“So, when’s the happy occasion?”
Mears looked blank.
“Your retirement.”
“Oh.” Mears offered him a disgruntled expression. “When I’m tired of living, I suppose. The few people I know my age who admit they’re too old to do it anymore, who retire to let their kin or their compound mates take care of them, tend to waste away and die pretty soon thereafter. Call me stubborn, but I’m not ready for that yet.”
“That’s a good kind of stubbornness.” Sato shook the older man’s hand and departed.
Walking through the maze of well-engineered tunnels and converted mine shafts that made up Clover Compound, Sato thought about the encounter. Meeting Mears for the first time as an adult, Sato didn’t know whether to like him or mistrust him. The man’s ruthlessness was well known in the Resistance. So was the fact that he’d maintained his compound under the very nose of Skynet for decades. In recent years, rivals to this successor Murphy had transferred out of Clover after becoming convinced that they could never replace Murphy in Mears’s eyes, that the fix was in. But this had benefitted the Resistance. Those rivals, hard-headed and pragmatic men and women, well trained in organization, proved to be effective leaders in the compounds and military units where they resettled. Sato wondered how many more like them, perhaps more stubborn or ruthless, might have ended up decaying at the bottom of Satan’s Hole.
Like him or mistrust him. Sato shrugged and settled on both. That was life in the modern world.
* * *
In the morning the Scalpers breakfasted in the main mess, a section of the old mine’s main access tunnel. Partitioned off by sheets and blankets strung from cables, this section housed the compound’s classrooms, child care, kitchen, and library as well as the mess.
“Busy work around here,” Sato said, “consists of digging new tunnels. The compound leader’s an engineer, and all through the compound’s history he’s dug new escape tunnels, diversionary tunnels to mislead invaders if the compound is ever breached, that sort of thing.” He set his spoon down into the corn meal paste that had been served as the main portion of breakfast and began pointing to tunnel entrances in turn. “That one goes to an escape route, that one goes sixty yards and ends at an intersection with a pressure plate and a bomb underneath it, that one heads down to their hydroponics level…”
“And none of them are marked,” said Jenna the Greek. With her cumbersome travel gear and night-sight apparatus off, she could once again bask in the attention she inevitably received, and she was receiving it in abundance from the nearby males of Clover Compound. A tall, slender woman in her mid-twenties, she had a prominent nose that accentuated her good looks and spoke of her family’s Mediterranean heritage. Her most extravagant concession to ego was her hair, which was unusually long by Resistance standards; black and wavy, when unbound it fell to her lower back. On display in the new environment of this compound, she had retained her military boots and camouflage pants but ditched her camo tunic, retaining only the close-fitting black shirt she customarily wore beneath it. She knew she was spectacular-looking but pretended that she didn’t, an affectation that irritated Sato endlessly.
Not that he’d ever let her know. Jenna the Greek was the sort of woman who, once she knew she had a handle on someone, would never let it go. And Sato didn’t need any additional sources of conflict with her. She’d thought, after the deaths of the senior Scalpers a month ago, that she’d be promoted to leadership of the team, and she did have the necessary fighting and tactical skills to be a good leader someday. But for now, her greatest failing as a leader was that she didn’t recognize her failings. Sid Walker, the overall commander of the 1st Security Regiment, had seen it and had appointed Sato her superior, and so far she’d mostly been careful to conceal the anger and betrayal she’d felt.
“If the tunnels were marked,” said Nix, “it would sort of defeat the purpose. Of slowing down assault robots by confusing them.” A small man in his thirties, Nix had close-cut black hair and a round face that always looked as though he’d just received long-awaited bad news. Serving as the Scalpers’ demolitions expert, Nix was a caver and engineer, capable of worming his way through gaps and passages that would give fits to any larger or less flexible man. “My question is: What about wear patterns? The real tunnels will get a lot more use than escape tunnels or false passages, and the infrared sight gear of a Skynet robot can pick that up.”
“Good point,” Sato said. “Except the deal is this: Anyone in the compound can reserve one of those halls for his sole use … as long as he walks back and forth along it for at least half the time he’s in possession of it.”
The others nodded. In any human habitat, privacy was a concern. People didn’t get much of it. Most people would happily trade a little exercise for an occasional hour or two away from all company, all distractions.
J. L. cleared his throat. Youngest of the Scalpers, at the age of seventeen not yet in his full growth, he was lanky and always a little uncertain. This manifested itself in little ways, such as the habit he had of getting people’s attention before getting their attention—raising a hand before making a comment, clearing his throat before sharing a thought. It was, Sato thought, odd that he lacked confidence, since J. L. might well be the most dangerous member of the Scalpers, with an aptitude for hand-to-hand combat unmatched by the other members of the unit. Of course, skill in hand-to-hand was only so useful when most enemies were made of hardened metal compounds. “I heard one of the cooks saying that he hoped you might, you know, bag a little game while you were here.” Then J. L.’s cheeks reddened, making his skin tone contrast even more starkly with his blond hair, and he glanced at Jenna. “He meant deer or something.”
Sato snorted. “It might be nice to show off the old skills and receive accolades from the meat-deprived, but unfortunately we probably won’t be here long enough for me to have any time off. Still, it’s good to be remembered.”
“It’d be nice to hunt,” Smart said. Oldest of the Scalpers by a couple of years, Charles Smart, like Sato and J. L., was among its newest members. Bald since his mid-twenties, he had a head like a flesh-colored bullet and piercing blue eyes that added to his militaristic aspect. He was the unit’s sniper and an expert in long-range combat with vehicular weapons and man-portable missiles as well. He seldom spoke. Sato had never heard him say anything as wistful as the words he’d just offered.
“Well, maybe circumstances will dictate that we spend some extra time here,” Sato said. “With any luck.”
Nix checked his watch. He owned an old-fashioned wind-up analog watch that had been keeping time for members of his family since the 1950s. “Oh seven hundred on the spot,” he said.
Someone else knew the appointed time, too. From a crowd of Clover Compound residents moving by on the main tunnel path, a man split off to approach the Scalpers’ table. He was black, maybe forty, and short, about halfway between Sato’s barely average height and Nix’s diminutive stature. Flecks of gray and white speckled his beard but had not yet crept up into his hair. His eyes were somehow simultaneously amused and hard, like an old-time standup comedian awaiting his audience’s reaction with a gun in his hand.
He extended a hand. “Sato, right?”
Sato took it. “That’s correct. Murphy?”
“That’s me. Ready for your official tour?”
“Sure.” Sato rose and the rest of his Scalpers followed suit. “Let me present Sergeant Jenna Vandis, Sergeant Charles Smart, Corporal Johnny Larson, Corporal Bobby Friedman.”
Murphy shook hands all around. “You guys don’t have to stage anything elaborate. When it comes time for most of you to run off and do your examination out from under my watchful eye, just say ‘I’m taking off.’ Saves time that way.”
The other Scalpers glanced at one another, J. L. in particular looking uncertain.
Sato snorted. “You obviously approve of saving time.”
“I sure do.” Murphy gestured toward the ma
in tunnel and led the Scalpers in that direction. “It might save us some more time if you told me why you’re really here.”
“I’m not sure—”
“What I really mean? Yeah, sure. You know and I know that John Connor will never come to Clover Compound. As close as it is to Skynet Central, he’d be crazy to—and he’s not crazy. He needs to take us off the list of potential visit sites, period, forever. So that’s not what you’re here for, and…” He dropped his voice so that he could only be heard by Sato. “Your private message to the boss last night, well, that’s fine, but it’s not enough to drag a presidential security unit out here.”
“True enough.” Sato walked in silence for several paces, taking in the sights of a bustling, well-managed human habitat and trying to figure out how to respond. He could deny that the Scalpers had another agenda, which would put Murphy off; he could admit it but not describe the agenda, which would probably have the same result; he could admit to his true purpose here, which would be professional suicide.
No, it was time to lie.
He kept his own tone at the level it had been before so his Scalpers could hear him—hear, and remember the story he was going to tell. “I’ll be honest,” he said. “Your boss, for all his admirable traits, is an egotistical son of a bitch who imagines himself as a medieval baron. I was surprised he didn’t greet me from the back of a horse. He thinks he can anoint his own heir. That’s not the way things are done in the Resistance. So I’m here to figure out if you are the best man to take over for Mears. If you are, great. When Mears steps down, Connor will confirm the appointment and everyone will be happy. If you aren’t, nobody’s happy—not Mears, who looks like a fool, or you, who gets passed over, or Mears’s replacement, who gets to step into a command where everyone resents him as an outsider. But that’s a determination I have to make.”
Murphy nodded. He actually looked pleased. “So, what do you need from me?”
“Not much. Freedom for my team members to do their job without interference. And answers to occasional questions.”
“They’ve got it. You’ve got it.”
Sato turned to his team. “Take off, guys.”
All four offered nonregulation salutes and turned away to pursue their true agendas.
“First question, maybe the only one for today,” Sato said. “What is your highest obligation to, in your opinion?”
Murphy marched along in silence for a few moments, as they entered a constriction in the main tunnel and found themselves marching along beside old but impeccably maintained mine car rails. Finally he said, “Human culture.”
“Interesting answer.”
“Well, I suspect it’s not one of the ‘correct’ answers. I mean, different people want to hear answers like human survival, the Resistance, Clover Compound, John Connor, Raymond Mears, and so forth. But it all boils down to survival of the species, and for me, that means more than just huddling in a cave while machines thunder around in the valleys below. If we’re going to be nothing more than troglodytes banging rocks together, I say, let us die. If we can’t preserve the spark that gave us Mozart, El Greco, and whoever it was that invented the piña colada, we’re not worth saving.”
Sato suspected that this answer would not please Mears, but probably would please John Connor and Kate Brewster. Too bad evaluating Murphy’s potential wasn’t actually part of his agenda. Still, he had to keep up pretenses. “Let’s have your nickel tour.”
“Got a nickel?”
“Nope.”
“Just my luck.”
c.7
They spent the rest of the day walking, from the deep drop-off that marked Satan’s Hole to the sealed-off wall that marked a boundary to Raymond Mears’s long-abandoned home atop the mountain. “It’s still one of our last-ditch escape paths,” Murphy said. “Pull the metal lever on the wall there, the wall collapses, and you can crawl through, go up through the basement, and flee out into the open air.”
“It must be painful for Mears to live so close to his home and not be able to visit it,” Sato said.
Murphy nodded. “I expect so. He talks about it a fair amount. Especially now that he’s getting on in years and talking about everything from his youth. He can describe every room, every beam. Not too surprising, since he designed the whole thing and supervised its construction back in the day.” He shrugged. “Me, I’m less of a romantic. I’ve had two homes. The first was a set of caves near some hot springs several miles from here. The second is Clover Compound. They’re both pretty ugly. Harder to be sentimental about them.”
Sato had been basically impressed with what he’d seen. Most human habitats, at least those belonging to the Resistance, were managed at a high level of efficiency these days. They had to be; without airtight security they were detected and destroyed by Skynet, without careful balancing of food production and population they could not be maintained. But Clover Compound had the sort of extra spark Sato liked to see, a certain snap and energy to its personnel. The population received enough calories and were allotted enough nonwork time to have a few leisure activities, ongoing tunneling and engineering projects kept the personnel busy even in times when Skynet activities made it inadvisable to go above, and morale was good. There was an odd insularity to them Sato wasn’t comfortable with; those he spoke to agreed that it was a good idea to have new personnel rotate in to replace casualties and “keep chlorine in the gene pool,” but among the Clover-born there was less enthusiasm for rotating out to other compounds.
Still, that seemed to be nothing more than a cultural quirk of the place—and nothing that Sato hadn’t seen elsewhere. What he was more interested in—and what he was having no luck detecting—was any point that could serve as a security leak.
One of three things was happening. First, Skynet could be intercepting transmissions or courier messages to and from Clover Compound or, worse yet, have some sort of eavesdropping apparatus set up within the compound itself, and be permitting the compound to exist in order to obtain better and better information from it. Second, someone within the compound could be a traitor, selling secrets to Skynet in return for weapons, food, or a promise of other rewards. Third, the increased incidence of mission failures originating at or passing through Clover Compound could be nothing more than a statistical anomaly.
But something in Sato’s gut told him to dismiss that last possibility. The last two missions staged from Clover Compound to fail were both critical ones. On each occasion, a team of specialists, armed with a suitcase-sized nuclear bomb, had set out from here to enter Navajo Mountain via a recently detected access and cripple Skynet through the destruction of its most important facility. Both had been ambushed and destroyed well short of their destination, with some of the Resistance’s best men and women slaughtered.
When the importance of a mission was directly proportionate to its likelihood of failure, Sato looked for more than statistical anomaly.
The Scalpers returned from evening mess to the small chamber they had been assigned as guest quarters. It had actually been engineered by Mears as a dwelling for notable guests and included one long bunkroom with a half-dozen beds, a table and chairs, a head, a communal shower, and a bank of lockers salvaged from a small-town bus station.
They sat at the table and Nix dealt cards. Sato looked at his hand, two sixes and change, and put two 9mm cartridges in the pot as his initial bet. “So. Anything?”
The others anted up. Nix, with one finger, pointed at all eight corners of the room. “All clean.” Which meant I’ve checked the chamber; we’re not being listened to.
Jenna shook her head. “Seems like a tight ship. A lot of pride in ‘We’re the ones who live next door to the devil.’”
Smart scowled at his cards as though they’d sold him out to Skynet. “This place will be hell for the toasters to crack. Get off the main tunnels and no one’s supposed to walk in tight clusters. Because of bombs under pressure plates, set to the pounds per square inch of an assault robot. The
re are deadfalls, trap doors over long falls.”
Sato shook his head. “I suspect none of that will matter when the time comes. I think this place is compromised already.” He took three cards and received a third six. He upped the bid by a .223 cartridge.
Nix threw in his cards. “Mears has set up a bunch of unmanned outposts over the years. Places where the population can run if the compound collapses.”
Jenna took two and anted. “Nothing weird about that.”
“Yeah, but I hear work on them is ongoing, like Mears is planning to build each one out into a little habitat.”
Smart accepted one card and raised the bid by an additional .223. “Colonies.”
J. L. folded. “I found a leak,” he said.
Sato glanced over at him. The boy’s tone was bored and nonchalant, but Sato could tell that he was struggling to maintain the pose of indifference.
Sato placed another .223 round in the pot. “Tell us.”
Jenna matched the bid.
J. L. said, “Her name is Lana. She’s Mears’s mistress. She already knows about the woman we’re looking for.”
“Show ’em,” Smart said. He presented his hand: three threes.
Jenna sighed. She tossed her cards onto the table: two pair, nines over fours.
Sato showed his sixes. “Boss goes on a shooting spree,” he said and scooped the pot over to him. Then he turned back to J. L. “So, spill.”
“She’s about twenty-five, brunette, good-looking, about as dumb as a box of hair.” J. L. shrugged. “But she knows it. Good-natured. Kind of lonely, though, since it’s hands-off for everyone at the compound or have Mears come down on you like a deadfall.”
Her tone arch, Jenna asked, “Was it hands-off for you?”
J. L. ignored her.
“Oh my.” Jenna’s voice turned positively musical with amusement. “Have we finally broken the curse of the World’s Deadliest Virgin?”
Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt Page 10
