Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt

by Aaron Allston

  “You applied knowing what the job was?”

  “Yes.” She shrugged. “I used to live in a—well, it wasn’t even a compound. It was just my family. A cabin deep in the woods. My father and brothers hunted. My mother and sisters and I cooked, kept the cabin up, gathered fruits and vegetables. It was, I guess, very traditional. My father was kind of weird about duties and roles. I knew about Clover Compound because my mother kept mentioning it. Since I was the oldest, she wanted me to be living somewhere else by the time I was an adult, and Pa wouldn’t hear of it … there was a lot of arguing about that. But it was all settled when the assault robot came.” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “I was the only one to get away alive; and I found my way here, and Raymond made me an offer; and the idea of not having to work, after all those years of it, and still to have somewhere to live and enough to eat, was so amazing…”

  “But now you’d prefer to work.”

  “Yeah. You think I’m disgusting, don’t you?”

  “I think you did what you needed to in order to survive. Maybe it was the right choice, maybe it was the wrong one, I don’t know. But it’s not ‘disgusting.’ Disgusting is turning your back on a brother-in-arms. Did you ever do that?”

  “No.”

  “Then you’re okay.” He settled back in place beside her. “You want to quit, I can get you out of here.” He didn’t know that for sure, but he was certain that Lt. Sato would act on this woman’s behalf.

  “No, you can’t.”

  “The lieutenant can. Remember, he can talk to John Connor and Kate Brewster anytime he wants.”

  “They’re not as powerful as Raymond here in Clover Compound.”

  J. L. suppressed a sigh. Perhaps it was because Lana hadn’t grown up with the names Connor and Brewster in her ear since she was a child—or perhaps she’d been indoctrinated too thoroughly in the cult of Raymond Mears the Patriarch—but it was obvious she had no faith in anyone to extricate her from this situation.

  He decided to change the subject … for the moment. “Is there any chance he’ll come down here and find us?”

  “No, he never comes down here. I know it’s the access to Satan’s Hole and all, but he doesn’t visit.”

  “So this isn’t where you and he go for privacy.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Where do you go?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “He’d punish you?”

  “I just can’t.”

  There it was again, the tinge of irrationality that accompanied every one of the dictates of Mears, at least as Lana understood them. J. L. wondered if the woman even understood how deeply enmeshed she was in the old man’s illogic.

  Well, it was time to find out. He spent a moment rehearsing the words Sato had given him and mixing them in with arguments he’d developed while talking with Lana.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Is just being alive still the most important thing to you?”

  Sato had insisted that he used the word “still.” “Say ‘still’ and it means she has to reevaluate what you’re asking her about.” J. L. had expanded on that. “Just being alive” was different from “being alive,” because the words would remind her that she understood how far from admirable she considered her life to be.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Let me put it to you this way. The worst Raymond Mears could possibly do to you—and that’s if none of the Scalpers were in the way—is kill you. My question is this: Is that the worst thing that could happen to you? Is that the worst thing of all?”

  “I guess maybe not.”

  “Well, listen. Something’s going on out here. People operating out of or through Clover Compound are getting killed. We don’t know why, but we’re pretty sure that it has something to do with the place where you go for privacy.” That was a wild leap of supposition, it was true, but Sato had said that the only person in the compound who had access to high-level information that could doom missions and had demonstrated a willingness to gossip about it with noninvolved people was Raymond Mears. So Mears was Suspect #1, and any secrets he was preserving had to be uncovered. “We need to find out where that is and look it over—or else more people will die. Just like your brothers and sisters and parents did. You might be able to put an end to it. Just by telling us where. So you have to decide whether it’s worse for this to keep happening, which it definitely will, or if it’s worse for him to try to do his worst to you, which we can probably keep from happening.”

  She was silent for a long time. He lay there, listened to her breathe, and felt his stomach do flip-flops. All the fighting he’d done over the years, all the bullets he’d dodged, hadn’t distressed him nearly as much as trying to back this woman into a corner and oblige her to do the right thing.

  Finally she said, “I’ll show you. Meet me in the high airflow chamber in an hour.”

  “Thank you.”

  She sat up. By touch, she located her garments and pulled them on one by one. “If I die, you’ll tell people why, won’t you? I don’t want to be remembered just as his mistress. Please.”

  “I’ll tell people. And if you do what the lieutenant and I say, I don’t think you’ll die. Maybe nobody will die. Everyone just has to be smart.”

  This time it was no giggle—she laughed and there was a touch of bitterness to it. “Now you’re asking too much. I’ve never been smart.” She stood. “You might want to wait a few minutes before you follow me out. You remember the way?”

  “I remember.”

  She moved off into the darkness, sure-footed, familiar with her surroundings.

  He waited until she’d been gone a minute. Then he pulled his pants on and carefully, keeping his hands before him to make sure he didn’t take a sudden fall, moved on hands and knees the fifteen yards or so to Satan’s Hole.

  Maybe, as Lana had asserted, it wasn’t half-filled with the rotting corpses of Mears’s rivals and enemies. There was certainly no smell of decay floating up from its depths.

  He leaned over the lip and threw up.

  He sat back, wiping his mouth. He felt shaky and finally suspected, despite glorious childhood dreams of being a leader of men, that he probably wasn’t destined for that role.

  Sometimes leading people meant manipulating them. And manipulating them made him sick.

  J. L. decided that he might have to stick to killing the machines instead.

  c.9

  When J. L. and Sato arrived at the high airflow chamber, Lana was already there, waiting.

  The chamber was half natural cave, half room dug out of solid stone by miners, and mostly filled with fans and ductwork. Powered by generators much deeper in Clover Compound, its machinery pumped air through several layers of the habitat. It didn’t pump air out; according to Mears, waste air exited from the lowest airflow chamber and was pumped out via ventilation shafts that emerged beside natural hot springs, making it unlikely that Skynet’s infrared scans would relate that heat source to a possible human habitat.

  Lana’s eyes opened a little when she spotted Sato, but she said nothing. Sato, who had not met her before, gave her a quick look. She was a tall woman, only a couple of inches under six feet, with a round face and long brown hair—not as long as Jenna’s, but still at a length that indicated luxury rather than practicality. She wore an unmarked uniform in deep blue; though it was plain, Sato recognized that it was cotton, probably traded for at considerable expense from a distant habitat in Texas or points farther east. And she was pretty, having the sort of appealing but unmemorable looks that the surviving copies of men’s magazines Sato had seen referred to as “the girl next door.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Sato.” He extended his hand. “Thanks for helping.”

  “Lana Miertschin,” she said and shook his hand. “M-i-e-r-t-s-c-h-i-n. Please remember that.” She turned away and opened the thin metal door covering the oversized metal case behind her. Within were circuit breakers and gauges.

  �
�I will,” Sato said. He turned a curious eye on J. L. The younger man gave him an “I’ll explain later” gesture.

  Lana flipped three of the circuit breakers, then restored them in a different order. There was no change to the operating of the fans and blowers around her. Then she closed the door again and gripped the entire breaker box and pulled.

  It rotated away from the stone wall, opening as if the whole box were a door, revealing a gap in the wall, a yard high by two feet wide, beyond. In the back of the breaker box was a metal handle.

  Lana stepped through and gestured for the men to follow. They did, emerging into a dark area the size of any of the thousands of elevators now standing unused all over the world. On the opposite side, dimly visible in the light spilling through the hole in the wall, was a dark door.

  Lana pulled and tugged the circuit box closed. It came to rest with a distinct click. “I’m going to open the other door,” she said. “I don’t need light on the other side, at least not until we get to where there is some, but you probably will.”

  Sato switched on his flashlight. In its harsh, unflattering glow, Lana looked uncomfortable and scared.

  “Then, when we get to where there is light, do exactly what I do,” she continued. “Okay?”

  Sato nodded. “Okay.”

  Lana twisted deadbolt knobs on the other door, three of them, one above the other. Then she pulled the other door open. From the slowness with which it moved, Sato guessed that it was metal rather than wood.

  Beyond was another small room that, when Sato entered it, turned out to be a shaft rather than a chamber. It had four concrete walls and was thirty or forty feet high. Stapled into one wall was a metal ladder. The paint on it, mostly red-brown, was blotchy, and some of it was comparatively fresh.

  Lana led the way, with J. L. second and Sato trailing.

  At the room’s summit, Lana pushed on a circular section of ceiling and it rose away as a hatch. Sato switched off his flashlight and they emerged into a lit room.

  It wasn’t bright, and it wasn’t a chamber designed for human occupation. It was long, perhaps sixty yards by twenty, with leaves and rubbish on the floor. The ceiling was cracked plaster, with many dark wooden beams supporting it; the windows, all along one wall, were broader than they were tall, barely tall enough for a human torso to fit through, and flush with the ceiling. There were what looked like wrought-iron bars on the outside of the windows, and the light coming in through them was sunlight. Sato could see hazy blue sky and clouds.

  Sato felt the hair rise at the nape of his neck. This is his house, the basement of Mears’s old house.

  There was a wooden staircase near one end of the room. Lana led them up it. The door at the top opened into a dark, wood-paneled hallway. There were doors all along the hallway, some closed, others open and admitting more light.

  Lana led them to the nearest one. It opened into a stairway, one with far more stylishly carved wooden banisters and supports than the basement stairs. Carefully, she walked up the stairs immediately adjacent to the wall. In spite of her precautions, her steps made the occasional step creak, but Sato recognized that tromping up the middle would cause far more creaking.

  The men followed her up one flight, emerging into a hallway that was even better lit; there were windows, the glass in them mostly shattered and gone, along the left side, while the doors on the right side were all closed. Leaves and dried grasses decorated the wooden floor in places, and a little breeze stirred them.

  Keeping just beside the left wall, Lana led them down the hall. She ducked and crawled past each open window, and the men duplicated her action. Once they were past the fourth window, with two more to go, she crossed the hall to the doorway there, opened it, and beckoned for the two men to join her within. They entered the chamber beyond and she shut the door behind them.

  This was a grand chamber, two stories high, twenty yards by ten, a classic gentleman’s library. Bookshelves stretched from the floor to nearly the ceiling, and a well-braced wooden ladder with wheels at its base permitted access to the higher shelves. At one end, a circular metal staircase gave access to a small platform one floor up; the platform was located directly beneath a skylight, though that aperture, like the room’s two other skylights, appeared to have been covered over by wood at some point in the past. At floor level were several pieces of furniture, including a large wooden desk, two easy chairs, a sofa, and—probably not original equipment—a bed.

  In spite of the fact that the skylights were blocked, the room was well illuminated. This chamber had three windows along one wall and two along another; all were about five feet high and two and a half feet wide, placed close to the ceiling. And the glass in all four was intact, though not entirely transparent. Sato didn’t know whether it had been frosted when manufactured or had been scoured by dust and debris in the decades since the house was built, but the glass was all cloudy and whitish, like cataracts.

  Lana opened her mouth to say something, but Sato raised a finger to his lips.

  Sato moved out into the center of the room and looked around. Immediately he knew Raymond Mears just a little bit better.

  This was the heart of the house. His personal library. Sato could see thousands of volumes, most of them hardbound. Sato had learned a phrase from his mother, a phrase she had used to describe the occasional well-preserved site that had once been occupied by powerful people: The place stank of money.

  Mears doesn’t give up anything he wants or loves. The library had been meticulously maintained in the decades since J-Day. Though weather had penetrated into other corners of the old house, Mears had taken steps to keep this chamber and its contents intact.

  And Mears is a selfish bastard. In spite of the fact that most human habitats, excluding only the ones that had managed to perform repeated raids on public libraries, were short on reading material, Mears had kept this horde of books to himself.

  Sato could almost hear the old man’s words. “To hell with what the great John Connor says. I’ve kept my home, on the outside, right under Skynet’s nose, all these years. My home, my books, my woman. No one can have them.”

  The windows had to be reinforced or armored glass of some sort, but that made sense; the high winds of this place would otherwise have shattered the difficult-to-reach panes on a regular basis.

  Sato moved to the desk. In one drawer he found a sheaf of yellowing paper and a well-maintained fountain pen. He began writing. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Lana wince. Obviously it was against the rules for anyone but Mears to use any of the precious paper stock. My paper.

  He wrote:

  Why were the skylights covered? Were they made out of regular glass?

  That didn’t make any sense to him. He crooked a finger to summon Lana over.

  Reluctantly, she took the pen from him and responded:

  he didnt want skynet satlites to see through them

  He boarded them over?

  he and his first mistress

  Doesn’t he worry about security? About the possibility of listening devices?

  the only way to get here without trigering warning devices is the way we took, but he does look for microfones sometimes there never was one

  It was true, the old engineer would be able to put together some sophisticated, clever security measures to warn him if a Terminator or assault robot entered his home. Sato could see dust on most exposed surfaces in the library; entering this chamber and planting a listening device would be very problematic, even for Skynet.

  There was something about the windows that bothered Sato. No, not just the windows here, any windows. He’d been suspicious of intact windows ever since he’d attended a security lecture John Connor had given many years ago. From one of the pouches on his belt he pulled out a compass and took his bearings. The long wall with the three windows faced west, the short wall with the two windows north.

  Those windows—do they look down over the Navajo Mountain Strategic Region?

&n
bsp; yes but its hard to see because the glass is so scratched

  Sato scowled over her response. That was probably it: the clue to how Skynet had penetrated the security of this place. It had somehow detected activity in this chamber and then had—

  He began writing again.

  I’m going to write out some words for you to say. You’ll say them as we’re leaving. I want you to pretend that you’re saying them to Mears. Okay?

  She nodded.

  From his shirt pocket, he withdrew another photograph of the fictitious Gwendolyn Drew. He set it on the desktop and began writing again.

  * * *

  “Honey?” Lana said. There was strain in her voice, and as she continued reading, she sounded as though she were reading. “You left that picture of the Drew girl on the desk. Do you want it?”

  She waited, staring at Sato. He held up a finger, then a second, counting up to five, and then gestured for her to continue. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll just pick it up next time.”

  Sato and J. L. accompanied her out into the hall and they retraced their steps back into the basement, the access shaft, the airflow room.

  * * *

  It was the height of the breakfast meal, and the mess hall was crowded. The Scalpers had their own table; it had once been a picnic table for a state park, and after innumerable years weathering the outdoors it had spent innumerable years in this mine. It was designed to accommodate six people; all five Scalpers and a nervous-looking Lana sat at it now.

  Sato kept a close eye on the crowd. All the other tables were full, and several of the Clover Compound residents were watching the Scalpers and their guest.

  Sato stirred the oatmeal in the main compartment of his sectioned metal plate, then swallowed another mouthful. There was actually a hint of some sweetening in it, and the other plate compartments held some sort of fried potatoes and a compact little mound of chicken scraps. “Not bad,” he admitted.

  “We eat pretty well,” Lana said. She wouldn’t look around at the other tables. She sounded miserable.

  “Remember what I told you,” Sato said. “If everyone acts smart—”