Exiles (5 page)

“We’re not in any shape to save anyone,” Jazz said. “Maybe not even ourselves.”

“And there’s a war on Cybertron?”

“That’s why we left,” Optimus Prime said. “We search for the AllSpark. Until we find it, Cybertron’s wounds will never heal.”

“Well, what can we do?” Blurr said, seeming to dismiss the Autobot’s words easily with a shrug. “Let’s race.”

At an appointed time in every solar cycle, the greatest racers of Velocitron gathered for what had become known as the Speedia. The arrival of the Autobots had interrupted preparations for that momentous event, but not for long. Most Velocitronians looked up briefly at these strange bots from a world they believed mythical—when they thought about it at all—and then went back to work. They had racers to prepare, tracks to resurface, and a thousand other preparations to make. The Speedia was without question the most important thing on the Velocitronian calendar. Often the choice of leaders was based on the order of finish at the Speedia, and certainly Velocitronians adored the winner whether or not he became leader of the planet. Override was a past winner—multiple times—and Ransack’s power came from a Speedia during which he had staged one of the great comebacks in the race’s history, roaring back from last place over the final five laps to come within a bumper of taking the whole prize. He and his followers, Blurr told them on their way into Delta, had been heard to mutter among themselves that Ransack actually had won that race. “It’s not true, though,” he said. “For one thing, there’s rules about how two-wheels and four-wheels should compete, and Ransack was only in that race as an experiment. For another, Override won fair and square. I know because I was third that time, right
behind both of them. But I’ve won a bunch since. I’m going to win this year, too.”

“Didn’t know you were one of the racers,” Jazz commented.

“I am.”

“Then how come we’re out here wandering around instead of in the track getting ready like everyone else?”

“You want to race?” Blurr challenged Jazz. “You beat me, then you can tell me how to get ready for Speedia. I know Speedia. You’ll see.”

“Okay,” Jazz said. “No offense.”

But Blurr’s comment—
You want to race?
—stuck in Optimus Prime’s mind. He had an idea. He wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, but it might turn out to be a necessary one. To deflate the tension, he kept Blurr talking about the race, and by the time they got to the great racetrack and Blurr broke away from them to run some last-minute checks with his crew, Optimus Prime and the other Autobots knew as much about Speedia as any non-Velocitronian alive.

Hound’s team, with Ratchet, Sideswipe, and Prowl, arrived just as the racers were coming to the starting line.

“They say they’ve done this a million times,” Jazz said to Ratchet. “You believe it?”

Ratchet shrugged. “Why not? The only limitation is how often their mechanics can put them together again.”

That was, thought Optimus Prime, a uniquely Ratchetesque perspective. He wondered how much Speedia and the whole infrastructure of smaller regional races contributed to the resource shortage on Velocitron. If the key to their survival turned out to be the surrender of their identity, what would they choose?

“A gloomy question,” was Ratchet’s answer when Optimus Prime posed his internal musings to the group quietly so that none of the Velocitronians could hear.
This was true as far as it went, but it wasn’t really an answer.

Then a roar went up from the crowd, and Optimus, along with the rest of the Autobots, looked around to see what was happening.

Delta’s central racetrack—one of twenty-eight in the city, Blurr had mentioned proudly—was a banked oval with straightaways of equal length and tight turns through which the track was angled at as much as forty-five degrees. “Enough to take flight if you handle the acceleration wrong,” Prowl muttered. Inside the track, the infield was scattered with rescue crews, media operations, repair facilities, and two low ranks of seating reserved for past winners and important visitors. The Autobots had been offered those seats but chose to sit in the main grandstand, which surrounded the track and rose three times as high as the next tallest structure in Delta. Optimus Prime had wanted to get close to the general sentiment of the Velocitronian people before spending so much time with their leaders that they wouldn’t open up to him anymore. Override, unfortunately, had complicated this plan by sending Ransack and a retinue of his cronies to sit with the Cybertronians. There was visible tension between the two leaders of Velocitron. Optimus wondered how much worse the Autobtots’ arrival had made it. Both of them, he assumed, would be looking for ways to turn the Autobots’ news to their advantage. He would have to be careful not to be used in that way; awareness of cynical political stunts was one thing Megatron had taught him a long time ago.

Even with all this occupying his mind, Optimus was curious about the intensity surrounding the imminent start of the Speedia. Velocitron was sparsely populated, and it seemed that most of its population was either jammed into the grandstand or milling around the staging
areas between the racetrack and the main hangar that also apparently doubled as the center of Velocitronian government activities. Anything could be happening out in the desert hinterlands, and no Velocitronian would care about it until the race was over.

At the starting line, ten alt-forms idled, revving their engines nervously and rocking back and forth until Override herself ascended a scaffold and raised her arms for quiet. “This is our greatest tradition,” she boomed through the speedway’s audio system. “The Speedia is the ultimate test of Velocitronian speed and determination. These ten racers are the best of the best. They have proved themselves on tracks and in road races since the last Speedia, and now comes the time to crown the newest champion!” The crowd roared, and Override paused to let the waves of approbation wash over her and the assembled racers.

“Best of the best, my exhaust,” Ransack grumbled. “I’m not running.”

Optimus Prime decided not to point out that neither was Override. Apparently the Speedia did not always decide the next leader of the Velocitronians, and on those occasions when the race was run purely to determine the fastest bot on the planet, the Speedia was a celebration rather than a political event. Ransack didn’t look happy about that. Optimus Prime had the feeling that he would rather have been racing and would have preferred his most notable opponent to be Override. Ransack’s discontent radiated from him in practically tangible waves.

None of the other bots nearby appeared to notice, though … or to care. For them, this was the great race of the solar cycle. Politics could be left aside for another day. Override was introducing the racers, each of whom briefly rocked forward over the starting line as his name
was called. Last came Blurr, who, if the crowd’s response was any indication, was the most popular.

“And now,” Override said, “to the starting line!”

The grandstands rocked with cheering. It was time.

At a signal from Override, the racers exploded away from the starting line. They accelerated along the first straightaway and bunched together into the ferocious bank of the first turn. Optimus Prime had seen races on Cybertron, but this was something else entirely. At Hydrax, races were a diversion; here, they were the highest expression of Velocitronian identity. To race was to live, to speed was to breathe, and these were the best of the best. He thrilled at the spectacle.

The race was one hundred laps of the track, a distance calculated from long practice to reward both speed and endurance. No stopping or repairs were permitted during the race, and nothing could interrupt it. If a crash occurred, the remaining racers were required to navigate the debris on the track.

All ten racers tore through the first laps in a cluster, jockeying for the inside position around the turns and making minute adjustments to draft on those immediately ahead or pinch off those just behind. The first twenty laps passed almost before Optimus had gotten an understanding of the tactics, even though Ransack provided a constant stream of commentary. On the twenty-fourth lap, two of the leading bots, right in front of the third-place Blurr, scraped against each other coming out of the final turn. One of them swerved wildly, nearly losing control and forcing the following racers out of their tight formation. A gasp went up from the crowd, quickly becoming a storm of denunciation as fans of individual bots blamed one or the other for nearly causing a crash.

The next thirty laps passed without incident beyond a series of passes and maneuvers among the back five in the race. The leaders stayed steady, still feeling one another
out and preparing for the second half of the race. “The first fifty,” Ransack said, “are practice. The next thirty are setup. The last twenty are where the race really happens. By then you know who has what it takes.”

Optimus Prime nodded, but he thought this characterization of the race was unusual coming from someone whose reputation rested on a historic comeback over the last few laps. Ransack did appear to be right about the increasing tension on the track, though. After the halfway point, every racer got more aggressive. There was more bumping and scraping around the turns, and several times one bot or another was flung out of the formation to scramble and force its way back in over the next few laps. From the nearby spectators, Optimus Prime heard an overwhelming amount of commentary, vitriol, cheering, and accidental history. Every Velocitronian, it seemed, was a walking compendium of Speedia history, and everything that happened on the track had historical antecedents. It turned out that one of the bots in the row just below Optimus and the other Autobots had won a Speedia long ago. He was known as Hightail, and everyone around him seemed to defer to his opinions about the race and its history. Optimus Prime decided that he would have to get Hightail alone and sound him out about the situation between Override and Ransack.

He was thinking about how to do this when, in the race’s final stage, a middle-of-the-pack racer swung a little wide coming out of a turn and collided heavily with its nearest competitor. The first racer overcorrected and hit a third coming up on the inside. All three went out of control, with the outside bot hitting the wall while the other two went into spins that inevitably turned into spectacular rollovers. From the crowd, cheering turned to shocked yells and confused contradictions. The bot coming off the wall spun through the
pack, miraculously missing every other racer as they darted around him and coming to rest facing backward at the edge of the infield. His front end was badly crumpled and sparking, but his engine still revved and his wheels moved enough that he could maneuver farther onto the infield.

The other two racers were not so fortunate. One ended up upside down near the center of the infield, bits of wreckage strewn behind it. Somewhere in its tumbling, it had reflexively reassumed its bot-form, as bots tended to do when seriously injured. It tried to get up and failed, collapsing on the packed earth of the infield. The other one had not rolled as far, ending up on its side against a stanchion supporting the stadium’s audio system. The stanchion rocked at the impact, and a spike of feedback blared across the space, cutting through the unsettled reaction from the crowd.

A repair crew deployed from the staging area inside the ring of the racetrack, reaching both of the injured racers practically before they had come to rest. Sparks and smoke partially obscured the audio stanchion and the bot below as it, too, reflexively transformed back into its bot-form. The crowd roared, but Optimus Prime didn’t know whether they were cheering the crash or the bots’ survival. In his short time on Velocitron, he had come to understand that their culture was very different from its Cybertronian ancestor.

The race went on, a pack of seven bots now rather than ten. Optimus Prime had lost track of how many laps the two leading racers had completed, but it was somewhere in the nineties. They ran wheel to wheel, trading the lead back and forth by minuscule amounts, as the other five jockeyed for position in a cluster just behind them. Despite himself Optimus Prime was getting interested. Sport in general had never taken much of his attention, but here with the entire population of a
planet riveted to an event he found the enthusiasm infectious.

Unbidden, a memory arose: the clandestine gladiator pit where Megatron had first shown Orion Pax the brutal glory of combat. Optimus Prime realized with a shock that he had been captivated then as he was captivated now … but in the same moment he could see the difference. There, lives had been at stake, sparks extinguished for the savage pleasure of the crowd. Here …

He looked again at the infield, where the damaged racers were undergoing treatment.
Was
it so different? Had Velocitron developed its own version of the pits, and for the same reasons? With the looming crisis over resources and the instability of their sun, Velocitronians had turned to the spectacle of dangerous sport. In the flush of this insight, Optimus Prime grew even more certain that the Autobots had been destined to come here. The Matrix did nothing by accident, and Velocitron was in need.

Yet the spectators seemed unconscious of their possible doom, or at least uncaring for the moment. The tension in the stands built to an unbearable pitch. The girders shook with the force of the Velocitronians’ roars, punctuated by the rhythmic stomping of their feet. On the track, a signal went up: Three laps to go. One of the leaders was Blurr. Optimus Prime did not know the other one.

Ransack, in the middle of the chaos, leaned over and spoke to Optimus Prime, keeping his voice just loud enough for Optimus alone to hear.

“You see,” Ransack said. “There are no faster bots in the galaxy than us. Maybe Override is counting on you to save us, but me? I don’t think we need saving. Certainly not from a bunch of refugees who destroyed their own planet on the way out. You have nothing for us.”

Optimus Prime nodded, letting Ransack have his say.
But while he was nodding, he fired off a quick subvocalized message. He had heard enough of Ransack’s slander. It could not be allowed to spread. A counterexample was in order.