Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt

by Aaron Allston

  Sato’s convoy—two dune buggies, running without lights—climbed along an old paved road that ascended, in a series of switchbacks, a gently angled mountain slope above the tree line. As the road neared the summit, the mountain sloped down and away to the west, revealing more distant peaks.

  Sato, in the passenger seat, tapped his driver on the shoulder, then raised one hand and waved it back and forth to alert the driver behind. Both dune buggies pulled to a stop and the drivers killed the engines.

  Sato, stiff-legged, pulled himself out of the passenger seat and moved to the road’s edge, where only the remains of a metal safety barricade still stood, and looked over the vista presented to him. His breath steamed out of his mouth. The air here was thin and cold enough to feel like ice flechettes cutting their way through his lungs.

  Even in the shades-of-green vision presented to him by the infrared sight gear he wore, it was a spectacular view: craggy ice-capped peaks, unchanged, so far as the eye could see, by man or Skynet.

  His driver, Jenna the Greek, joined him at the road’s edge. Unnecessarily, she kept her tone low: “Which one is Navajo Mountain?”

  Sato shook his head. “Can’t see it from here. It’s too far away. But we’re looking right at the Navajo Mountain Strategic Region. You’re looking the abyss right in the eye.”

  “It’s not fair that it’s so pretty.”

  “True. Skynet should surround the whole zone with a huge wall and install itself in a giant black castle, half Gothic, half industrial hell.”

  Jenna ignored the fact that she was being kidded. “I think so.”

  Sato grinned. So had he, the first time the Strategic Region had been pointed out to him.

  Deep in those mountains, Navajo Mountain offered much more protection for its inhabitants than walls and castle towers ever would. It had protected the humans who had built it, and now it protected the most crucial computer gear constituting Skynet itself. A major Department of Defense communications facility, it had been dug so deep into the mountain’s roots that no nuclear weapons built by man could seriously affect it. No matter which of several “end of the world” theories actually occurred, Navajo Mountain would endure as a means to keep the American military forces coordinated.

  Except the enemy had struck from within instead of without. Skynet, the operating system designed to facilitate that coordination even in the face of the complete breakdown of standard means of communication, had somehow developed self-awareness throughout the government network that had housed it. It had replicated and distributed packets of itself, ported to more conventional operating systems and computer languages, and propagated itself throughout the old human Internet. In so doing, it had made itself a million-headed hydra, with no Hercules powerful enough to cut off all its heads. Then it had lashed out against its creators and conquered the world.

  One little irony was that the name of the site wasn’t actually Navajo Mountain. There was a real Navajo Mountain, in Navajo territory straddling Arizona and Utah. No, this site had simply been code-named Navajo Mountain by the U.S. military. A few members of its personnel had been on leave when J-Day fell; a very few on-duty personnel had managed to flee a rampage by Terminator T-1s in the facility’s depths and had gotten out before the blast. doors closed for the last time. Sato didn’t know what the mountain’s real name, its original map name, was. He didn’t care.

  “We shouldn’t wait here,” Jenna said. “Our heat trace…”

  “Yeah, I know.” Sato sighed and turned back to the dune buggy. The driver and occupants of the other buggy hadn’t even bothered to get out of their vehicle. “But sometimes, you have to look right at the enemy.”

  And to feel the enemy looking back at you, he added to himself.

  On the other side of the ridge, the road descended out of sight of the Navajo Mountain Strategic Region, and the sensation that cold, unfeeling eyes were staring at him abruptly ended.

  A few hundred yards down the slope, Sato signaled for Jenna the Greek to slow, then to turn onto a dirt path. It followed the mountain contours around for half a mile and then ascended to a point where an old train trestle entered a mountain tunnel. At Sato’s direction, Jenna turned into the tunnel, followed it for a hundred yards or so, and stopped, killing the engine. The second dune buggy pulled up behind and shut down.

  Sato waited until silence fell again and his ears strained against it, then called out, “Prickly pear.”

  Somewhere ahead, probably behind cover of a wall of artificially aged concrete or cunningly matched stone, a soldier in a guard station would be scanning a hand-printed list of code words and countersigns. And if Sato had been given the wrong one, in a matter of seconds that soldier and everyone in his vicinity would open up on the Scalpers with every weapon they had at hand.

  The reply came, a female voice echoing against the stone tunnel walls: “Jam-packed. Advance.”

  Ahead, a seam of light appeared—a vertical glow—and then widened. Finally enough emerged to reveal its source, a chamber hidden behind a slab of stone that swung open on a giant pivot. It revealed an opening large enough to admit the vehicles. Jenna started up the dune buggy again.

  A minute later they were within a stony, half-smoothed area that had to have been half natural cave and half rockfall area from the time in the late nineteenth century when this tunnel was originally blasted out of the mountainside. Now it served as Clover Compound’s own vehicle and other transportation depot. At one end Sato could see, neatly arrayed on smooth stone floor with jagged rocky ceiling above, two small pickup trucks, a snowmobile, and what looked at first like a disassembled frame for a hang glider He directed Jenna and the driver of the second dune buggy to park beside the trucks.

  On the far end of the irregular, badly lit chamber was a broad, closed wooden door. A trail of carefully laid-out dirt and straw led from it to the outside door. “Stables,” he said. He was impressed; it took a lot of care and food to keep horses going, though they could be invaluable to Resistance fighters in compounds surrounded by rough terrain.

  The middle open area of the chamber was empty, offering room for vehicles to turn around. The machinery and counterweights for the exterior door were on one side of the chamber and a stone archway and heavy wooden door were set into the other.

  The place smelled like every other compound Sato had visited. No amount of scrupulous hygiene or regular habitat maintenance could quite rid a place like this of the mingled odors of sweat, ancient smoke, raw food, cooked food, rotted food. And most places couldn’t even manage conditions of scrupulous hygiene or habitat maintenance.

  Armed guards, dressed in the distinct indigo-blue uniforms of Clover Compound, holding assault rifles and plasma rifles at the ready, waited beside the walls. From another direction, a male handler brought up two dogs, one a German shepherd and one some sort of long-legged, mixed-breed hound dog. He led the dogs from vehicle to vehicle, and each Scalper extended his hands for the dogs to sniff. Satisfied, the dogs looked up at their handler, who finally gave the Scalpers a friendly nod and led the dogs away.

  The wooden door opened, admitting three men—two young and carrying rifles, the third older—all wearing brown-and-green camouflage uniforms. They approached as the Scalpers, cold and stiff, clambered from the dune buggy seats.

  Sato saluted. “Lieutenant Sato. Resistance 1st Security Regiment, Company A, Squadron 2.”

  The older man he faced was taller than Sato by a couple of inches and had probably been taller still in his youth; now, age and perhaps old damage caused him to walk with a stoop. His hair, beard, and mustache were white with flecks of black and gray, a pattern distributed not quite evenly enough to be attractive, but his eyes were a clear and intelligent blue. He returned Sato’s salute briskly enough. “Mears,” he said, omitting his rank. Sato knew him to be a full colonel in the Resistance, a rank appropriate to the leader of a compound as vital as Clover was. “Are you old Dick Sato’s boy?”

  “That’s right, sir.
”

  “He visited here a long time back. Brought some goat meat and cooked up a goat curry. I can still taste it.” Mears looked past Sato, not at the other Scalpers but to some point in the distant past.

  “I know, sir. I was with him on that visit.”

  “Were you, now?” Mears returned his attention to the present. “So, it’s the Scalpers. This is obviously a more important visit than I’d been led to believe.”

  “Not really, sir. A standard check of installed security. Any compound John Connor might visit within a two-year span, we have to have a pretty good idea of its defenses and procedures.”

  “Ah.”

  “But I do have a message he wanted hand-delivered.”

  That caused one of Mears’s salt-and-pepper eyebrows to lift a bit. “Ah. Well, maybe I’d better show you my office.”

  “Please.”

  They turned back toward the door by which Mears had entered. Sato felt a flash of annoyance. Mears hadn’t shown any interest in the other Scalpers, so Sato hadn’t made an attempt to introduce them. This was bad form on Mears’s part. It was always a good idea to get to know visitors from other compounds, to encourage one’s own men and women to get to know them. It was a Connor/Brewster maxim that contact between the compounds had to be encouraged at all times, that populations had to be rotated between them, in order for ideas to spread, in order that inbreeding not occur. But Mears merely said, “Akins, get quarters together for the Scalpers and get them some food while I talk to their boss.”

  The guard’s reply was a disinterested “Yes, sir.”

  * * *

  Sato decided that Mears’s office was an accurate reflection of the man he’d heard so much about.

  It was lined with shelves filled with books scavenged from small-town libraries m the region, supplemented by trade with compounds that had access to university libraries. On those shelves Sato saw volumes on engineering, mining, architecture, mathematics, geology, metallurgy, and more. There were also framed diplomas on the wall, some of them yellowed or browned by age and mistreatment. There were photographs of a Raymond Mears, his hair jet-black and his posture perfect, shaking hands with pre-J-Day celebrities and heads of industry.

  Sato knew the stones. Mears had introduced and refined mining techniques, hydraulic machinery, pumping equipment. He’d been a multimillionaire because of his patents before he was forty, and had gone into semiretirement, lavishing money on a Colorado mountain estate and Hollywood parties. His mountaintop mansion had been an inspiration to engineering geeks, with its just-for-fun secret passageways and concealed basement chambers. The reporters who’d written about it hadn’t known about some of its features, such as the wells that would provide it with water for years in case of trouble—and the abandoned well attempts that had punched into the undocumented nineteenth-century mine shafts that riddled this mountain.

  Mears had been lucky enough to be at his home when Judgment Day came. He weathered the months after the disaster in considerable comfort, living on stores of supplies, using his engineering skills to improve access into the mines. As it became clear that the machines were actively hunting and exterminating humankind, he moved all his critical supplies and personal possessions into the mines, sealing up accesses into his old home, abandoning it. But he left surveillance equipment functioning and could detect when machines and human survivors came to visit.

  Some of those humans he invited to live with him in his subterranean home. With the character judgment, sense of self-preservation, and pragmatic ruthlessness that a captain of industry needed to survive, he was quick to recognize men and women who might be a threat to his leadership or his life. In those early days, as rumor had it, they ended up shot or with their heads caved in, their bodies tossed down the lowest vertical shaft, nicknamed Satan’s Hole.

  Only after he accepted an invitation to bring his self-supporting compound into the general framework of the human Resistance did Mears learn that he lived within sight, within a few days’ walk, of the center of Skynet activities. His comment at the time, still quoted, was “You’d think that after the end of the world you wouldn’t have to worry any more about sorry neighbors.”

  Now over seventy, he was still unquestionably in charge of Clover Compound, and as he rummaged through the drawers of his battered metal desk, which looked broad, heavy, and elegant enough to have cost as much as a luxury car when it was new, he seemed to have lost none of his sureness of purpose, of confidence.

  Finally the old man came up with a glass bottle, unlabeled and corked, and waved it in Sato’s direction. “Care for a bit?”

  “What is it?”

  “Vodka. Good old Colorado vodka.”

  Sato snorted. “Hit me.”

  Mears found a couple of genuine shot glasses, souvenirs with DENVER and the skyline of that city etched into them, and poured a couple of slugs. “You know what I always found weird about your dad? And about you, now?”

  “No.” Sato picked up his shot glass and angled it toward the old man.

  “Salute,” Mears said and clicked his rim to Sato’s. “It was the lack of an accent. You see a big old Japanese face, you expect to see a big old Japanese accent come rolling out of it. Your dad always spoke like an American.”

  “Well, he is.” Sato took a sip. The homemade spirit was strong, nearly flavorless, much more pure than most liquors brewed by members of the Resistance. “My family settled in California in the nineteen twenties. That generation got to spend some time in the interment camps in World War II, and my father said they were the last ones who spoke with an accent.”

  “You speak any Jap?” Mears knocked down his shot, reacting not at all to its potency, and poured himself another one.

  “A little.” Sato just waited.

  Mears grinned at him. “You don’t rile too easily, do you, boy?”

  “Nope.”

  “I didn’t figure you would. Old John Connor doesn’t pick excitable people to do his dirty work. Neither do I. It’s bad business. But I like to find out a little about the kind of people he sends to me.”

  As if you were a businessman entertaining couriers from another company, Sato thought. Rather than a military officer doing his job for his superiors. Do you acknowledge any superiors? Mears probably didn’t, Sato decided. And he probably got some amusement out of baiting people over whom he couldn’t assert direct authority.

  “So, what’s this message?”

  Sato unbuttoned the right breast pocket of his jacket. “John Connor is looking for a young woman.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Mears gave him an overly personal “Just between us guys” smile.

  Sato fetched out the contents of the pocket and handed the single item to Mears. “A specific young woman.”

  Mears looked at the object and turned it top to bottom. “A photograph. Well. These days I don’t get to see many photographs that aren’t as old and yellow as I am.”

  Sato had studied the photograph during the long trip in from Home Plate. It showed a twentysomething woman, lean, round-faced, blonde, wearing an expression that suggested she’d been through a long-ago tragedy from which she’d never fully recovered. Behind her were the treads of a main battle tank.

  “Her name is Gwendolyn Drew,” Sato said. “She’s a photographer. Three months ago, she fled the Great Lakes compound where she’d been living. Her friends think she was heading toward Home Plate, where her mother was from. No one knows why she ran, but there’s speculation that she saw or even photographed something at her compound that somehow endangered her life more than a solo trip across half a continent’s worth of hostile territory would. So I’m checking into whether Clover Compound—or any compound you’re aware of—has taken in any strays in that time frame.”

  “We haven’t.” Mears was deeply absorbed in the photograph. “She looks like … She looks like…”

  She looks like Sarah Connor, John Connor’s mother Sato didn’t say it, and Mears became quiet. Of course she looke
d like Sarah Connor; this photograph had been artfully crafted from an old photo of Sarah, doctored by artists who knew how to use thirty-year-old software designed exactly for the purpose of modifying photographs and output on one of the extremely rare photographic printers in the Resistance’s possession. Only John Connor had the resources to command that could have led to the fabrication of this false piece of evidence.

  Sato watched as the inevitable conclusion clicked through Mears’s mind. This young woman might be a daughter of John Connor, but not by Kate Brewster, since the three children they shared were well known to the Resistance; alternately, she might be a distant cousin who had inherited the looks of the Connor women. Either way, she was obviously kin to John Connor and he wanted her found alive.

  Mears looked up and smiled. “May I keep this?”

  “Of course. I have one for each compound I’ll be visiting.”

  “I’ll show it to my chief scouts and to my liaisons with other compounds. Perhaps they’ve seen her.”

  Sato finished his shot of vodka and set the glass down. “I’ll get out of your hair, then, and begin my inspection in the morning.”

  Mears rose as Sato did. “I’ll send my second-in-command, Murphy, to give you the guided tour. He needs to be meeting people, getting his face known. He’ll be taking over for me when I retire.”

  Sato smiled, covering for the sudden annoyance he felt. “That’s sort of John Connor’s choice to make, isn’t it?”

  “To confirm, yes.” Mears led Sato to the door and opened it. “And he technically has the right to refuse my choice, to choose someone else. He won’t, though. No one’s better suited to command here than Murphy. I’ve trained him in that role for the last ten years.”