Inside the command bridge of the Ark, Teletraan I's primary radar instantly flagged the strangely familiar, purple-grey wedge silhouette.
Wheeljack's expression shifted instantly. "Frag, it is the Decepticon flagship, the Nemesis!"
"They truly tracked our telemetry," the surrounding survivors muttered, their internal systems instantly tightening with anxiety.
One wrong calculation here, and their signatures would be permanently deleted from the active roster today.
Since Teletraan I had pinpointed the dreadnought, the scanners aboard the Nemesis had naturally locked onto the Ark as well.
The heavy barrel of the orbital bombardment cannon along the flagship's spine pulsed with a violent light, gathering a massive energy charge.
After a few brief seconds of calibration, a superheated particle beam tore through the void, tracking straight toward the Ark.
Hum...
At the exact fraction of a second, the streams of blue particle fire surging from the Ark's rear thrusters flared to maximum output.
Flash!
Moving at near-instantaneous velocity, the superheated beam cut through the upper atmosphere of Hecate, missing the hull entirely.
The stray kinetic energy went wild, expanding into the deep void of space like an untamed beast.
Behind it, the blast left nothing but a distorted, shimmering wake of warped atmospheric pressure.
With its propulsion arrays fully engaged, the Ark smoothly demonstrated a baseline flight capability that easily rivaled the Nemesis.
Of course, that metric held true only when measuring defensive shielding and raw atmospheric mobility.
As a vessel redesigned purely for global survival, the weapon modules integrated into the Ark's hull were remarkably few.
Missing the opening strike didn't cause the Nemesis to drop its pursuit parameters.
The dreadnought closed the distance rapidly as the Ark climbed through the upper layers of Hecate's atmosphere, firing its heavy batteries continuously.
The Ark held zero desire to entangle its systems in a prolonged fleet battle, ignoring the incoming fire to push its velocity metrics even higher.
The moment it broke clean from the moon's gravitational pull, the ship single-mindedly locked its trajectory onto a solitary deep-space vector.
Far behind the retreating vessel, deep within the command bridge of the Nemesis.
Watching the Ark slip cleanly out of his primary weapons range, Skygnaw sat relaxed upon his massive throne, slowly cutting the ship's acceleration parameters.
The Autobots were executing a full retreat, but he held absolute zero intention of abandoning his assets on Cybertron just yet.
This marked his absolute first engagement in deep-space fleet warfare, and though the target had escaped, he felt no trace of disappointment.
If anything, his processors felt a lingering wave of raw excitement.
His navigation subroutines were still uncalibrated for high-speed ship maneuvers, and the Autobots were purely focused on fleeing, refusing to engage his hull head-on.
The automated point-defense networks and localized laser batteries were strictly effective at mid-to-close range, leaving him reliant solely on the orbital bombardment cannon.
Although the system carried the designation of an orbital gun, there were zero hardcoded rules restricting its deployment against enemy starships.
However, because the weapon required a set duration to fully charge its capacitors, it was structurally unsuited for high-mobility dogfights, traditionally deployed against static planetary strongholds.
Staring into the endless expanse of the dark void where the Ark's signature had completely vanished into the stars, Skygnaw pulled the primary manual lever, banking the massive prow around.
Laserbeak's intelligence had simply arrived a fraction of a cycle too late.
The moment Shockwave passed the spy bird's telemetry logs to his personal network, Skygnaw had launched the Nemesis from the capital's hangars.
He had calculated a sudden surprise slaughter to show the resistance the true meaning of a qualitative disparity in power.
He simply hadn't anticipated that the Autobots would be desperate enough to successfully ignite the Ark's long-dormant engines.
Hecate, Sector Sixteen.
Laserbeak and Ratbat glided down, touching their boots onto the rim of the massive jagged volcanic trench.
"Ratbat, observe! It is the subterranean sanctuary of the Autobot resistance!"
"My sensors register the infrastructure, but their signatures have completely cleared the grid."
Before their vocalizers could exchange another data point, the colossal, violet-grey wedge of the super-dreadnought slowly descended over their helms.
"The Nemesis!"
Laserbeak's audio arrays clicked with intense excitement; though he had missed the orbital duel, he had just received a direct signal from Skygnaw himself.
Without that administrative clearance, neither he nor Ratbat would have dared to approach the drop zone.
The Nemesis leveled out at a set altitude, hovering silently over the chasm.
Stepping onto the primary exterior deck, Skygnaw cast his optics downward, his interest immediately captured by the structural layout of the Autobot base.
"Razorclaw, lead a vanguard team into the lower levels to run a complete sweep."
"Right away, my lord."
Razorclaw deployed his boosters, leading the Predacons and a small detachment of infantry straight off the boarding ramp.
For this rapid lunar transit, Skygnaw had mobilized only the Predacon squad and a fraction of his Aerospace Force.
His personal combat specs were more than enough to handle any resistance, but keeping a heavy crew aboard the dreadnought was an operational necessity.
"Commander Skygnaw," Laserbeak and Ratbat signaled, clearing the perimeter to touch down onto the ship's primary deck.
"Why do my scanners register only the two of you?" Skygnaw asked, raising an eyebrow in mild confusion.
According to Shockwave's logs, Soundwave's remaining lunar surveillance division was comprised of five distinct operatives.
"Commander, a short duration ago, our scouts intercepted the Autobot Stereo Force cell."
"The Aerialbots executed a sudden deployment to reinforce their position; Overkill, Slugfest, and Rumble were permanently deactivated during the engagement."
"Is that so," Skygnaw replied with a slow nod, his expression remaining perfectly unreadable.
He didn't waste processing power asking why the ground grunts had been disassembled while the airborne spies escaped unharmed.
Tactical losses were a standard baseline in warfare, and termination was a daily routine for a Decepticon soldier.
Furthermore, the casualties belonged exclusively to Soundwave's specialized division, completely separate from his own Aerospace Force, meaning the inventory loss didn't affect his assets.
A brief duration later, Razorclaw's thrusters roared as he ascended from the volcanic breach, settling back onto the deck to deliver his report.
"Commander, the interior is completely hollow; the Autobots have wiped their data tracks."
"Understood."
Discovering the nest empty didn't surprise Skygnaw's calculations.
The scale of their exit vector spoke for itself; since they had successfully mobilized a resource-guzzler on the level of the Ark, they were obviously executing a permanent relocation campaign.
Their destination required zero calculation; they were undoubtedly mapping a transit vector straight toward Earth to regroup with Optimus Prime.
"Recall the deployment wings immediately, and as for this hidden base..." Skygnaw cast a cold glance toward Razorclaw. "Your programming knows exactly how to process the structures?"
A functional underground facility held zero value to his current long-term logistics; it simply represented a waste of monitoring resources.
"Your intent is clear, Commander."
Razorclaw understood the underlying script perfectly, diving back off the deck to execute the demolition parameters.
The Predacon captain harbored his own internal calculations; now that Skygnaw held a Leader-class classification alongside Lord Megatron, his authority would inevitably rival the warlord himself.
Rumors whispered that the Air Commander held the intact chassis of a High Commander in his private storage, and if Razorclaw pushed his performance metrics to the absolute peak, he might secure a chance to elevate his own tier.
Lost in his dreams of securing a Commander-class evolution, Razorclaw cleared the lower infantry lines from the chasm before descending alone into the core of the base.
A moment after his silhouette cleared the entrance, a catastrophic series of explosions ripped through the underground foundations.
BOOM...
The towering plumes of fire and violent shockwaves tearing through the trench failed to register even a single vibration across the hovering frame of the Nemesis.
Skygnaw returned to the high bridge tower, and the primary propulsion engines hummed back online.
Executing a slow orbital cruise around Hecate, Skygnaw's scanners mapped out an immense network of dormant manufacturing shipyards scattered across the craters.
This discovery represented the absolute cornerstone required to anchor his long-term strategy of forging a private star-fleet.
He felt a profound sense of cosmic alignment, though his processors noted that his grid still lacked the raw fuel to fire up the assembly lines.
The geographical advantage and the necessary workforce were fully secured; his network simply required a massive influx of raw materials to bridge the final gap.
"Where should my scouts deploy to harvest the necessary resources to forge a fleet?" Skygnaw pondered silently.
Hecate was a typical satellite planet, its surface composed of exceptionally dense metallic rock, while its deep core was a frozen block of ice, lacking any rich mineral anomalies to mine.
Fabricating advanced warships wasn't like stacking primitive building blocks; even if he systematically scraped every city ruin across Cybertron, the metal wouldn't yield enough refined components to build half a dreadnought.
The dynamic was identical to comparing a terrestrial aircraft carrier to common structural concrete; no matter how much raw stone you melted down, it would never yield military-grade composites.
The quality tier was completely mismatched.
Yet, a massive, unharvested resource world already sat perfectly marked within his database.
"Then again, continuously stripping all my assets from Earth feels slightly uncreative, does it not?"
Skygnaw idly rubbed his chin; the galaxy contained hundreds of billions of stellar bodies, and the solar system sat right at the absolute rim of their charted sector, making it a perfectly convenient neighbor.
Throughout the seven millennia of the civil war, both factions had deployed countless deep-range expeditions to harvest resources across the void, yet Earth remained the solitary world of its tier discovered so far.
Whether the environment was biologically habitable mattered zero to his calculations, since Cybertronian terraforming technology could easily reshape any atmospheric envelope to match their needs.
Looking strictly at the raw material metrics, Megatron's continuous fixation on that blue planet proved that the warlord's long-term strategy was heavily influenced by the world's natural reserves.
Megatron had initially declared war on the natives to secure the AllSpark, later aligning with The Fallen to harvest the sun, but his decision to remain entrenched on the planet today carried a much deeper meaning.
The official logs claimed it was driven purely by his absolute hatred for the Autobots and Optimus Prime, but Skygnaw knew that if Megatron ordered a full withdrawal back to Cybertron, the Prime would never remain behind to play protector to the organics.
"Never mind. The timeline still holds a comfortable margin; let us return to the capital first," he decided, cutting the line of inquiry.
In the canonical records, Sentinel Prime's discovery by the Autobots wouldn't manifest until after the human named Sam had completed his academic graduation cycles.
Currently, the boy had only just entered his university curriculum, meaning his calculations held a safe window of two to three orbital cycles before the events triggered.
Two or three years was a mere micro-cycle to the vast lifespan of a Cybertronian, yet it provided more than enough time for him to manipulate the board.
During his previous deployment to the lunar sectors, Megatron had obviously finalized a secret covenant with Sentinel Prime.
In other words, the warlord held zero logical reasons to leave the ancient leader asleep inside his flagship indefinitely.
Although Skygnaw hadn't witnessed Sentinel clearing the hull before his own departure from the moon, field logs from Onslaught indicated that Megatron frequently conducted covert transits to meet a hidden entity across the western sectors of Earth.
He deduced that the mystery entity was undeniably Sentinel Prime.
Evidently, the ancient leader was spending this multi-year window either repairing his physical frame or quietly executing the foundational layouts for his grand campaign to rebuild their home world.
He was simply waiting for the optimal chronological alignment before allowing Optimus Prime to stumble across his coordinates by accident.
The Solar System, Earth.
"Silverbolt, our tracking systems confirm absolute proximity to the target planet."
The compact command deck of the Ark was tightly packed with Autobot warriors.
The remaining members of the Aerialbots stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the surviving Wreckers.
Hound and Silverbolt anchored the forward viewport, standing flanking Wheeljack as they kept their optics locked onto the beautiful blue sphere expanding across the Teletraan I display screen.
"So that is the exact world where Optimus Prime has established his garrison; it is truly magnificent..."
Navigating a transit across the stars to reach this coordinate had required only a few brief solar cycles, a speed variable that left Wheeljack deeply surprised.
He had calculated that the Prime was entrenched on a world drifting far beyond their local sector, never expecting the vector to terminate within an adjacent star system.
Since the distance was this trivial, why had the Autobots' early global tracking arrays completely failed to register the presence of this world?
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