Infiltrator t2-1

by S. M. Stirling

  Infiltrator

  ( Terminator 2 - 1 )

  S.M. Stirling

  Based on the blockbuster 1991 film “Terminator II, ” created by James Cameron and William Wisher, this is the first officially authorized novel and the first book in a trilogy. Hiding out in Paraguay, Sarah and John Conner must confront a new, more terrifying Terminator unit—one that can actually pass as human.

  T2: Infiltrator(T2 #1)

  by S.M. Stirling

  PROLOGUE

  A MOTEL, LOS ANGELES: 1995

  Tarissa Dyson sat silent and motionless in the motel room’s uncomfortable chair and watched her children sleep. Blythe and Danny lay totally abandoned to it, like puppies collapsed after a long, hard romp, dark lashes still against soft, plump cheeks. They had wanted so desperately to stay awake for their father’s return, had fought so valiantly to keep their eyes open.

  She felt a twinge of regret for not keeping them awake. But their constant refrain of “Where’s Daddy?” and “When’s he coming back?” had strained her nerves to the snapping point. She’d rather feel guilty for letting them get some much-needed rest than for yelling at them when they were already so frightened and stressed.

  She tried to steer her mind away from what had frightened them. Frightened them and terrified me, she admitted to herself. The brutal image of the Terminator peeling the flesh off the metal skeleton of its forearm flashed unbidden into her mind’s eye. That memory was like probing a broken tooth with your tongue, at once painful and irresistible.

  They were in a little motel off the interstate, clean but shabby, showing bare spots in the tired carpet and worn patches on the arms of the sofa, smelling slightly of disinfectant soap.

  The Terminator had said that the T-1000 would probably go to their home, extract information from whomever it found there, and then terminate them.

  Terminate them. What a sterile way to put it.

  So Sarah Connor had chosen this place from the phone book. They would meet here after the mission, she’d said. Mission—another word that distanced people from what they were doing.

  Only the destruction of Miles’s dreams.

  Images crowded into her mind: Miles pressed against his file cabinet, terror on his face as shots destroyed the room, glass shattering and paper turned to confetti swirling around him.

  “Take Danny and go! Run! Just run!” he’d shouted.

  She’d grabbed their son and dragged him toward the front of the house. Then Miles broke from his office, running toward them. A bullet struck him; she could

  still see the arc of blood as he fell. Tarissa swallowed hard. Then her son had slipped from her grasp and thrown himself over his father’s prone body.

  “Don’t you hurt ray daddy!” he shouted.

  She looked at her son, awed by the courage in that small package. Tarissa put her hand down on the bed beside him, fearful that touching him might wake him.

  She sighed. If what they’d told her was true, then the loss of Miles’s dreams was a small price to pay to ensure that their son and daughter would live to have dreams of their own one day.

  The endless sound of cars shushing by might have been lulling… had there been any possibility that she could sleep. Tarissa sighed again and squeezed her eyes shut, whispering a brief prayer for Miles’s safe return.

  Danny started snoring and she looked at him. The corners of her full lips wanted to lift in affectionate amusement, but she lacked the physical strength, even for such a little thing.

  Call, she thought passionately. Call!

  She’d never been good at waiting; that was why she was so punctual herself.

  Miles was less so, and had often teased her out of her irritation over his tardiness by asserting that opposites attract. He’d slide his arms around her, his beautiful dark eyes smiling… Tarissa shook her head.

  But this wasn’t just waiting. This was slow torture.

  Call!

  With another sigh she rubbed her face, then got up from the ugly chair to pace the little room. It was taking so long. Too long? Who could say? How long did

  “missions” take anyway?

  Miles, Miles, come home to me! Please, please, please…

  She looked at the TV and then at Danny and Blythe. If she kept the volume down it probably wouldn’t bother them, and there might be something… Tarissa sat on the end of the bed and tapped the remote. Sound blared from the TV and she groped frantically for the mute button. Her heart pounding, she turned guiltily to Danny and Blythe. The little guy turned over and uttered a muffled protest, but didn’t wake up. Blythe didn’t even stir.

  What kind of jerk leaves the volume on max? Tarissa thought, then answered herself: The type who thinks that sort of thing is funny.

  When she looked back the screen had cleared and there was Cyberdyne Corporation… on fire. There were shattered police cars everywhere and the strobing lights of dozens of ambulances. It was a disaster, a war zone. She watched bodies being carried out on stretchers and she forgot to breathe.

  “Miles,” she whispered, and her heart shriveled with horror.

  The phone rang and she dived for it.

  “Yes?” she said, amazed at how calm she sounded. Danny and Blythe slept on.

  “Tarissa?” It was John Connor’s voice. The voice of a smart-ass ten-year-old, mature beyond his years.

  “Where’s Miles?” she asked. She heard John take a breath, and froze, screaming silently. Miles should be on the phone, not John. John’s just a kid. Don’t blow up at him. Suddenly she felt very distant, as though she’d been cut free from her feelings. John hadn’t answered yet and the pause was getting painfully long.

  “He’s… gone,” she said, sparing the boy.

  “He saved you tonight,” John said firmly. “He saved Danny and Blythe and millions of other people. You know that. You’ve got to remember that,” his voice pleaded.

  “I know,” she agreed, then choked. With a hard swallow she steadied herself and asked, “Where’s your mother?”

  “She’s been hurt,” John answered. “She’d needs a transfusion, but that’s’out, for obvious reasons. She’ll be all right, I think. Mom’s tough.”

  Yes, she was, and terrifying—maybe because she was visibly hanging on by a thread. Tarissa would never forget the sight of her standing over Miles, trembling and cursing, her finger tightening on the trigger. But Sarah Connor had lived alone with this slowly approaching horror for years and had still soldiered on. She was tough all right.

  And so are you, kid, Tarissa thought with amazement. So much was riding on this boy’s slender shoulders. She remembered the way he’d calmed his mother.

  “Where’s the Terminator?” she asked. With the massive… being beside him, John should be able to take on anything. She became aware of another too-long pause.

  “We had to destroy him,” John said rapidly. “He said so… he said so himself. He climbed into the… he did it, with Mom’s help, himself. We couldn’t risk someone getting hold of his microprocessor.”

  Oh my God, Tarissa thought. “No, I guess not,” she managed to say numbly.

  “Besides, the T-1000 damaged him so badly, he couldn’t pass for human anymore.” John sounded almost distracted, as though more important things were happening around him and his attention was divided.

  You poor kid, she thought. Poor Terminator as well. Poor Miles. My poor love.

  “Then you didn’t really have a choice.” At least I suppose so. What do I know?

  I’m new to all this. The image of the Terminator’s flesh-stripped arm, of the intricate, exposed mechanism of it, made her squeeze her eyes shut. She didn’t want her imagination to supply her with anything more. “Good luck,” she said.

  “And to you,�
�� he answered.

  Tarissa hung up the phone. She couldn’t say thank you, even though she knew that Miles’s sacrifice had just saved the world. She couldn’t bring herself to thank one of the people who’d brought him to it.

  Tarissa pushed herself up from the bed and stumbled to the window.

  Pressing her hand hard against her mouth, she kept as quiet as possible so as not to disturb her sleeping children. A great fire made of pain and rage and fear

  swelled in her chest and sobs like a series of blows racked her.

  After a few minutes the worst was over and she leaned panting against the window frame, feeling sick. Tarissa could feel the world crumble to broken ice as she stared at the dingy parking lot through her tears. How was she going to tell her children that their father was never coming home?

  ALTADENA, CA: 1995

  John paid the clerk with some of his stolen cash. Easy money, he thought: it was only two days since he and his best friend had ripped off that hapless whoever-it-was, hacking his PIN number at the ATM machine. It seemed like a lifetime.

  Then everything had seemed to be going in a straight line toward a future as miserable as the present. Now? It was all different.

  Poor Todd and Janelle, his court-appointed foster parents, were dead. Now they’d be dicks forever. His mother wasn’t a psycho, she was a hero, and his life had been saved repeatedly by a Terminator.

  If he didn’t feel so rotten He’d think he was dreaming this. He felt numb and tense at the same time, wired and exhausted. Every motion he made seemed remote, like the gestures of a puppet. His mother looked like hell and her wounds didn’t seem to want to stop bleeding, and though he cared—a lot—that also felt distant somehow.

  John came back to the car, pulled a jar of orange juice out of the plastic bag, uncapped it, and handed it to his mother.

  “I wanted coffee,” she said. Sarah’s hand was shaking as she took the drink from

  him.

  “You coulda used their coffee to seal tire leaks, Mom.” He looked at her, worried, as he worked the cap off a bottle of aspirin. “Anyway, isn’t sugar supposed to be good for you if you’re hurt or something?”

  Sarah took four aspirin and a swig of orange juice.

  “Yeah,” she said, closing her eyes and leaning her head back against the seat.

  “Glucose. Energy.”

  The car they’d stolen was a well-used Chrysler, nondescript and fortunately full of gas. It ran well, too. They were already fifty miles from Cyberdyne.

  “I got some bandages, too,” John said, offering her a look into the bag.

  Sarah opened her eyes slowly; it was a struggle. Despite her pain she wanted desperately to sleep. Bad idea, she told herself. She couldn’t leave John alone.

  Her full lips jerked in an almost smile. He was something special, but he was still only ten years old.

  “There used to be a doctor who didn’t ask questions,” she said vaguely. With an effort, wincing, she sat up straighter. That was better. “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Altadena,” he answered.

  Sarah seemed to come out of a fog she’d been sinking into, shifting again into a still more upright position.

  “All right,” she said. “I know where we are. Let’s go. Get on the highway, John,

  head north.”

  “Can this guy give you a transfusion?” he asked, slipping into the driver’s seat.

  She shook her head. “But he can stop the bleeding.”

  John started the car and drove. They didn’t speak for a long time, but he didn’t notice as he concentrated on driving and on not thinking. Suddenly alarmed, he glanced over at his mother, afraid she might have finally fallen unconscious.

  He caught the gleam of her eyes as she looked at him, and was reassured.

  “It’s going to be all right,” she said, a world of satisfaction in her voice. “We stopped them. We stopped Skynet, Judgment Day, all of it.”

  John glanced at her again and saw tears glisten in her eyes. His throat tightened in sympathy.

  “What will we do now?” he asked. His voice sounded weak in his own ears.

  “Head to South America, I think,” Sarah told him. “We’ll make a nice, peaceful life for ourselves and die in obscurity many, many years from now.”

  “Heh,” he said, hardly daring to believe it was really over. “Sounds good.”

  “It does,” she said. “It does.”

  CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS CORPORATION PARKING LOT: 1995

  Paul Warren and Roger Colvin, respectively president and CEO of Cyberdyne

  Systems, stood together in the cold predawn darkness and watched their company headquarters burn.

  “Dyson!” Warren exclaimed. “Dyson, of all people.”

  “Goddamn Luddites,” Colvin growled. “The bastards are everywhere.” He crushed the empty coffee cup he was holding and threw it away in disgust. “Did he leave a note, anything to explain why he did this?”

  Warren shook his head.

  “The cops said that his house was shot up. His computer and all his records were trashed or burned. They said his wife and kids were missing.”

  Colvin looked at him quickly.

  “Do you think he killed them?”

  “If he did he hid the bodies.” Warren looked at his boss. “There was a lot of blood. It doesn’t look good.”

  Colvin ran his hands through his thinning brown hair.

  “Guys kill their wives and kids all the time,” the CEO said in frustration. “But they don’t blow up the company they work for! Why the hell would he do this?”

  “There’s a good chance that terrorists forced him to it,” a friendly-sounding voice said from behind them.

  The two executives turned to find themselves under the regard of a middle-aged

  man remarkable only in the perfection of his ordinariness. He looked like he’d dressed as rapidly as they had, expensively casual yet rumpled. He approached the two men slowly and their stance became subtly deferential.

  “Mr. Colvin,” he said to the CEO. “Mr. Warren.” He turned piercing blue eyes on the president.

  “Everything is backed up off-site,” Colvin assured him.

  “Everything is not backed up, Mr. Colvin,” the man said, his voice still friendly, his pale gaze like an ice borer. “We’ve lost the chip and we’ve lost the arm.

  These items are irreplaceable. Let’s not kid ourselves. Even Mr. Dyson can be replaced eventually, but not those two items.”

  “We have copies of all his files,” Warren offered eagerly. “Even his home computer files.”

  The man stared at Warren for a long moment. The president’s hands fisted inside his jacket pockets; nobody had looked at him like that since high school, since he’d been a pencil-necked geek bullied by the jocks. Making a very large fortune before he turned thirty had been vengeance enough… until now. Now he felt as if he’d been face-slammed into a locker again and had his lunch money stolen.

  “But the loss of those materials,” the man continued, “will be a very heavy blow to your research.” He turned his attention to the CEO. “Frankly, your security was a joke. The most valuable artifacts ever found by human beings were put into your trust and you just—”

  He made a single sharp gesture toward the burning chaos of the Cyberdyne labs.

  The other men flushed, as if the movement of the long narrow hand had somehow flicked something rancid into their faces.

  “—pissed it away. The very least that you could do is have off-site backup. Have you checked with that site?”

  Colvin and Warren shot a panicked look at one another.

  “You haven’t, have you?” The two men shook their heads. “Is there at least a spare off-site backup?”

  They just stared at him.

  “Jesus! You people are unbelievable!”

  “We’re engineers,” Colvin said with strained dignity, “not security.”

  “I would never have guessed,” the man sneered. “Ok
ay”—he spread his hands

  —“get your shit together; whatever shit you might have left, that is. From now on you’ll be working under our auspices at another location.”

  “Our people won’t like that,” Warren said.

  “Then get different people! The only guy you’re going to have trouble replacing is Dyson, which makes everybody else expendable. Including you two clowns. If someone mouths off about working for us, fire them. And for Christ’s sake get yourself a decent security manager… or I will!” He spun on his heel and walked away. After a few steps he turned back. “I’ll be in touch. Check your backup and for God’s sake get a few more copies of everything made and distributed to

  people you can trust.”

  “You think they might come after us?” Warren said, and flushed as he felt his voice rise to a squeak.

  “They might. That’s acceptable. Losing those records isn’t. See to it.” With a last scowl he turned away and walked off.

  Colvin and Warren looked at each other covertly, with the mutual resentment of men toward someone who has seen their shame.

  “Who is that guy?” Warren asked after a few moments.

  “He’s—”

  “I don’t mean what he is. Who is he?”

  “Tricker?” Colvin said with a shrug.

  “Is that his first name or his last?” the president asked.

  “Hell, for all I know it’s his job description,” the CEO answered.

  Warren snorted.

  “Well, we should get a move on,” he said at last. They’d waited at least five minutes; now Tricker’s orders could be claimed as their own idea.

  “Apparently,” Colvin said dryly, giving the burning hulk of Cyberdyne a long last look, “we should have gotten a move on the day before yesterday.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  CINCINNATI: 2021 , POST-JUDGMENT

  DAY

  Multiple sensors scanned the broken wasteland of the ruined city as the Hunter/

  Killer’s treads rolled its massive steel body over the rusting wrecks of automobiles, crushing the bones of their long-dead drivers. The tortured metal squealing of its passage frightened flocks of birds into flight and sent more earthbound animals scurrying for cover.