Exiles (8 page)

In the shadowed emptiness of the speedway, as celebrations rang out across Velocitron, a group of bots met surreptitiously. Three of them were envoys from Ransack, who earlier had made tentative inquiries to the Cybertronian visitors:
What was the real story? Who was this Optimus Prime, and why did they follow him? What could Velocitron expect now that its ancient isolation had been broken?
Eventually, one of the visitors in the group had stepped forward and suggested that a conversation was in order but that it should perhaps take place beyond the watchful eyes of either Autobot or Velocitronian authority. Hence the current gathering.

One of Ransack’s envoys was called Hightail, though once, he thought, certainty having long ago fallen victim to the passage of time, he had been called something else. The Cybertronian in the foursome would not give a name. “You can call me 777,” he said. “That was once my name, when I was a bounty hunter in the slag swamps between the Hydrax Plateau and the city of Kaon. You’ve heard of those places?”

None of the others assembled could remember. Hightail surely couldn’t.

“See?” 777 said. “You’re not Cybertronians, but rather
Velocitronians
, all of you! Yes, the AllSpark gave
you life. But that life is your own—not tied to Cybertron.” After a pause, he added, “Especially once Optimus Prime threw the AllSpark into space.”

“Why’d he do that?” Hightail wanted to know.

“Because he didn’t trust regular Cybertronians to make their own decisions,” 777 said. “Once he was part of a revolution, but the High Council on Cybertron gave him too much power. They named him Prime, and he forgot the regular bots. Once the war started, he didn’t want to free bots anymore. He wanted to lead them.”

Another silence followed. Eventually, 777 broke it. “And if he couldn’t lead them—or if they didn’t want to be led—he decided he would destroy them. That’s why Cybertron is still at war. That’s why Optimus Prime is running across the galaxy. Because he let power go to his head.”

“What do we care about Cybertron?” Hightail said. “We’re here.”

“And I got here, right?” 777 answered. “Optimus Prime got here. You can’t ignore what’s happening on Cybertron any longer. The Space Bridges are going to be rebuilt. You’re going to have to choose sides. Optimus Prime is not the only voice on Cybertron. There are plenty of bots who think differently than he does.”

“How many cycles has it been since you saw Cybertron?” one of the Velocitronians asked. Hightail honked at him to shut up. He was jittery, anxious to hear more, revving his engine to burn off some excess energy.

“I’ve been there more recently than you have, bot,” 777 said.

“How do we know?” Hightail said. “You won’t even tell us your name.”

“Why would I? How do I know I can trust you? How do I know you won’t roll right back to Optimus Prime and tell him everything I said?”

The rumble of engines was the only sound for several
cycles. Hightail would have left it there, would have forgotten about the whole thing and gone back to the life he had—going fast, looking for ways to go faster, and building better roads so they could go faster yet. But there were three other bots there, and one of them said, just when it looked like 777 might give up and leave them there, “Tell us more.”

That other bot was a malcontent pit crew chief who had spent his entire life working on the racers without ever being able to race himself. Not every Velocitronian could be the fastest, and only one could be Blurr, but every Velocitronian had the dream. Backfire’s dream had died a long time ago as he watched other bots retool themselves or get sponsored by one of the big racing teams. Those bots became Velocitronian celebrities while bots like Backfire labored in the shadows of the hangars and watched their work be celebrated without anyone ever paying attention to who did it.

Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. On a planet like Velocitron, being a good mechanic was respected and admired. Backfire couldn’t contest that. But he knew he would never get a chance to race, not because he wouldn’t have been a good racer but because he never knew the right bots. He had raced out in the wastes, along the smaller feeder tracks, and had even won some of those races. But it had become clear a long time ago that he would never make it as a racer. He had known Blurr then, and even then Blurr had the mark of a star. Backfire wasn’t that fast and never would be no matter what tweaks and retoolings were applied to his alt-form chassis.

So he had become a crew chief, and a respected one, gradually climbing the ladder until he was second to Mainspring in Blurr’s pit, which was the one all Velocitronian mechanics angled to work in. But that kind of
respect was the respect a general had for a useful junior officer. It was condescending, wasn’t real. Backfire wanted the real thing.

That was why he asked the question of 777 even though 777 was wrong about them all being Cybertronian. He wanted to hear more about this Megatron.

Prowl listened. He couldn’t tell exactly what was being said, but he heard enough to understand that the topic at hand was Megatron. Had the Decepticons somehow found a way to get to Velocitron before the Autobot escape from Cybertron? That didn’t seem possible. Not even Shockwave had the kind of scientific acumen needed to teleport bots across time and space.

The only other possibility was that there was a turncoat on board the Ark.

Prowl had been a part of a lot of clandestine missions, and he had infiltrated more secret sites than just about any living Autobot. Even so, he was stunned to think of the possibility that one of the Autobots was a traitor and, even more so, that one of the bots Optimus Prime had chosen to come with him on the Ark was a traitor.

Optimus Prime had tried to get as many bots as possible on the Ark, knowing what those left behind would face, but even so, he had made some choices. Not being able to take every bot, he had tried to construct a combination exploratory mission, fighting force, and sampling of Cybertronian civilization. Some resolute Autobots had elected to stay behind and continue the fight, such as Ultra Magnus and the mighty Wreckers, but by and large the crew members of the Ark were there because Optimus Prime had made sure they were there. At least that was how Prowl understood it.

And now, listening to the conversation under the speedway grandstand, he understood that Optimus had taken a Decepticon on board the Ark, too.

But who? Prowl didn’t recognize the voice and couldn’t give away his position to get a visual of the traitor. He recorded the voice for processing through the Ark’s scientific facilities, and then he quietly got away from the unfolding plot. It made him feel dirty and furiously angry. Traitors would pay.

First, though, they must be identified. When he got clear of the speedway, Prowl headed straight for the Ark, hoping to catch Sideswipe between maintenance tasks so the two of them could put their heads together over a tricky but crucial problem of voiceprint identification.

The third Velocitronian at the meeting was a track engineer called Armco. He wasn’t sure what to think about the Cybertronian calling himself 777, and what genuinely unsettled him about the whole setup was that he had seen every Cybertronian who had come down from the Ark, since he’d been working on a balky welder in the hangar when Optimus Prime had presented each member of his team to Override.

777 wasn’t any of those bots.

This made Armco wonder why he was disguising himself or, if he wasn’t, why he hadn’t been presented to Override. Another possibility was that 777 was just one of a number of Autobots who were on Velocitron without the knowledge of either Override or Ransack.

So he had a problem. He should report this, whatever was going on. Hightail and Backfire wouldn’t do it for their own reasons. Backfire was already curious about this Megatron, whoever he was, so he wouldn’t say anything about 777 until he knew more or had a chance to see Megatron for himself … or until 777 asked him to say something to Ransack. Hightail, in contrast, wasn’t particularly loyal to either of Velocitron’s leaders. Neither was Armco. What Armco wanted was for the
Autobots—or Cybertronians or whatever they wanted to call themselves—to leave and let Velocitron figure out its own problems.

“Not bad enough that our sun is dying,” he grumbled to the tools in his workshop when he’d gotten back to the hangar much later. “We’ve got to be dragged into Cybertron’s wars, too.” The main hangar was deserted, with all the various crews and groups of Velocitronians gone back to the garages where they spent their nights. The hangar was a work space. Armco did not feel like resting, so he was working.

“That didn’t take long,” came a voice from nearby, startling him.

He looked up. His workshop was in a small annex walled off from the central hangar space, near the wall that faced the track complex itself. If you weren’t looking for Armco, you had no reason to be there. He held up the welder, and it sparked to life, its pure white tongue of plasma casting a harsh glare over the speaker.

It was one of the Cybertronians. “You’re the one they call Prowl, right?” Armco said.

“That’s my name. And you’re Armco.”

“That’s my name.”

“Armco, there are going to be problems here. You know that, right?”

“Everywhere has problems. Sounds like Cybertron has plenty,” Armco said.

Prowl nodded. “You can put the torch down,” he said. Armco did. “I need to ask you a favor.”

“Ask Override.”

“Well,” Prowl said, “there’s a problem there. If I ask Override, then she’s going to figure out a bunch of things that I’d rather she didn’t figure out just yet. There’s such a thing as knowing too much.”

Armco thought this over. He sure never felt like he
knew too much about anything. “You want me to be a spy for you,” he said.

“No,” Prowl said.

“Then what?”

“I just want you to come and tell me if this 777—that’s what he called himself, right?—if he starts talking specifics on when Megatron or the Decepticons might arrive here.” He paused to let this sink in. “That is very important information to your survival as well as ours. You understand?”

“Yeah,” Armco said even though he didn’t. He understood what Prowl wanted but not why he wanted Armco to do it.

Prowl started moving back into the darkness of the main hangar space. “Don’t come looking for me. I’ll find you.”

I bet you will
, Armco thought. He realized he hadn’t put out the torch and did so, scolding himself for wasting the fuel. Resources were scarce enough without him adding to the problem.

And things were tense enough between Override and Ransack without these Cybertronians coming in and making everything even hotter. That was racing, though: Sometimes everyone’s bunched up coming out of the final turn. Then you find out who’s got what coming down the straightaway.

Armco sat there in the darkness, half expecting someone else to appear and ask him to become a double agent. When no one did, he fired up the welder again and got to work.

One of the gifts bestowed by the Matrix of Leadership was patience and meditative focus beyond the ordinary. Optimus Prime waited, perfectly still. He felt a gradually intensifying transformation in the landscape around him, as if all of Velocitronian time had been superimposed on the lived moment of the present. Optimus opened his eyes. The monolith was before him. On his right, a long heaving slope fell away to Velocitron’s southern plain, crisscrossed by roads. On his left was the untouched natural landscape of a planet before it had been given the name Velocitron. Immediately behind him, Clocker waited, trying to stand still but suffering from the impatience seemingly built into the nature of every Velocitronian.

“This feels … I don’t like it,” Clocker said.

“You are not used to it,” said Optimus Prime.

Clocker ticked and jittered in place. “I don’t want to get used to it. Let’s go back to Delta.”

“Clocker, what are you afraid of?” Optimus Prime could see that the Velocitronian was on the verge of flight but was too embarrassed to say that he was frightened.

“There are stories about this place,” Clocker said. “If
I’d known we were coming here, I would have stayed home.”

“What kinds of stories?”

“It’s haunted. No Velocitronian will come here because of the stories.”

Haunted. Optimus Prime was not superstitious and did not understand superstition. The real universe was strange enough without layering myths over it. Still, he once had considered the Thirteen at least semimythical, so who was he to render judgment on the myths of other worlds?

“What haunts it?” he asked.

“The story is that something fell from the sky here and that any bot who comes close will be destroyed,” Clocker said. “That’s it, plain and simple. Whatever is in there doesn’t want you going in with it. Can I go?”

“No. Stay here,” Optimus Prime said.

Clocker backed up a step. Small plates along his shoulders and legs flipped up and then back down, as if he were barely resisting the impulse to assume alt-form and roll out of there as fast as his wheels would carry him. “Why?”

“Because I do not know what will happen when I do this. If it goes wrong, I will need someone to report back to the Ark and bring help.”