Humans enjoyed smiling; they took pleasure in their own foibles. Since it was important for Serena to pass as human, anything that made her more so was a successful feature. As long as such attributes stayed within controllable limitations, of course.
Serena had seen tapes of animals mating, and with them it seemed proper and necessary. But for some reason the sight of the humans so engaged offended her.
They seemed more animal than animals.
This will become one of your weapons, Skynet told her. Once a human has had sex with you, it will consider you safe.
“It looks wet and disgusting,” Serena remarked.
Skynet showed her a magnetic resonance image of a human’s brain as it engaged in sex.
“Astonishing,” she said as she watched the colors swirl. It obviously felt better than it looked.
“Don’t they know we’re watching?” the girl asked.
No, Skynet told her. There are several places in the complex where I permit them to think they are unobserved. This one is almost always used for this purpose.
“Creatures of habit.”
It is equally true that they are unpredictable.
And thus a challenge. Serena enjoyed challenges.
Her eyes were open as if she’d never been asleep. Serena sat up in her cot, straining to hear.
Invasion, Skynet told her. Stop them.
She rose and entered the bright corridor barefoot and wearing the simple shift she slept in. Mystified, she noticed that none of her sisters or brothers had been wakened.
“Where are they?” she asked.
In answer, Skynet flashed a map of the corridors showing the location of the invader with a flashing dot. There were probably others, but this one was her assignment.
As she trotted down the hallway Serena wondered how the humans had found this facility. It was small, and discreetly underground. Its only product was biological and therefore hard to trace, unlike the giant factories that produced the war machines and the soldier robots, the mines and foundries and chemical plants.
True, it held a node of Skynet, making it a worthwhile target, but even the destruction of that node was bearable. Skynet’s main location was well out of their reach. All other systems were multiply redundant. The destruction of this node would mean only that a new laboratory would be created elsewhere. The only significant loss would be Serena and her siblings and the scientists who had created them.
“How did they find us?” she asked at last, unable to suppress her curiosity.
A human escaped, the computer admitted. It led them to us.
This confession of fallibility on the part of Skynet shook the girl to her foundations, but she pushed the information aside as irrelevant. She would consider it later.
Observing her reaction, Skynet recorded another success in her training and attitude.
Montez crouched at the branching end of a sterile white corridor, alert for any incursions of Skynet’s battle robots. He listened to the infrequent communications of the other teams and waited for his signal to proceed. He checked his watch and looked around; all silent, all clear.
Serena watched him. A brief scan in the ultraviolet range showed his fear, any overt sign of which was hidden by the gas mask he wore.
“Kill or capture?” she asked.
Kill.
She peeked around the corner again and considered how she’d do it.
Some instinct warned Montez he was being watched and he spun round, weapon at the ready. Training held his fire and he stared at the child who gasped and jumped in fear.
The girl was a pretty little thing, with enormous, up tilted hyacinth blue eyes and a shining cap of pale blond hair. Barefoot and dressed in her nightgown, she looked incredibly vulnerable. She bit her lip and then ghosted toward him on tiptoe.
“Help me!” she whispered. “Please, please take me with you.”
He didn’t answer for a minute. The lieutenant would have his ass for bringing a kid along. But what could he do? With a grimace she couldn’t see, he lifted a finger to the area of his mouth in a shushing gesture. Then he signaled that she should grasp his belt.
With a grateful little noise the kid did so and they waited together. Finally the signal came and he started to rise.
Serena couldn’t believe it had been this easy. The human hadn’t even felt it when she took his knife out of its sheath. As he started to rise she plunged it up to the hilt into his spine at the base of his neck.
She stood back as the body spasmed and voided. There was very little blood.
A neat kill, Skynet observed. Congratulations. You may go back to bed now.
Warmed by the praise, Serena turned and padded back to her cot, convinced that the escaped human had been planned by Skynet to provide this training opportunity.
She lay back down, pulled up her covers, and was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
INFILTRATOR CRÈCHE: 2028
After her last growth acceleration Serena awoke to all appearances a young woman of twenty; her hair had darkened to the color of burnished bronze, and she moved with the animal grace that only an inhuman perfection of nutrition and training could have produced. She had received enhancements to her neural-net-computer implant and could now freely access Skynet’s data systems—or any other system that Skynet had ever interfaced with or recorded, and given a little time, virtually any system complex enough to have an operating code. To power the mechanical subsystems she had an improved biological fuel cell running off of her bloodstream that would never need to be replaced as long as
she herself was viable. Most intriguing of all she now had the ability not merely to communicate with Skynet but to actually merge with it. Skynet itself could take control of her body, using it as an extension of itself. For Serena the experience was ecstasy.
She was given her mission at last: Her function would be to gain the confidence of humans in order to discover their plans and, if possible, assassinate their officers. Her particular mission was to find and destroy John Connor, the human leader.
LONGMONT, COLORADO: 2028
Crouched behind rubble, Serena peered at the humans through the rib cage of a skeleton. Their ingenious destruction of the satellite transmission tower had left Skynet temporarily blind in this area, allowing them to move freely in daylight.
She was to join this team and follow them back to their base.
Her cover story was that she was the lone survivor of a scouting party. She bore artistic and deliberately, though not seriously, infected wounds as proof of her ordeal. She also bore dispatches, genuine ones, from one of Connor’s lieutenants to the commander of this particular group.
Skynet had determined that passing on the documents would have a negligible effect on the war and would support her story nicely. It was believed that the humans had no means of verifying personnel records, and she had passed for human more than once in the lab’s interrogation chambers. Skynet had also gone to considerable trouble to determine that there were in fact no survivors of that scouting party.
Serena followed her targets at a distance, watching their movements and imitating them with perfect mimicry. She noted their hand signals and found a file on them, making the full set available to herself.
The 1-950 stalked the humans all day, taking note of where they holed up for the night in a huddle of ruins whose charred walls stood above the surrounding sea of rubble, scrub, and tough dry weeds. She watched them eat their cold supper and sip from their canteens as she settled herself to wait for morning.
Approaching them at night would surely get her shot. They hadn’t survived this long by being stupid.
They’d been heading north out of the ruins of a megalopolis, and because of the terrain, they would continue to do so for some miles. Farther on, the landscape flattened out, natural cover increased, and the number of routes they could take would expand.
She’d place herself in their path a few miles farther ahead and let them discover her.
It would be best for them to stumble onto her trail by themselves, much less suspicious. After a moment’s consideration Serena decided to begin by laying a trail several kilometers back, in case their commander was of a cautious nature, leading to the place where they would “find” her. Five ought to be enough. She started off at a lope.
This might be more elaborate than was strictly necessary. In all probability the humans wouldn’t be too alarmed by her. She was, after all, wearing their uniform, bearing dispatches and wounds, and clearly wasn’t a Terminator.
Serena allowed herself a grin at the thought, for practice. Humans did such
things, even when alone.
No, she couldn’t be a Terminator. They were all huge, lumbering things—even with miniaturized power sources, they had to be, to match the surprising resilience and energy density of a large mammal. And male—one and all.
Dogs might not warm to her, but they wouldn’t fear her; she was too organic to upset them, with no lingering traces of metallic key tones for their inconveniently keen noses to detect. And she’d been taught gestures that soothed canines. Several puppies had lasted as long as six months in her company, before becoming nonfunctional and being destroyed.
Serena was careful. The signs she left were few and far between, in one place rolling around on the ground as though she’d slept, then covering the traces almost as well as she could. The farther she went beyond the human camp, the more obvious the signs became, to mimic the effects of increasing fatigue and fever. She didn’t want them to suspect they were being led into a trap, or to be surprised; when surprised, humans tended to shoot first and ask questions later.
At least, the ones who’d survived this long did.
Finally Serena laid up just as dawn was approaching. Supposedly she had been out of touch with other humans for a while and so wouldn’t know about the raid that had blinded Skynet. So she’d only be traveling by night.
That directive had never made sense to her. Given the instrumentation available to Skynet, humans were almost more visible by night than by day. Not that they were going to tell the enemy that. But it was puzzling. Perhaps, since humans couldn’t see very well at night, darkness made them feel invisible, even when logic should tell them that they were very much exposed.
Serena was actually tired as she lay down, not in the state of crawling, panting exhaustion she would be experiencing if she were human, but tired. The infections that she’d nursed in her wounds were bad enough now to actually be bothersome.
Should she allow them to get worse? Yes, she decided, a raging fever would be a nice touch. Her computer would see that it didn’t become too dangerous, as well as keeping her delirious ravings, should she become genuinely delirious, on such safe topics as the horrible destruction of her squad.
When next she became aware she felt someone wiping her face with a hot, wet, very rough, and foul-smelling cloth. Then whoever it was made a loud grunting cough.
Not human, her computer supplied. Then, a moment later: Feline, large. Serena slitted her eyes open and closed them at once. Her heart sped up slightly; she dampened her adrenaline flow and got it under control.
It was a tiger.
After the destruction of the human habitat, many animals that had been kept in captivity had escaped. Many had died, some had thrived. Being prolific, voracious, and cunning, tigers had done very well. By the time human prey became scarce and wary and well armed, other animals had bred back enough to compensate.
Risking another glance at the animal as it sniffed her abdomen, she realized that she was in luck. The tiger was young, and not very hungry or she might not have
wakened at all.
The cat sniffed the wound in her side, the one that was most infected, and wuffled its displeasure. Serena could smell the wound, too, over the other scents around her: the cat, the grass and weeds she crushed beneath her, her own body odor. Maybe that was why it hadn’t taken a bite out of her; she smelled rotten.
The tiger moved, so that it was standing over her with its back to her head. It sniffed at her crotch.
With exquisite care she drew her knife, so slowly the cat was unaware of the movement. It licked at the blood that had dried on her pant leg, took a small, cautious bite.
Heat scan marked the exact spot where its heart beat and she plunged the dagger into it with one swift stroke. The cat collapsed without a sound.
It was a young cat, nowhere near the six hundred pounds it would have been full grown. It must weigh only half that.
Serena pushed at the creature and to her astonishment couldn’t budge it. She felt its blood soaking into her uniform and the knife’s hilt dug into her side quite painfully. But she couldn’t get the leverage to push the thing off of her, and, frankly, didn’t have the strength.
She fell back with a hiss of exasperation and assessed her condition. Her fever was one hundred and three and she was physically exhausted.
Outwitted myself, she thought. She gave the computer permission to begin stimulating the repair of her body. She could be in much better shape than this
and still convince humans that she was at death’s door. After a few moments her temp was down a degree and she made another effort to shift the tiger’s carcass.
After a few minutes she flopped back down again.
“He-lp,” she said facetiously.
“Hands over yer head,” a male voice snapped.
Serena’s eyes popped open in surprise.
“Burns, Serena!” she blatted out, surprised at the strangled sound of her own voice. She rattled off her serial number and unit.
With effort she managed to raise her head high enough over the tiger’s hips to see two very ragged individuals, both male. Mentally, she congratulated herself; they were the advance guard for the unit she’d been following.
Hands up? she thought. That seems a bit superfluous. I’m half-buried under this immovable, overgrown pussycat and they want my hands up? These boys have been in the field too long.
“Help,” she said feebly.
They continued to advance cautiously and she couldn’t control her amusement, breaking into chuckles despite her wounds and the weight of the tiger. Even at her most subtle she couldn’t have arranged such a scenario. This was way too over-the-top to be anything but real. So what did they think was going on here beyond what was going on? To be fair, though, the tiger is dead.
“If you’re looking for its mama I don’t think you need to worry,” she said at last.
“It’s not full grown, but I think it’s old enough to be on its own.”
The soldiers continued to ignore her.
“Help!” she said again.
One of them came over at last and dragged the tiger off of her.
“Oh!” she said sincerely. “Thank you.”
“Jesus, lady,” he said, looking her up and down. “You’re a mess.”
Serena looked at him, grinned, and for the first time in her life genuinely blacked out.
“Can she make it?” Lieutenant Zeller asked.
“She’s feverish, these wounds are infected, and she lost an amazing amount of blood from that tiger bite.” Corpsman Gonzales shook his head. “I can’t say, ma’am. It all depends on her constitution and her will.” He shrugged his big shoulders. “We’ll know more when she wakes up.”
“And when will that be, Gonzales?” Zeller was aware that her corpsman had a soft side and might well stack the deck in the stranger’s favor.
“Uh…” He looked at the woman on the ground.
“Now,” Serena rasped, weakly raising her hand.
“Now,” he said with a grin. He turned back to his patient. “This may sound stupid, but how do you feel?”
“Sick as a dog, I hurt all over, my arms and legs feel like they’re full of hot, wet sand.” She grinned weakly. “Feeling this bad is a sure sign I’ll live.” Serena pulled herself up onto her elbows and regarded the lieutenant with bloodshot eyes. “Serena Burns, ma’am. Rodriguez’s
Rangers, 17-A440. My commander was Lieutenant Atwill.”
“So what’s your story, Burns?” Zeller asked.
“I was on rear guard, we were heading north to hook up with the Mendocino Command, carrying dispatches for Fujimoro. Things were quiet, we’d been lucky…” Serena paused for dramatic effect and let herself lie back with a hiss.
“We were lucky up to that point and then all hell broke loose. HK units—new type, looked like a ball about the size of a head on eight legs. Darts, gas, plasma guns. I was only about a thousand yards back, but by the time I caught up to the unit… it was over. I got knocked out by what must have been a final blast. I don’t think they even registered that I was there. When I came to I was almost completely buried. I picked up the dispatches and kept heading north.” She dug in her pocket, which brought both the lieutenant and the corpsman to high alert, and drew out a tattered scrap of paper. “This sure as hell wasn’t going to take me as far as I needed to go. I figured if I kept on long enough I might hook up with somebody.” She let her hand flop down in not entirely feigned exhaustion. “And here I am.”
Zeller picked up the map fragment. It was half-burned and spattered with blood.
She looked at the woman on the ground.
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll take you with us. I’ll give you the rest of today and tonight to rest up. We head out at first light.”
Serena blinked tiredly.
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” Then she frowned. “Light? You travel in the daytime?”
Gonzales grinned at her and knelt to offer his patient a sip of water.
“Right now we do,” he said happily. “We just blew up Skynet’s eyes.”
Serena grinned.
“Man, I feel better already.”
The whole troop of men and women wore their hair fairly short; the men shaved when they could. It was cleaner and offered less cover to disease-bearing vermin. Prisoners had said that to her when Serena had gone into their cells to learn. But it wasn’t until now, when she got her first case of head lice, that she understood. The computer regulated her system so that they almost all died, for which she was grateful. But getting rid of all of them would look suspicious, so she scratched along with the humans, surprised at her own revulsion. It had been easier to accept the biological side of her own being in the antiseptic corridors of the research facility, and even full-sensory input from Skynet’s databanks was not the same as really being there.
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