Retribution

by David J. Williams

  Prowl nodded. He obviously felt negligent himself, but there was only so much a scan of the planet from orbit could accomplish. “How do you want to proceed, Optimus? Perhaps we should wait until the Curator has his search vessels ready.”

  “No, I don’t want to use their ships.” Optimus had tried to think of a way to keep the Aquatronians out of the search altogether but had decided that was impossible. If nothing else, he would still need the maps and satellite data the Curator had offered. But Optimus wanted to find his people before the Aquatronians did, and that meant he was going to have to move fast.

  “Well, the combat shuttle doesn’t have the same deep sea capability as the dropship. We can only use it for an hour or so of underwater use before coming back to the surface. So it’s virtually useless for search and rescue.”

  “Maybe the Aquatronians have—”

  “I said I don’t want to use their equipment for this. Jazz, contact Silverbolt and find out how long it will take to prep another dropcraft for underwater use. Also, find out if there are any other ships on the Ark suitable for the search that we can deploy immediately.”

  “On it.” Jazz stepped away, using his internal communication systems to link back up with the Ark. Optimus turned back to Prowl.

  “I want you to take command of some search teams and cover the shores of this whole island. Maybe they were able to swim back. I know it’s a long shot, but we’ve got to check every angle on this one.”

  Prowl saluted, then changed into his pursuit-vehicle mode and sped over to the groups of Autobots gathered around the Aquatronian holo-map projector depicting satellite imagery of the seabed. Optimus knew that Prowl was more than a little irate that Rodimus, Kup, and Bumblebee had behaved so rashly. But he also knew that if Prowl was given a specific task, he would complete it to the very best of his ability, and that was the kind of can-do attitude Optimus needed right now.

  “What do you want me to do, boss?” Ironhide asked. Optimus put his hand on his old friend’s shoulder.

  “You stick with me, just like old times.” Optimus seemed to hesitate, then said, “I’ve been having some issues, Ironhide.”

  “Tell me about it,” Ironhide said. “This is a bad situation we’re in.”

  “Not those kinds of issues,” Optimus replied. He pointed to the Matrix. “In here. I’m having trouble trusting my own intuition. I need you to help keep me … Be my eyes and ears. Let me know if I seem to be acting oddly and not realizing it. Will you do that for me, old friend?”

  Ironhide nodded. He figured that Optimus simply wanted to keep him close to keep him out of trouble; even so, Ironhide was touched that Optimus would make such a show of needing his help. After all, Optimus was a Prime and was guided by the wisdom of the greatest leaders. Why did he need the opinion of a worn-down bucket of bolts like him? Yet Ironhide was proud to stand at his leader’s side regardless of the circumstances. It was the least he could do to make up for letting Rodimus and the others go off the reservation. But before he could voice his gratitude, Jazz came running back over with a frantic look on his face.

  “Optimus! Sound the alert!”

  “Calm down, Jazz. What’s going on?”

  “It’s the Decepticons! They’ve found us!”

  Chapter Eighteen

  SIDESWIPE HAD BEEN GETTING BORED. THE ARK WAS now in the middle of its tenth orbit around the planet below, and he’d already seen everything worth seeing. That which wasn’t wreathed in clouds was covered in ocean, and everything that mattered was clearly under that sea. The away team would have to figure out the rest, but apparently they were having some issues. Kup, Rodimus, and Bumblebee had managed to get themselves lost—or maybe there was something more sinister going on. The Curator undoubtedly was hiding something, but Sideswipe had no doubt Optimus was up to the task of ferreting it out.

  “Anomaly detected,” Teletraan-1 said.

  Sideswipe looked up. “Where?” he asked.

  “In the second planetary ring.” The screens lit up with imagery showing a portion of that ring. It looked normal enough.

  “Magnify,” Sideswipe ordered.

  Teletraan-1 obliged, zooming in, the detail becoming fine enough that if someone had just walked onto the bridge at that moment, he’d never have guessed they were looking at a planetary ring. It was more like crystal under a microscope, filled with fractal edges and intricate patterns. Accompanying readouts showed the basic structure, most of it debris, that presumably once had formed the space bridges that led to this planet. But there was something in that mass that had no business being there—blurry and indistinct yet too large to simply be more of that debris.

  “Give me magnetometer readings,” Sideswipe said. “And let’s have spectrometers while we’re at it.”

  Hatches on the hull outside slid open; instruments protruded and began active scanning of the anomaly. There was a disadvantage in doing that, of course, because if that anomaly was intelligent, it would know it had been detected, since now it was being subjected to a full spectrum of electromagnetic waves. But Sideswipe had to have more data.

  In short order, he got it.

  “Anomaly identified as the Nemesis,” Teletraan-1 said in a dispassionate voice that utterly failed to do justice to the situation. The specs of the massive warship lit up the screen, along with the faint pulsing of its engines. It must have been making its way through the complicated ring structure for some time, Sideswipe realized, slowly creeping in toward the Ark’s orbit. Now it was only a few thousand miles away.

  And it was about to get a lot closer. Realizing it had been detected, the Nemesis gunned its engines to full blast, emerging from the ring and streaking straight at its prey, firing several barrages of missiles as it did so. Sideswipe hit the alarm; Klaxons began sounding throughout the Ark.

  “Give me manual control,” he yelled to Teletraan-1 as he raced for the pilot’s chair. Even as he was strapping himself in, he was activating the thrusters, sending the Ark hurtling forward, moving away from the Nemesis at an angle. But the Decepticon warship altered its vector of approach.

  As did its missiles.

  “Impact in ten seconds,” Teletraan-1 said.

  Silverbolt came running onto the bridge.

  “What in the name of Primus is going on?” he yelled.

  “What does it look like? We’re under attack!” Sideswipe retorted. Silverbolt glanced at the tactical display and saw the oncoming bulk of the Nemesis streaking toward them.

  “Missile impact in five seconds,” Teletraan-1 said.

  Sideswipe pulled back on the stick, twisting the Ark off to the side while he deployed several packets of decoys. The Decepticon missiles exploded among them, barely a few hundred meters from the Ark’s hull. Silverbolt slapped Sideswipe on the back and eyed the shipwide com-system.

  “Red alert! All hands to battle stations! I repeat, red aler—”

  But suddenly Silverbolt was knocked to the floor as a massive explosion shook the ship.

  “Where the slag did that come from?” he yelled.

  The hull cameras had the answer. Flickering suddenly into view on one of them was—

  “Skywarp!” Sideswipe snarled.

  The Decepticon teleportation artist removed a plasma bomb from his armor and planted it on the hull. Apparently he’d already used one to considerable effect. Sideswipe stabbed a button on his console, and the hull of the Ark magnetized; Skywarp was hurled off into space as though he’d been shot from a cannon. One of the Ark’s gun batteries opened fire on him, but its shells ripped through empty vacuum as Skywarp teleported back to the Nemesis.

  The next moment the second bomb exploded, ripping off a whole segment of the hull. Several Autobots were blown out into space even as air lock doors slammed shut to maintain pressurization.

  “Damage report,” Sideswipe barked.

  “Hyperdrive actuator is out,” Teletraan-1 replied. “Auxiliary actuator compromised.”

  “What does that mean?” Sil
verbolt asked.

  “It means we can’t go to lightspeed!” said Sideswipe.

  “We wouldn’t want to,” Silverbolt said. “We can’t leave Optimus!”

  “Sure, but if the intake accelerators are damaged, they’re going to catch us.” He keyed the coms. “We need an emergency repair crew down to engineering, and we need it now—”

  But Teletraan-1 was already interrupting. “Negative. Engineering room hull breach.”

  “Those dirty Decepticreeps!” Sideswipe cursed.

  “They never fight fair!” Silverbolt yelled, slamming his fist down on his armrest. “There’s no way we can outrun them!”

  “Doesn’t mean we’re not gonna try,” Sideswipe said. He worked the controls; the Ark surged toward the planet’s pole, exchanging fire with the Nemesis, which raced after it.

  “Have you tried to reach Optimus planetside?” Silverbolt asked.

  “I got word to Jazz, but now the Decepticons have jammed communications. We’re on our own up here.”

  “Same down there,” Silverbolt said.

  IT WAS THE MOTHER OF ALL FIREWORKS DISPLAYS, AND it was the last thing Optimus Prime wanted to see. The Ark was a ball of fire streaking across the sky—so close to the planet now that it was touching the atmosphere as it raced across the southern pole—while behind it came the Nemesis, slightly higher but reflecting enough sunlight to be starkly visible. Both ships were firing away at each other with everything they had. Flashes of light roiled the sky, followed by the sound of thunder rolling over the ocean.

  “This is not good,” Jazz said.

  “Really?” Prowl asked sarcastically.

  “He looks like he’s coming in to land,” Ironhide said. “That’s atmospheric reentry we’re seeing—”

  “It’s not,” Optimus said. “Sideswipe’s cutting it as close to the planet as he can to get it between him and the Nemesis.”

  “But why doesn’t he come down here and pick us up?” Prowl asked. “That’s the ultimate battle going on up there, and here we are stuck as spectators at the bottom of this gravity well.” He was beside himself with frustration, but Optimus just shook his head.

  “Prowl, Sideswipe’s making the right call. The last thing he should do now is come pick us up. Because then the Nemesis would just rain fire down on him from space. Destroying all of us in the process.”

  “So you’re saying all we can do is sit here and watch,” Jazz said through gritted teeth.

  “Sometimes patience is the only option,” Optimus told him. But the calm with which he said those words belied the emotions raging within him. How could he have been so foolish as to take so many of his key lieutenants onto the planet with him? And why hadn’t he ensured that scouts were deployed throughout the system to provide early warning of any Decepticon approach? If the Ark was destroyed, they’d be stranded down here, and it wouldn’t take Megatron long to figure out that Optimus was still alive down on the planet. After that, Optimus wouldn’t be alive much longer, not when Megatron had the Nemesis and all his troops at his disposal. Optimus couldn’t help wondering if his errors of judgment were due to his inner turmoil and confusion over the Matrix and his memories. But that was no consolation whatsoever. And it certainly was no excuse. He watched as the glow of the Ark vanished over the horizon, the Nemesis accelerating after it; he wondered how this situation could get any more precarious.

  “What’s going on?” a voice inquired.

  Optimus turned to see Kup rolling toward him, Rodimus and Bumblebee trundling right behind.

  “You’re kidding me,” Prowl said. “Where the slag have you guys been?”

  “Downstairs,” Rodimus said, switching to humanoid form. He gestured at a doorway in a nearby tower from which they’d just emerged.

  Jazz’s voice was dangerously soft. “And what’s downstairs?”

  “All sorts of things,” Rodimus said enthusiastically. “We took the pod over to the seabed and came up through the roots of the city. They’ve got whole chambers loaded with mining equipment, and there was one room filled with … with … how would you put it, Kup?”

  “Dormant fish-bots,” Kup said. He felt like he was forgetting something, but the next moment the feeling passed.

  “Yeah,” Rodimus repeated, “dormant fish-bots. Keeping them in reserve, I guess.”

  “You guys were crazy to wander off alone,” Jazz said angrily.

  Rodimus looked abashed. “We just thought this place was suspicious, like we should take a closer look.”

  “Sure, we need to take a closer look,” Jazz said. “But the three of you wandering off like that wasn’t the way to do it.”

  Rodimus ignored him. “Optimus, I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have. But the place looks pretty clean from what we could see.” Like Kup, he felt like there was something he ought to mention but just couldn’t put his finger on it. And right now his main concern was avoiding Optimus’s anger.

  But Optimus showed none. “There’s no time for recriminations right now,” he said. “We’ve got bigger problems. The Decepticons are here.”

  MEGATRON HAD NEVER FELT SO HAPPY. HE STOOD ON the bridge watching as the Nemesis’s forward cannon subjected the Ark’s rear shields to unholy amounts of firepower. The planet Aquatron rolled past beneath, the Ark swooping close to the atmosphere as it tried to vector below the Nemesis’s line of sight. But the Nemesis’s engines were undamaged, and the Decepticon craft was rapidly overtaking the Autobot ship. Megatron grinned.

  “Today is a good day for you to die, librarian,” he said under his breath.

  “Excuse me, sire?” Starscream asked.

  “Shut up, fool. Close the distance and prepare boarding parties.”

  “Standing by to activate tractor beam,” Soundwave said.

  “How soon?” Megatron asked.

  “We’re inside the one-minute window, lord.”

  “Hail them,” Megatron said. “If Optimus has any honor, he’ll accept my challenge to personal combat.”

  Starscream liked the sound of that. Before he and his Seekers boarded, the Ark was going to be crippled even worse than it was now. The surviving Autobots wouldn’t be able to put up much of a resistance. Thus, the Decepticons’ victory was assured, and the only way the situation could get more ideal would be if Optimus somehow was able to defeat Megatron in a duel. Because then Optimus would be no match for the combined wrath of the hundreds of remaining Decepticons, and Starscream would be left in charge of everything. He glanced at his leader’s smiling face and couldn’t resist a subtle smirk. The smartest thing to do would be to just destroy the Ark entirely, but Megatron’s ego had to be satisfied. And that was just fine by Starscream.

  Except that apparently Optimus didn’t want to fight.

  “DON’T ANSWER,” SILVERBOLT SAID AS THE COMMUNICATION line buzzed again. The Nemesis was trying to hail them, and the last thing Silverbolt wanted was any kind of dialogue.

  “Why?” Sideswipe asked as he pushed the Ark’s engines into the red zone. The bridge began to shake as the ship’s metal groaned in protest. “They’re right on our tail. We might be able to buy ourselves more time.”

  “Megatron is on the end of that line,” Silverbolt snapped. “And no prize for guessing he wants to talk to Optimus. Who isn’t here, because he’s down on the planet. And the only reason Megatron didn’t have Skywarp plant a bomb big enough to destroy us altogether is so he can board us and fight some insane duel with the only Autobot he wants to annihilate personally. So if he finds out Optimus is down below, he’s going to stop at nothing to finish us off and then swoop down on Optimus.”

  Sideswipe got it. “So you’re saying the only reason we’re still alive—”

  “Is that we’re not answering that call. Yeah. That’s precisely what I’m saying.”

  “Well, that’s great, but we’re still about to get boarded and massacred.”

  “Not if I can help it,” Silverbolt said. “I’ve got a plan.”

  Sideswipe switched off
the com-link. “Tell me more,” he said.

  “THEY’RE REFUSING TO ANSWER OUR BROADCAST,” Soundwave said.

  “Optimus,” Megatron snarled. “You are a traitor, but I never marked you for a coward.”

  “Didn’t you hear what Soundwave just said, lord?” Starscream couldn’t resist. “Optimus isn’t on the line. He’s not taking your calls.”

  Megatron gave Starscream a look that made him glad he was on the other side of the bridge. “He’s still going to die,” he said. “And if you open your mouth again, so will you.”

  “Thirty seconds to tractor-beam range,” Soundwave said.

  OPTIMUS AND HIS FELLOW AUTOBOTS NO LONGER could see the combat, but they could certainly sense it. Electromagnetic waves rippled through the atmosphere, testimony to the titanic clash of energies taking place on the far side of the planet. Only a few more minutes passed before a glow suffused the southern horizon.

  “They’re coming around again,” Jazz said.

  Optimus nodded. From the condition of the Ark, he was surprised they’d been able to make the chase last for an entire circumlocution of the planet. But it couldn’t go on much longer. The fact that the Ark was fleeing meant that it must have been damaged too badly to stand and fight; the fact that it hadn’t gone to lightspeed meant that the damage extended to the engines. He begged the Matrix within him for insight, but it was the same as before: nothing. No answer.

  Just when he needed it the most.