by Peter David
(It strikes the attack ship as it attempts to get past it. The impact knocks it hard to the side and causes it to strike another building. The attack ship blows up. The building remains resolutely where it is.)
(Just like that, the attack is over.)
(Now comes the hard part.)
iii
All seven of Lennox’s men landed atop the roof of a parking garage.
All seven? Lennox couldn’t quite believe that those words had played through his mind. Eight men in total had survived, including him. He’d lost thirty-two men already. And if he hadn’t gotten off that shot that brought the building collapsing upon their pursuer, it was entirely possible that none of them would have survived. All seven? They weren’t “all” of anything, and he told himself that he would do well to remember that.
“Weapons status,” he said briskly, giving no indication of the feelings roiling within him. “What have we got left?”
Zimmerman was right on top of it. “Twenty nine Bot Busters. Twenty piercing D-bots. Frags, but no rockets. No launchers.” That seemed a bit of a downer, but Zimmerman immediately rallied. “But ass-kicking attitude, sir.”
Despite the overall seriousness of their situation, Lennox couldn’t help but permit a small smile to let the soldier know he appreciated his enthusiasm. Then the smile faded, and he gestured for all of them to come closer. “Listen up,” he said. “For our brothers, let’s make this trip worth it.”
“Hooah!” the soldiers shouted, and Lennox returned the shout.
They ran out into the streets of Chicago.
CHICAGO
i
It was called the Galileo Building. Apparently they specialized in producing equipment for astronomical endeavors, but now it had an additional meaning that was remarkably appropriate: Galileo, according to legend, performed a famous experiment involving the dropping of objects of varying weights off the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
Now it’s going to serve another purpose, Sam thought. It’s going to help us stop an alien race from beyond the stars. Galileo would have liked that. At least I hope he would have. Hell, for all I know, he was a disguised Decepticon. I don’t know what to believe about anyone anymore.
Sam, Carly, Epps, and his merry band of mercs were making their way up as quickly as they could. Naturally, taking the elevator was out of the question. The power was out, and even if it wasn’t, this was not a situation in which to trust oneself to some rickety contraption.
So they took the stairs.
This was not the easiest of endeavors. First, clambering up forty flights of stairs was something of a challenge in and of itself under ordinary circumstances. The building’s angle served to make gravity an additional factor.
Sam felt as if he were perpetually on the edge of falling over. He clutched on to the railing with a death grip, making his way up the stairs, hauling the Hellfire missile, which seemed to be getting heavier by the second. Others offered to carry it, but Sam, through gritted teeth, insisted that he could do it. It was a matter of pride by that point. Foolishly stupid pride that had meaning to no one but himself, but pride nevertheless. Pride goes before a fall …
He glanced down the dizzying stairwell and gulped. Don’t think about falling.
“We have a problem!” came Hardcore Eddie’s voice from ahead of them.
“Just one?” Epps said sarcastically.
Up ahead of them, the way was blocked. Not only was there massive debris, but a sputtering power line was dangling in front of it, swinging gently back and forth, seeming to invite them to take a whack at trying to dodge it.
“We’re at the thirty-fifth floor,” Carly said, tapping the entrance door next to her. Sam couldn’t believe it. She didn’t seem the least bit out of breath. He was starting to think that maybe she was part machine. That would explain a lot of things.
“It’ll have to do,” Epps said. “Open it.”
She pushed it open and almost slid right out. With a startled yelp she grabbed on to the doorknob, her feet nearly going out from under her.
“Carly!” Sam shouted.
“I’m okay! I’m okay! But boy, thank God I’m not wearing stilettos … Sam, you know the ones I mean.”
“Yeah … yeah, I do.” He grinned, his mind suddenly going to a much happier place, and then he yelped as someone hit him on the shoulder.
Ames scowled at him and rumbled, “Focus, kid.”
“Right, right. Sorry.”
One by one, they made their way out into the office. It was the most surreal thing Sam had ever seen. It was an open area so that he had a clear view of the skewed office landscape.
Carly was now in a crouch, as if she were tentatively making her way down the side of a mountain. “Nobody move too quickly.” She made her way out the door, crab walking as she went. The others followed suit.
It appeared to be some sort of graphics design office. A vast bullpen area stretched out in front of them, dotted with art boards and high chairs. There was also one long, flat table that might have been used for conferences or perhaps simply as a communal gathering place to eat or discuss things. Some of the offices, presumably those of the higher-up guys, had glass partitions.
There was an entrance to another stairway off to the left. Sam made a mental note of its location, just in case.
The rest of the determined band followed Carly’s example, except for Rakishi, who must have been born on a mountain since he simply walked forward with utter confidence, apparently unbothered by something as trivial as gravity.
At one point Sam stumbled, and he grabbed on to a nearby chair for support. The chair promptly sped away from him, and he would have fallen if he hadn’t shoved himself against a desk. Stackhouse said to him, “All the chairs here are on wheels. Not exactly anchors.”
“Thanks for the safety tip,” Sam said.
Then the phone rang on the desk that Sam was leaning against. Incredulous, he picked it up. “Hello?” he said tentatively.
It was an automated message informing Mrs. O’Shea that she had a dental appointment at Doctor Friedman’s office tomorrow.
It was such a trivial, mundane thing, yet it struck an odd chord for Sam. It reminded him of how people had simply been trying to live their ordinary lives, and then all this insanity had happened. It made him all the more determined—as if he required any more incentive—to beat those bastards and return at least some semblance of normality to their lives.
Load-bearing columns dotted the tilted landscape, and that quickly became their main means of support as the group made its tentative way across the office. Minutes later, they reached a wide window that opened up on the cityscape and gave them a clear view of the Hotchkiss Gould building.
“Okay, Sam, we’ll take it from here,” Epps said.
His determination to contribute having been satisfied, Sam handed the missile over to Epps. Epps and Tiny then brought it close to the window and started setting up the makeshift launcher cobbled together by the Wreckers. Sam couldn’t believe it, but he actually missed the arrogant, crazed bots. He missed all of them and continued to have a deep fear in the pit of his stomach that they wouldn’t survive the day even if somehow the humans did manage to stop the Decepticons’ plan.
Suddenly there was a groaning of metal from deep within the bowels of the building, and everything shifted.
Sam banged up against a desk, the impact of which caused the desk to slide a few inches. Carly threw her arms around one of the pillars, and the other mercs braced themselves against whatever they could find.
The launcher started to tip over, and Epps barely managed to catch it.
Hardcore Eddie seemed to be getting far less hardcore by the moment. He was actually starting to sound frazzled. “This whole thing’s unstable! We gotta get outta here!”
“If we don’t do what we came for, nothing else matters,” Sam said. He pointed to the anchor pillar positioned on the roof of the Hotchkiss Gould Building across the way. “That’s our target
.”
“All right, everybody,” Epps said as Tiny started to reposition the launcher. “No sudden movements.”
Suddenly Carly pointed and shouted, “Watch out for the ship!”
A Decepticon attack ship rose into view. It was moving in what seemed a leisurely manner, just sort of drifting along. It might not have necessarily known they were there. Or else it had a general idea of their whereabouts but wasn’t sure.
The humans tried to find hiding places to obscure themselves, Tiny grabbing the missile launcher to protect it. But it was too late. The attack ship caught sight of their movements and wheeled around to face them. Now it was no longer a matter of hiding; it was a matter of trying to find shelter before the inevitable assault.
The attack ship cut loose, blasting through the windows, shattering them. Sam fell behind a desk, bullets chewing up the furniture around him. He saw Carly positioned behind one of the support pillars. Bullets or whatever the hell it was shooting blasted off overhead sprinklers, sending water cascading everywhere. Great. Just what we need. The floor’s tilting and it’s wet.
“The stairwell! Over there!” Sam shouted frantically.
The mercs, from their makeshift hiding places, saw where he was pointing. The moment the firing ceased, perhaps so that the Decepticon could determine how much damage it had done, they broke from cover and dashed for the exit. The Decepticon started firing again as the mercs dodged and wove through the tilted floor, banging through the exit door.
“Go, go, go! Next floor up!” Epps was shouting, gesturing wildly to Sam and Carly. He wasn’t going to leave until they were clear. Sam made a break for it, grabbing Carly by the wrist as he went.
There was another crashing sound near the window, and Sam saw to his horror that the Decepticon who had been piloting the vessel had leaped in. The ship was drifting away; he must have set it to land itself. Unlike the Autobots, he was small enough that he was able to maneuver within the confines of the office and didn’t seem to care what effects his weight might have on anything. Water cascaded down upon him from the busted sprinklers, serving to disorient him temporarily.
The motion of Sam and Carly must have caught his attention, though, and he started toward them, glass crunching under his feet.
Sam and Carly bolted into the stairway and up the flight of stairs so fast that Sam barely felt them underneath his sneakered feet. Epps followed them, and as he sprinted up the steps, the door below burst open and the Decepticon stood framed in the doorway.
In an instant Epps’s gun was in in his hand, and he opened fire on the Decepticon. The bullets hammered home, blasting away at its chest, shredding a portion of it. The Decepticon’s body swayed back and forth from the series of impacts, but its face remained impassive.
The trigger of Epps’s gun clicked on empty.
The Decepticon, aside from having sustained some upper torso damage, looked none the worse for wear from the barrage.
And then slowly, deliberately, it lifted its hand and extended one clawlike middle finger upward at Epps in an unmistakable and familiar display of contempt.
Sam, watching from the doorway above, had no idea where the Decepticon could have picked that gesture up from.
“Oh, hell, no!” shouted Epps, and as the Decepticon advanced on him, he snapped a grenade off his belt, yanked the pin from it, and flung it at the Decepticon. As if it had eyes, the grenade lodged itself in the hole that had been created by the bullets from Epps’s gun. The Decepticon reached for the grenade but in its haste knocked it into its own innards.
Epps dashed for the door, bellowing, “Fire in the hole!”
He flung himself through the door, and Sam slammed it shut behind him just as an earsplitting roar thundered from within the stairwell.
The door wasn’t designed to withstand that degree of impact. The blast tore it off its hinges and sent it flying across the office space, which was similar in design to the one on the floor below. It smashed through a far window and out.
Between the pounding from the Decepticon attack ship and the explosion from within the stairwell, the building started to give way even more. It jolted violently, angling even more sharply. Desks, chairs, everything, started sliding, and that included the desperate humans inside the office. They grabbed for whatever support they could as anything that wasn’t nailed down skidded past them.
Sam threw one arm around a column and the other around Carly, barely managing to prevent her from falling away from him. I am never watching Titanic again, he thought grimly.
Then, above the groaning of metal and the crashing of furniture, Sam heard an alarmed shriek. He turned just in time to see Ames, arms pinwheeling, plummeting headlong out the window at the far end. The man who had preferred to be by himself apparently hadn’t been close enough for anyone to grab at him, and he hadn’t been able to snag on to a support fast enough.
And then he was gone.
ii
(Shockwave does not see the human coming. He does, however, hear it. It makes a heavy noise hitting the ground, like a sack of wet cement, and Shockwave turns toward it and regards it with curiosity.)
(Then Shockwave looks up toward the tilting glass building from where the human had just fallen. Knowing where the human landed, he easily charts the trajectory and determines precisely what level the human must have been on before it began its terminal arc.)
(He turns to the Driller and indicates the human’s point of origin. “Eliminate,” he says.)
(The Driller moves to obey.)
(Shockwave returns his attention to his initial mission: finding the Autobots. They have proved elusive, which is particularly annoying. Rather than stand and fight as one, they have headed in all different directions. Cowards. How can they not realize that they are simply prolonging the inevitable?)
(Best to return to Optimus Prime’s weapons cache. He has deliberately left it there as bait for the Prime to return and try to reclaim it. He has also left six Decepticons there, camouflaged, who will ambush Optimus Prime and bring him down should he be foolish enough to try to retrieve it.)
(It is a solid plan and sure to work.)
(Because this is the Day of the Decepticons, and nothing is going to stop their inevitable triumph.)
iii
Sam, Carly, and the mercs had slowly edged toward the far end of the building, Tiny still clutching the missile. They made sure to keep themselves anchored to anything that seemed stable enough to support their weight.
Then they heard a distant roar.
As much as they would have preferred not to, they looked down.
In the distance, but approaching fast, was the slithering metal creature that Leadfoot had referred to as a Driller.
“Holy Mother …” Tiny whispered.
The mercs looked stunned. Epps looked envious. “Man, the Decepticons always have the best shit. Just unfair.”
The building swayed slightly beneath them. There were collective gasps, and then it stilled again.
Hardcore Eddie came up alongside Tiny and quickly started helping him set up the Hellfire, using a desk to brace the weapon. The desk slid in response, and Eddie said, “Guys, you gotta keep me steady!” Tiny and Stackhouse quickly pitched in, crouching to try to achieve some traction while bracing the desk on either side.
“Targeting for ninety meters!” Eddie said as he sighted on the pillar. Sentinel was standing nearby. Sam hoped that if Sentinel got in the way, it wouldn’t make a difference. That he would be blown to hell along with his precious anchor. “Wind five knots … almost … locked … almost … there!”
Just as he fired, the Driller slammed into the building far below, shaking it violently.
The missile blasted out of the tube, knocked off course by the sudden impact of the Driller against the building. The Hellfire hurtled across the Chicago skyline before blasting apart the structure half a block over from the Hotchkiss Gould Building.
“Goddammit!” Epps shouted. “Plan B! Lemme hear it!�
�
“The stairs! Get back to the stairs!” Rakishi shouted. “We gotta go down!”
Sam was already there, looking down into it through the doorway that the door had vacated. The grenade had done its job and more besides. The stairwell was a showcase of wreckage. “They’re blocked!”
Then they heard a distant and constant thudding, starting from ground level within the building and drawing steadily closer. “Oh, now what?” Eddie said.
“It’s the Driller,” Epps said. “It must be coming up the center shaft of the ventilating system.”
Of course it is, Sam thought bleakly. Where’s an Autobot when you really need him?
iv
When he looks back upon the ruin of this day, I believe that Shockwave will realize, in the final analysis, that his greatest mistake was to underestimate me.
He mistakes compassion for weakness. He thinks that my concern for humans, my time spent among them, has somehow made me less than what I am.
He is wrong, and he will discover that.
The minions that he left guarding my weapons have already learned that harsh lesson.
They lie scattered in pieces. This was not some murky, underwater environment where they could wait in ambush. This is a war-torn surface, the type of which I have known for far too long. Six of them against me? Some might consider those to be unfair odds, and in a way they were. It was unfair to them. But I will certainly waste no time weeping for them.
I reach the weapons pack, still in the alternative form of a truck trailer. Upon my touch it changes into its true form.