4.0: After-image

Qosho Region

Cybertron

Within three cycles, the cities of Tarn and Vos had ceased to exist. When the light from the explosions cleared, what was left lay shattered and broken around the rims of the craters, wreathed in smoke and dust billowing up from the gaping wounds in the landscape. Along the Vosian coast, the heat boiled the Iron Sea to vapour. In Tarn's industrial out-lands, factories popped as cleanly as overheated rivets. Munitions, armed and ready for a pitched battle that never came, combusted in their silos, opening fresh chasms in the scorched ground.

Everywhere, people died. Those caught at ground zero were gone in an instant. Those unfortunate enough to be just outside the initial blasts faded more slowly, becoming their own funeral pyres as their fuel ignited in their bodies. Thousands more were left crushed under the wreckage, their lives seeping away as their consciousnesses shattered and distorted with the damage. By the time the echoes of the detonating photon bombs reached Tagen, five million people had been snuffed out. By the time the shock waves reached Kalis, another three hundred thousand had joined them in the Allspark.

The ground would not cool properly for days. From space, the glow of molten metal was a double blotch smeared across three continental plates. They would be distorted forever, marking a million stellar-cycles of history more indelibly than any tower or orbital hub.

Vos had been a jewel, a hymn to flight. Tarn had been a machine, a search for scientific perfection. In their time, they had been among the greatest cities ever built. Their enmity had shaped the world around them. Who would finally emerge from the inevitable conflict had been a topic of speculation and debate for mega-cycles.

Now the academics finally had their answer.

Council Chamber

The Celestial Temple

Iacon

Cybertron

The projectors filled the air above the circle with an unrelenting stream of devastation. Every sky-spy that got through the electromagnetic storm revealed some fresh scene of horror until it became impossible to distinguish the two cities any more and they threatened to blur into a single, immense vision of the Pit itself.

Xaaron let his optics fall. On opposite sides of the Council, the Emirates of Vos and Tarn watched their cities burn, their endless arguments finally rendered utterly meaningless.

"Vosian scum!" Hacaano howled, surging from his seat, transforming to tank mode as he came.

"Barbarians!" Graviitus rose into the air, thrusters blazing, wings snapping open.

Sentinel Prime's spear struck the floor like thunder. "SILENCE!"

They looked up at him in shock and dread, their anger crumbling into hopelessness. The spear slashed downwards in an arc of crackling light. "BEGONE FROM THIS PLACE! For the slaughter they have unleashed on their own citizens, Vos and Tarn are forever expelled from this Council!"

Dignity shredded, shame etched on their faces, the two mechs stumbled out of the circle and half-ran to the doors. They threw despairing looks back at the Prime and, seeing no mercy there, fled, their footsteps echoing back along the Temple's cavernous hallways.

His mouth set grimly, Sentinel spoke to the Supreme Commanders whose holograms still haunted the aether above the Council. "The Defence Directorate will deploy immediately to render aid to those caught up in this atrocity. You will disarm and contain any and all Vos and Tarn soldiers still functional and will extract all survivors to safety. Deca Magnus!"

Another hologram flared into existence, the massive figure of the Magnus jittering and shimmering with movement as it rendered him in the middle of frantic coordination. He bowed the briefest of bows to Sentinel. "My Prime. Civic Guard units are on route to the disaster zone. Special medical teams have already reached the Qosho Region and will be on the ground in less then two deca-cycles."

"We are grateful for your swiftness of action, Magnus. Defence Directorate forces are on their way as well."

Magnus nodded. "So I understand. That's good. We are going to need as much help as we can get. Now, forgive me, my Prime, I am boarding a flight as we speak –"

"Go well. You have the full backing of the Council. Whatever you need, you shall have."

Deca's image vanished and Xaaron wondered if the practical-minded mech believed that the Council really would be bound by that promise – if anyone from the highest Elite to the lowest labour grade would believe it. On recent evidence, it would have been easy to think otherwise. Even the Prime's intervention had come so late in the day as to be ultimately useless.

Sacred trusts had been shattered, perhaps irrevocably. The consequences were appalling and were counted in the number of the dead. To set it all right was going to take a great deal of will and effort, more perhaps than Cybertron's many governments had shown since their foundations.

Xaaron quietly resumed his seat and signalled for his brother Emirates' attention.

There was no more time to waste.