Within seconds, as the guards watched goggle-eyed, the rest of the disguised cars assumed their robotic forms. Accessing his arsenal, Wheeljack produced several new cannons and handed them out to his peers. “Here, lads,” he said convivially. “Might be a bit spicy. They’re fresh out of R&D.”
Bumblebee eyed his with curiosity, while Sideswipe cradled his as he would an infant. A very large, lethal infant that could inflict untold damage upon anything it was aimed at.
Then he swung it around and took aim at the facility. His onboard sensors swept it and found an unpopulated section. He pulled the trigger, and the cannon hammered the east wing. Brick and mortar flew, and a gigantic belch of flame leaped skyward.
It was all the incentive that the remaining workers in the facility required. They came tearing out in all directions, screaming, their arms raised over their heads, making no attempt to seem as if they were planning to put up a fight. That suited the Autobots just fine; it was impossible to teach human beings a lesson if they were all dead. The more survivors there were to inform the Iranian government of the ultimate folly of its actions, the better off everyone would be.
The Autobots set to work with a vengeance, and within minutes the entire facility had been reduced to rubble.
And just before they left, Mirage turned to the two guards, who had not moved from the spot where they had fallen. “See? Not long at all. Have a nice day,” he said.
The guards, who didn’t understand him but would have agreed to anything, nodded.
RUSSIA
i
For there are missions for which we are more suited … to stand in harm’s way.
There were times when it seemed that the compound adjective “war-torn” had been coined specifically for Chechnya, and this was one of those times.
In one of the more notorious insurgent zones, rebels were busy planting a bomb in a disabled car. They thought they were unobserved.
They were mistaken.
From high above, a helicopter pilot radioed, “This is Pale Rider-6. Confirmed visual on four targets placing roadside IED. You’re cleared to engage.”
Seconds later, a black 4×4 pickup, a GMC TopKick, came rolling up and glided to a stop alongside the men. They watched it warily. Two of them thumbed the safeties off their sidearms, ready to open fire on whoever might emerge from within.
Instead they were witness to the same astounding conversion process that had been witnessed in Iran, not to mention terrorist strongholds all over the world.
Looming over them, Ironhide looked down. If he could have smiled, he would have.
“What’s up?” he said.
ii
Still, while many trust in our human alliance, others believe we are to be feared. So, given this debate, we deem it best to call little attention to ourselves.
Furthermore, there are greater concerns than the humans can readily comprehend. There are Energon detectors in Earth’s cities now. There are long-range defense systems watching the skies. And for years, it has been far too quiet. For in my Spark, I know … the enemy shall return.
The words came to Colonel William Lennox from all the way back in basic: They also serve who stand and wait.
He was clinging to that old saying now and holding tightly for all he was worth. The truth was that he didn’t feel like he was serving his country at all, no matter how many aphorisms claimed that he was. He hated standing and waiting.
By all discernible measures, he was succeeding in his career track. He not only had been steadily promoted but was currently being trusted with matters of greater and greater delicacy. Matters having to do with the security not only of his country but of the entire world.
Yet he felt he was dying by inches, being sent from one nondescript building to the next—this one in the heart of Russia—for one dead-end meeting after another. Always it was with informants who claimed to have intel that was vital to American interests. And every single time, they had nothing that U.S. intelligence didn’t already have in its own files, often more accurate than what was being presented to him.
He felt like his talents were atrophying in this endless pursuit of dead-end leads. Sure, one in twenty resulted in some action, but the intervening nineteen were boring the crap out of him.
It seemed like yesterday that he was doing what he was born to do: fighting a furious ground battle against an enemy that was threatening everything he held dear. He had been in a desert and the ground had been erupting beneath his feet, and then some kind of metal creature such as he never would have thought possible had emerged. Metal tentacles had been whipping everywhere, and there was an endless series of explosions, so loud that even to this day he still suffered from tinnitus.
It had been his, and the world’s, introduction to the alien race called the Decepticons. From then on, the world around humanity had been transformed into a vast battle arena for creatures seemingly beyond comprehension. Lennox, alongside Sergeant Robert Epps and so many others, had fought desperately, bravely, and, in far too many cases, fatally.
In those first insane hours, Lennox had been giving no thought to his career track. He had been too busy just trying to stay alive. If, however, he had been inclined to give any real speculation to it, he never would have come up with his current assignment. It would have seemed astoundingly anticlimactic.
Too often, his workday began and ended in places just like this one: long hallways, dimly lit by flickering fluorescent bulbs, and silence hanging like a shroud.
If I were dead, how would I know? Lennox wondered. Maybe I didn’t survive even that first battle. Maybe I only think I did, and now I’m sitting here dead, and the only way I’ll be able to move on is if I admit what happened and leave the world behind.
Might be worth a try.
Seated behind his colorless desk in the colorless office, Lennox said aloud to no one at all, “I admit that I’m dead. I’m ready to move on. Come and take me.”
He then waited with his fingers interlaced, his hands upon the desk.
Seconds ticked by, and then, to his surprise, he heard a distant, rhythmic tap of footsteps echoing down the hall, growing louder and louder.
“I’ll be damned,” he said.
The door creaked open, and a washed-out heavyset man with a gray flecked beard stood at the threshold. Even though he was indoors, his black overcoat was buttoned all the way up. He was holding a briefcase in his gloved hand. The light overhead continued to flicker, making it seem to Lennox as if he were watching an old silent movie.
Without a word, he entered the room and sat. Obviously, this was not a heavenly host sent to gather up Lennox and bring him home. No, this was the man with whom he was supposed to meet. It was Lennox’s job to make an immediate assessment of the man and get a feel for what, if anything, he might represent as a source of information.
The man was methodically removing the contents of his briefcase on the desk in front of Lennox. He lay down photos and documents neatly in meticulous rows, even stopping to jog the pictures so that they were parallel to one another. Once he had done so, he placed his hands just so on the desk and said with a bearlike growl, “I am Voskhod, general counsel, Ukrainian Department of Energy.” He spoke very carefully, his English hardly fluid but perfectly understandable. “My government will officially deny that we are having this conversation. However, at one of our decommissioned facilities, a discovery was made, which I fear may be alien in nature.”
Of course he would say that. He knew that that was what Lennox was looking for. It had, after all, become Lennox’s specialty, the thing that he was best known for in the intelligence community, even though his expertise grew not from a lifelong interest in the subject but from simply having a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Just because Voskhod was saying “alien,” however, didn’t make it so. In fact, it probably wasn’t. Making the sort of snap judgment he was paid to make, Lennox was sure he saw before him just another tired, washed-out So
viet bureaucrat, probably looking to sell something. Pictures of lights in the sky, perhaps, or samples of pieces of metal that couldn’t readily be identified.
Another dead end. Another waste of a fighting man’s talents.
Fighting off boredom, Lennox began sorting through the pictures and documents.
He frowned.
Suddenly fighting off boredom was not a problem. He was no longer remotely bored. These were not the images he had expected to see.
He looked up questioningly, silently asking, Is this what I think it is?
As if reading his mind, Voskhod nodded. “The facility is named Chernobyl.”
And Lennox felt a pulse of the old excitement beginning to beat within him. Even though he knew there was the potential of a threat, even though he knew his life might be at risk once more, all he could think was, About freakin’ time.
iii
Upon approaching the city of Prypiat, Ukraine—the city that had once been home to thousands of power plant workers—the first thing one noticed was the silence. No birds sang there. No children played. It was like one of those postapocalyptic cities in the movies. One might have expected to see Denzel Washington walking around with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a determined look of survival on his face.
At the edge of the city, a Ferris wheel was rusting on its chassis, and rotting bumper cars were peeking out from beneath the overgrowth. It was a city abandoned, a city of the dead. It was clear from everywhere one might have looked that it had been the scene of a hastily beaten retreat.
Faintly, when the wind blew in just the right direction, one could hear Russian classical music drifting through the air, serving to break up the monotonous silence. Supposedly the music was played to entertain the cleanup crews so that the surreal isolation did not drive them mad. Whether it managed to succeed in that goal was open to debate. There were many who felt that the music simply elevated the environment to entirely new levels of creepiness.
Looming over the scene of devastation was the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, entombed in a towering concrete sarcophagus.
A light snow was falling, adding to the seeming permafrost that already covered the landscape. And now something shattered the silence with far greater force than the strains of Russian music. Thundering along the road came an ice-covered semitruck with a trailer hitch, arriving outside the gates of the plant. A custom red and blue paint job could be seen through the ice and salt splatter.
The cab door opened, and Colonel Lennox jumped down. A NEST technician named Willis climbed out the other side. “Uninhabited since ’86,” Lennox said to Willis. “Don’t expect it to be livable again for twenty-thousand years.”
Even though the radiation had fallen precipitously from its lethal levels of 1986, Lennox and Willis weren’t taking any chances. They were clad in radiation suits.
Voskhod, who was waiting for them, was not. Instead he was dressed identically to the way he had been when he’d met with Lennox the other day. Voskhod was looking around the city that he had once called home, and there was unspeakable sadness in his eyes. Except … Lennox might have been imagining it, but there might have been hope in his expression as well.
“Mr. Voskhod,” Lennox said, making no attempt to hide his concern, “where’s your radiation suit?”
Voskhod shrugged as if he had neglected to bring an umbrella when a light shower was predicted. “It would not matter. For me, it is only a matter of time.”
Lennox didn’t know what to say to that. As always, when unsure of what to say, he opted for saying nothing at all. It was hard to go wrong when following that strategy.
They entered the reactor sarcophagus together. Unlike the city outside, the interior of the power plant was surprisingly clear and orderly in places. Men had come back to work there and had slowly brought some of the utilities back online.
But as the group descended, they began to see the effects of that terrible day in April 1986.
“There were energy experiments going on in this reactor,” Voskhod said casually, as if he were leading a tour down the middle of Hollywood Boulevard. “Its fuel quite literally melted down. Remains fossilized, like lava.”
It was true. Lennox had been stationed in Hawaii for a time and had walked fields that were composed of lava that had cooled and dried centuries ago. This had the same feel to it. The closer the men drew to the core, the more they encountered the hardened fuel.
“Every year,” Voskhod continued, “our cleanup efforts probe deeper. Only days ago, we found … it.”
There were several men waiting for them, all dressed in radiation suits as well. One of them stepped forward upon their arrival and bowed slightly. Voskhod indicated him as he said, “Yuri will lead you below.”
Willis moved past Voskhod, carefully checking the readings he was receiving on his instrumentation. Lennox started to follow him, but Voskhod pulled him aside before he could go past. “And Colonel … one other thing …” he said in a voice filled with caution.
Before Voskhod could continue, there was an echo of movement from above. A shadow flitted through the rafters, catching Lennox’s attention. He squinted in the dimness, seeking the source. “Don’t tell me you have birds living in here?”
Voskhod was looking up as well, studying the ceiling. Suddenly he seemed nervous where he hadn’t before.
“It can wait,” he said.
iv
The group descended into the core, the heart of where the meltdown had originally occurred. The accident that had shaped an entire generation’s views on atomic energy had begun right here, and Lennox realized that he was holding his breath for extended periods as they moved around within the ruins of the reactor.
“There,” Yuri said, pointing below and to the right. Willis, the NEST tech, came forward with his instruments. Everyone in the group was shining flashlights around so that the entire area was bathed in illumination.
The excavation crew had cleared away a section of the “lava” just as Voskhod had claimed. In doing so, it had revealed what appeared to be a charred case on which were emblems that Lennox was reasonably sure he recognized.
His communications channel open, he said, “Optimus, we have a visual. Objects in some sort of metal harness. There’s also a case. Guys,” he said, turning to the Ukranians, “those markings on the case … they’re from the Soviet space program, yes? Why are these markings from the Soviet space program?”
He did not have the opportunity to get an answer, however, because the entire room began to shake violently. Lennox staggered but didn’t quite fall. “Willis! Talk to me! What are we dealing with!”
“Energon reading, sir!” the NEST tech shouted, even though his voice was coming loud and clear over Lennox’s headset. “It’s strong! Below us! Closing fast!”
Lennox had heard and felt enough. The environment had suddenly turned unstable. Remaining here, particularly with a bunch of civilian scientists, was not an acceptable option. “Everybody abort! Move topside! Now!”
That was when the room erupted in a blast of dirt and rubble, and for a moment Lennox was back in Qatar, with the ground being torn apart by the attacking Scorponok.
But this looked different, felt different, and, most particularly, sounded different. He was hearing whirling tendrils coming up from below. It sounded like something was … drilling.
He didn’t have to see the entirety of what was coming for them to make an educated guess as to where its allegiances lay.
“Take cover! Decepticon!” he shouted, trying to make his voice heard above the arrival of the attacking creature.
Metal tentacles emerged from the floor, grabbing two of the scientists who had simply been trying to get away. It thrust them upward, and they screamed for mercy, but their appeals were in vain as the tentacles crushed them against the ceiling, killing them almost instantly. More and more of the creature was emerging from the floor below, from underground.
Lennox flattened himself against the wall as th
e tentacles whipped past him, just barely missing him. He was trying to discern what it was that he was seeing, but it was beyond huge, beyond vast. It was hauling itself out now, bringing itself into full view. As near as Lennox could determine, the closest analogue the thing had to species that dwelled on the earth was a giant squid. Its body, or at least what Lennox could make of it, looked like a massive torpedo, with a half dozen or more tentacles extending from it. And on the end of each tendril was some manner of whirling cutting apparatus that had chewed through the rock-hard lava as if it were cotton candy. His pure guess was that the thing was, tip to tip, about a hundred yards long and thirty feet in diameter.
And it was barreling straight toward the surface.
“Optimus! Whatever this thing is, it’s heading your way! Optimus, do you read me? Optimus!”
v
Optimus Prime was waiting.
Even as the creature from below, which had so ruthlessly mowed through several hapless scientists, punched through the roof of the once-potent nuclear power plant, the blue and red tractor trailer rearranged its surface, parts clanging together, overlapping and taking on the size and stature of the leader of the Autobots. The trailer he had been hauling changed as well, making itself over into a horseshoe-shaped weapons pack mounted on his back.
In seconds Optimus Prime was standing poised and ready, confronting something that had absolutely no business being there.
It was a Driller, and it dwarfed Optimus. It was the size of a football field, and Prime, for all his stature, was comparable to a bunch of football players. If the field decided to annihilate the players, they wouldn’t have much of a chance.
Drillers were of Cybertonian origin, semisentient at best. They were essentially beasts of burden that obeyed simple commands and developed fierce loyalty to whoever their particular masters were. Typically they were used for mining operations, but not this one. This one had been bred for use in military operations and was much larger than any typical Driller, bigger than any Driller that Prime had ever seen.