Exiles (38 page)

“Bah-weep-graaaahnah wheep ni ni bong.”

Wreck-Gar had not heard the universal greeting in a long time. He gave it right back. “Welcome to Junkion!” he added. “Need something broken down, junked, un-junked, we do it!”

The big blue bot reached out and seized Wreck-Gar by the throat, lifting him off the ground. Wreck-Gar was pretty big himself, and even in the middle of his shock he was thinking that there weren’t many bots out there who could do what this one was doing. “Gurk,” he said. “Junk!”

“Are you the leader of these bots?” the invader growled.

Now, how did he know that?
Wreck-Gar wondered. “I am Wreck-Gar!” he said, getting his composure back even if his feet weren’t touching the ground. If this bot thought he was going to intimdate Wreck-Gar, he was in for a surprise. “Who’s asking?”

“Tell me where the Cybertronians are,” the one-legged bot said.

“Look around,” Wreck-Gar said. “We got junk here!”

“Tell me where they are!”

Now Wreck-Gar was angry and didn’t bother to hide it. “This is Junkion. No time for this! Too much to build!” He really didn’t have time for this. There were machine shops, foundries, furnaces, and the spaceport to put back together.

The leader looked left and right. “Cannonball, Brimstone. Convince them,” he said. At this cue, two of his henchmen—one-wheeled and one-legged but both larger than Wreck-Gar—converged on the nearest Junkion, who happened to be Arclight. Before any of the Junkions knew what was happening, one of the bots seized Arclight’s arms and the other tore his head from his shoulders in a burst of sparks. Arclight’s legs shot out straight, and the bot holding his arms let his decapitated body go. There was dead silence.

“Tell me where the Cybertronians are,” the one-legged bot said again after the last sparks had stopped jumping from Arclight’s severed head.

In the shocked silence, Wreck-Gar said, “Now, hold on.” He thought furiously, knowing that the Junkions stood no chance in a fight against these invaders. Could he sacrifice one of his Junkions? Who? Or could … He glanced up at the sky and saw that in the distance, almost as far as the Space Bridge the Autobots had used to come from Velocitron, the
Nemesis
and the Ark had stopped.

Were they coming back? Or …?

“My patience is limited,” said the one-legged bot, his voice low but ominous.

Then Wreck-Gar’s old friend Detritus, who had barely made it out of the wreckage of the furnace at the bottom
of the pit, stepped forward to rescue Wreck-Gar from the dilemma of leadership.

“Axer’s a Cybertronian,” he said, pointing across the empty space between two drifting bits of Junkion. “He’s been here for a long time, but he’s Cybertronian.”

Wreck-Gar kept silent. There was no proof to corroborate Detritus’s story, but he was grateful that the decision had been taken out of his hands. Because Detritus did not lie. Ever. If he said Axer was Cybertronian, it was true.

And if a Cybertronian had to be sacrificed so that the Junkions might live, well, Wreck-Gar figured, that was another problem that could be laid at Optimus Prime’s feet. Nobody had asked the Autobots to come to Junkion, and the Junkions had no reason to love them after what had happened to their planet with the excavation of the Requiem Blaster.

Plus, he had no love for Axer, who even if he was not Cybertronian was almost certainly a murderer.

The pirate leader followed Detritus’s pointing arm. “If we do not find this Cybertronian there,” he said, “we will be back. And we will be angry.”

“You’ll find him,” Detritus said. “Now leave us.”

They did, and as the invaders poured back into their landing craft, Wreck-Gar noticed that there were two of Detritus.

No
, he thought, but why should he have been surprised that Makeshift had escaped during the upheavals that had practically destroyed Junkion? “You, Makeshift,” he said, and the shifter flickered out of Detritus’s form into his own: a plain, unburnished gray.

“At your service,” Makeshift said.

“I don’t want your service, junk!” Wreck-Gar said. “You I want dead! Junkions, destroy him!”

“Aw, come on, Wreck-Gar,” Makeshift said, his form already beginning to shift. “You’re not still holding a
grudge about Shearbolt when you have all of these other problems?”

He vanished into a flickering succession of forms, running through the Junkions, who kept searching for a good shot and passing it up because Makeshift kept assuming the form of the nearest Junkion. He disappeared into the rubble and was gone.

Wreck-Gar felt sick. “Junkions,” he said, speaking slowly so he would not be misunderstood, “when these Autobots and Decepticons are gone, remind me to destroy the Space Bridges after them.”

They looked down at the decapitated body of Arclight. Then an explosion sounded from the drifting fragment that Makeshift had sent the invaders to. Across the narrow void, Wreck-Gar and the other Junkions watched as a brief fight erupted. Then the landing ship lifted off the large bit of flotsam. They expected it to return to the larger ship, which loomed over the Junkion debris, blotting out fifteen degrees of starfield, but instead it looped back toward the recovery site where Wreck-Gar and his crew had returned to their work. Almost before it had braked to a landing, the pirate’s minions were among them, fighting nonlethally but irresistibly. Wreck-Gar tried to fight, but surprise and superior numbers were too much. Before they could muster any real resistance, Wreck-Gar and several other Junkions were magnetically bound and thrust together into a group for the pirate leader’s inspection. Detritus was closest to him, on his left.

At the rear of the pirates—increasingly, that was what Wreck-Gar was sure they were—flapped a winged bot unlike the Autobot or Decepticon Seekers. From its steel talons dangled Axer.

“I have the Cybertronian,” the pirate leader said. “But that’s not all I need.”

He pointed up toward the ruins of the Space Bridge
that hung glimmering in the middle distance, near the original site of Junkion. “How long has it been since that Space Bridge functioned?”

Wreck-Gar shrugged, unwilling to give this pirate even the semblance of cooperation. “A long time.” He did not mention that one of the other ones worked. The way Wreck-Gar had it figured, he was issuing information to pirates on a strictly as-requested basis.

“You will make it work again,” the pirate leader said. “But not the way it originally did.” He motioned to his minions, who roughly dragged the Junkions onto the landing craft. It wasn’t until they were all aboard the ship that Wreck-Gar found out what the pirate captain wanted them to do.

Slipstream’s first attack very nearly knocked Optimus Prime loose from the death grip he had on the base of the Requiem Blaster’s barrel. A piece of the barrel housing came loose in Optimus Prime’s hand, and he broke it again over Slipstream’s head as he scrambled to get his feet planted. In bot-form, Slipstream fought hand to hand with the occasional aid of a short-range energy cannon that fired so fast that its individual bolts almost became a white-hot plasma curtain. She brought that cannon to bear, and Optimus Prime slammed it aside with the last piece of the Requiem Blaster’s barrel housing.

He looked over his shoulder and saw the
Nemesis
was swinging around, taking a course that would miss the Space Bridge by a long way but put the ship on a direct intercept course for the central remnant of Junkion.

Where the Ark, too, was returning, its engines barely flickering and crystalline puffs of escaping gas trailing behind it. Sideswipe was executing the plan perfectly.

Megatron
, thought Optimus Prime.
You just can’t resist
the idea that you can put this ship down and finish things face to face
.

One shall stand
, Optimus thought.
And one shall fall
.

Slipstream came at him again, grappling him up against the makeshift turret the
Nemesis
had created to hold on to the Blaster. Optimus Prime deflected a punch from Slipstream that left a dent in that turret instead; counterpunching, he caught Slipstream flush in the face. The dazed Seeker slipped along the outside of the
Nemesis
’s hull but caught herself. Once again she came after Optimus Prime, this time firing a barrage of energy bolts on her approach. Optimus felt the burn and the sting of them, but he put his head down and charged right into Slipstream’s attack.

They met head-on with a crash that boomed through the hull of the
Nemesis
and was undoubtedly audible to the Decepticons inside. Optimus Prime, bouncing back from the impact, caught the Requiem Blaster’s barrel again. With his other arm, he caught the unconscious Slipstream, giving her another couple of taps to make sure she stayed unconscious.

Then he heaved Slipstream upward so she would pass in front of the
Nemesis
’s bridge.

Come and get me, brother
, he thought.
Either here or when we get back to Junkion. I will meet you either place
.

One shall stand. One shall fall.

Junkion—what was left of it—loomed ahead. The Autobots’ Ark—seemingly flying on its own but still visibly in the final stages of repairs that seemed as if they could never be completed—drifted near the remnant planetoid, having given up its pursuit of the
Nemesis
. It limped back toward Junkion, fighting the tug of the Requiem Blaster all the way. Megatron hoped that not too many of the Autobots had perished in the disintegration of Junkion.

He wanted them all to see what was coming.

Some of the drifting wrecks that littered the near space between Junkion and the line of Space Bridges would be fine additions to the Decepticon fleet, particularly the great black wedge of a ship that hung on the far side of the debris field. Megatron could see Junkions crawling over its surface, torches flaring as they did what Junkions did: They worked. Farther out, one of the Space Bridges—and this surprised even Megatron, who prided himself on never being surprised by anything—appeared to be in the grip of a tractor beam and was being drawn in slowly toward another waiting crew of Junkions. Its lights glittered; Megatron wondered where it led. It had been on one end of the string of Space Bridges arrayed
at the edge of Junkion’s gravitational influence. Now the other three were beginning to drift apart.

If the Junkions were trying to get that monster into fighting form, it would be a formidable opponent. But the
Nemesis
would be a match for it. Megatron was confident that the
Nemesis
would be a match for any ship yet built.

What they would want a Space Bridge for, Megatron had no idea. Once he had settled things with Optimus Prime, he would find out. And then the battleship would be the first addition to that new Decepticon fleet he envisioned.

Except once he had destroyed Optimus Prime, the
Nemesis
could return to Cybertron and mop up the rest of the doomed Autobots, and there would be no immediate need for a Decepticon fleet. Not that lack of immediate need would stop Megatron from wanting a fleet. Or building one. Or using one as soon as he could find another world to use it on.

All of that was getting ever so slightly ahead of things, however, given the fact that the librarian was still grappling with Slipstream on the external hull of the
Nemesis
, right under the barrel of the Requiem Blaster. First things first. He could dream of a fleet once he had news that Optimus had been disposed of.

Except, apparently Optimus wasn’t willing to go along with that plan. Slipstream, battered and limp, drifted past the portals at the side of the
Nemesis
’s bridge.

“Get us back to Junkion, now!” Megatron ordered.

First things first, indeed
.

There is much that even I do not know about my companions among the Thirteen. I would not be surprised if more of them than I had guessed still travel among the stars, waiting for history’s great wheel to bring them back together in some combination that only the great Wizard of Forms, Nexus Prime, could have predicted
.