Sarah leaned in. She had to admit it looked a hell of a lot better than the Jeep.
The hoses didn’t look like they were going to melt, for one thing. And the interior looked pretty good for all its age.
“Air-conditioning?” she asked.
Enrique nodded proudly. “Works great.” He held up the keys. “Want to try her?”
She snatched them out of his hand and opened the door. “Coming?” she asked.
*
Sarah leaned her elbows on the old picnic table, gazing out over the desert, watching the sun go down in opalescent fire. She let her eyes wander around the compound, resting briefly on the incongruous chain-link fence. Almost every open diamond formed by the crossing of the wires was filled with the head of a rattlesnake, jaws open as if screaming, fangs out in ferocious display.
She sighed, remembering when she’d first met Enrique and Yolanda. They were a young couple then, with only the trailer to live in. She’d been lost and thirsty and frightened, as well as big as a house with John.
They’d taken her in, fed and watered her and calmed her down, letting her stay as long as she wanted. They’d introduced her around and, in a sense, had gotten her started. Who knows how long it would have taken her to make the contacts she needed without them.
Sarah thought about the girl she’d been then. She’d led a sheltered life, protected, well fed, well cared for. Better than her son’s actually. Until the night that changed her life the worst thing that had ever happened to her was her father’s death from a heart attack when she was seventeen.
When she met Enrique in the desert she was still soft as a kitten, despite the loss of Kyle and the terror of being pursued by a Terminator.
Kyle, she thought wistfully, seeing his beautiful face in her mind’s eye. What a life he must have had. And yet he’d remained a decent and gentle man. He’d touched her as though she were spun glass, impossibly delicate.
One night, she thought, not bitterly, but with an aching longing. Just one night to learn to love one another, to express that love, to conceive their son. Her throat tightened. She loved him still, and he deserved her love. I wonder if he would love me if he could see the woman I’ve become.
With an effort she pulled her mind from such maudlin thoughts. She was certainly a different woman than she’d been when she last sat here. Then she’d just met the T-1000, been saved by a Terminator, and was coming down from the drugs Silberman had pumped into her. Desperate to do something to stop Judgment Day. She looked at the words in the table before her, carved into the wood with a K-bar bayonet.
NO FATE.
“There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves,” she murmured, completing the thought. Kyle had told her that. John made him memorize it as a message to her from the future.
“That Web site is very strange,” Dieter said, coming up behind her.
Sarah shifted, making a place for him on the bench.
“Why?” she asked. Sarah put her elbows on the picnic table and rested her chin on her fist, her eyes on the first faint evening stars. “What’s strange about it?”
She looked at him, and rubbed a finger over the time-smoothed words.
Dieter glanced at the graffiti, then swung one long leg over the bench. “Well, for one thing, whoever put it up thinks you’re the victim of a government conspiracy.”
Sarah laughed; it was so stupid she couldn’t help it. “No kidding?” she said. “Are there UFOs?”
“How did you know?” he asked. “There seems to be a sizable group of people who imagine that the government is working with aliens to make your life difficult.” Dieter hunched his shoulders, leaning his big arms on the table. “I find it disturbing that people that dumb can afford a computer.”
“And they can vote!” She grinned at his expression. “Don’t let it get to you. If they’re busy on-line they aren’t out making trouble.”
“Not necessarily, Sarah. The ones that worry me are the ones who call themselves Luddites; they seem very serious. They had a private chat room, but I couldn’t get into it. It seems to be by-invitation-only.”
“So what are you saying? That I’ve got a following?”
“Just a feeling,” he said. “I think somebody’s manipulating these people. They attract them by using certain key words—‘conspiracy,’ ‘aliens’—like ringing a supper bell for a dog—then direct the discussion. Whoever set up the site also set up the invitation-only chat room. It feels like they’re picking and choosing individuals.” He shrugged. “Big things have started from such small beginnings.”
Sarah picked at a splinter on the table and thought about it. A Web site suggesting a government conspiracy would pull in a lot of discontented people no matter what the conspiracy was supposed to be about. But my name on it…
Could that be a coincidence?
She sighed heavily. “It could be that ‘master Terminator’ we were talking about,”
she said, making air quotes. “If it exists it might just be smart enough to know that under the right circumstances humans could help it.” She grimaced.
“Interesting, but I don’t see what we can do about it.”
Sarah looked at him sidelong and watched him shrug again. She punched his arm gently and he looked at her.
“If it’s some long term plan then the only thing we can hope to do is disrupt it by destroying said ‘master Terminator’.”
“What if there’s more than one?” he asked.
Sarah rolled her eyes. “If you want a headache that badly! Dieter, just hit yourself in the head with a hammer.” She stood up. “I’m going to check on John.”
“Hey, sweetie,” she said, coming up the steps of the bus.
He looked up from the keyboard and grinned. Sarah glanced at the arrangement he’d made on the tabletop. He’d stripped the Terminator’s skull off the interior matrix, which he put in a smaller version of the Faraday cage he’d made for the whole head. The CPU was connected to Dieter’s laptop by yet another jury-rigged contraption.
“How’s it going?” she asked uneasily. “There’s no modem…”
“Not as well as I’d hoped,” he admitted. “In the movies they always break a code like this in a couple of hours.”
“Ah, but this isn’t the movies,” Sarah said wisely. “Maybe you should take a break.”
He shook his head. “Nah. I’ve got to keep banging away at this. I couldn’t sleep anyway.”
Wanna bet, Sarah thought. She seemed to remember sleep coming easily at sixteen, no matter what the circumstances.
“So what’s the problem?” she asked.
John shrugged, drawing one corner of his mouth up sardonically.
“I dunno; maybe I’m just not cut out to be a hacker.”
“My advice is to go for the simple solution,” she said. “The machines probably aren’t that big on innovation. Anything they used was undoubtedly based on human work. It might even be less complicated than something used for humans.”
John frowned and nodded, his eyes on the screen.
“Let Dieter help you,” she ordered. “He’s been trained in cryptography.”
John raised his head at the change in her tone.
“I’d like to see some progress on this by tomorrow morning,” she said. Then she got up and walked away.
John blinked. He’d just been given a lesson, he realized. Okay, he thought, so I’M
get the big kraut.
“First of all, I think we should disconnect this,” Von Rossbach said. He pulled the clips off of the CPU and drew it out of its slot. “If it’s functioning it might be altering any information remaining, or erasing it.”
John slapped his forehead.
“Don’t be hard on yourself,” Dieter said. “Nobody can think of everything.”
“Now here’s what we’re going to do.” He began typing rapidly. The screen lit up and columns of numbers and symbols flowed past.
John leaned close. “What’s it doing?”
The computer beeped and information began scrolling up in standard English.
Dieter’s face lit with surprise.
“Hey, maybe they were right!”
John leaned out the door of the bus. “Mom! Hey, Mom!”
Both Yolanda and his mother came running, both of them shushing him and making violent waving motions with their hands.
“For God’s sake, John! The kids are asleep!” Sarah hissed.
“Sorry; sorry, Yolanda,” he said, reducing his voice to a near whisper.
Yolanda ruffled his hair and rolled her eyes. “There’s no point in whispering now, hombre,” she said. “I’ll go check on them.” She cast Sarah one of those shared-between-mothers glances women do so well.
Sarah smiled and shook her head, then she approached the little table. “So what’s all the excitement?”
“We cracked the code!” John said. “Well, Dieter did.”
Sarah looked at him.
“The Sector did,” von Rossbach said modestly. “We’ve got entry codes, a map of the facility—”
“Anything on this master Terminator we’ve been supposing,” she asked.
“Uh, no. At least, not so far,” Dieter said.
“There’s a chance that the Terminator may have altered its memory, or erased stuff,” John admitted reluctantly.
Sarah tightened her lips and put her hands on her hips. She stood in thought for a
moment, then she shook her head. “We can’t use this,” she said bitterly. “And this… possible misinformation, coupled with the fact that they know we’re coming, only makes me even more certain that we should go for the main facility first.”
“No, Sarah. We need to know more before we can attack there.” Dieter’s voice held absolute conviction. “Nothing has really changed here,” he insisted. “I still believe our best chance of succeeding with Cyberdyne lies in the Sacramento facility.”
“And I still believe that going there would be a mistake,” she said. “My gut tells me it would be a wrong choice.”
“Sarah, we’re not ready,” Dieter said quietly. “We need the information that the Sacramento facility holds.”
“Need I remind you that they are ready,” she said through clenched teeth.
“But we know that!” John said.
Sarah rubbed her face, then slowly pulled her hands down and away. “So what you’re saying is that we know that they know that we know, and that’s supposed to make some kind of a difference?”
“Yeah, ‘cause they don’t know that we know,” John said. “We only think that they know that we know. But do they?”
Sarah glared at Dieter.
“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I lost you the first time around. My argument is that Sacramento is the only place where we might be able to obtain entry codes and a map of the main facility. You know we’ll need that. And we don’t dare go on-line looking again.
“Besides, their main facility is on a military base. At the very least we need to know which one! Or were you planning to just hit them at random, hoping you’d get the right one the first time out.”
Sarah blew out her breath and paced two steps one way, two the other, then stopped, her lips pressed into a thin line. “All right,” she said reluctantly. Her eyes snapped toward John. “But you are staying here.”
“Mom!”
Dieter nodded. “Fine by me.”
“Well, it’s not fine by me!” John protested.
“My mind is made up, John,” his mother said.
“Mom, if you keep me from taking risks I’m never going to learn anything and I’m never going to lead anyone! This is my fight, too.” He drew himself up.
“And I am going.”
“It’s too big a risk!” Sarah insisted.
They looked at each other and said a great deal with their eyes.
“I think it’s a bigger risk to leave me here.” John shook his head. “You can’t
protect me forever, Mom. Skynet has to be stopped, and even if I am a kid, I have to try to stop it, too.”
He startled her by pulling her into a hug and by doing so once again reminded her of how tall he’d grown. Sarah leaned her head against his shoulder and hugged him back. She could put her arms around him twice, he was so adolescent thin. Sarah let out her breath, and the last precious thread of her dream of a peaceful life for him slipped away in a long sigh. She pushed back and looked him in the eye, then she nodded once and released him.
“I want to go on record as saying I don’t like this.” Sarah muttered.
“We’d better get some sleep, then,” Dieter interrupted, rising. “We leave at dawn.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SERENA’S LAB: THE PRESENT
Serena frowned at the newly decanted pair of Terminators standing dripping on her improvised laboratory floor, amid the musky smells of the nutrient bath and the scent of damp concrete. Because she had needed them so quickly she’d put some of the tissue accelerant into their nutrient baths. Perhaps a little too much.
They looked like weather-beaten men in their mid to late thirties. But they’d come out with full heads of hair and beards and a full crop of body hair, which was a convenience.
She walked around the two. No gaps, no flaws. But something niggled at her.
I’ve forgotten something, the T-950 thought. As she came around to the front
again Serena saw it immediately. They were identical. She gave an exasperated hiss. ,
This is what comes from having too many balls in the air, she thought. It was necessary to assign them both to the Sacramento facility and they were going to draw attention with their looks. I suppose they could be twins. No. Maybe brothers or cousins, but twins would cause too much comment.
Immediately she began planning what to do to differentiate them from one another. One would shave his head, the other his beard, and she’d apply a different hair color’ to the bald one’s mustache. A Fu Manchu, she thought. She’d trim and color the eyebrows, too. Some sort of stain to the skin to mimic a darker coloration should also help.
The T-950 viewed the mock-up the computer part of her brain supplied with satisfaction. Then she applied dark glasses to one and half tints to the other. It would do. Especially if they weren’t constantly lined up beside each other.
The next pair will look different from the get-go, she wowed. It wouldn’t be hard, a few minor adjustments to the cartilage matrixes and different hair colors. She was pretty much stuck with the same bone structure. But there’s a lot you can do with that. If you were smart enough to think of it first.
She relayed instructions to the two. After they were finished, she’d set them to watching several talk and game shows that she’d recorded; then they would listen to a half-dozen radio shows of the same type. That should give them some idea of how ordinary people spoke and their body language. She’d already downloaded maps of California and information about the Sacramento target facility as well as a driving program.
Before doing their homework, however, Six and Seven started on the cosmetic adjustments she’d designed. Pity there wasn’t time enough for corrective surgery.
Four she was sending to Two in the outback cabin where her own replacement was breeding. It would be taking the rest of the CPU and energy-cell packets with it. With the way I’m going through Terminators, it might be best to leave a few in reserve for Serena Two, she thought.
If it all worked out, the Connors and their allies destroyed and Cyberdyne safe, then she would probably keep the second fetus and abort the first as potentially unstable. If things went horribly wrong, she’d done her best to cover any potential outcome.
Five was young looking enough that it wasn’t absolutely identical to the other Terminators; it just looked amazingly like them. Instinct prompted he
r to send it to Sacramento as well. There were probably cosmetic things she could do to it to further differentiate it from its cohorts.
The T-950 frowned. She could be giving the Connors more credit than they deserved here. Sending three Terminators, even this homegrown variety, after two humans was… embarrassing. Yes, perhaps she’d keep it with her at Cyberdyne.
Satisfied with her decisions, Serena closed her eyes and sat back in her chair. As the two Terminators worked on their hair and eyebrows, she sorted through the day’s downloaded data. Still nothing from the Connors or their ally. They were definitely avoiding the Internet. Well, if they weren’t updating her on their whereabouts and interests at least she’d deprived them of an important tool.
The last report she’d received from Three indicated that it had been captured.
Serena had come as close as she ever had in her life to genuine rage. How had humans captured her Terminator? Destroyed, she could understand, all they’d have to do was knock it off the plane somehow. But captured?
True, Three wasn’t one of Skynet’s best. But it was a damn sight better than any three humans, especially when one was a smallish woman and another barely more than a child. Or it should have been.
Making the best of the situation, the T-950 had ordered it to erase certain portions of memory while she planted other information. Whether or not the Connors would fall for the false information remained to be seen. But they’d seemed dead set on attacking the Sacramento facility. One can only hope that they’ll remain stubborn about it.
She wanted to go there herself. Very, very much. It would be exciting to pit herself against Skynet’s two greatest enemies face to face. Serena imagined herself crushing John Connor’s skull between her hands. Then realized she was smiling and smoothed her face to blankness.
Daydreaming. That was the sort of thing a human would do. She ardently wished for the stabilizing influence of Skynet, instead of the silence in her mind.
Another human response, she thought disparagingly.
With an effort she pulled her thoughts away from that realization and the feelings that accompanied it. It was irrelevant. What was important was killing or capturing the Connors. Even more vital was defending Skynet from them.
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