eugenesis-text

‘Is there no other way’ Prime asked, proffering his upturned wrists. He moved the moment the Q-
142 looked down: a double-punch across the Quintesson’s face. The other Autobots rounded on their
aggressors, and before fingers fell on triggers Prime had bundled everyone back into the tunnel.
‘Let them go!’ hacked Q-142, trying to reattach his dangling jawbone. ‘They’ll not get far.’
Nightbeat reached midpoint and wheeled in horror. The Quintessons on the other side were waiting
with drawn weapons. ‘We’re trapped,’ he said, ‘and right back where we started!’
The Autobots hit the ground as the two sets of Quintessons opened fire. Laser flew over their heads
in taut strings of red and yellow.
Q-142 looked at the bloated embassy building. It straddled the tunnel with greying thighs and buzzed
with a kind of sweet-smelling decay, having spent the best part of four million years trying not to loose its
balance. ‘Bring it down!’ he yelled. ‘Crush the tunnel!’
‘Everyone fire at the floor,’ ordered Optimus, but there was no one to hear him. Sunstreaker, Hoist
and Grapple had bolted for the exit, weapons blazing.
The embassy fell like a house of cards, 150 papery layers toppling towards a common core.
Hovercyclists pumped ammo deep into the creases and the tunnel roof shook itself into a million
pentagonal pieces.
Nightbeat grabbed Prime’s arm. ‘Optimus, please! I’m not leaving you here!’
The tunnel collapsed.
On Cybertron, the Past is inescapable. It exists as a frame of reference, a rigid table of comparison.
After four million years of war, so much is defined by what it isn’t, by what it used to be. Iacon is an excapital.
The Golden Dome is an ex-council chamber. Transgalactica is an ex-spaceport. And every Autobot,
every Decepticon, every side-swapping spy and counterspy – everyone is an ex-Cybertronian.
Once the jewel in the galactic crown, Cybertron has been scandalised and misappropriated, rebuilt
into a vague shadow of its old self. Beneath its misshapen crust, however, one thing remains unchanged: the
utility ducts. After millions of years of voracious recycling, the utility ducts are still utility ducts: a coiling
network of rust-ridden tectomene tubing, thousands of miles long, dappled with bacilli and grime cultures
as old as the First Ones themselves.
They even have their own language, a murmured vernacular that will still be heard when every
dialect and comm-prog has been de-codified and unwritten: the metronomic drip of oil on sticky surfaces;
the hum of warm liquid tumbling through anchored piping; the mildewed kiss of water against curved
walls; the wheeze of rust, red as a waxy apple, as it prises itself from the copper-top ceilings.
Down in the ducts, the upper world is mythical; the lower world, the Underworld, is madness.
Prowl’s Autobots were making slow progress. Halved by the Quintessons’ aerial attack, halved again
by Sideswipe’s sacrifice, they now numbered less than two hundred. They were the leftovers, knee-deep in
mech-waste. Prowl and Perceptor took the lead, then Kup, then Chromedome. The dead and the dying
were somewhere near the back, supported by stronger Autobots.
Rev-Tone wondered what the local conditions were doing to his damaged legs. Even now he could
feel the wounds re-opening, teased by the questing current, by the froth and bubbled scum. He focused on
Quark’s whispered voice and tried to ignore the pain.
‘It’s not that I’m not grateful to be here,’ said his companion. ‘Of course I am… it’s just that I was
given an order to stay and fight. You don’t realise how it feels to run away.’
‘I have three things to say to that, Quark. Firstly, no one but you and I know that you disobeyed
orders. Secondly, one more Autobot isn’t going to turn the tide of battle, is he What use is an
anthropologist against thousands of screaming Quintessons’
‘Yes, but if everyone thought like that we’d never—’
‘My third point is the most important: I wanted you to come with me.’
‘But it feels as if I’ve cheated – cheated Sideswipe and Scattershot and Gunrunner and everyone else
who stayed behind…’
‘…Getting slaughtered. We’re a team, Quark! We stick together!’
Prowl craned his neck. ‘Everything okay back there’ Rev-Tone waved the enquiry away and the
Autobot leader went back to his own conversation with Perceptor: