eugenesis-text

Prowl made his way to the door. ‘Kup and Chromedome can look after him; buzz me when he’s
talking again. I want everyone else to check the other wards for survivors.’ He stepped into the corridor and
saw Perceptor. ‘The Quintessons did get here first. We’ve just discovered the bodies.’
‘Inevitable, I suppose, that they should capitalise on their advantage.’
‘You make it sound like a Fullstasis move.’
‘Not at all. I was merely pointing out the logic in their actions.’
‘I don’t think this is the time or the place to discuss logic.’
‘You think I’m being insensitive, but you and I have a responsibility to look at this dispassionately.
Divining the Quintessons’ strategy from their actions is one way we can keep a step ahead of them.’
‘They slaughtered them in their beds, Perceptor! Walk into that ward and let’s have this conversation
again!’
‘If you’re implying that… what is it, Rad’
‘Sorry sirs, but we’ve found something else.’
Prowl followed Rad to the operating theatre. The room twitched under a honeycomb of spotlights
and frosted glass, and when they stepped inside they left their shadows at the door. Just as well, because
there was no room on the floor: it was covered with body parts. Finger splints, thumb-frames, lumbar
supports, optic bulbs, cranial casing, a spinal strut (curled), a chest plate (near mint – scuffed in one corner),
a voxbox - everything arranged like model parts on an Airfix frame. Even the wiring had been unwound,
and though the fuel pump was ringed with fat drops of oil it was pared down to its bare minimum: three
pipes and a puckered antrum. Thousands of microchips had been sifted and separated into a silver mosaic
that probably looked like Primus’ frowning face from a high enough balcony.
High up on the far wall was First Aid’s cruciform skeleton, outlined by a hundred jutting scalpels. He
had no skull, no eyes, no brain module. His facemask, pocked and socketed, was tilted at a questioning
angle above his shoulders.
The Helio Generator Complex was gone and Iacon had a new kink in its landscape. The jumbled
surface tricked the sunlight, bending it this way and that. There was no unity here, no binding force to
cauterise or thicken. The wasteland pulsed with its own deadening rhythm, its own sound-slur and trace
echo, as if the smash and grab battle, visually absent, was still raging sonically: a superimposition of past on
present, then on now, with the same snipes and strafes and suicides happening again and again and again.
And as it was in Iacon, so it was in Polyhex; and Lonium, and Mytharc, and Tensk and Vos and
Tyrest – every battle ever fought would rage forever, translated into waves and pulses that bounced among
the debris. In every suburb and quadrant and city-state, the screams and gunshots were woven into the air.
Cybertron was already wrapped in centuries of sound; by the Omega Point, by the End Days, it would be
bandaged in pure white noise.
Quintesson Assessment Squads dragged their feet across the basin where the Archives Centre had
been, carrying their usual toys and accessories. A dozen dead Sharkticons garnished every Cybertronian
corpse; Tridents surrounded every crumpled Autobot aircraft. Stragglers were dumped in Tenderizers and
processed. Salvageable Quintessons – ‘90%ers’ – were locked in trucks that dotted the outer rim.
Quintesson officers stood in a celebratory group outside a newly arrived transport vessel. Shielding
their eyes against the sun, they surveyed a landscape transformed by their attack. Inside the vessel, Q-319
saluted a monitor screen.
‘The Cybertronians’ Iaconian base has been secured, General Quantax.’
‘Survivors’
‘We found 38 in the salvageable class. They will be sent to Kledji shortly. The majority of injured fell
well below accepted resuscitation levels. I have initiated a second sweep.’
‘Did any escape’
‘A small number, yes.’
‘A small number being…’
‘I cannot say exactly how many, commander. They fled underground.’
‘Your victory counts for nothing until every last Cybertronian is accounted for. How many of you
remain’
’80, maybe 90.’