Transformers-Revenge of the Fallen

  Everyone stared. It was, a part of Sam reflected in awe, the first time since he had made their acquain­tance that the Twins had been motionless and silent

  for more than a couple of moments. In the center of

  the image was a pool. Surrounding it were thirteen massive but indistinct robotic forms. In the middle— in the middle was ...

  A reverential croak rose from deep within Bumble­bee’s still-impaired vocal apparatus.

  “All—sparkkk...."

  “In the beginning,” Jetfire intoned, his voice having regained some of the inherent dignity that attends great age, “we were ruled by the Dynasty of Primes— the first thirteen Transformers, created by the All­spark to bring life to Cybertron. And as Energon was scarce, the Allspark forged us a means to obtain more.”

  Motion infused the image. The pool in the center seemed to weep a tear of silver plasma. Within the daggerlike sliver a crystalline shape formed.

  “The Matrix of Leadership,” Jetfire explained solemnly. “Simultaneously a key and a driving force containing essence of the Allspark itself, it is used to both activate and power the Great Machine ... a ma­chine built to destroy suns and collect their raw en­ergy. ”

  “Wait a minute.” Sam was gazing intently at the storytelling Decepticon. “ ‘Destroy suns’? Like blow ’em up?”

  “Uh, we kinda need our sun,” said Mikaela.

  “Fortunate for you,” replied Jetfire, “the Primes were bound by one rule. Life is precious ...”

  “That’s what I’ve been telling everybody all day,” agreed a self-satisfied Leo.

  “...thus any star system inhabited by living beings must be spared.”

  Mikaela spoke up, her tone subdued. “What hap­pened to this ‘Matrix of Leadership’?”

  Jetfire was staring off into the distance, seeing something long ago and far away. “One of the Primes defied all the rules. ‘The Fallen.’ ” At Jetfire’s mention of the name, the otherwise cloudless sky seemed to darken slightly. “To claim the Matrix for himself, he murdered his brothers. All but one, who escaped with it. The Great Machine was left abandoned, too dan­gerous to be used.

  “This last, noble Prime hid the Matrix ... in a tomb built from the bodies of his brothers. And as a final sacrifice, he sealed it from within.” He looked down at his spellbound listeners.

  “This was done so that your sun would be spared, and your species would survive.

  “The human race evolved, multiplied, and ma­tured. Some of your first cities were built over scraps of our history, founded on rumors of an ancient greatness that had once dwelled, however temporarily, in such places.” Once again an arm rose to encompass their pristine surroundings. It was silent for a long while. Somewhere, a desert crow called.

  Sam was trying to make sense of it all. “This all started here—in the presence of our ancestors?”

  “And The Fallen intends to finish it. If he claims the Matrix, he’ll use it to activate the Machine. Once it begins to draw upon the fires of your sun to create Energon, there is a very real chance that all life on your planet will end.”

  “Then how do we stop him?” asked Mikaela. “Only a Prime can defeat The Fallen. That is why he returned to Cybertron to wage war. All direct de- scendents of The Prime Dynasty were slaughtered. Except for one who was hidden away, an orphan, for­ever unaware of his destiny.”

  Sam looked up in recognition. “Optimus Prime.” “You’ve met one named ‘Prime’? Alive? Here on this planet?” Jetfire inquired in surprise.

  “He sacrificed himself ... to save me.”

  “A Prime indeed, and a tragedy.”

  Reaching into a pocket, Sam withdrew the charred splinter of Allspark that had so forcefully and unex­pectedly revived Jetfire and that he had recovered from the museum storage yard. An idea that had been growing in the back of his mind now moved to the forefront of his thoughts.

  “You said the Matrix was made by the Allspark. It was part of the Allspark.”

  Jetfire nodded in confirmation. “Aye, they share the same energy.” He looked thoughtful.

  Sam voiced a thought that had been growing rapidly in his mind. “Just a touch of that energy brought Megatron back. So is there any chance con­tact with this Matrix might work for—Optimus?” Mikaela stared at him. “Optimus?”

  “To heal him and bring him out of stasis lock.” Jetfire considered carefully. “Hmm. Never been tried. But an interesting concept. Such is not the pur­pose of the Matrix. It is the key to activating the Great Machine. Then again, it holds a power beyond all understanding.”

  “Then how do we find the Matrix before the De­cepticons find me?”

  Tilting back his head, Jetfire let his lenses catch the sun. “All I can do is translate your symbols. I’m no longer any good to you. Were I to attempt to continue on with you, I fear I would only draw unwanted at­tention.” His eyes began to dim.

  “Wait!” Sam stepped forward anxiously. “You didn’t tell us how to find it.”

  “Sadly, I don’t know. Never managed to reach it myself. All I can do is translate relevant text as it was set down, utilizing the most recent terms and refer­ences I recall that might have some meaning to you. ‘When dawn alights the Dagger’s tip, Three Kings will lead the way.’ ”

  “ ‘Dagger’s tip’?” Mikaela’s tone reflected her con­fusion. “What ‘three kings’?”

  There was no response. The rangy, metallic head fell forward, the sharp-edged chin came to rest on Jet- fire’s chest, and the aged Decepticon was silent.

  Leo had reached his limit again. “No way. I’m not going on your little scavenger hunt. Life’s precious, especially mine; he said so himself. Who’s with me? Vamanos! Viva la revolution!”

  Leo sat down in the sand next to the silent Jetfire. But rather than reply to his most recent outburst, Sam and Mikaela simply turned and hopped into Bumble­bee, ready for the next stage.

  Simmons turned to Leo. “Better if you stay; you’re slowing down the mission. Give ya twenty minutes before the vultures start pickin’ at ya like lunch meat. Try swallowing your tongue, end it quick, go out with dignity.”

  “Good luck, Leo,” Mikaela called from Bumble­bee.

  “Yeah, enjoy the heat,” added Sam.

  “YOU GUYS SUCK!” was the best Leo could do.

  Bumblebee roared off, followed closely by the Twins. Left alone, Leo panicked and started running after the departing cars. “Wait, don’t leave me with this old-ass plane!”

  Point made, Bumblebee slowed and allowed Leo to jump in the backseat.

  The vehicles sat silently in their barred containers. To an outsider they looked like any shipment of cars and trucks being prepped for transport. One who knew them for what they actually were might have considered them chained prisoners. They made no noise, gave no evidence that they were anything other than what they appeared to be. Invisibly, impercepti­bly, they conversed silently among themselves on fre­quencies undetectable to the covey of armed humans working around them.

  This was what Optimus had wanted, the group de­cided, so this was how they would respond. They would not resist; they would not fight back. Despite the current situation, it was not humans who were their enemies. Those remained farther afield and out of reach. The Autobots would stay quiet and quies­cent in their present terrestrial guises. Only time would resolve the existing deadlock in which they found themselves.

  As Autobots, they knew all about time.

  A couple of the humans looking on from nearby had no such extended concept of time. Unlike their Autobot friends, they were angry and impatient. But there was nothing either Lennox or Epps could do ex­cept watch as their friends and allies were bundled up like so many Detroit rejects for transshipment under guard back to Diego Garcia. The authorities in Wash­ington who currently held sway over such matters would not allow them to travel back to NEST’s base of operations unfettered and without guards. Given all that the surviving Autobots had done for hu­mankind, Lennox thought it i
nsulting and Epps, downright harsh.

  Worse, it was undignified.

  It might have encouraged the two men if they had been present at the discussion that was even then tak­ing place in the depths of the Pentagon. Having con­vened in the “tank,” as it was called, the Joint Chiefs were no less upset than the two lesser-ranking mem­bers of NEST.

  “How can the President accept the loss of five thousand sailors, marines, and observers and do nothing?” The army chief of staff did not quite pound on the table with his fist—such melodramatic reac­tions were the province of cinema, not real life. But he wanted to.

  His air force counterpart voiced the frustration that was seething in all of them. “What can he do?

  We have no one to retaliate against. Not anyone that we can locate.”

  “Or any thing,” added the navy’s second-highest- ranking admiral.

  Morshower was too tired to shout. In any case, those he wished to rage against were not among the men present.

  “Even if we find them, with my team on ice we’ve lost our best ally against the enemy. ”

  The army chief met the chairman’s gaze. “What about our ongoing efforts to have the Autobots re­stored to active engagement?”

  Morshower shook his head. “The administration needs a scapegoat for the loss of the Lincoln, and the French haven’t let up alternating requests for expla­nation with demands for retribution.” He smiled thinly. “You know how it is when you’re running a country. If you can’t eliminate the real enemy, invent one you can deal with. We have no influence over these Decepticons, but we do over the Autobots. So— the Autobots take the fall.”

  The chief of the navy summed up the situation suc­cinctly: “It stinks.”

  Morshower nodded in agreement. “Like old motor oil. But we have to live with it, gentlemen. Unless something happens to alter the existing situation.” Leaning back in his chair, the army chief slumped against the thickly padded backrest. “Sometimes at times like this I wish I’d stayed in Payroll, That’s one part of the military where everybody leaves you alone to do your job.”

  “When dawn alights the Dagger’s tip, Three Kings will lead the way.” Repeating Jetfire’s mantra didn’t make Leo feel any more confident of success. What he wanted more than anything else was to be back in his comfortable, utterly ordinary dorm room.

  In short, he desperately wished to be normal again.

  Instead of normality, he found himself riding in the backseat of a car that wasn’t a car alongside a spec­tacularly alluring girl who wasn’t his girl as they trun­dled down a desert road on the approach to greater Cairo in search of some potentially world-destroying ancient artifact that might or might not even exist. The rest of his company consisted of alien robots of varying size, capabilities, and in the case of the Twins, sanity; a perpetually paranoid ex-government agent; and his roommate, who might simultaneously be more important and crazier than any of them. Leo Spitz licked dry lips.

  What he wouldn’t give for a cheap, pseudo-beef hamburger and a Coke the size of a bed pillow!

  Simmons had been working his cell phone ever since they had come in adequate pickup range of a relay tower. It had taken longer than expected to ac­quire the information he sought, because he had been forced to go through multiple channels and numbers in order to avoid being traced. But he had eventually been able to obtain answers to some of his questions.

  “Old secret agents never die,” he explained with a sly smile. “They just set up their own networks.”

  “So, what were you able to find out?” Seated be­hind the wheel of the Camaro, Sam kept his eyes on the pair of compact vehicles that were leading the way. Each boasted a rezzed simulation of a driver lifted from a car billboard. That these advertisements had featured supermodels had not yet attracted undue attention.

  Simmons spoke without turning, likewise keeping his attention forward. “Okay, here’s what my CIA contact in general history says. Because of its shape,

  the ancient Israelites used to call the Gulf of Aqaba ‘the Dagger.’ It’s part of the Red Sea, divides Egypt and Jordan like the tip of a blade, with a bit of Israel occupying the topmost portion.”

  Leo spoke up from the backseat. “Jetfire referred to a body of water. Maybe he was talking about the Gulf of Aqaba.”

  Simmons nodded approvingly as he squinted at the image being displayed on his phone. “At the very tip the Israelis have a long-established holiday town called Elat, and the Egyptian side around Ras al Masri is lined with resort hotels and scuba safari en­terprises. But the Jordanian side is pretty deserted ex­cept for the town of Aqaba itself. So we know what the ‘dagger’ is. What we don’t know is how these ‘Three Kings’ relate to it.”

  “Uh-oh,” Sam murmured.

  They were approaching a police checkpoint, the first of its kind they had encountered since rumbling out of the western desert. Idling in wait, Sam watched nervously as first Skids and then Mudflap were waved through.

  “How’d they do that? I can understand the sim driv­ers passing for human, but what’d they use for pa­pers?”

  Leo ventured a possible explanation. “Did you see the women the Twins reproduced to put in their dri­vers’ seats? If you were an Egyptian cop stuck out here in the wind and the sand all day and someone who looked like a cross between Gisele Biindchen and Tyra Banks suddenly showed up at your gate, would you spend your time asking for papers—or staring at simulated boobies?”

  In the seat next to him, Mikaela shook her head knowingly. “Men.”

  One of the guards was gesturing for them to come forward as his colleagues gazed, no doubt longingly, after the departing Twins. Sam lightly tapped the wheel.

  “Okay, okay, we gotta go—we can do this.” “Yeah?” From behind him, Leo voiced skepticism. “What’re you gonna flash ’em, Sam? Your winning smile?”

  “Shut up, shut up, lemme think.” His fingers gripped the steering wheel more tightly as Bumblebee edged toward the checkpoint.

  Simmons tried to dispel the growing anxiety among his youthful companions. “Let me do the talk­ing. Everybody be chill; these are my people.”

  Sam looked around sharply. “I thought ‘your peo­ple’ were Jewish.”

  “I’m one thirty-sixth Arab,” the ex-agent informed him. “Hey, kosher, halal—it’s all the same thing.” While Sam kept his window up Simmons rolled his down, greeting the approaching guard with a wide smile and a blast of air-conditioning. Bending for­ward the guard glanced inside, no doubt regretting that this unexpected and striking American car was

  not occupied by more of the recently departed super­models.

  “Rayih fayn ? ”

  By way of reply, Simmons nodded emphatically.

  His eyes fixed on the road ahead, Sam muttered without turning. “What’s he saying?”

  Continuing to nod and smile at the guard, the ex­agent replied cheerfully, “No idea.”

  The guard’s dazed expression, a legacy of the Twins’ rezzed supermodels, was beginning to wear off fast. “Rayih fayn?” he asked again, more force­fully this time. “Ismakf Bit amal? Bititkallam Ara- bee?”

  As the man continued to pepper Simmons with increasingly agitated queries and the ex-agent re­sponded only with shrugs and smiles, Sam’s gaze drifted away from the road and out his window. His eyes widened at the sight of a CCTV camera. Mounted on a post, it was pointing directly at him.

  “Shit, they got cameras! We gotta get outta here! Bumblebee!”

  Spitting dust and gravel, the Camaro blasted away from the checkpoint. Whirling in their seats, Mikaela and Leo peered out the back window. Two of the guards were shaking their fists at the fleeing car while the third was trying to level an AK-47 in their direc­tion. By the time he had it raised to his shoulder and was taking aim, the accelerating Camaro was already out of effective range.

  “Not good,” Leo muttered as he slumped back into his seat. “This is not good at all.”

  Leaning forward, Mikaela put a hand o
n Sam’s shoulder. With no need to sustain the charade, Sam relaxed and let Bumblebee do the “driving.”

  “Do you think they got your picture, Sam?”

  “I don’t know. We got out of there pretty fast.” He looked over at Simmons. The ex-agent was calmly contemplating the road ahead.

  “You don’t look worried. Shouldn’t you be wor­ried? Shouldn’t we be worried?”

  “Kid, when you’ve spent your entire adult life either being worried or worrying about someone else or worrying whether or not someone was doing the appropriate worrying, you don’t let little things like cameras get to you.” He nodded in the direction they were going. “In a few minutes we’ll hit the outskirts of greater Cairo. I understand the traffic there makes midtown Manhattan at rush hour look like a farm road in northern Nevada. Relax. I got a feeling you’ll need the adrenaline later.”

  Simmons’s reassurance, however misplaced, had a calming effect on his companions. “Maybe,” Sam said, “we got out of there before the camera snapped me.

  An excited crowd was gathering around a console in the Cairo office of Interpol. Of all the active moni­tors in the room, only this one was screaming an alarm from its integrated speakers. The somewhat vacuous expression on his face notwithstanding, there was no mistaking the identity of the American teenager whose image was being looped on the brief video.

  “Red flag at Marsa Alam!” the duty officer in charge was shouting. “Send a team to intercept and get it out on the wire now

  In a very large room in a very secure building in an­other town half a world away, an intelligence officer turned and yelped to his colleagues, “We got a hit on the kid. Cairo.”

  “Illinois?” wondered the woman next to him.

  The first officer shook his head. “He’s gone the other direction. Egypt”

  A flurry of movement filled the room, none of which boded well for a certain astrophysics student now long absent from class . . .