For twenty-five years the colossal battle between Megatron and Optimus Prime has captivated Transformers fans around the world. Now, for the first time, here is the thrilling saga of Optimus and Megatron before they were enemies, before they arrived on Earth, before they even knew each other. On the caste-bound planet of Cybertron, Megatron, an undefeated gladiator, gives voice to the unspoken longings of the oppressed masses—and opens the mind of Orion Pax, an insignificant data clerk who will become Optimus Prime. What happens between Orion Pax and Megatron forever changes the destiny of all Transformers. This gripping, action-packed novel reveals all the loyalties and treacheries, trust and betrayals, deadly violence and shining ideals, as well as the pivotal roles played by other well-known characters. Discover how meek disciple Orion Pax becomes the fearless leader Optimus Prime; follow the tantalizing clues about the lost Matrix of Leadership and the lore surrounding it; find out why the two allies fighting a corrupt regime suddenly turn on each other, and what triggers their epic war. Transformers: Exodus provides everything fans ever wanted to know about one of the fiercest rivalries of all time.   Transformers © 2011 Hasbro Inc.  HASBRO and its logo, TRANSFORMERS and all related characters, are trademarks of Hasbro and are used with permission. Transformers: Exodus is precisely the origin story that the franchise needed. It’s entertaining, filled with the sort of epic battles Transformers lend themselves to, and keeps the reader breathless with anticipation even though we already know how it ends.  [I]n the framework of a political revolution and the civil war that overthrows a system that had practically calcified, there are terrible fights, friendships made and broken, and the beginnings of a genuine epic; above all, it’s fun to read.  —Booklist Alex Irvine ’s novels include Buyout, The Narrows, A Scattering of Jades, and the novelization of the film Iron Man 2 . He also is the author of nonfiction books including The Vertigo Encyclopedia and John Winchester’s Journal, as well as the comic series Daredevil Noir and Hellstorm, Son of Satan: Equinox. A past winner of the Locus, Crawford, and International Horror Guild awards, he teaches at the University of Maine. Chapter One The Hall of Records in Iacon was closed to the public. In the archive stacks, at a workstation where he had been installed following the tradition and practice of his caste, sat a monitor named Orion Pax. He was tapped into the Communications Grid that invisibly spanned all of Cybertron, monitoring and recording every communication that passed through the Grid. Those that met certain criteria, he listened to, annotated, categorized, and saved in a different sector of the DataNet. Like much of the rest of the great city of Iacon, the Hall was constructed of a golden-hued alloy that lent itself to the curving architectural style that predominated elsewhere in the city. The architects of Iacon had favored towering, monumental buildings topped by conical structures that looked as if they might take off. The entire city was a monument to aspirations . . . only there were no aspirations among Cybertronians anymore. They were born into a caste, a place that they would maintain for their entire lives. The civilization of Cybertron existed in a perfect stasis. It had been that way for millennia. Iacon was in some ways a memorial of a Cybertronian culture that had not existed in the memory banks of any existing Cybertronian. Inside the Hall of Records, another kind of stasis existed. The history of Cybertron, from the mythical ages of battles among the Thirteen Primes across the billions of cycles, to the latest transmissions on the latest bands Orion Pax was charged with monitoring-all of it was here. All of it was categorized, cataloged, stored, indexed, and cross-indexed. After that, save for when the High Council or another authority got interested in a threat to civic order, the ever-growing collections in the Hall of Records were ignored. Once-or so Orion Pax understood from reading in the older records- Cybertronian civilization had maintained links with other planets that surrounded other stars. Via a network of Space Bridges constructed with technology long abandoned, populations of Cybertronians on far-flung planets had stayed in contact with Cybertron. Gigantion, Velocitron, even the Hub, all were once part of a greater Cybertronian culture. Now the Space Bridges were all long since collapsed and degraded. The last of them, which hung in the skies between the two moons and the Asteroid Belt, had not been used since a long, long time ago. Even Orion Pax, who could ordinarily dig anything out of the records of Teletraan-1 and the DataNet, was not sure exactly how long it had been. Now a Cybertronian like Orion Pax would not go to the stars. He would not fight nobly for the great ideals of the Pr