Maggie was checking her minimal makeup in a compact mirror. It was left to Sam to break the silence. He did so with his typical aplomb. “So, uh—this is awkward.”

  Lowering the mirror, Maggie regarded the younger passenger seated across from her. There was no condescension in her voice because of his apparent age. She remembered all too well what that had been like. “What’d they get you for?”

  Sam tried to frame a reply that might make a modicum of sense. It all seemed so very long ago. “Short version? I bought this car. Turned out to be a giant alien robot.” If he expected the attractive woman to blanch, he was surprised. He might as well have told her that he was present because he had cheated on his calculus final.

  “You?” a curious Mikaela inquired of the woman seated across from her.

  Maggie shrugged. “Caught something, maybe one of them, hacking into Air Force One.”

  “Huh” was all Sam said by way of reaction. Like the woman, he was way beyond being surprised by much of anything.

  “Man,” an unhappy Glen muttered, “me, I was just watchin’ television. CNN. I shouldn’t even be here.”

  Stretching out across the hold, Sam extended a hand. “I’m Sam Witwicky.”

  That did get a reaction from Maggie. “Witwicky? You by any chance related to an old sea captain named Archibald?”

  Sam nodded. “Yeah. He was my great-great-grandfather. And—a great man.”

  As the sun rose sharply, its intensifying rays struck gold off the surface of Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. Sam, Mikaela, and Maggie sought windows to look out while Glen remained sunk in his funk. All three choppers began to descend.

  Along with a couple of agents, a group of seven soldiers emerged from the first helicopter. Coming down the steps, Lennox looked around, shook his head, and muttered to Epps.

  “No matter what a soldier does these days it seems he can’t get away from the freakin’ desert.”

  Sam, Mikaela, Maggie, and a reluctant Glen exited the second chopper, while the third disgorged the secretary of defense, Sector Seven agent Banachek, and Agent Simmons, the latter looking even more gaunt than usual. As he had been instructed, Lennox held his ground as the secretary came up to him. The two men shook hands.

  “We got your intelligence, Captain. Excellent work, especially getting that thermal image.”

  Lennox nodded in the direction of his friend. “Technical Sergeant Epps deserves the credit for that, sir.” He squinted at the desert sky. Unnervingly, it looked exactly like the sky over Qatar. “What about the gunships?”

  “Being retroloaded with sabot rounds now, Captain,” Keller told him, “but it’s going to be difficult to coordinate much of anything if we can’t get military communications back up. The last thing we want is to have to involve civilian authorities in this.” He gestured at the woman standing next to him, who seemed unable to keep from shifting back and forth from one foot to the other, as if she needed a continuous outlet for her energy. “This is Maggie Madsen, one of our analysts. And her assistant, Glen Whitmann.”

  That was enough to bring Glen out of his depression. “Excuse me—‘assistant’?” No one paid him any attention as they started toward an art deco entranceway. Mikaela paused to admire the view of the vast lake held back by the dam. As she was doing so, something hopped out of her purse, which had eventually been returned to her, and disappeared among the concrete and scrub.

  Scuttling under a barrier, the spider-shape worked its way through passages far too small to admit anything bigger than a large rat. Finally halting beneath a sign, a resurgent Frenzy looked upward.

  SECTOR SEVEN ONLY

  NO TRESPASSING!

  LETHAL FORCE AUTHORIZED

  A sonic squeal emerged from the transformed Sidekick. Lasting less than a second, it shrieked in code too dense to be deciphered and too rapid to be picked up by the primitive native sensors nearby.

  “Sector Seven located. Follow my signal—and bring my body.”

  On a nearby air force base the engines of an F-22 Raptor suddenly roared to life. Taxiing off the end of a line of identical planes, the interceptor headed for the main runway. Within the nearby tower there was sudden confusion. No one among the air traffic controllers present seemed to know who had requested permission for a takeoff or who had authorized the departure. Their bewilderment would have been worse had any of them been able to see that there was no one in the plane’s cockpit.

  On the edge of an army motor pool a huge mine-clearing vehicle rumbled to life. It was six-wheeled and heavily armored, and its front end sported specialized steel mine-excavating prongs. There was no one around to notice as it cut quietly through a fence and headed for the nearest highway.

  Above a city not far from Tranquility a military helicopter banked sharply and headed north. It was an MH-53. A particular MH-53. Lennox and Epps would have recognized it immediately. They had seen the exact same chopper before. In Qatar.

  In a salvage yard two workers were in the process of removing a wrecking ball from the top of a crushed police cruiser. The sight generated chuckles and some especially crude jokes. These were transformed into screams when the freed cop car abruptly morphed into a towering, glowering bipedal shape. As the terrified workers fled the lot, Barricade reached down and picked up the crushed metal body that had been lying next to it. Once the last human had fled, the powerful, thick-bodied Decepticon changed back into police cruiser form. Lights and siren stilled, it rolled quietly out of the lot.

  At the base of Hoover Dam, a wheeled platform surrounded by heavily armed Sector Seven agents was being drawn into an access tunnel. Tightly bound to the moving platform, a yellow-and-black mechanical shape struggled ineffectively against its bonds. Mobile platform and its robotic cargo disappeared into the base of the great curved weir.

  On top of the dam, Sam and Mikaela were being ushered forward by Simmons and his minions. They were joined by a tall agent with a gleaming metal briefcase cuffed to his left wrist. Banachek glanced at the two youths but said nothing.

  “Get your hands off me!” Mikaela growled at the agent who kept shoving her forward. Sam was equally upset. He didn’t like where this was going. He didn’t like where he was going.

  “Don’t touch me! Where’s my car?”

  Simmons chuckled under his breath. “Hey, kid—I think we got off to a bad start. You must be hungry by now. Wanna latte? A Popsicle? What do kids eat these days?”

  Unmollified, Sam glared at him. “Where’s my car?”

  It was Banachek who responded. “Son, listen to me carefully. Some really bad things have happened this past week. There are some really bad things going on right now. People have died. More people could be killed—maybe a lot more. We need to know everything you know, work together, to stop those things from happening.”

  Sam calmed down—but only a little. “Not till you promise me you won’t hurt him—my car, I mean. It’s the only way I’ll talk.”

  Banachek nodded understandingly. “Agreed. There will be a few passive scans only. Nothing intrusive, no—dissection. Deal?”

  Sam nodded, albeit reluctantly. “One more thing.” He indicated Mikaela. “You gotta let her dad outta jail.” He eyed Simmons, smiling as he remembered. “Like, for-ev-er.”

  The other agent’s expression was unreadable. Mikaela’s, on the other hand, was not. She was looking at him gratefully. As the two of them eyed each other, they were joined by a group of soldiers. Soldiers with grim expressions and very good tans, Sam noted thoughtfully.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Banachek exclaimed as soon as the troops had joined up with the rest of the group, “follow me. Time is of the essence.”

  Having once been forced to sit through a dated black-and-white presentation on Depression-era government construction projects, Sam recognized the massive turbines in the vast room at the base of the dam. He had never expected to see them in person, though. As Banachek led the group past the humming generators, Simmons was finally able to unburden himself of some classified information.

  “Here’s the situation insofar as we have been able to determine it,” he told them. “We appear to be facing war against a highly advanced technological civilization far superior to our own.” He nodded at Sam, then Mikaela. “You’re here because in one way or another, you’ve all had direct contact with the NBEs.”

  “Which, like it or not,” Banachek told them, “makes you the world’s foremost experts on the—visitors. In this situation, age is of no consequence. It’s your individual experiences that are important and that interest us as a matter of national and world security.”

  Epps looked uncertain. “NBEs?”

  “Non-biological extraterrestrials,” Simmons told him. “Try and keep up with the acronyms.”

  “Oh,” Epps shot back challengingly. “Like CQ, Vector Delta, Niner-Alpha—that kind of acronym?”

  “Maybe,” Simmons admitted, realizing he might have overstepped.

  “In our language, they can be called ‘Transformers,’ ” Sam put in helpfully. Banachek looked sharply back at him.

  “They told you that?”

  Sam put a little more hip in his step. “They told me a lot. We’re tight.”

  A massive door loomed ahead. It would not have been out of place fronting an airline hangar—except that it was hundreds of feet underground. Though out of time, Banachek still tried to prepare them.

  “You’re about to see something few people know about and even fewer get to experience in person. Don’t forget to breathe.”

  Rumbling, the door began to move aside. As soon as enough of an opening had appeared, Banachek led them inside.

  The underground silo was immense. Multitiered gantries and girders leavened with strands of tubes containing liquid nitrogen surrounded something frozen in blue-tinted ice. Something huge, ominous, and—bipedal. Another robot. As big as if not bigger than Optimus Prime, an awestruck Mikaela decided. She could not take her eyes from it as they were led inside. Neither could Sam.

  Such a spectacle was completely new to Maggie and Glen. He simply stared, nervously rolling a last trio of Fruity Pebbles back and forth, back and forth, between his fingers.

  “Oh my God,” she murmured as she gazed up at the mechanical colossus. If it was any consolation, the secretary of defense was no less flabbergasted than she was.

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Keller murmured as he regarded the metal leviathan.

  Aware that he was privy to information denied to all but the highest level of government, there was a note of pride in Simmons’s voice as he joined Banachek in leading the group forward.

  “This baby’s the first we found.”

  Banachek offered more detail. “We think that when it approached our world, it came in too low over the North Pole. Maybe there was an especially active aurora at the time, or maybe it miscalculated the strength of our gravitational field, or maybe a sudden solar flare screwed up its navigational instrumentation. Though we remain ignorant of the cause, it was fairly clear from the position and attitude in which it was found that it did not make a controlled touchdown. We surmise that it crashed into the polar ice, was seriously incapacitated, and subsequently became frozen in place by a series of active cross-current pressure ridges.” He looked over at Sam. “Not unlike the fate that befell your great-great-grandfather’s ship.”

  “We call him NBE One.” Simmons glanced at Epps. “Acronym.”

  “I got it,” the tech sergeant snapped irritably.

  Eyes fastened on the gigantic frozen form, Sam stepped forward. “I don’t think that’s quite all of it, sir.” He nodded at the towering shape. “That—is Megatron. Leader of the Decepticons, as we would call them.”

  “Basically, the bad guys,” Mikaela added helpfully.

  Lennox eyed her admiringly. “Yeah, I kinda got that from the name.”

  As they conversed, a tiny mechanical spider-shape was working its way around the perimeter of the enormous open space. When workers threatened to come too close, Frenzy merged into the background until they had continued on past. None of the passing humans noticed anything out of the ordinary. How could they, when the slender Decepticon could transform itself to become an indistinguishable part of their surroundings?

  A tight-lipped Keller was glaring at Banachek. “I guess no one thought I might, as secretary of defense, need to know that the government is keeping a hostile alien robot frozen in the basement of Hoover Dam?”

  The agent waxed apologetic. “I’m sorry, but it’s always been that way, sir. Presidential discretion. Roosevelt never told Truman we had the atomic bomb, and he never told him about this, either. Being a military man, Eisenhower was informed. He understood the need for continuing the secrecy. Other presidents have maintained the practice, wishing above all to avoid anything that might cause a general panic. And until now, we had no reason to believe that there might be others like it—much less that they might show up here and pose a direct threat to national security.”

  “That’s a question.” A curious Lennox spoke up. “Why ‘here’? Why Earth?”

  “The Energon Cube.”

  Wherever else they had been looking, whatever else they had been thinking, all of them now turned to stare at Sam. He’d always wanted to be the center of attention—but not necessarily here, and not necessarily now. He indicated the towering, frozen shape.

  “The way it’s been told to me, Mr. NBE number one here, aka Megatron, is like the harbinger of universal death. Pretty much wants the Cube so he can transform all machine ‘life’ and take over the universe one technologically oriented world at a time. Starting with ours.” He turned a slow circle, the look in his eyes a bit wild. “Can I get a Coke?”

  Banachek and Simmons exchanged a fleeting glance. Sam was no trained psychologist, but the meaning behind that look was easy enough to grasp. He gaped at them both as comprehension dawned.

  “You know where it is!”

  Though not as vast as the silo that contained the frozen body of Megatron, the chamber that held the Energon Cube was just as impressive. The Cube itself hung in the center of the brightly lit room, swathed in a web of umbilicals that both supported and monitored the alien artifact in their midst. Visitors and technicians alike could observe the Cube from an observation deck walled with panels of transparent, double-thick polycarbonate. As his charges moved close to the panels to examine the interior of the chamber, Banachek filled them in on some of what was known.

  “Carbon-dating of organic debris recovered near the Cube and from the same frozen strata puts its arrival here around ten thousand BC. We didn’t find it till 1913. Its actual age is unknown. A few years ago we managed to obtain a tiny sample of the outer coating utilizing a high-energy industrial laser.” He shook his head. “We couldn’t make a determination on anything, much less radioactive decay. We couldn’t find any potassium-40 and there are no uranium elements. We thought we might have detected traces of thorium-232, but that turned out to be a false positive. As far as datable isotopes go, the recovered alloy sample continues to drive our people crazy.

  “It was stored nearby in a deep salt mine in Utah until President Hoover had the dam built around it.” He pointed straight up. “One hundred football fields of concrete thick. Perfect way to mask the energy it’s leaking from being discovered by anyone on the outside.”

  “It’s not perfect,” Sam corrected him with assurance. “Optimus Prime says it calls to them every thousand years. That’s why they came. I guess all the necessary conditions were finally right for making contact.”

  Maggie tore her gaze away from the Cube and looked back at Banachek. “Wait a minute, back up. You said the dam hides energy that’s leaking from the Cube? What kind of energy, exactly?”

  “I could give you a thick file to read through. There are more equations than words. Come,” he told her quietly, “and I’ll show you.”

  The next chamber they entered was barred by a thick steel door that opened to reveal a laboratory that must have been founded some time in the 1930s. While much of the equipment and technology on view was state-of-the-art, some that had been pushed aside or stored near the back hinted at experiments that had been conducted much earlier. The slender tentacles of electrical and other cables spread out in all directions from a central transparent box mounted on a high dais. Or maybe, Sam thought, the cables ran to it. A couple of uniformed technicians were waiting for the visitors. Busy preparing instruments and checking readouts, they spoke hardly at all.

  “Everyone step well inside, please,” Banachek told them. “They have to lock us in.”

  Lennox looked unhappy. “Why do they have to lock us in?”

  The vault-like door swung shut behind them with a loud, decisive boom. This was followed by a series of metallic clicks as heavy bolts were slammed home. Unlike the visitors, Simmons looked like he was enjoying himself.

  “Kind of a tricky bit of science they do in here. You never know how things might develop.” He grinned humorlessly. “Could turn out to be a bad day.”

  Epps gestured toward a series of deep parallel gashes that scored the far wall. “Who did they have in here? Freddy Krueger?”

  Simmons indicated a sign that proclaimed we have WORKED 322 SAFE DAYS, then pointed to the gashes. “Those happened three hundred and twenty-three days ago.” Now even his severe smile vanished. “That was a real bad day.” He nodded to one of the techs who was working nearby. “Charlie was a good man.” The tech nodded back.

  “Anybody have any advanced electromechanical devices?” Simmons asked them. “BlackBerry, key alarms, flash drive, cell phone?”

  Remembering that he had seen Glen with a cell phone, Banachek walked up to the programmer and confiscated it. “For essential demonstration purposes,” he explained. Having been shuttled gruffly around the country like an accessory to one of the computers he so loved, Glen was in no mood to be accommodating.

  “Demonstration purposes my ass—anything happens to that, I want every song that’s on it replaced—and I’ve got a list!” His voice fell when one of the techs handed him a pair of heavy-duty industrial safety goggles. “Hey, what are these for?” The tech didn’t reply, moving along to hand goggles to everyone else.