eugenesis-text

Death’s Head sat upright in the smoke like a vampire rising from his coffin, an empty dart-gun
attachment falling from his wrist. Q-2709, meanwhile, clawed at the points of impact, crumpled to the floor
and lay still.
Now for the fun part, thought Death’s Head, opening an anti-grav hatch. He decided against calling
Ratchet, fearing some boring tirade about the Autobot Code, and threw Q-2709 inside. The Quintesson
looked up to as his murderer closed the airlock.
Q-2709 lunged for the door and grappled with the release catch, but his arms buckled and stretched
new wounds. He was sucked into the void before his brain registered the noise of the outer door priming
its release catch. His hands remained clamped to the inner hatch and then they too were carried away on
the vacuum rush.
Death’s Head laughed and foraged for his discarded wrist attachment. Ratchet came running.
‘What happened Did you find him’
‘What do you think I do for a living’
‘Where’s the body’
Death’s Head looked at the antigrav chamber.
‘You flushed him! Primus! We needed him alive! Think about it! We know nothing about the
Quintessons’ motives – he could have told us everything: their strategy, the size of their army, their
hardware, their—’
‘Yes, yes, get the idea, eh Heat of the moment. You’d have been the same.’ He looked at him.
‘Perhaps not.’
‘At least the Ark’s in one piece. When Magnus comes ’round, we’ll – hang on.’
‘What is it’
‘I could’ve sworn I heard something.’ Ratchet paced up and down the corridor, frowning. ‘I’m
picking up signals from the Bridge.’
‘Is that good or bad’
‘I don’t know! Everyone’s supposed to be off-line!’ He ran towards the vacuum lift.
‘Don’t understand the urgency.’
‘The others were primed to reboot themselves only if something was detected on the radar.’
‘And you think that—’
They were thrown forwards as the Ark sustained a direct hit.
‘Yes, I do.’
The debriefing chamber had always been too large for the meagre complement of Autobots stationed
at Delphi. It had the dimensions of a cathedral, the chill of a mortuary, and row upon row of empty seats.
Siren and his men usually preferred to hold their daily conference in Cloudraker’s mechanical pool – one of
many traditions borne of eight years in the wilderness, hundreds of miles away from the nearest Decepticon
settlement.
The Delphi crew had used their self-described ‘exile’ to glamorise a comparatively mundane function:
surveillance, monitoring and munitions runs. They were the outsiders, the disaffected loners on the front
line – or so they liked to think. Delphi’s links with the outside world had been re-established the moment a
holographic Xenon had delivered his manifesto; then came Raindance, and suddenly they were on the
frontline of the war against the Quintessons.
They sat in the dark and watched Raindance’s jittery surveillance footage. Siren studied the faces of
his men from the shadows. Fastlane and Cloudraker, his joint seconds-in-command, sat in the front row;
Omega Supreme and Sky Lynx stood at the back. In-between were Autobots of various ranks and subgroups:
Camshaft, Downshift, Chromar, Splashdown, Overdrive, Backstreet, Aragon, Hosehead, Skyfall,
Swerve, Zetar, Groundbreaker, Sky High and more. Micromasters loitered in the aisle. Like everyone else,
they let the atrocities wash over them, unable to react: it was somehow too shocking, too impossibly
violent. The Polyhex massacre, the convict ships, the Inhibitor Claws and the concentration camp.
Flogging, spraying, chipping. Slamdance had witnessed it all, from battlefield to prison cell, and smuggled it
back into their home.
Then the picture went haywire, showing an escape sequence from the escapee’s POV. Siren stepped
onto the podium as the screen went dead.