Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt

by Aaron Allston

  Though it didn’t matter what the Terminator wore. Under the right circumstances the T-600 could kill every living member of the Hell-Hounds.

  The T-600 opened the sliding door on the near side of the van and pulled out a wooden crate larger than a coffin. The way the box creaked as it was handled, the way it sagged slightly when it was placed over the T-600’s shoulder, suggested that it weighed a few hundred pounds. The T-600 carried it without apparent effort to the hospital’s main entrance and began tapping at a plate inset in the wall beside the doors.

  Ten resisted the urge to signal Glitch. He’d given Glitch precise, difficult-to-misinterpret orders. Now he had to rely on Glitch’s own sense of timing, not second-guess or micromanage him.

  Glitch rose, near-silent, and began moving toward the T-600.

  There was a quiet buzz from the hospital main doors. Light appeared, outlining the doors—top and bottom, then between them as the doors swung inward. Then the T-600 turned just enough to look at Glitch, who was twenty yards away and closing.

  The T-600 did not react. Glitch did not alter the pace of his approach. They merely looked at one another, a long moment—all it took for the two Terminators to exchange signals that established their respective identities, model numbers, missions, and priorities. Glitch’s data, of course, was a fabrication, based on the scraps and leavings of data the Resistance could sometimes intercept from Skynet communications traffic. It wouldn’t hold up to a detailed check at Skynet’s end.

  The T-600 turned away and entered the building.

  Glitch waited there and pulled objects from his jacket pocket. As the spring-loaded doors swung back to close, he bent over to place the objects before them—wedge-shaped pieces of wood. Door stops. The doors hung half-open.

  Glitch returned to the parking lot, his heavy steps loud. Ten could feel them in the pavement as Glitch neared him. Now was the part Ten had hated since this plan was conceived … and he’d been the one to suggest it. He wrapped himself in his thermal blanket, pulling it around him like a cocoon so that it hid head, feet, and everything in between.

  Blind, he lay there as Glitch came around the vehicle that served as his cover. He heard the jingling of metal clasps on Glitch’s gear and could smell lilacs as the Terminator bent over him. Glitch picked him up, as effortlessly as a grown man might pick up a wicker basket, and carried him.

  It was forty long steps. Ten could see light increasing in intensity. Then Glitch set him down on a hard, flat surface, turned, and was gone.

  Ten unwrapped himself. He lay in the hall just beyond the entry doors Glitch had rigged with the door stops. He was up in an instant, scanning the walls and ceiling of this hallway for cameras and other sensors. He wouldn’t be able to detect subtle sensors—fiber-optic camera lenses, pressure plates under the floor—but in a secure area like this, Skynet didn’t generally rely on subtlety.

  He saw first that the hall had not only been kept up but had been redecorated since Judgment Day. The paint on the walls was white and fresh. The linoleum on the floor was clean, and though not new—Ten imagined that no factory had manufactured linoleum in decades—it was polished and relatively unscuffed. Visible doorways up the hall showed no signs of decay or neglect.

  Cool air was blowing through the building’s vents.

  That didn’t make a lot of sense. Skynet facilities tended to operate only the machinery and equipment useful to Skynet. Decorations, comfort, doors for privacy—these were all things machine intelligences did not need and so they were never maintained. Ten felt worry pluck at him. He hated things that made no sense.

  Glitch returned, carrying an extra-long bundle, and when he set it down Mark unrolled himself from the blanket. Then it was Earl’s turn—and finally Kyla’s. The two dogs trotted along behind Glitch for that trip, their ears back.

  They were properly trained Resistance dogs. They hated Terminators. It had taken a lot of extra training for them to understand that Glitch was a member of the team, was an ally of Kyla. It had helped when, early in that process, the Hell-Hounds had found an old, unlooted perfume shop and Earl had hit on the bright idea to take all the perfumes and colognes that time had not rendered absolutely revolting. Now Glitch always wore perfume, a helpful scent recognition for the dogs, who otherwise would have a difficult time distinguishing him from other Terminators.

  Nor was their presence, if captured by the facility’s external cameras, likely to alert Skynet to danger. Dogs were no threat to Skynet … unless they were under Kyla’s direction, that is.

  Kyla unrolled herself from her blanket and stood, somehow not hampered or made less graceful by the sniper rifle case she held. Ten kicked the door stops out from under the doors and they closed. The team was assembled.

  Now it was time to find out just what the hell was going on in the old San Diego Naval Medical Center.

  Present-Day

  California

  “Actually, I think I’m mentally ill,” Paul said.

  Eliza smiled again. This was not the right reaction from a woman receiving that sort of news. “You’re obviously trying very hard to impress me.”

  Paul smiled back at her. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean really mentally ill. You’re the first person I’ve had a chance to talk to in, well, I don’t remember how long. And I think the solitude is making me sort of nuts.”

  “How nuts?”

  “I have odd little moments of paranoia. Thinking everyone is looking at me and trying not to show it. Spying on me. Secretly keeping me from finding a decent job.”

  Eliza nodded. “That is nuts.” Her tone was agreeable, not at all alarmed or cautious.

  “Do you ever feel that way?”

  “Everyone is always looking at me,” she said. “They just don’t bother to hide it. And no one is trying to keep me from finding a decent job. I’m already at the top of my profession.”

  “Killing people.”

  “Advertising.”

  “Oh, that’s right.” Paul signaled the waitress for another round of drinks. He’d never thought of himself as a beer drinker, but whatever they were serving on draft tonight was good. Plus he’d had three already and wasn’t even beginning to feel the effects.

  So, now the hard part. How to ask her out? He’d somehow been born without the gene that made it effortless just to walk up to a woman and ask her out, ask her to dance, ask her for her number. Each time, it was a struggle to find a way that didn’t sound awkward and contrived.

  “I think you should show me around town,” Eliza said.

  Paul’s grip on his glass faltered. He managed, fumbling, to catch it before he deposited the last of his current beer onto the tabletop. “What?”

  “I think you should show me around town,” she repeated, her tone patient. “You said you were a historian. I imagine you know a lot about the city’s history.”

  “Yes, of course. I’d love to.” Paul nodded agreeably, tried to retain his cool.

  Then a new thought occurred to him and caused coldness to trickle down his spine: What city am I in?

  c.2

  September 2029

  San Diego, California

  They were at what had to have once been a nurse’s station. It was at the intersection of two long, broad hallways on an upper floor and looked like many such installations Kyla had seen in pictures and books: a big desk, thick with computer equipment and piles of paper, situated behind a low wall that constituted a barrier to keep patients and visitors psychologically at bay.

  Mark sat in the chair behind the main computer. His laptop was up and running beside the machine and cables ran between the two devices. Mark frowned as his fingers flew over his laptop’s keyboard. He was among the world’s best at hacking into Skynet computer systems, but that didn’t mean that such tasks were simple, and this one was taking a while.

  Kyla was set up at one end of the low wall, her rifle propped against the wall top. The weapon was a Barrett M99, manufactured shortly before Judgment Day. Just
over four feet long, it was made of blackened steel and brushed-silver aluminum, as elegant and simple in its beauty as Kyla herself. The .50-caliber rounds it fired were, when placed very accurately, capable of taking Terminators down—sometimes.

  Kyla was oriented so that she could see down two of the hallways, the two that were better lit. Ginger and Ripper were together at the end of one of the other two halls, standing guard, ready to offer a growl or a yelp if they detected anything but friends headed Kyla’s way. Glitch was at the end of the last hall, motionless and silent; in his hands was a weapon from his backpack, a rare and precious chain gun. Though small enough to be carried by a man or Terminator, the weapon possessed the multiple spinning barrels of a Vulcan machine gun and could fire high-powered ammunition at a terrifying rate.

  Ten and Earl were not in sight. They’d waited until Mark was set up, then moved on to find the optimal portions of the building for their loads of explosives. But they still didn’t know what they were blowing up.

  “So?” Kyla said.

  “Stop bugging me.” Mark’s voice lacked conviction. It was a rote response.

  “What is this place?”

  In getting to the nurse’s station, they’d passed whole sections of the hospital that had obviously been reconstructed since Judgment Day. Wards had been redecorated as apartments, with pictures and posters on the walls, old but well-maintained furniture, television sets that came on when activated and began displaying authentic shows from the last century. There were also chambers that were undecorated, unpainted, plaster still raw and white on the walls.

  Mark had said that he wasn’t even sure this nurse’s station was original equipment. It could have been a reconstruction of a nurse’s station, he’d admitted.

  Finally Mark answered. “All those apartments, the other places. They all represented slightly different time frames.”

  “I don’t understand. They were all twentieth-century.”

  “Right, but the twentieth century wasn’t just one constant, unchanging thing. Not like today. That’s what makes it so interesting. The toys in the one bedroom, foot-long action figures—”

  “The dolls?”

  “The dolls. Specific games. Those little metal molds were for pouring in raw plastic and then cooking over a stove to harden it. That’s all from the nineteen sixties. But the next room over had a record player for vinyl records, and the recordings were all disco. Artists called Abba and Donna Summer and the Bee Gees. That’s from the nineteen seventies.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Mark shook his head, the motion barely visible in Kyla’s peripheral vision. “Neither do I. I’m just a history buff, an amateur. It’d take the real deal to figure this out. Hey, I’ve got the security camera network.”

  Kyla resisted the urge to move next to Mark and peer over his shoulder. She was needed here. She was the sniper, the long-range defender of her team. “Tell me.”

  “An operating theater. It looks functional. Empty hospital rooms. Outside, the T-600’s van is gone; it must have finished with its deliveries and driven off. The roof. A—” Mark’s voice faltered. “A man and a woman talking in a bar. I think it’s a TV show, though. I’ve seen both the actors before, somewhere. More empty hospital rooms…” Then, a moment later, it was “Oh, damn.”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got Ten and Earl on camera. And if I can see them…”

  “Right.” Skynet could see them, too.

  * * *

  It was a hospital basement level, with hospital basement equipment. Electrical junction boxes. Water pumping equipment and water pressure gauges. Emergency generators. The overhead light-bulbs had been replaced at some point after Judgment Day with clusters of light-emitting diodes; they shone bright, not flickering, somehow at contrast with the way Ten thought basements should be illuminated.

  The emergency generators had obviously been improved after Judgment Day. A portion of the basement level larger than a boxcar was sealed off, monitoring gauges installed. Labels on the gauges made it clear that this portion held fuel. “The generators could run off this for days or weeks,” Earl said. “Skynet really doesn’t want an interruption in the functions of this place. What do you have in mind?”

  Ten gestured toward the pipes that connected the tank to the primary generators. “I think I’ll just cut these now and flood the basement with fuel. First disconnect the pressure meters so Skynet isn’t alerted. Set up an explosive charge on both timer and radio reception, but I don’t want to set it off until the air is pretty much saturated with fuel.”

  Earl gave a mock shudder. “Economical.”

  “Lots of bang for the buck.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Then the radios at their belts hissed, two short bursts of static.

  The team was supposed to maintain radio silence … except in times of trouble. One burst meant “Heads up, be alert.” Two meant “The jig is up, we’re compromised.” Three would mean “We’re under attack.”

  “Let’s do it fast,” Ten amended.

  Present-Day

  California

  The question ate at Paul: What city is this? San Francisco? San Bernardino? San Diego? San something. Definitely California. Why couldn’t he remember?

  The beer, it had to be the beer. He was more drunk than he realized. But the wrongness of it, the realization that something in his brain was just not working right, caused his heart to hammer.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “I can show you some of the sights.” And remember where the hell we are. And clear my head.

  Eliza nodded, a slow movement, like a queen gesturing assent. “All right.”

  Paul signaled the waitress for the bill, then a shadow fell across him. He looked up.

  The bouncer stood over their table, massive, blocking the light. His attention was on Eliza. “We must go,” he said.

  Paul rose. He was as tall as the bouncer and could face him eye to eye—or, at least, eye to sunglasses—though he lacked width of shoulder. “Excuse me?”

  “It’s not a problem.” Eliza stood. “He’s an old friend of mine. This will only take a moment. Have another drink while I’m gone. Better yet, take a nap.” She reached over to brush away strands of Paul’s hair that had drifted down onto his forehead.

  Paul’s knees buckled as weariness settled on him. It was like a late-night work jag when the espresso had finally worn off or like lying on the beach in the late afternoon, the exhaustion from a day’s worth of swimming finally catching up to him.

  I’ve never been swimming at the beach.

  I’ve never had espresso.

  He sank, almost nerveless, back into his chair and leaned helplessly across the table, knocking empty bottles of beer out of his way. They skittered across the tabletop and fell out of sight, but he did not hear them hit, did not hear them break.

  His eyes closed, but he concentrated on the fast, panicky beating of his heart and managed to stay awake. He forced his eyes open again.

  Eliza and the bouncer were gone. It had been only a second, but they were not within his field of vision.

  The bartender, the waitress, and the other bar patrons were still there. They weren’t moving. They stood as immobile as store mannequins. But there was a slight sway to their stances and their eyes were alive.

  The fear rose in Paul, fear of the wrongness of his situation, fear for Eliza and what the bouncer might intend for her. He struggled to stand, struggled to move, and when neither proved possible for him, struggled to shout.

  He heard a noise, a garbled, strangled sound. It really didn’t seem to come from him, but it corresponded to his attempt to scream. He tried again, heard the noise once more, as if from across the room.

  He had to stand. He shoved with his arms, with his legs, trying to get a little distance between his body and the table.

  His limbs did not move. But he felt something, pressure against his knees and hands, a less distinct pressure holding his limb
s in check.

  He pushed harder, ignoring what he saw, concentrating entirely on what he felt. He could feel his arms and legs lashing out again and again, could feel pain where his hands and wrists and knees were connecting with a surface.

  Then, for a brief moment, there was light, a vertical shaft of brightness to his left. It dazzled him. It faded a second later, but the spots before his eyes remained.

  He pushed again and the light reappeared. He pushed harder and it broadened, lengthened, until it washed across everything he could see and blinded him almost completely.

  As his vision adjusted, he found that he could see two sets of images, superimposed over one another. One was the bar; the other, a set of acoustic tiles directly in front of him. To his right was a dark oval plane angled toward the tiles, rocking just a bit. To his left, a black metallic surface, as though he were lying in a container, and beyond it were chairs and banks of machinery—but it was all oriented wrong, as if he were lying on his back and staring up at the ceiling.

  He felt dizzy, sick to his stomach, but he tried rolling over to the left. He saw his right arm, clad in a skintight gray-black material, flop over the surface, even though he could also see it, in its white sleeve, lying before him on the tabletop, supporting his head.

  It was wrong, everything was wrong. But he could now feel his right arm over the metal lip of whatever he was lying in.

  He gasped and choked as water poured into his mouth, into his lungs. He kept his elbow hooked over the metal lip and hauled with all his strength, pulling his face up out of the fluid, up over the lip.

  He scraped over the metal lip, first his chest, then midsection, and suddenly he was falling, slamming down hard onto a flat surface. Pain cut into his shoulder, the side of his head. Fluid splashed down atop him. And his vision of the bar and all its paralyzed inhabitants, himself included, remained unchanged. He closed his eyes and saw only that for long moments. He coughed until his throat was sore but almost all the fluid was ejected from his lungs.