eugenesis-text

He could hear voices nearby and crept to the top of a stairwell. Wondering why he was being so
cautious, he pressed his head against the wall and peered downstairs, into the other hangar. Kup, Rev-
Tone, Rapido, Quark and Rad were loitering under the strip-lights, holding glider packs.
He felt beads of lubricant appear on his forehead. He knew what was happening: they were leaving
for Polyhex to retrieve Rodimus Prime’s dead body. Disobeying his orders. Acting against his specific
instructions. How dare they No wonder Kup had been so compliant earlier; no wonder he’d backed him up
during the Soundwave argument – smooth the animosity, throw him off the scent, give him something
more immediate to worry about.
He heard the sound of anti-grav pads and looked around for an alarm. He had to stop them. He had
to get help and alert the others and—
Let them go.
The thought startled him but he couldn’t put it out of his mind. Let them go. Why interfere They’d
made their choice, and that choice was to deliberately ignore his strict and specific instructions. Let them
rebel. Let them sneak out. Were they four of the 86 who had voted against him
Rocket thrusters peaked and faded as the MARB left the hangar. He waited for the noise to die
completely before heading for his office. Passing Soundwave’s cell, he was sure of a word, a comment.
‘Did you say something, Decepticon’
‘Nothing, Prowl. Nothing.’
The corridor shook, but Xenon’s anti-gravity beam held him steady. Aquaria was falling apart and it
didn’t matter. The death of yet another world was only to be expected: his men had been siphoning energy
from the planet’s core and stockpiling energon cubes for over a year now. The leech had no doubt
destabilised the planet’s core, accelerating the collapse.
They had drawn trillions of gigowatts, enough to power the third and final warcruiser, Thermopylae,
energise the Cargo and, ultimately, solve New Quintyxia’s historical energon crisis.
He pulled the pulsing Matrix closer to his body and approached the vault door. The orb itself,
wrapped in a casing of sentio metallico, was cold against his sinewy tentacle; each chiselled facet snapped
against braided flesh and metal. He had no other way of holding it, no neck to hang it from, no shoulders
on which to rest a chain. Instead, he held the Transformers’ life force as a child clutches a favourite stuffed
toy, dragging it from place to place, never letting it from sight.
He punched in a clearance code, depressurised the suction locks, and a Chinese puzzle of quad-bolt
fixtures, cross-weave plating and liquid shields disentangled to the hum of a thousand binary commands.
The vault door was more than a slab of cold-moulded beryllium: it was a labyrinth of time delays and false
starts and forces held in check: a masterpiece of sustained tension. It opened like a flower, like an iris
gorging on light. He walked inside.
The vault was almost beyond size. It was endless space, without ceilings or walls or limits; it
accelerated into darkness until the eye admitted defeat. There was only one constant: the floor. It joined the
invisible walls, mirrored the unseen ceiling, and gave scale to enormity.
The floor was full. It heaved with painful detail, as if the vault’s contents had been compressed against
its one visible surface.
Xenon walked along a gallery that stretched like a needle into wide-open space and looked over the
edge. This was the masterplan, the end product, the Cargo – the final phase of a project that had begun
over 60 million years ago.
The floor was full of people.
The new race; the third generation of Quintessons; ten thousand bodies inside individual birthing
tubes, wrapped in wire feeds. Electrical pulses thudded into techno-organic neuro-systems, nurturing
quicksilver morphcores, maintaining circuit hubs and liquid-set CPUs. Modified energon laced the oilstream
while adaptive endoskeletons flexed like anemone in saltwater.
He bowed to the new breed of biomechanical, self-generative colonists - a fresh sparkline of stronger,
faster, more intelligent Quintessons. Where the Progenitors had failed, where Unicron had failed, he alone
would succeed.
He’d seen the Cargo before, of course – hundreds of times. He’d seen the vault slowly fill with
prototypes and birthing tubes, and been present when the first cautious trickles of energy were pumped