Bella could tell these weren't ordinary meteors.
She shoved her foot into her remaining shoe and slapped the hood of the Camaro. "Bee—back up! Move!"
Bumblebee reversed instantly, putting over a hundred meters (roughly 330 feet) between them and the impact zone. Bella watched the sky with her eyes fixed and narrowed.
Natasha didn't have Bella's long-range vision. She pulled out a compact monocular and tracked the incoming shapes as they grew larger and closer.
No time elapsed between "falling" and "landed."
Four objects punched through the atmosphere, trailing heat, and came down in a stretch of ruined city blocks not far from where they were standing—the kind of urban wreckage the earthquake had left in abundance across Los Angeles.
Bumblebee executed a sharp sliding turn and drove them toward the impact site.
They met at the entrance to a narrow street.
Coming from the far end: a semi-truck in red, a Peterbilt with a long trailer—unmistakable in its size and proportions. From behind Bella and Natasha: a Pontiac sports car, a GMC heavy-duty pickup, and what appeared to be a Hummer modified for search-and-rescue operations.
"This feels like an ambush," Natasha said, hand already on her sidearm, eyes moving between the vehicles ahead and behind. She ran the numbers quickly—her and Bella alone could fight their way out. With Bumblebee added to the equation, it wasn't even close.
Bella wasn't worried. One look at the red Peterbilt and she knew.
She was not, she reminded herself, Sam Witwicky. She was not going to be as frantic as he would have been.
Both groups came to a stop. Natasha kept her hand on her weapon and read the environment. Bumblebee maintained his cover as an ordinary car.
Then came the sound: a cascade of mechanical motion, sharp and complex—parts folding, rotating, locking into place. The red Peterbilt transformed first.
The truck's undercarriage extended into arms. The trailer split and swept outward, its halves becoming the outer edges of enormous legs. Three wheels on each side nested into the thigh assemblies. The cab rolled forward and over, covering the torso, and a head emerged from where the cab's rear had been—rotating up and forward into place with a definitive click.
The figure that stood there was enormous. Ten meters tall (roughly 33 feet), predominantly red and blue. As he completed his transformation, the three vehicles behind Bella also shifted—and Bumblebee, with obvious uncertainty, transformed beside them.
Bumblebee stared at the others. Memory, once lost, couldn't simply be recovered—but something about the assembled figures felt deeply familiar. Not recognized, exactly. Just... close. He didn't raise his weapon.
"Is this memory module damage?" The large one spoke. His voice was measured, deliberate. "Ratchet, your assessment?"
"Bumblebee has definitely suffered amnesia. The damage occurred during atmospheric entry—his memory storage unit sustained significant trauma." She paused. "—who are you? Are you also from Cybertron?"
"Yes." The large one's voice was measured, deliberate—carrying a weight that was harder to place. There was something about him that felt different from Bumblebee's open, almost childlike energy, and different again from Shatter's hot-headed young-fighter swagger. This was something older. Settled. A leader's gravity. "I'm Optimus Prime. Bumblebee's friend."
"The one standing there is Bumblebee, yes. He lost his memories when he entered Earth's atmosphere." She gestured between herself and Natasha. "He's been with us since."
Natasha leaned slightly toward Bella and lowered her voice. "Be careful. This one feels very strong."
"I know," Bella murmured back. "I'll handle the negotiation."
Optimus Prime looked at them for a moment. Then he crouched—a deliberate, unhurried movement—bringing himself down toward their eye level. At full height, the angle was absurd. This was a more respectful arrangement.
Bella appreciated the gesture. But craning her neck upward for a full conversation sounded exhausting, and she'd come prepared. She reached into her bag and produced the flying carpet. She tugged Natasha onto it and they rose—floating up to Optimus Prime's eye level, steady in the air, facing him directly.
The carpet served a second purpose. It established that neither of them was helpless. That if this conversation went sideways, they could move.
She looked at him, then glanced at the three Autobots behind her.
"Hello, Optimus Prime. And to the three of you as well." She kept her tone even, professionally courteous. "You're here looking for Bumblebee?"
Optimus Prime shook his head. "No. I wasn't aware he was with you—I only picked up his signal after we entered Earth's atmosphere." He paused. "We came because we detected Decepticon activity. We're here to stop whatever they're planning, and to locate the AllSpark."
"The AllSpark?" Natasha asked.
"An energy source. A means of augmentation. A primordial artifact with the unique capacity to grant mechanical life." He delivered the explanation without condescension, as though the distinction between those three things mattered and he expected them to follow.
Bella's attention had already moved past the AllSpark. The Decepticons interested her more.
She had no particular need for the AllSpark. Manufacturing hundreds of Transformers wasn't useful on its own—without the leadership template, without whatever authority allowed Optimus to turn even Dinobots toward a cause with a few words about freedom, a mass of newly-created mechanicals was just machinery. That template wasn't a mere artifact; it was the reason Optimus could lead, and why even Megatron—who had held the positions of Cybertron's guardian and Supreme Commander of the Cybertronian Defense Forces—could resist its pull. He was leadership. He didn't need the template to tell him so. Most Transformers were not Megatron.
"When Bumblebee first arrived on Earth," Bella said, "there were two or three Decepticons pursuing him." She skipped past what had happened to Shatter—Bumblebee was too devoted to Optimus; there was no blocking that. But Shatter could stay in the ocean for now. "Are you saying there's a new contingent that's arrived since then?"
Optimus didn't know about Shatter. He didn't know he'd quietly gained a devoted follower either. "Yes. They were on Mars before this. Some intelligence leak—something from Earth's side—gave them a lead."
"How long ago did they pick it up?"
"Approximately thirty Earth days."
Thirty days.
Bella and Natasha looked at each other.
"The timing's slightly off," Natasha murmured.
"Could it be the earlier quake?" Bella thought aloud. "Not the main event—the one before Kitty was born. The Nevada tremors. Something was disrupting signals then that stopped disrupting them the day of the earthquake. Why would a signal be blocked and then released?" She paused. "Unless it was never blocked by natural causes."
Natasha was already ahead of her, pulling the thread faster. As a trained intelligence operative, Natasha could disassemble a lead in ways that left Bella several steps behind. "It was probably actively suppressed. Whatever was doing the suppressing is in Nevada, connected to the earthquake, and associated with extraterrestrial research." She said it almost to herself. Then: "Hoover Dam. Sector Seven maintains a facility there. I remember the intelligence file. They were studying something non-terrestrial. The quake must have disrupted their containment, and when it did, whatever they were holding sent a signal."
Without access to the full picture, working only from intelligence she'd accumulated over years at S.H.I.E.L.D., Natasha had reconstructed roughly eight-tenths of it—the essential shape, if not every detail confirmed.
She was, Bella reflected privately, extraordinarily good at her job.