eugenesis-text

Sevax shrugged and returned to the view. ‘Book 2, Chapter 1:
And with the ancient prize buried deep
Beneath Quintyxia’s mottled crust
The Exodus drew near…’
Half blind with optical feedback and retina-burn, Emyrissus watched his skeletal hand flake into the
ground. He felt no pain, and wondered when his nerve circuits had decided to give up the ghost, when
they’d said, ‘No, enough’s enough’, and quietly burned themselves out.
He was smeared across a bombed-out and blistered Iaconian high street (and the topographical
adjectives could just as easily have been applied to his body). He wasn’t sure when his leg had fallen off, but
there it was, lying at the other end of the street like a half-smoked cigarette.
Although he’d been hit, high above the Ibex spaceport, he’d managed to ride the thermals into
Iaconian airspace and give Slugslinger and Misfire a convincing crash-landing. He’d hidden among the
crater-flames, leaving the Decepticons, with their bristling arrogance, to assume that they’d finished him off.
After a painful front-crawl across precincts and suburbs, he was now only half a mile from the Archives
Centre. For an intact Autobot, home was but a short canter or quad-thrust away. Blurr could’ve made the
journey in 0.09 seconds, Superion in a couple of strides, Pulsar or Sleepscape by teleporting a few moments
into the future. For Emyrissus, bent on his hands and knee, dragging a cocktail of glistening lubricants,
every inch of ground was as vast as the Badlands, as the Acid Wastes, as the Rad Zone itself.
He thought of what he’d seen at Darkmount, and his jaw dropped – literally. It hit the ground teethfirst.
At the end of the street he saw the entrance to Autobase. The weathered metal skin spoke of age,
weight and frailty: the public face of the Resistance, complete with crow’s feet and a furrowed brow. In
reality, it was just a holographic façade, coated with its own holographic dust, dappled with its own
holographic moonlight.
He dug his better hand into the ground and began to drag himself towards sanctuary. Although the
end of his journey was in sight, he knew he was going to die. Oh yes, no doubt about that. He was
reminded by the sounds and the shivers in his brain, by the oil arcing over his forehead. It didn’t matter
whether he died on a slab in Ratchet’s medical lab, or in a tatty stairwell en route to AMC1, just as long as
he told someone what had happened to Galvatron.
The noise came from nowhere – a nonsense string of sound-snippets, like cassette tape tripping on the
spool.
He realised it was coming from his own mouth.
Autobase winked at him conspiratorially (only forty metres away – come on). All he needed to do was
break the holo-seal and trigger the alarm. His vibrating hand shook off loose casing until it was pared to a
shoestring. There was a shift in balance as his waist rejected his body.
With only six metres to go, his arm froze up. He rested his head on the ground as his body began to
kill itself off bit-by-bit, tying up loose ends and unfinished business, setting its affairs in order before
shutdown.
Bumblebee crouched behind a shattered windowpane and fumbled around his feet for another
energon clip. He’d taken the vacuum lift to the command tower hoping that sub-space communicator
inside could be used to contact Cybertron. He’d been unsuccessful, but the tower had proven a good place
from which to shoot down Tridents. A damaged Trident was actually heading towards him now, in fact,
smoke spewing from its rear.
He found a clip in a pool of shadow, jacked it into his rifle, shouldered another splinter of glass from
the window frame and fired, trying to knock the attach craft off course.
It didn’t work.
The Trident plunged into the command tower and speared Bumblebee on its tip. It shuddered as its
engines collapsed and an airlock flew off its hinges. The pilot jumped to the floor, brushed down his cloak
and only then noticed the unconscious figure impaled on the ship’s spike.
‘Have we met before’ asked Death’s Head. ‘No Maybe you’ve just got one of those faces, yes’