Warp

It was so strange a realization that it took him four more of his dwindling minutes for his logic processor to raise to his attention the chance that he could survive: he couldn’t aim himself, but he could calculate a trajectory for Earth’s solar system and then engage his warp drive when he was aligned in the right direction. He would almost certainly lose consciousness from the strain on his battered frame, but his engines would deliver him to the target once engaged. He needed only set a simple distress beacon broadcasting on the general channel, and the others would find him.

He slowly began the calculations, trying to decide if he truly meant to survive this day. He could think of no better resting place than here—with his lord, and also with Scourge, with Ironhide, with the Combaticons and the Predacons, with Grimlock; the last handful of all their greatest warriors, those who had fought to the end against the Quintesson yoke. But to die only through inaction—not in battle, but in surrender—no. That was not a warrior’s death, and if he died it, he would not deserve to mingle his ashes with theirs. They had not died for no purpose.

The leading edge of the blast wave was nearly upon him: it would be a near-run thing, and his warp drive might interact badly with the disruption of space-time. That did not matter. He would try. “Rest in honor, my comrades,” he said softly, as his visual sensors swept one last time across the expanding field of debris, most of it still glowing: all the remnants of his world and the rushing expanding surface of the shockwave sphere so near he could already feel the molten heat of it upon his frame. Then he was turning away from it, towards Earth, and as the glow rose up around him, he engaged the beacon, and flung himself into warp.

[...]

He was—on Earth, his gravitational sensors supplied—and in the presence of three dead mechs, two of whom had died before his own creation. He could not have traveled through time: his systems were stable, as they would not have been if the very matter of his frame was beginning to disintegrate as the universe corrected a duplication. Therefore, he had—been flung into a parallel universe, his processor finally, grudgingly offered, dredging up an improbable solution to a still more improbable set of parameters.