eugenesis-text

Hubcap tapped his screen. ‘Got it! The Quintesson warcruiser is moving towards the – ah. It’s
positioned itself over the City. Directly over us, in fact.’
Mirage got up and started pacing, looking for something to hit. He looked at Death’s Head.
‘Still waiting for the ignition sequence to kick in,’ said Silverbolt, anticipating the question.
‘What about Magnus’ said Hound.
‘We’ll have to take off without him. We can’t risk waiting. Look Hound, he’s probably dead…’
‘Thanks for the vote of confidence,’ said Ultra Magnus, stepping out of the airlock and onto the
bridge. A pair of Sharkticon jaws were clamped around his arm like a sprung trap. Additional bite marks
described a dark crescent from armpit to abdomen. ‘Nice to know where you stand.’
‘Right! Good!’ Mirage slapped Silverbolt on the back. ‘Now let’s get out of here!’
The floor tilted backwards and the bridge levelled itself. Loose bodies thudded into the far wall and
the overhead lights cut out.
The bridge shuddered as the thrusters were ignited and the surrounding water reached boiling point.
The Ark lunged for the surface, breathless and panicked, lost in water-ribbons, awash with pocked rock and
shreds of screaming phosphor.
It skidded up the launch shaft, scraping the sides, and with a final, almighty lunge, it smashed clean
through the surface of the city.
To be fair, Rodern did not expect a four-million year old Autobot super-cruiser to burst from the
debris of a ransacked City, spinning like a firework and shrugging off flaming wreckage, and so what
happened next was not down to timing or cunning or hair-trigger reactions, just one dumb chance-in-amillion:
The Enslaver fired.
The laser bolt missed the Ark but sliced through the remains of the City, finding resistance inside
caverns and minerals and twisted geo-strata.
Autobot City was burnt off the face of the planet.
The Ark was swallowed up by the explosion, by the quivering heliosphere that ballooned towards
orbit. Viewscreen shields fell away like scales and banks of flame rolled naked against
the plexiglass. Everyone screamed as the Ark outpaced the explosion, ram-raided the Enslaver and gunned
for the stars.
Some time later, while the Autobots were still staring blankly at their laps, too traumatised to speak,
Silverbolt steadied the engines and gave the all clear.
Ratchet eased himself from his seat and began to unpack the mound of bodies at the end of the
bridge. Functioning Autobots on one side, deactivated Autobots on the other side, undecideds
in the middle.
‘How bad is it, Ratchet’ asked Ultra Magnus.
‘What am I going to do A quarter of them are already dead…’
‘Take a look at this, Magnus,’ said Silverbolt.
‘What is it’
‘I didn’t want to announce it in front of the others, but it looks as if the Quintesson warcruiser is
moving towards Earth’s orbit.’
‘They’re giving chase. Damn. I didn’t expect them to recover from the collision so quickly. How
long until we can break into hyperspace’
‘Immediately. But I’d like to run some damage checks before I initiate the jump.’
‘There’s no time. We have to rendezvous with Prowl and the others. God knows what it’s like on
Cybertron.’
Ultra Magnus rounded on the rest of the bridge. A few mini-Autobots were slumped over their naviposts.
In the corner, something unpleasant – rust – was seeping from Springer’s eyes. Mirage stopped
pacing from workstation to workstation, sat down on the floor, and put his head in his hands.
‘Hyperspatial interface in 0.2 seconds,’ said Silverbolt quietly.
The space outside became goose-pimpled and waves of light curved towards the Ark. Ultra Magnus
listened to the starship rattle and whine as another Autobot coughed up oil in the background.
All he could think about was Earth, and how he would never see it again.