Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt

by Aaron Allston

  This was bad. He shoved that entire problem aside for the moment. It was too big for him to deal with just now. “Small things first. Paul Keeley’s going to be a problem.”

  “Of course he is. People are going to be suspicious of him. He’s not going to be able to lead a normal life until that fades.”

  John shook his head. “He’ll never be able to lead a normal life again.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know the expression ‘touched in the head,’ don’t you?”

  She smiled. “Sure. Basically, it means crazy. Or mentally diminished.”

  “Yeah, but it means more than that. Crazy Pete explained it to me once when I was a teenager. The subject came up when he pointed out that, being a hormone-addled adolescent, I had an excuse for acting like I was touched in the head, while he had no excuse society would accept.”

  “So?”

  “So he told me that in some societies, crazy people had a special, I don’t know, role. They were feared and kept at bay because they were crazy, sure, but they were also accorded a certain amount of respect because insanity was the same as being touched by a god. There was a divinity to it.”

  “So you’re saying that Keeley has been touched by the gods?” Kate frowned. “Okay, you’ve obtused me into a corner. What the hell are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that he’s been changed by powers nobody understands and that he’ll never be a regular human being again. He may try for a while, but neither his memories nor the people around him will let it happen. Which points to any of several results. He could kill himself. He could fall victim to being touched, become a howling madman.”

  “Like we need another one.”

  “Or he could accept that he was touched, use it to rise above what he was and what people expect him to be. That’s really the only path to survival. And since letting him sink back into his old habits and work won’t fix things, I think we need to put him where several sets of informed eyes can be on him, monitor his progress.”

  She flashed him a mocking smile. “Do I need to remind you that you can’t worry too much about his situation? That used to be called micromanagement. Now it’s just professional insanity. You have bigger things to worry about … such as running the Resistance.”

  “Oh, yeah. I forgot.”

  “Sure you did. And we need to figure out how to keep this T-X from running you down when you’re in diapers and finishing you off.”

  He shook his head, helpless. “For that, I have no idea. When that T-X jumps into the past, we’ll have no way to find her.”

  “So we prevent her from going back in time.”

  “How? We’ve already made two failed attempts to get a nuke into Navajo Mountain, and we have no reason to believe further attempts will work. And we don’t have the resources to knock down the power satellite.”

  Her smile deepened. “It’s so nice to be a step ahead of you.”

  “You have an idea, then.”

  “Yeah.”

  He gave her an expectant look.

  “I think, if we can’t stand to have Skynet aim this weapon at you then, we should force it to aim the weapon at you now.”

  “Huh. Tell me more.”

  c.5

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” Ten asked.

  Mark shrugged. “I figured if Castillo was mad enough at me, he’d be diverted from his very sensible desire to murder Paul Keeley.”

  They moved along the concrete-lined corridor that linked John’s conference room to other portions of his command center. They lagged behind the others who’d been in that conference. A few steps ahead, Mike glanced back to give her son a “What the hell did you think you were doing?” scowl.

  “Is Keeley your friend?”

  Mark shook his head. “No. Once upon a time, we had a few good discussions about pop culture. But he’s kind of hard to like—or even to get to know. Still, I hate seeing a useful resource get thrown away because someone in charge isn’t thinking clearly. Plus, the whole firing-squad aspect of Castillo’s outlook doesn’t appeal to me.”

  “Speaking of that, you need to report to the kitchen. Tell them you’re there for six hours of KP duty. While you’re doing that, you can reflect on the notion of ‘thinking clearly.’”

  Mark winced and did not reply, but offered a salute and turned off into the first side corridor.

  * * *

  Paul woke, unhappily aware that he was facing another day of entering actuarial tables into a computer spreadsheet. He hated his job.

  Then he opened his eyes and saw the ceiling. It had once been an indifferent tan in color, but in the first few months after Judgment Day, survivors hunkering down in this bunker had used this small room for cooking fires, trusting its ventilation shaft to carry hot air and smoke away. The shaft had done so with only partial success, and smoke had stained the ceiling in irregular patches. Now it was a dark tan at some points, a dirt-brown in others, and peeling in most places.

  The sight jolted Paul. Suddenly the temp job and its concerns were gone. That was all a lie. He was back at Home Plate, where his job used to be to evaluate garbage to see whether it could be restored to functionality for the Resistance.

  But now he had no job, and there was a thing in his head, a mechanical cancer placed there by Skynet. He didn’t know what it was for or what it could do to him. For now, it simply meant that he was no longer what he used to be, no longer completely human, and in a civilization where machines were used but not to be trusted, Paul Keeley had himself apparently entered the category of “machine.”

  He rose and looked around. They hadn’t put him back in his original quarters, of course. Those had been reassigned for a year. Now he was in a small room that was all his, at least for the time being. His meager store of possessions—the clothes he’d brought from the medical center, his belt pouch—fit easily within an ancient, crumbling plastic storage box somebody had apparently donated to him.

  All his possessions from before were gone. His computer, scratch-built from the few undamaged components found in literally dozens of prewar machines. His videotape player, found intact in the back room of a plundered supermarket. Books. Audiotapes. Videotapes. Videodiscs. Posters. Clothes. Knives. He supposed his main weapon, a .30–06 hunting rifle he’d carried on his few field missions, had been destroyed when he was captured.

  Paul’s last remaining relative, his father Will, had died when Paul was eleven. A mechanic who had scrupulously trained Paul in his profession, the man had been killed during an assault robot attack on a Sacramento garage where the Resistance was attempting to restore vehicles for their own use. Neither he nor anyone else remained to inherit Paul’s possessions, so they had had doubtless been distributed among the population of Home Plate. It was all irretrievable. All he had was a few changes of clothes, most of them unsuited to the demanding life of a Resistance fighter and made in the first place for a man who really didn’t exist.

  He dressed in the least out-of-place of the garments, jeans and a short-sleeved blue shirt with snap closures, and left his room to report for work.

  That meant navigating along corridors—some of them converted from drainage systems, some bored crudely through the earth by the Resistance engineers after J-Day. Many of these corridors were piled so high with stacks of equipment or supplies that passage through them meant squeezing through gaps as small as eighteen inches wide, or cluttered with the bedrolls and personal possessions of inhabitants. Eventually he reached the civilian operations center, a corridor intersection that had been crudely widened out into a sort of lobby, its ceiling propped up by concrete pillars. It had not changed much in the last year; dominating it was the oversized desk he remembered. Once an information kiosk from a shopping center, it had been laboriously dragged down to this place by someone with a sense of humor. Behind the desk was Harve Pogue, Director of Labor.

  Pogue was a large white man, over six and a half feet in height, with a lean body
that seemed knobby at the joints and a bald head that was the result of pragmatism and shaving rather than male pattern baldness. An Iowa farmer, he’d been vacationing in Los Angeles when the bombs fell and had been one of the lucky few to find his way into a shelter. His wife and one of his daughters had also survived. It was said that he’d been tremendously overweight at the time, more than 150 kilos, but the subsequent decades had melted the extra weight from his frame. Also as a gesture to practicality, he seldom wore anything but overalls.

  He had two on-duty expressions, which the labor force of Home Plate referred to as Get to Work and Stop Wasting My Time. Now, as Paul approached, he looked up from the forty-year-old news magazine he delicately held in his oversized hands and put on his Stop Wasting My Time face.

  Paul cleared his throat. “Keeley, reporting for work.”

  “You’re not in my department.” Harve returned his attention to the magazine. Paul glanced at the cover. Its cover story was a retrospective of the life of ex-President Richard Nixon.

  “Uh, well, technically, I am,” Paul said. “My old post was terminated when they concluded I was dead. That puts me back in the common labor pool until I’m reassigned by R&D.”

  Harve looked up again and the Stop Wasting My Time expression hardened into something worse, something like Take A Big Step Back Before I Come Over This Desktop At You. “Did you say ‘common labor’?”

  Paul felt desperation rise inside him. It was the same desperation he normally felt when confronted with any social situation he wasn’t prepared for. Fortunately, those situations, in a society as regimented as that of the Resistance, tended to be rare. “I meant ‘common’ in the sense of ‘widespread.’”

  “Oh. You didn’t mean ‘unskilled.’ You didn’t mean ‘beneath me, except when I have nothing else to do.’”

  At a loss for words, Paul shook his head. This was wrong. There was always work to be done at Home Plate.

  “Well, good.” Harve seemed to relax just a little and returned his attention to the magazine. “I’ve got nothing for you. I think you’re on sick leave.”

  “I’m not sick.”

  Harve didn’t reply.

  I’m not sick. I just have a potential monster installed in my head.

  Paul stood there an awkward few moments, then turned and headed back the way he’d come. At his first opportunity, once he’d rounded a corner and was out of sight of Harve, he put his back to the wall and slid to sit down on the concrete floor. He was in plain sight of the workers manning tables along this corridor—though they were engaged in the maintenance of handguns and submachine guns, cleaning and repairing the weapons, he could feel their eyes on him. But he didn’t care.

  He felt sick to his stomach. He was shaking and could not stop.

  They didn’t want him. He was tainted by his association with Skynet, with the T-X. Tainted by the unknown quantity that the device implanted in his skull represented.

  Dr. Lake, the woman who’d given him the bad news about the implant, who’d clipped the antenna portion of the device and withdrawn it, a yard of hair-thin metal, from his skin yesterday afternoon, had hinted that something like this might happen. “They’re going to call you the T-X’s ‘boy-toy,’” she’d said, her tone friendly but mocking. “Be ready for it. So, did you ever sleep with her?”

  “No,” he’d answered, appalled. But he’d been more appalled by the realization that he wouldn’t necessarily have remembered if he had. He had no idea whether the T-X was equipped for such an act.

  He remained leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed, until he got his stomach under control, until the shakes subsided. Then he rose.

  It was time to go back to his room. He’d just wait there until they called him to duty. He’d come out for meals and to go to the bathroom. That was it.

  He took two steps back toward his room and froze in place. No, it’s not right. What happened to him wasn’t his fault, and the brass agreed that he hadn’t betrayed the Resistance.

  They didn’t have the right to exile him.

  He turned and walked along the corridor where he’d taken momentary refuge until he reached the table where the section boss worked. He recognized her from his life before. Her name was Janet, she was about forty, and she’d always responded with unsmiling thanks when he’d provided her with information about a prewar weapon she hadn’t seen before. “Hi,” he said. “I’m the T-X’s boy-toy. Got any work for me?” He noticed there was an edge of bitterness to his voice.

  Silent, Janet shook her head.

  “Thanks.” He continued down the hall.

  His heart was pounding. He knew why. He had no context for that sort of encounter. He was doing something outside his place.

  But he had no place anymore. So everything he did would probably feel the same way.

  He peered into the first door beyond the weapon maintenance crew. Inside that room were home computers, eight or more, many of them cabled together in a network. Paul recognized the setup; he’d help put it together. It was a representative sampling of pre-J-Day machines with a broad range of operating systems and was set up to do initial testing on data storage, such as discs and CDs, found in the field.

  Paul turned to the two men huddled behind the monitor of a tower-configuration machine. “Hi,” he said. “I’m the T-X’s boy-toy.” This time he managed to keep bitterness from his tone. “Need any help?”

  The two computer operators, dark-haired men barely out of their teens, looked at one another and then at him. The first of them kept his expression professionally neutral; the second actually looked worried, perhaps even frightened.

  The first operator shook his head. “Thanks anyway.”

  “Sure.” Paul continued onward. He was actually feeling a little better.

  He stuck his head in the next door. Within that room, a young woman, at least seven months pregnant, her short curly hair a dirty blonde, sat in an ancient school-style chair facing toward Paul’s right.

  “Hi,” Paul said. “I’m—”

  Then he saw what the woman faced. There were a dozen or so children in the room, some seated on old chairs, the others on newer, cruder benches. The oldest of them looked to be about seven years of age.

  “Paul,” he finished. “Need any help?”

  The woman looked him over, uncertain. She appeared to be even more weary than the average Home Plate worker—no surprise, at her stage of pregnancy. Finally she said, “Do you know how to read?”

  “I am a spectacular reader. I can read while walking, while chewing gum, even while humming.” His answer was oddly glib, even to his own ears. Paul wondered if all those months talking to the Terminatrix had taught him something about conversation.

  “We’re doing alphabet drills and then story time,” the woman said. She rose unsteadily to her feet. Her face paled just a bit as she did so. “I need to…”

  Paul suspected that she intended to say “take a nap” or “go throw up,” but as she paused to sort out her words, he said, “Take a break. Sure. I’ll see if I can keep ’em busy until you get back.”

  She drifted out past him, as unsteady as an airship caught in wind gusts. “Thanks. I’m Doreen.”

  “Nice to meet you, Doreen.” He moved into the woman’s chair, but did not sit; built for teenagers at best, and barely large enough for the woman, it would make him look ridiculous if he sat. “Okay,” he said as the first panicked thought touched him: Oh, my God, I’m teaching school “Who knows his ABCs?”

  * * *

  “Ginger and Ripper were dogs,” Paul said. “Ginger was orange, and Ripper was black, and they went with their mistress on all her adventures, and they protected her from all harm.”

  “I know them,” Adrienne squealed. She was five, with long blonde hair and brown eyes, and in the last couple of days Paul had learned that she was Doreen’s oldest child. She was also the best reader of the class. “I’ve petted them.”

  “Me too,” Paul said. “Shhh. They would
sometimes go out in the ruins and look for things, and sometimes they’d go farther away, to where the mountains rose up and there were long stands of trees. Anyone know what long stands of trees are called?”

  Several hands rose, but Brandon, the dark-haired seven-year-old, jumped the gun: “Forests.”

  “Forests is right. Or woods. But next time, wait until I call on you. So when they weren’t protecting their mistress, Ginger and Ripper sometimes got to play, running among the trees and nipping at one another. But they never barked. Anyone know why?”

  This time twelve sets of hands stayed down; some of the children held their hands rigidly in place or tucked them under their thighs, making sure it was absolutely obvious that they wouldn’t be raising their hands.

  Finally one did, Adrienne again. “Because they were taught not to?”

  “Very good! But that’s only part of the answer. They were taught not to because barking could give away their location when they’re Above. Only the dogs smart enough to learn this get to be Above dogs. And when they do bark, they have different barks for different things. So on this day, as they were playing away from camp, they stopped and listened because they heard something, a ching-ching-ching noise coming their way…”

  The children froze, some of them wide-eyed. Even at their age, they knew the ching-ching-ching sound had to be a robot or Terminator. But Brandon looked over at the doorway and several of the others followed suit.

  Paul did, too. And in the doorway were Ginger and Ripper, the real ones. Ripper sat, yawning, while Ginger stood there, slowly wagging her tail. And beside them, leaning against the door jamb, was Kyla. Her expression was dubious.