eugenesis-text

Keeping his rifle tight against his shoulder, Prowl signalled for his troops to split into pairs and inspect
the wards: Tacker and Rad, Rev-Tone and Quark, Spindle and Chromedome. Kup steamed ahead, alone.
Prowl caught up with him outside Rodimus Prime’s medivault. Inside, their ex-leader was still hooked to a
modest life support machine. A jumpy bioline threw light across his face.
Kup spread his hands around the porthole. ‘Thank god. Perhaps the Quintessons didn’t see him.
Perhaps they didn’t recognise him.’
‘Oh, I think they did,’ Prowl said quietly, and swept hot torchlight across the back of Kup’s legs.
The vault door was covered in bullet holes. ‘They couldn’t get to him, but it wasn’t for wont of trying.’
Rev-Tone’s yell – so sudden, so unlike him - dragged them away from the medivault. They ran
through corridors, dodging wheelchairs and hardware trays, and found him outside ward B. Quark was
there too, hugging the doorframe.
Prowl slowed to a jog. ‘You scared us! What have you found’
Rev-Tone pushed him into the darkened ward. It was full of Autobots, full of patients lying on their
backs and on their beds. None of them had heads.
Prowl moved between the slabs, pale and trance-like, pushed by the same morbid force that turned
his head from side to side. His torch beam picked out details he didn’t want to see: the open hand, bowled
with tension, the splintered rabbet between chin and cheekbone, the daisy chain of shallow craters. These
people used to have names: Torpok, Highslide, Ammo, Elion, Slipstream, Warpath, Hookjaw. Now they
were just shapes, collisions of metal and microchip: dead things. Clips, jackets and cartridges swam around
his feet, dusky and hollow. He shook himself from his stupor as Kup and Quark ran to an unoccupied slab
in the corner of the ward.
Red Alert was bunched in the corner. He said something, but the words followed their own pattern,
their own semantic symmetry. Prowl groped for the nearest circuit slab, desperate for support; he tried to
think of something to say, some order to give, but all he could do was watch. Red Alert’s body moaned
like stressed wood as it was lifted. The floor retained a map of his injuries, an archipelago of grease.
Chromedome sprinted into the ward brandishing an energon resuscitator and pulling a trolleymounted
surge-pack. He crashed against the slab, shouldered Prowl out the way and primed the resus-pads.
The energy reading reached a neon peak (‘Clear!’) and Chromedome thrust the pads against Red Alert’s
chest. The security officer arced towards the ceiling. A silky thread of electricity tied the two pads together,
lingering as Chromedome withdrew.
‘He’s not dead!’ Kup yelled, keeping well back. ‘I heard him speak!’
Chromedome kicked the trolley. ‘Come on… come on. Yes! Clear!’ He pressed the pads deep into
Red Alert’s chest. A ball of lightning splayed the bedside crowd and danced across the ceiling, leaping
between strip lights. Red Alert was skewed by the central fork, smaller threads webbing his eyes, hands and
feet. Only his heels and shoulder blades touched the slab; his body had become one big photoelectric cell.
The resuscitator expired in a scrabble of sparks, the pads gorged on overload and Chromedome was
catapulted across the ward. His matt-black hands carved a ten-lane trail in the air before he crashed into
three occupied circuit slabs.
Smoke curled out of Red Alert’s mouth as if a spirit was leaving his body. Prowl nursed him upright
and turned his face from side to side, waiting until the smoke-rimmed eyes were wide and attentive.
‘You’re going to be okay, Red. You’re going to be okay.’ He looked up sharply. ‘Someone see to
Chromedome.’
But Chromedome was already stirring: somewhere deep among the crash site, among the red and
white pile-up of pumps and lube-feeds, his body was cooling and contracting. He looked like a matchstick
cap, dragged and flamed. Surplus energon fizzed and nibbled at his swiv-joints and body-junctures, but
apart from that – apart from the cocaine blitz of systems overdose, of looped reflexes and delirium tremens –
he seemed okay.
There was an odd sound - scraping chairs, perhaps, or nails skimming a blackboard – and fresh smoke
bulged from Red Alert’s mouth.
‘I think he’s trying to speak,’ said Quark. ‘Can someone fix his vocal synthesiser’
‘I’ll have a go,’ said Kup, flexing his fingers and wrists. He looked as if he was going to unblock a
drain.