Exiles (2 page)

At the touch, something happened. Optimus Prime tried to speak and found he could not. He lurched to one side, banging into Jazz, who steadied him.

“Optimus,” Jazz said. “You okay?”

Optimus Prime could not answer. A surge of energy inside him overwhelmed all of his systems. He could barely stay upright even with Jazz’s support. The Matrix began to glow inside his torso, its radiance so fierce that it shone through Optimus’s external armor. He was made into a window through which the Matrix cast a hologram into the space above the command console. Optimus turned, and the hologram turned with him, expanding and holding its place in the center of the bridge. “Look,” he said finally.

“We are,” Jazz said. Optimus nodded absently but made no other response, and Jazz followed up with the first thing that passed through his mind. “You sure you’re okay?”

“Of course,” Optimus Prime said. Jazz had the sense that he would have given the same answer to any question, so absorbed was he in the hologram manifestation.

“It’s a star map,” Ratchet said. He reached out and
touched the edge of the hologram. It spun and angled itself around, reacting to the touch and presenting Ratchet with the view that Optimus had seen when the hologram spawned. “See? We’re here.” He indicated a glowing triangle.

Yes
, Optimus thought. The surrounding constellations started to make sense with what he could see in the hologram.

“Where did this come from?” Jazz asked.

“The Matrix,” Optimus Prime said.

“Well, why?” This was practically the first thing Perceptor had said since the Ark had lifted off from Cybertron. A dedicated astronomer and physicist, he spent most of his time looking at the stars. Maybe, Jazz thought, he hadn’t seen anything worth commenting on until the appearance of the map. “I mean, why would the Matrix be showing us a star map? We can look out the viewport, and I could calculate our position easily enough.”

“I wonder how old this map is,” Jazz said. On the hologram, the triangle representing the ship moved ever so slightly. “It still doesn’t tell us where we are if there aren’t any known stars to steer by.”

“You’re not listening, Jazz,” Perceptor said. “All we need is a brief spectrographic sweep and I can identify enough stars to fix our position.”

“Well, excuse me,” Jazz said. He knew Perceptor was speaking with a scientist’s typical bluntness and disregard for social protocol, but he was unsettled and in no mood to be talked down to.

“The more interesting question is why the Matrix contains a star map,” Ratchet said.

“Not to me,” Perceptor said.

“Well, you’re not like an ordinary bot,” Ratchet said. “The rest of us are curious. Prime, what do you think?”

“I do not know,” Optimus Prime said. “The answer may be contained in the map itself.”

“It’s almost like the Matrix knew this would happen,” Ratchet said.

Perceptor shook his head. “There’s no reason to get mystical,” he said.

“You don’t have to get mystical to think that there’s more to the Matrix than we understand,” Jazz argued. Perceptor shrugged and busied himself plotting the relationships among the stars on the map, trying to coordinate them with the Cybertron-based star maps contained in the Ark’s memory banks.

Optimus reached out and touched the triangle. “I agree with Perceptor, at least in part. There must be at least some known stars on this map regardless of what we might see through the viewport.” He watched as the star map reoriented itself again, zooming in a thousand or ten thousand times until they had a view of the ship and the nearest stars.

Jazz pointed at a blinking blue sphere. “That one’s different,” he said. “Touch it.”

Optimus Prime did, and the map zoomed farther in, revealing a hot yellow star with seven planets orbiting around it. One of them remained blue and steadily blinking.

“It’s telling us to go there,” Optimus Prime said.

Jazz looked skeptical. “If you say so.”

The Matrix thrummed within Optimus, pulsing in time with the blink of the blue-tinted planet. “I do say so,” Optimus replied. “Would you rather drift in empty space waiting for the
Nemesis
to arrive?”

“Depends on what we find on that planet,” Jazz said. “Ask me again when we know what awaits us there.”

“If you want to know, we are going to have to make
planetfall. There is no telling from here,” Optimus pointed out.

Bumblebee buzzed, clicked, and then made a bunch of noises that were nearly words. If they were words, they would have been “Let’s go, then.”

Which was what all of them had known he would say.

The Ark established a geostationary position over the planet in preparation for an initial series of scans. The results were surprising enough that Silverbolt ordered them to be repeated. “There are Cybertronians here,” Jazz said when the Ark confirmed the initial results.

It was true. The planet abounded in the unique spectrographic signature of Energon. No other being in the universe was known to use Energon, which was produced, so far as was known—only on Cybertron. From the scans, the Ark inferred the presence of several thousand bots, living in fairly advanced circumstances.

One of the lost colonies? Optimus Prime could hardly believe it. How many of them were there? How long had it been since they had been in contact with Cybertron?

“Prime,” Perceptor said. “I have completed the spectrographic scan. The Ark should now be able to fix our location.”

Optimus Prime laid one hand on the Ark’s command console and said, “Ark. Ascertain three-axis coordinates with respect to Cybertron.” The Ark executed a series of simulations using the brightest visible stars in conjunction with the star map provided by the Matrix of Leadership.
In short order it had a fix on their position and displayed it on a holographic map of the galaxy.

For several cycles every Autobot on the bridge was struck silent by what it showed. Then Jazz said slowly, “We’re a long way from home.”

That much was certainly true. If they had not traversed a Space Bridge, they could not have come this far in the known history of Cybertron. Their home planet winked in an arm of the galaxy far to the spinward of their current location, which was approximately halfway out from the galactic core in a region defined by a trio of large clusters with smaller groupings of stars spread among the triangular space.

“It’s hard to believe any Cybertronian ever came this far,” Ratchet said.

In that statement, thought Optimus Prime, was contained much of the recent history of Cybertron: the loss of a great heritage and the Autobots’ first steps toward recovering it.

Now came the real question.

“Ark,” Optimus Prime said. “Cross-index this position with known colony worlds as of the collapse of the Space Bridges.”

Time passed as the Ark accessed that information, which was buried deep within rarely used archives. Then a chime sounded on the bridge, and the galaxy map reoriented itself. A single star system enlarged, and information about it spilled across the holographic field.

Velocitron
.

The name sounded strange to them, a series of sounds out of Cybertron’s distant past. All of them had thought it mythical, just as they had thought the old stories of the Thirteen were mythical …

The war has taught us this much, if it’s taught us anything
, thought Optimus Prime.
We built our stories to conceal truths that someday we would need again
.

“Velocitron?” Jazz said. “When I used to go to the races at Hydrax, there was a Team Velocitron. I didn’t know it meant something else.”

“I doubt any of us did,” Optimus Prime said. “But now we do. And once we make contact with Velocitron, we might find out that they consider us a myth as well.”

“They need to hear what’s happened to Cybertron,” Bulkhead said. Optimus Prime looked at him and nodded. It was rare for Bulkhead to jump into a tactical conversation. He had served with the Wreckers, letting Ultra Magnus make the decisions, and came aboard the Ark only in the chaotic last moments before the Ark’s liftoff. Like all the Wreckers, Bulkhead was massive and taciturn, his muted coloration matching his temperament. He must have been deeply unsettled by something if he was provoked to speak.

“The Wreckers’ story will be told, Bulkhead. But that is not all Velocitron will need to hear.” Optimus Prime was thinking of Megatron. The Decepticons would be coming. If they had not made it across the Space Bridge at Cybertron, they would find another way. Of that, Optimus Prime had no doubt. And it was possible that the Space Bridge had ejected the
Nemesis
in this same region, beyond sensor range but within reach … if Megatron was able to put together the same information the Autobots had. Their advantage was the Matrix and the map it had provided. Megatron would not have that.

But they did not know what else he might have. Best to plan for pursuit or even ambush.

A wave of sadness hit him as he thought of all the brave Autobots left behind on Cybertron and all the unallied bots who had tried to stay out of the conflict and now found themselves subject to the sadistic whims of Shockwave. For all that Cybertron had needed reform, Optimus Prime regretted the way civil demonstrations had become a civil war. He had tried to avoid that, tried
to defuse Megatron’s raging sense of injustice, but in the end he had failed. When the High Council had made him Prime, they also had guaranteed the endless war that had engulfed the planet. So much had been lost.

What might be gained? That was the question. That was the motivation for their quest.

Cybertron would be restored.

First things first
, Optimus thought.
Right now we need to get off the Ark for a little while, see if we can figure out for certain where we are … and along the way maybe learn something about this place. There were Cybertronian colony worlds scattered across the galaxy. What if it were possible to bring them all together again into a grand confederation of free planets …?

That was a question for another time, Optimus decided. He needed to stay focused on the task at hand: making planetfall and then figuring out the next step in recovering the AllSpark.

“Leave the Ark here,” he said. “Let’s meet our Velocitronian cousins. It’s been a long time.”

The Ark carried a number of landing craft large enough for small exploration or assault teams, and it was in one of them that the first Autobot visitors to Velocitron arrived. They dived from the Ark’s high orbit toward the lost colony planet—Optimus Prime, Perceptor, Jazz, and Bumblebee—abuzz with the tingle of discovery even as each of them knew that their arrival would bring with it consequences that none of them could predict. For the first time in uncounted cycles, Cybertronian and Velocitronian would greet each other. What history had unfolded during those long eons?

And what new history would be made as a result of the reunion?

“Look at that,” Jazz marveled as they reached the outer edges of Velocitron’s atmosphere. Optimus Prime did, and he was amazed at what he saw.

Velocitron!

The planet’s surface seemed entirely taken up with nodes consisting of road interchanges around which were built massive works. At intervals along the roads between cities were enormous grandstands where Velocitronians gathered to gawk and cheer as the intercity commerce became a race, as it inevitably did. The Velocitronians were forever looking to go faster, forever experimenting
with fuels and customizations to themselves, all dedicated to the idea of speed. Optimus knew something of this planet from ancient records he had accessed on the Ark as they made their approach to the planet, but he also had familiarized himself somewhat with colonial history because he found it interesting. In his long tenure as a clerk, he had developed a number of interests in specific areas of Iacon’s nearly endless archives. From both sources, Optimus Prime’s memory and the Ark’s, it was clear that the Velocitronians had been hard at work since the collapse of the Space Bridges. The entire planet was now crisscrossed with roads, its natural topography reengineered to create better banks for turns and longer straightaways for tests of a bot’s absolute limits of speed and endurance. Viewed from orbit, the planet looked like a brown and gray ball encased in a net, each thread of which was in fact a planet-spanning road. The knots were settlements where those roads came together.