eugenesis-text

‘Ignore it!’ ordered Ultra Magnus, reaching the floor. ‘Don’t look at it, don’t go near it.’
‘But where does it lead’ Siren asked. ‘Do you think we could use it to esc—’
Siren screamed as laserbolts snapped hunks off his shoulders. Another shot knocked him off his feet.
Xenon appeared on the balcony, pistols in his tentacles. Galvatron and Death’s Head gamely returned
fire. The Majestrix slithered across the rigging and dropped in front of the warp-gate.
‘Defeat is a small price to pay for immortality,’ he cried, and backed into the light. ‘Maybe I cannot
create new life, but I can preserve my own. The Lifecode protects me, you see. I think of it and I am recast!
When you slump and rot think only of me, and how I will outlive the stars!’
He sank into the portal, which immediately began to contract.
Galvatron tore the Scraplet from his neck and threw it into the warp-gate. ‘Now we can get out of
here,’ he said.
Ultra Magnus climbed into a Trident, a leaking Siren thrown over his one good shoulder. ‘See you
on the other side,’ he said, sealing the cockpit.
The hangar walls began to crack, spilling aqua fortis across the floor. Death’s Head offered Galvatron
his hand. ‘If we don’t see each other again, there’s one thing I’d like to do before we go.’
‘Now is really not the time, bounty hunter,’ Galvatron snapped, but gave his hand nonetheless.
Death’s Head wrenched the Decepticon’s arm from its socket. It dissolved the moment it hit the
water. ‘Now we’re even, yes’
Re-routing his sense-circuits to stem the pain, Galvatron considered climbing into Death’s Head’s
Trident and dismantling him by hand, but his wound was vulnerable to the sprinkler spray, and he was
somewhat concerned that the water around his waist had just reached boiling point. He boarded a Trident
and postponed his revenge, little knowing that he would never see Death’s Head again.
The walls crumbled like icing. When the ocean had reclaimed every inch of its deep-sea air pocket,
the Tridents flew into the abyss. After an eternity of cross-currents and pressure pockets, the three ships
broke the sizzling surface and ploughed through layers of cloud. The world outside was one of zero
visibility, of atmospheric turbulence and winds that could remould steel.
‘It feels as if the planet is breaking up,’ said Siren, slumped in the back seat. ‘Whatever the
Quintessons did down there, it wasn’t good. What do you reckon Energon skims Core mining’
‘Unfortunately,’ replied Ultra Magnus, trying to pilot a Trident with one hand, ‘I’m a little
preoccupied at the moment.’ He looked down at a dashboard he didn’t understand, wondering whether
five extra fingers would have made any difference anyway. The tugging sensation at the back of his head
was distracting him too; he’d only felt such a sensation once before, and that was when he came on-line for
the first time.
The clouds thinned, and after a series of grav-wells and vortices, the Tridents reached the orbital rim.
Galvatron had mentally avoided the very concept of atmospheric breakdown, afraid that the thought of
getting this far and being crushed into a pellet would sap any will to live. Now, as he crossed the final
barrier, he felt gravitational forces making one last-ditch attempt to hold him back. He detonated the
liquidene fuel packs and won a final rush of propulsion.
Ultra Magnus copied Galvatron’s slingshot manoeuvre and achieved breakaway velocity. The planet
howled as another got away, venting its fury with skystorms and wind tunnels, and then suddenly, as it
reached an exquisite point of deterioration, it began to fall apart.
‘Where’s Death’s Head’ asked Siren, now that Aquaria was receding in the viewscreen. ‘Not that I
care.’
‘He was last out of the hangar,’ said Ultra Magnus. ‘I don’t think – oh my god. Oh my god.’
Why hadn’t he seen it sooner Floating like driftwood and lost to the soft curves of deep space, there
was Thermopylae – or what was left of it. The spacecruiser was now nothing more than a brittle flake of
ligament and femur; old bones stripped of meat. It had been devoured in a flurry of teeth and acid. Millions
of Scraplets were still eating, still spreading, still splitting and dividing.
Anaemic Quintesson bodies hung crucified in zero gravity; a choir of comatose angels strung up by
starlight, buoyed by the void, each one sieving the gleam of distant constellations through an archive of
body-holes. Xenon was among them, half-swallowed, half-digested. His remains had been chewed to a
rust-ridden, finger-bitten endoskeleton, a thatch of matchsticks brushed with hunger scars and graphite. His
brain module had been devoured and dispersed, shared among ingestion tracts and acid sacs.