Transformers, page 19
High-intensity spotlights swept across Optimus Prime’s massive outline. Taking one giant step forward, he picked Sam and Mikaela up, reached back, and deposited them on his shoulder.
“Hold on.”
Merging defensive sonics, the other robots emitted a collective pulse blast that simultaneously flattened the tires on every one of the SUVs. It was a disabling defense, but not one that was damaging to life. As multiple vehicle chassis hit the pavement, Optimus charged in the direction of the nearest cover. On his shoulders, Sam and Mikaela held on for dear life.
One of the choppers immediately set off in pursuit of the fleeing robot. On the ground, agents used bolt cutters to free Simmons and his driver. Slipping and sliding in the spreading lake of lubricant, Simmons displayed admirable determination, if not balance, as he alternately hopped, slid, and ran toward a descending copter while simultaneously trying to climb back into his pants.
The systems operator in the first helicopter gazed in frustration at his multiple readouts. Given the amount of sensing gear on board the advanced chopper, it should not have been possible to lose the position of one running giant robot. Try as he might, however, he could not locate the alien machine. The chopper cruised low over hills, checked clusters of trees, and even flew underneath a high overpass bridge.
Since every instrument on board was aimed straight down, they did not detect the robot that was clinging to the underside of the viaduct.
Possessing muscles made only of flesh, Sam and Mikaela struggled to hang on to the upside-down robot. They were just barely managing—when the rotor wash from the helicopter passing directly underneath sucked Mikaela downward. Hugging the body of the mechanoid with one arm, Sam reached out with the other and just did catch the loop of her purse.
“Don’t let me go!” she screamed, hanging on to the other end of the loop as she dangled over the pavement below.
The strain was evident in his voice as well as his face. “I—I can’t hold on!”
A second chopper followed the first under the bridge. Its draft proved too much for the overstressed leather strap. It snapped. Reaching for her, Sam lost his own grip and they fell together, screaming. Swinging out a long leg, Optimus tried to catch them. All the effort did was to slightly slow their fall. The eyeglass case slipped from Sam’s pocket and he made a desperate, futile grab for it. Closing his eyes, he waited for the final impact of his body hitting the ground. It came and he winced—and opened his eyes again. The pain was much less than he had expected.
Perhaps because he had landed in one of Bumblebee’s hands, and not on the hard pavement beneath the overpass.
With infinite gentleness, the robot set them down on the roadside. Almost immediately, a steel-mesh net launched from one of the circling copters looped his right arm while another whipped around his legs. Working in unison, the two choppers turned north, yanking the robot off his feet and dragging him across the asphalt. Heedless of his own well-being, Sam ran after the entangled mechanoid.
“Stop it! You’re hurting him!”
“Sam, you can’t—” Mikaela began as she hurried after him. Her words were cut off by the heavy hand that slapped over her mouth. Catching up to Sam, a second beefy agent began wrestling him back in the direction of the waiting vehicles. All the money his parents had spent over the years on good dental work paid off as Sam bit down on one of the restraining hands. The agent cursed and let go.
Scouring the surrounding area, other agents recovered most of what the two teens had dropped during their fall from the bridge. Mikaela’s purse and its contents ended up in the back of another vehicle.
Down the road, Bumblebee detected what was happening and redoubled his efforts to free himself from the entangling nets. Around him, camouflage-clad commandos were zip-lining down from a newly arrived chopper. They carried no guns, no explosives. The packs on their backs were filled with a unique supercooled carbon-fiber liquid held under high pressure. Hovering just out of reach, they began spraying the struggling robot from head to heel. Encased in the rapidly hardening material, Bumblebee took a step, a second—and then toppled forward as the substance hardened to form an unbreakable shell around his entire body.
“Get the hell away from him!” Sam howled as he neared the scene. “He’s not gonna hurt anyone!”
On the bridge high above, the other robots arrived. Crawling over the side of the bridge, Jazz hung upside down to face Optimus.
“We have to help him!”
The bigger robot’s voice was heavy with resignation. “We cannot engage a situation like this without harming humans!”
Racing ahead, Sam reached the place where the commandos had touched down and were continuing to spray the increasingly motionless Bumblebee. Kicking one from behind, he ripped the nozzle out of the startled soldier’s hands and pointed it at his leg. The man howled as cold plastic enveloped his lower limb. A moment later agents swarmed Sam and yanked the device out of his hands. They were less gentle this time as they threw him in the back of a different SUV, practically on top of Mikaela.
As the car screeched away, Sam fought to sit up. Turning to look out the back window, he was just in time to see a pair of helicopters lifting the netted Bumblebee off the ground and swinging away to the north. He hit at the window with one fist as he howled in protest. His shouts did not penetrate the SUV’s extra soundproofing.
The last of the choppers was gone. The commandos had been picked up and whisked away. None of the black SUVs remained. It was quiet again beneath the bridge. Somewhere, a pair of crickets began calling to each other. Nothing moved.
Optimus Prime dropped from the underside of the bridge to land heavily on the pavement below. Continuing to harden on contact with the air, tendrils of the special liquid plastic coated parts of the street and the nearby hillside. There was also something else. Something the human agents had missed.
Bending low, the robot plucked a small, almost insignificant object from the ground where it had fallen: an eyeglass holder. With the touch of a surgeon, enormous metal fingers delicately opened the case. A pair of shabby old spectacles gleamed in the light from his eyes.
Straightening, the massive robot looked first to the south, then to the north. They had the glasses.
But they had lost something else.
Soundproofed as thoroughly as the best of modern sonic technology could manage it, the conference room had been designed and built especially for holding meetings at the highest levels of government. Nothing could penetrate it: no bugs, no listening devices, no echoes or reverberations from outside. A president could sit and chat securely with a premier—or a useful dictator.
At present the room was occupied by lesser lights: a soft-voiced, enigmatic individual who called himself Tom Banachek and the secretary of defense of the United States of America. As he spoke, Banachek was working to unfasten from his wrist the briefcase whose contents he had yet to disclose.
“You’ll have to accept, sir,” he told Keller, “that there are many things you won’t understand right away. Some will be self-evident, but many will require additional explanation. Sector Seven is a special-access division of the federal government, convened in secret and established under President Hoover. Our jurisdiction, our specialty, is—everything that falls outside every other branch of the government’s jurisdiction and specialty. Especially those things that fall way outside. By way of introduction, I ask you to remember that President Hoover was trained as an engineer and was therefore comfortable discussing security matters that would have been meaningless to many of our other presidents.” A thin smile crossed his face. “I’ll cut to the chase.
“Aliens are real. Sir.”
Keller started to say something, then stopped himself. Banachek was right. There were things he was not going to understand right away. If he kept his mouth shut, he had the feeling many of the questions boiling up inside him were likely to be answered before he could ask them.
From the briefcase Banachek extracted an armored laptop. The secretary looked on in anticipation as the other man turned it on. One after another, a series of security logos ran rapidly across the screen as programs were loaded.
“Self-contained,” the Sector Seven agent explained. “Still should function.” Sure enough, the appropriate telltales winked to life as he fingered the keyboard. “A few years ago, you may remember, NASA lost the Beagle Two Mars rover. Following our analysis of the information that was made available to us from the JPL, my section told them to report the mission as lost, a complete failure.”
His fingers danced lightly over the laptop’s keys. On one wall of the conference room a screen came alive with light. On it a pixilated video feed appeared. It was blurry and imperfect, but watchable.
“It wasn’t lost,” Banachek continued. “The Beagle Two touched down successfully, the equipment package activated as intended, and as programmed it immediately began transmitting back to Earth. It did so perfectly. For thirteen seconds.” He hit a key.
On the big screen a field of rust-red rocks appeared, protruding from similarly colored sand. Abruptly, the image was darkened by a moving shadow. The view whipped around sharply, as though the camera and its mount had absorbed a severe blow. There was a brief but unmistakable glimpse of something large, regular in outline, and metallic—whereupon the image gave way to static.
Banachek turned to the secretary. “Before it ceased transmitting, the Beagle sent back an image of something other than just a pile of Martian rocks. Do you recall the final image?”
A stunned Keller nodded slowly, his tone subdued. “Pretty hard to forget.”
“Right. Our analysts had similar reactions. Now here’s the image our Rangers were able to retrieve from the attack on the base in Qatar.” He tapped a few keys. The screenful of Beagle static was replaced by a thermal shape. Additional keystrokes refined the outline, freezing it for close examination. Keller said nothing; he could only stare.
“We think it’s the same exoskeletal type as the one in the image returned by Beagle before it went dark,” Banachek informed him. “Could even be the exact same figure: we simply don’t have enough information yet to be able to confirm anything. But one thing we are pretty sure of: neither one is Russian or North Korean in origin.”
The secretary swallowed hard as the agent darkened the screen and closed the laptop. “Are we talking about—an invasion?”
Banachek’s tone was somber. “Mr. Secretary, we don’t know what we’re talking about—yet. We do know that we’ve been the subject of hostile action with no attempt at contact. If it is an invasion, it’s been a pretty localized one—so far. We have no idea what might be coming next. On a more positive note—”
Keller interrupted. “There’s a positive note?”
The agent managed a small grin. “We picked up a message from those Rangers. Our people are trained to fight back even when they’re not sure what they’re fighting. These things aren’t invincible. They can be hurt by our weapons, and now they know it. It’s surmised that that’s why the virus, or whatever you want to call the synaptic intrusion, shut down our communications. So we can’t coordinate against their next assault. Or whatever it is they’re planning next. Whatever that might be, I’ll bet my inadequate government salary that it’s coming soon.” He slipped the laptop back into its featureless, impenetrable case. “Usually it’s the other way around, but in this case the president has authorized your department to assist us.”
Keller nodded, beeped for an aide. Stationed outside the room, the woman arrived immediately. “Get word to all our fleet commanders over the National Guard system. It’ll take awhile for the information to be relayed, but they have shortwave radio that’s still working. Tell them to turn their ships around and come home pronto. The enemy are not the ones they are presently confronting. No combat is to be engaged in, there is to be no exchange of hostilities. Make sure that’s understood.”
“Yessir.” The aide turned and hurried out. As she did so, Banachek closed his briefcase.
The snapping-shut click of the metal cuff that kept it attached to his left wrist was very loud in the quiet room.
The room in which Maggie Madsen and Glen Whitmann found themselves was also soundproofed, though not to such an extreme degree as the one in which the Sector Seven agent named Banachek had just alerted the secretary of defense to the crisis facing the planet. While adequate for essential hygienic purposes, the furnishings were also considerably more austere.
Both occupants rose as a cluster of agents entered, followed by none other than Keller himself. His hands secured behind his back, Glen immediately started blubbering.
“Oh God, don’t put me in prison, please can we call my grandma?”
Throwing Glen a look it was better he did not see, Maggie addressed the agents. “Why are we here? What’s going on? I want my lawyer!” Wordlessly, an agent un-cuffed each of them.
Keller came up to her. “You don’t have a lawyer. You don’t need a lawyer.”
She glared at the secretary. “Yes I do, because I’m going to sue you, the Department of Defense, and the whole damn United States government!”
“You don’t have time to sue anybody,” he replied, “because you’re going to be my advisor. And if we can’t take care of this problem that’s come up, there might not be a United States government left to sue.” That quieted her. He jerked a thumb in Glen’s direction. “Who’s he?”
Maggie didn’t look in Glen’s direction. “My advisor.”
Though he found the explanation doubtful, the secretary chose not to question it. “Okay. He can come, too.” Pivoting, he exited the cell. Maggie and Glen followed, the latter wiping at his eyes. The agents who surrounded them said nothing at all.
It was quiet in the hilly woods above Tranquility. A few birds chirped back and forth as they searched for food or mates. A couple of white-tailed deer strode cautiously between the trees. Movement caused them to bolt, springing off into the nearest cluster of dense bushes.
Having unintentionally frightened the whitetails, Optimus Prime held a pair of decrepit human spectacles up to his face. Two narrow beams of carefully modulated photons shot from his eyes to pass at a particular angle through the lenses of the old glasses. The combination of light, lens, and what had been etched on the glass generated a three-dimensional sphere some distance from his face. Recognizably the world on which they presently found themselves, the slowly rotating sphere was breathtaking in its detail and straightforward in its message: a single pinpoint of light shone unblinking on one of the northern continents. Optimus altered the light, and the view expanded to reveal an irregular body of water entirely surrounded by land.
Less than a second of electronic noise issued from the huge mechanical life-form. “In terms of local measurement, the cube is two hundred and fifty miles from our present position. A distance easily and clandestinely traversed.”
Jazz’s response took nanoseconds, the sonic alien equivalent of a single Chinese glyph. “They have Bumblebee!”
“Bumblebee is a brave soldier who understands and accepts the risks of our war,” Optimus replied solemnly. Sonics gave way to common English. “For the sake of practice and gaining familiarity with idiom, we should speak now in the language of our new home.”
“Our new home?” Ratchet was clearly bemused even as he complied with the directive.
Optimus turned to regard his colleague. “I have had sufficient time to ponder all possible ramifications of a multiplicity of actions, and what I have decided is this: if we return the Cube to Cybertron, our war will continue. I postulate eventual victory, but not for a minimum of another thousand years. We have been fighting so long, I can remember nothing else.” With a sweep of one great arm he took in their surroundings: quiet, tranquil, and at peace, albeit unsettlingly organic. “The opportunity to live, to exist in a state of being other than perpetual combat, lies here, on this world. The madness ends today.”
“But how?” Jazz understandably wanted to know.
Optimus proceeded to reveal that he had indeed thought out the situation in depth. “When we reach the Cube, I will join it with my spark.”
Ratchet was openly appalled. “But an energy resurgence of that magnitude will destroy you both!”
“I will not allow the humans to become a casualty of our war,” their leader declared firmly. “That is not our way. If we have battled so long for naught else, we have fought for that much. It is an immediately achievable goal. To fight to preserve life, however different it may be from our own.” He hesitated for a split second. “That is a belief worth dying for.”
One by one his counterparts closed in around him. They transformed together, reasserting the aboriginal mechanical forms they had adopted in order to be able to conceal themselves among the humans. Optimus studied his companions. Though still machines, they looked wholly terrestrial. What would be an appropriate indigenous designation for bots of this kind? Conscious of his own directive to utilize local language and idioms wherever possible, he followed through as he voiced his next command.
“Autobots—roll out.”
* * *
It was very early and the sun was just raising its scorching self above the sere brown rocks of the desert horizon. These first rays found the three big army choppers traveling low and fast over the desiccated terrain. Each carried a different human cargo. Each component of that cargo had its own perspective on the incredible events of the past several days.
Sam Witwicky and Mikaela Banes sat on the bench on the left side of the middle chopper’s cargo hold, Maggie Madsen and Glen Whitmann on the other. All wore advanced radio headsets that for some time now had told them absolutely nothing. They had been exchanging uncertain, uneasy looks ever since they had been loaded onto the copter.
