move fast enough, and Makeshift hadn’t been kidding about holding a grudge. Another tremor ran through the subsurface, opening some spaces and closing others off. It seemed Makeshift spotted an opening. Straining his lenses, Axer, too, could see light, pale and washed out from a thousand deflections and reflections down the vertical wall of an exploratory shaft.
Yes
, he thought. Makeshift ran for the opening, already assuming the shape of another bot. Axer could almost see which one, but then the tunnel between him and Makeshift collapsed, and he was alone.

He waited, getting his bearings. “All right, Makeshift,” Axer said. “I’d say we’re even, but we’re not. One day I’ll find you, and we’re going to settle things permanently.”

Pained and slowed by his leg, Axer looked around. Junkion boomed and groaned and shifted around him. He would find a way out. The interior was riddled with tunnels and passages and accidental gaps. Maybe that giant bot had torn Junkion apart. Maybe Megatron had abandoned him. Maybe Makeshift had betrayed him. None of it mattered.

Axer would find a way out.

Junkion heaved, and Axer sprawled into darkness. Still, when this latest shock passed, he thought he could see a glimmer of light.

Nothing could keep a bot going like a grudge, and if there was one bot who was never going to forget a
grudge, it was Axer. “Makeshift,” he growled. “You bought yourself an enemy for life.”

The passage ahead shifted and closed off again, but there was a way forward somewhere. Powered by hate like a furnace, Axer tore through the shattered substrates of Junkion, looking for the way back to the surface that he knew must be there.