This story will be build up in the form that every new chapter will show a new time-line. For the next chapters at least, this time-lines will be mostly independent from each other. So this fanfic will be as much a line of different short stories as a single story.


Chapter 2: Empire

The Decepticons had lost the great war. That was it what the history of Cybertron stated.

At least in their home galaxy, that statement was true.

Many of them however, had left Cybertron before the last battles of the war were even fought. Because their group left before the war was decided, they never truly lost.

Realising that the war had become senseless a long time ago, they decided to leave for the unknown regions of space to build up their own worlds without any interference from the Autobots.

But also the Decepticons themselves had changed. After 9 million years of war, after the destruction of entire worlds, after Unicron, the Quintessons, the transorganics, Cabal and countless other terrors, even many of the Decepticons had grown tired of war.

And they have learned from their experiences. They changed many of their agressive policies. Their allience with Lord Zarak´s nebulons and their binary bonding, had shown them the worth other species could have as allies and not only as subjects. The most of the worlds they colonised were not populated anyway and on the ones that were, they tried to in the most parts to come to an agreement with the natives and to recruit some of them as new head- target- and powermasters or as guards, technicians and workers. In the end, this faction of the Decepticons got the empire they had wanted, even if it looked completely different from what they had expected.

Despite all that, many of them asked themselves often how it had been if the Decepticons had actually won the war.

In one world, that question was actually answered. While in timeline 0, the assassination attempt on the Autobot leader Optimus Prime was prevented, here, the renegade who called himself after Megatron had succeeded.

xxx

"Megatron no", Optimus Primal called out.

"Too late Optimus", the Predacon renegade replied, "too late."

Megatron fired. His shot hit the Autobot leader Optimus Prime directly in the head. And in this world, the damage wasn´t able to be repaired.

In this world, the assasination attempt by the renegade leader was successful and as a result, the timeline changed. Everything what should have been was devoured by a time storm.

Optimus Prime was dead.

As the Transformers reawakened, millions of years later, the Autobots were without their leader. Disorganised and without a clear command, they could barely hold themselves against the Decepticons. Even worse was the moralic backlash for them. The Autobot who had been leading them for over five million years, was gone, killed without anybody truly realising how and when. Optimus didn´t go out in some glorious battle, like the most would have expected of him, he died in a space ship crash.

Nobody know exactly what had really happened, if the impact had killed him or if it was, something else. The cause of his death seemed to be a strange head wound, that nobody could really explain. Everybody remembered that Optimus had still been active and unwounded when the ship went down. It was thought that this had somehow happened during the crash, but as Ratchet stated, it didn´t really made sense. Some even speculated that a Decepticon assassin had sneaked into the ship and killed him when everybody was out. But why should such a assassin only kill Optimus and just let the other Autobots lay untouched and not reactivate the Decepticons when he had the chance. It didn´t really made sense. In the end it was only an attempt to explain afterwards what had happened.

After all this time, it was no longer possible to find out. Ultimately it wasn´t really important anyway. What mattered was that he was gone.

From the moment they had reawakened on earth, the Decepticons had the upper hand over their enemies

Even Megatron saw this situation with mixed feelings. His troops were now raiding the ressources of the planet earth. Soon they would be ready to completely revitalize Cybertron with energy and to fully charge all their troops.

They were winning the war.

The loss of Optimus Prime had brought Megatron over short or long to the road of victory. Despite that, a part of him was actually unsettled by Optimus mysterious and unexplained death.

And of course he regretted the fact that he wouldn´t have the chance to fight and kill Optimus Prime himself. His most dangerous enemy and sole competitor for five million years and in the end, his triumph over him was simply robbed from Megatron. Of course he wouldn´t let such silent regrets stand between him and victory.

Despite their fractured state, the Autobots on earth, under the leadership of Jazz and Prowl, were still fighting back and holding up resistence. For a time, they were able to delay the advance of the Decepticons. After five battles they had been completely defeated. Optimus Prime´s former Ark crew died, fighting till the last Bot.

In the following months, Megatron´s troops took control over the rest of the planet. Earth became a colony of the Decepticon empire. Over new build ships and space bridges, energon was transported to Cybertron.

The entire Decepticon army was reactivated and recharged to their full strength. Cybertron itself was revitalized to it´s state before the war. The last Autobots were hunted down and either killed or forced off planet. Less than two years after the Transformers were reactivated on earth, the great cybertronian war was over.

Under the leadership of Ultra Magnus, the last surviving Autobots fled into exile and left this part of the galaxy. Like some of the Decepticons in another world, they started anew there and build up a new world for themselves.

The Decepticons in their world on the other side, were by far not finished. After Cybertron and earth, they went out to conquer other planets. First were the planet Tlalaka, the relative primitive population was subjucated and put to work, next was a pre-industrial world named Tam and then followed some of the higher developed civilisations, Athenia and the robot world Lithone, all this worlds became part of the Decepticon empire, if the natives wanted or not.

At the planet Dredd they eliminated the monster named Chaos and then took control of this world.

On Monacus, one of the greatest criminal centres in the galaxy, they started an invasion. The ruling gangs and syndicats were disbanded, their bosses executed and their members send to prison worlds, the planet itself put under the rule of the empire.

Their expanse was only halted as they ran into the Quintesson race, that was the begin of a line of wars with them. The Quintessons, an ancient, half organic and half mechanical species, that was holding robots as slaves, turned out to be the greatest threat for the Decepticon empire since the Autobots.

But also they were defeated.

They, as it turned out were the aliens who ruled over Cybertron millions of years before and had enslaved the Transformers. Many Decepticons were enthralled about the idea to go to war against their former masters, seeing it as a strain on their history and vowted the complete destruction of their enemies.

The war against them took seven years. In the end however, the ressources and power of the Decepticon empire was to great. The Quintessons were losing ground more and more.

During the later half of the war, they made a decision concerning some of their "client worlds". The planets Lanark and Xintaxis had been at war with each other for centuries. Unknown to everyone, the Quintessons were playing them against each other, keeping the war going on and selling weapons to both sides.

But now the truth was slowly threatening to come out. The Quints feared that the two races that they have exploited for so long would now turn against them instead of fighting each other and with ungoing war with the Dcepticons, they could not afford another enemy, even less two. So they decided to attack both worlds with global weapons of mass destruction and exterminate the population. The surface of the planets was devastated, both races brought close to extinction.

For the Quintessons however, it made no difference in the end. Their fleets were destroyed, their Sharkticon armies decimated and they were about to be pushed back to their home system.

Megatron himself led the attack on Quintessa. After the last defending troops were destroyed, the home-world of their enemies was being burned down, every ship in orbit destroyed, every they found Quintesson killed. The few survivors fled out of known space.

With their victory over the Quintessons, the Decepticon empire was the strongest known force in the galaxy. Over a dozen major worlds were under their rule, hundreds of outposts and bases through known space, their influence reached over a great part of the universe and they were still growing.

xxx

But it wouldn´t last, Ultra Magnus knew.

The Cybertron of this world was destinied to be destroyed by Unicron.

xxx

In this world, the Matrix had survided the assassination of Optimus. It had even survived the millions of years it had been lieing dormant in the Ark and made it´s way back into the hands of the Autobots on Cybertron.

And as they had finally left the galaxy, they had taken it with them.

For that reason alone it would not be there when it was needed.

xxx

What Ultra Magnus didn´t knew, was that in his last moments, on his battleship, even Megatron was asking himself what could have been and what he could have done if things turned out differently.