Transformers, page 21
“Ohhh,” Simmons was murmuring knowingly as he considered the device, “cell phones can be real nasty.”
Banachek passed the phone to one of the technicians. Opening the box, the man placed it inside and proceeded to attach to it a couple of cables no bigger than wires. He then stepped back, closed the box, and locked it down with enough seals to secure a rampaging wolf.
“Goggles everyone, please?” Banachek advised them. No one saw fit to argue with him by not donning theirs. Once everyone had proper protection in place, he moved to a console and thumbed controls. Energy flowed into the transparent box—a minuscule bit of energy channeled from the Cube in the next room.
Sam and Mikaela leaned forward. Was the phone shaking? It began to vibrate violently, trembling on the platform inside the see-through box. Without warning it sprang to loud life, blasting music into the room. The box, clearly, was not soundproofed.
Then the phone began to transform.
Lacking intelligence, without anything to guide it but with the Cube spark to animate it, the device went mad. Legs and arms sprouted in all directions. Impelled by the powerful but aimless life force with which it had just been imbued, the trembling, jerking, writhing mechanism threw itself violently against the side of the transparent enclosure, fighting to break out. Every one of the newcomers instinctively jumped backward, away from the insanely flailing machine. Looking on as it all but beat itself to pieces against the unyielding transparent polycarbonate, Maggie thought it entirely appropriate that the music that was blasting from its outraged speaker was thrash metal.
“Mean little sucker, ain’t it? Kinda like the Energizer Bunny from hell.” Fearlessly, Simmons approached the container. Sensing his presence, the transformed multilimbed phone began battering rabidly at the transparency that was all that separated him from the soft-fleshed human. Leaning toward the box, the agent studied it phlegmatically. When he had seen enough, he nodded at Banachek. “Better zap the little freak. Before it figures a way out.”
Removing a small cylindrical charge from a standing container full of them, the other agent slipped it into a straightline tube that pierced one side of the container. Patiently, he waited until the struggling phone was directly opposite the tube before pushing a switch. The box was filled with a blinding flash. When it cleared, everyone could see that the insane shrieking mechanism had been torn apart. Emitting a horrific electronic squeal, it flipped onto its back. Everyone could clearly see the hole in the center of its body where frame and components were melting away. The steaming circle continued to widen as they looked on.
Stunned silence filled the room. One by one, the numbed spectators removed their protective goggles and handed them wordlessly back to the waiting techs. Simmons grinned, contentedly this time.
“Well whaddya know: sabot rounds work. Even mini sabot rounds.” Reaching out, he gave Lennox an approving smack on the shoulder. “Nice work.”
The Ranger captain took a deliberate step away from the agent. “Don’t touch me.” His tone was not hostile, just very matter-of-fact. Nonetheless, there was no mistaking the implication that underlay it.
Steel and bolts notwithstanding, Glen promptly rushed the lab’s vault-like inner door. “Okay, Grandma needs her insulin. I’m out. You hear me? Find somebody else to help you. Go ahead and shoot me if you want to, but I’m—”
The floor rocked beneath them. Not enough to knock anyone off their feet, but sufficient to indicate that for a locality that was supposed to be tectonically inert, something was badly wrong. If they could have seen the approaching transformed bots, from the F-22 Raptor to the MH-53 assault helicopter to the eclectic assortment of oddly perfect vehicles that was presently rushing the dam, Sam and Mikaela would have felt considerably worse.
A lack of familiarity with Decepticons and their capabilities did nothing to still the tide of dread that was rising inside Maggie. Moving to the port that overlooked the Cube suspended in the larger room nearby, she gazed anxiously at the alien relic. It was completely covered in static alien glyphs—except that some of them now seemed to have acquired a slight shimmer. Nothing more than a trick of the artificial lighting—she hoped.
Lennox was looking upward. “Those are concussion blasts. Could be terrorists—or something else.”
Keller bit his lower lip. “Terrorists could never get this close to the dam. Security is too tight. Has to be something more than that. Bigger than that.” The secretary did not have to further identify the unstated “something.” Everyone in the lab knew who he meant. Knew what he meant. Turning, he looked toward the chamber that held the silent, pulsing Energon Cube.
“They know it’s here.”
High above the canyon of the Colorado, a pilotless F-22 swooped in low and dragon-like over the dam. The missiles it unleashed struck the main aboveground electrical distribution complex. Immediately, significant portions of the city of Las Vegas went silent and dark.
In the old laboratory far below, lights exploded and instrumentation went crazy. The lab went black, but only for a moment until battery backup power kicked in. Lennox didn’t know about the others, but he for one was not about to wait around toothless for the next strike. Terrorists or Decepticons, he was not about to go naked into the good day. Turning, he put himself right in Simmons’s face and demanded:
“Where’s your security armory?”
Meanwhile, in another room that was much larger but not very far away, power to a special cooling system failed. Emergency backup immediately came online. Initial panic among the technicians began to subside. It resumed full-bore when backup power, too, suddenly vanished. Essential readouts were frantically checked, vital monitors scanned. The junction where the flow of backup power had been cut could be located, but could the key failure be repaired in time?
Not if the spidery mechanoid called Frenzy had anything to do with it. Unseen and unchallenged, it roamed through the most sensitive concatenations of circuitry and linkages, snipping cables, frying microchips, and generally wreaking nonstop havoc with the intricate system that maintained the vast room at a specific predetermined temperature.
That room was beginning to warm up.
With the power to them now cut off, clamps and cables holding the huge mechanoid steady and stable in the center of the room began to retract. Some of the technicians began to flee the observation deck, running like mad for the elevators.
Lennox and the others had no time to flee. But the security armory was close by. The captain felt much better as soon as he was cradling one of the high-tech handheld rocket launchers in his arms. Together with the few Sector Seven agents Banachek had been able to round up, Lennox and his men began feeding the weapons dozens of recently arrived compact sabot rounds. As loading continued, everyone present spun possible options.
“Nellis Air Base is fifty miles away,” Keller remembered. “They can have air support here in ten minutes.”
Maggie had been employing every kind of work-around she knew to try and coax a response from her phone—to no avail. “Everything’s still out.” A distraught Glen eyed her meaningfully.
“You wouldn’t get a signal down here even if they were working.” He gestured upward with an index finger. “All those football fields’ worth of concrete, remember?”
“I thought there might be embedded relays …,” she began. Ignoring the others, the two of them fell to discussing possibilities for communicating with the outside world.
Sam, on the other hand, felt he knew exactly what had to be done. “You gotta take me to my car!” He was doing everything but kicking Simmons in a frantic effort to get the agent’s attention. “He’ll know what to do with that Cube!”
The agent finally deigned to notice him. “You nuts?” Simmons gestured back in the direction of the lab they had just fled. “You saw what just a drop of that energy can do to even a small machine. We have no idea what might happen if we let one of these more advanced Transformer-things near it.”
Sam met the older man’s gaze without flinching. “You wanna find out what’ll happen if we don’t?”
Another concussion coursed through the ground under their feet. Lennox confronted the agent. “I’ve seen what these things can do. If whatever is here now is anything like the ones I and my people had to deal with in Qatar and they get hold of that Cube’s energy, we’re dead anyway.”
Glaring at both of them, Simmons protested loudly. “He’s a delinquent! You expect us to believe a—”
Grabbing the agent by the front of his jacket, an enraged Lennox lifted him off the ground and slammed him up against the wall. Immediately the Sector Seven agents in the armory drew their weapons. So did the captain’s men.
Lennox’s tone was low and tight, his words careful and distinct. “Listen to me. I got a wife who’s wasting away waiting for me to come home and a baby I’ve never even seen and I promised a good man as he was dying in my arms that we’d waste these things and you haven’t got an idea in hell what to do next, so take the kid to his damn car!”
The tension in the armory was thick enough to cut with a knife, except that it would have upset the shaky balance of power. In the ensuing silence, Keller took a deliberate step toward Banachek.
“I’d do what the captain says. Losing’s really not an option for these guys.”
Torn between several options, none of them promising, and unsure how to proceed, Banachek continued to hesitate. “If the boy is wrong, we could be unleashing hell.”
Holding his recently acquired weapon at the ready, Epps let out a short, scornful laugh. “We’ve already been in hell.”
Simmons’s expression changed from natural defiance to a resigned sneer as he relaxed in Lennox’s grasp. “All right, sure, why not? Hey, you wanna lay the fate of the world on the goodwill of a kid’s Camaro? That’s cool.”
While the soldiers, agents, and visitors in the lab tried to decide how best to proceed, the now-unclamped and fully defrosted monster in the silo not far away was starting to awaken. Electronic synapses pulsed with renewed energy. Permanently self-lubricating joints began to stir. Enormous limbs ran checks on the condition of their long-dormant extremities. Dark irises expanded. Consciousness was returning to Megatron, and the cosmos would be the worse for it.
Optics began to focus. On the floor and within the observation deck techs and scientists and maintenance personnel were now fleeing in all directions as they scrambled to reach the nearest exits. Behind them, the first electronic utterance to emerge from the gigantic long-quiescent mechanoid was accomplished with the expenditure of a barely measurable amount of energy.
“INSECTS.”
Contemptuously shaking off the last of the restraints that had held it in place for so many years, the first of the great metal limbs began to move forward.
In a separate containment area, Bumblebee remained secured to an examination slab. Lights of different wavelengths bombarded both the platform and its imprisoned occupant. Mists that had been treated with various chemicals drifted over the struggling subject and were drawn into multiple collection tubes. The venue was loud and unpleasant.
Sam had to yell at the top of his lungs as the door to the examination area burst open and he rushed in, followed by his companions and the two groups of armed agents and soldiers.
“Stop! You gotta let him go!”
Banachek had hurried over to the researcher in charge. Flashing a badge, he nodded agreement. “It’s okay, release it. My authority.”
Despite the racket, Sam overheard. “He’s not an ‘it’!”
Puffing, Keller came up alongside Banachek. If the agent’s security clearance was not sufficient to justify the release of the mechanoid currently undergoing examination, the presence of the secretary of defense certainly was. Feeling covered, the lead researcher relayed the necessary orders.
Study lights winked off and the cloud of sensing gas began to dissipate, sucked away by concealed fans. Bindings and clamps were withdrawn. When the last of them had pulled away, the robot on the rack sat up as Sam raced over to check on his—friend.
“You okay?”
The Transformer looked down at the young human. The song that emerged from within the metal body was perfectly appropriate to their reunion.
“Yeah, yeah,” Sam responded, “it’s great to see you, too, but listen to me. The Cube’s here, so is Megatron, and we’re pretty sure the Decepticons are coming for both of them!”
Instantly the yellow-and-black robot was on its—on his—feet and racing for the access door. With shorter strides and considerably more apprehension, the growing knot of humans followed. Fresh shocks passing through the surrounding concrete knocked lines and supports, old plaster and paneling from the ceiling as they ran.
Halfway to the exit, Keller spotted the secret installation’s central research room. He started to tell his idea to Banachek, reconsidered, and instead found himself making the suggestion to the attractive young woman with green streaks in her hair who was running alongside him.
“National Guard radio may still be up and functioning. We can try and get word out over rudimentary frequencies.”
She considered, nodded approval, and turned to Glen. In the absence of his usual Fruity Pebbles fuel he was having a hard time keeping up.
“Can you hotwire some old gear to transmit simple Morse?”
Panting hard, he replied while shaking his head. “I dunno, I dunno. Maybe. I’m a coder and a decrypter, not an electrician.”
“Bull,” she shot back. “I’ve seen you build portable drives out of crap RadioShack throws out as unsalable. I know you can do something this uncomplicated.”
“All right, yeah—get on it!” Pacing effortlessly nearby, Lennox drifted over to the two youths. “Make contact with Nellis if you can. You get our birds in the air, then when we get wherever we’re going we’ll find some kind of transmitter and Epps can vector ’em in.” His expression was feral. “Put ’em right on top of these Decepticons of yours.”
Simmons stared at him. “How the hell’re you gonna do that?”
Lennox grinned over at the agent. “Improvise.”
Keller leaned close to Sam. At that moment he was not the secretary of defense of the United States, one of the most powerful men in the world. He was merely an older man urging on a younger one.
“Never, never give up, son. Do it—go!”
Sam responded with a nod as the group separated, with Keller, Maggie, Glen, and Simmons heading for the research room.
Having been informed via runners about what was happening throughout the complex, the researchers in the Cube-holding chamber were not startled when the group of soldiers and youths burst in. There was a moment of confrontation during which the guards who had arrived in small military vehicles had to be convinced to place themselves under Lennox’s orders. Having Banachek present as a leader of Sector Seven and taking the captain’s side greatly facilitated the hasty handover of command.
It was much harder to convince the technicians charged with monitoring the Cube to step back from what for many of them had been their life’s work and let an alien robot take control. Lennox and his men felt no such restraints. Having been witness to the deaths of many of their comrades at the hands of malevolent versions of such machines, they were eager to have one on their side for a change.
Another explosion shook their surroundings. Shielding his head from falling debris, Epps shouted at the advancing Bumblebee, “Do your alien thing fast, big guy. I don’t like enclosed places. Remind me too much of coffins.”
Bumblebee reached the Cube. For an instant he hesitated and simply stared. The artifact before him was, after all, the original source of all life energy for his kind. It was not quite like a human confronting God. More akin, Mikaela found herself thinking as she looked on, to a sentient laptop being offered a battery that would never run down.
No one asked Bumblebee what he was thinking.
As the robot extended both hands toward the Cube, the ceaseless hum that emanated from it began to rise and fall, to stutter rapidly as it responded to the proximity of a Transformer. Tendrils of energy suddenly arced between the Cube and Bumblebee’s fingers. Some type of contact had definitely been made, Sam was sure as he raised a hand to shield his eyes from the flashing, flaring lights, but it was contact of a kind that could never be known to mere humans. The robot and the Cube were talking with light.
Contact came to an end. There followed a moment of silence that was shocking in its tranquility. Then both Cube and robot began to transform. Sam and Mikaela and the captivated soldiers looked on as Bumblebee bent and twisted before their eyes, first contorting in upon himself, then thrusting blades of metal out and forward, until finally where the robot had been standing there stood nothing more complex and alien than a simple car.
Well, maybe not so simple, Epps thought admiringly. The tricked-out Camaro was pretty slick.
As for the Cube, it had begun the process of transformation by folding in on itself, sides and glyphs and symbols shrinking and contracting, becoming a steadily reducing succession of concentric squares, until at last it had shrunk to something that was no bigger than a football. Resting in the backseat of the car, it presented an appearance that was both harmless and unimpressive. A seat belt rose up seemingly of its own accord to lash it down. Doors snapped open, and the car’s horn honked anxiously.
Sam and Mikaela exchanged a glance. Looking back, Sam saw that the army captain was waiting for him to take the lead, to issue an order—to do something.
Well, why not? he thought. It was his car.
He got behind the wheel while Mikaela climbed in on the other side. In the backseat, something a lot bigger than it looked lay snugged up against the brand-new upholstery. Before either of them could say anything they were thrown back in their own seats as the Camaro peeled out, heading for the exit tunnel. Joining the recently arrived security troops in their compact vehicles, Lennox and his men followed.
