Terminator - T3 01 - Rise of the Machines

by David Hagberg

  building that bristled with satellite dishes, laser guidance transmission heads, and its own separate power station and air-conditioning plant.

  Some distance behind the rambling building from which a dozen different wings branched in all directions was the antennae farm for worldwide communications and data links from the upper gigahertz frequency range all the way down to ELF—Extremely Low Frequencies—used for communications with submarines.

  In the basement and subbasement levels were beehives of laboratories where sensitive experiments took place around the clock. Beneath the hangars and stretching in a huge circle nearly a half mile in diameter was a supercooled particle accelerator, the electromagnets of which in themselves constituted a radiation hazard when operating at full power.

  An airstrip ran east and west with a modern control tower and several hangars and maintenance buildings nearby. Several military transport aircraft, a number of helicopters, and several small private aircraft were parked on the ramp or inside the hangars.

  Terminator spotted the LAPD helicopter in front of one of the hangars.

  "T-X is already here," he said.

  Kate scrambled to the passenger seat as they started down the long hill to the gate, still a half mile away. "How do you know?" she demanded, her heart in her throat

  "The police helicopter. N-one-zero-zero-nine. It was in the air near the cemetery." Terminator pointed to the chopper on the ramp.

  "Oh, God," Kate said. "Hurry." She turned to Connor. "Cover up that stuff. I'm going to talk our way onto the base."

  Connor grabbed a blanket and covered the weapons and explosives as Terminator slowed for the gate.

  A pair of Air Policemen stepped out and motioned for Terminator to stop. He pulled up and opened the side window. Kate leaned across to talk to the security cops. "I'm Kate Brewster. My dad, General Brewster, is expecting us," she said.

  The security officers were dressed in BDUs with black berets, M16s slung over their shoulders. "May I see some identification, please?" the tech sergeant asked.

  Kate took her driver's license out of the wallet in her jacket pocket and handed it down. "My fiance, Scott Peterson, is in back," she said. She smiled and placed a hand on Terminator's arm. "This is... Tom Peterson... his brother. Our best man."

  The sergeant went into the guardhouse with Kate's ID, while the other guard kept a watchful eye on them. There was no traffic.

  A couple of minutes later the sergeant came out and handed Kate's driver's license back. "The general's a little busy right now, ma'am. But his secretary's authorized your visit."

  The second guard swung the gate open. "Straight ahead to the main entrance," the sergeant instructed. "Someone will meet you there and get you signed in."

  "Thank you," Kate said. "Please hurry," she said under her breath to Terminator.

  CRS Computer Center

  CRS was at the highest state of readiness it had ever been. There was an air not so much of panic, but of expectation. Awe. A little trepidation.

  General Brewster stood next to the Mainframe Duty Officer's console, looking up at the display on the large plasma screen on the back wall.

  The field was deep blue, a Mercator projection of the western hemisphere centered on the North and South American continents, with the shoulder of Africa off to the right and the Pacific out to Guam to the left.

  U.S. air, naval, and ground stations were highlighted by icons, the electronic networks connecting them marked by lines, along with the great circle flying and sailing routes to battle zones.

  The display was labeled skynet battlefield management system. Tool bars were labeled firewall penetration. LOCAL DEFENSE NETS. SYSTEM STATUS.

  In rapid succession every military network, base, unit, or weapons system currently en route came up with an on-line icon.

  At the end of the list was the simple interrogative: y/n.

  The big room quieted down by degrees as the last of the installations came on-line.

  Skynet was telling its human controllers that it was ready. It was asking if they were ready too.

  Tony Flickinger was at Brewster's elbow. "Sir, shall I?" Brewster shook his head. "No. It's my job now." He had trouble dragging his eyes from the display. He hesitated.

  This was what they all had worked for over the past several years. This was what the Pentagon had spent more than fifteen billion dollars on. Actually more had been spent, but the above-the-line budget, the number that Congress saw, was fifteen billion.

  Skynet was going to assure world peace. No national leader in his or her right mind would dare attack when such an efficient, emotionless, capable system stood watch, unblinking twenty-four/seven.

  Attack the U.S. or one of her allies and die. Simple. All the power of the mightiest nation on earth would be unleashed.

  An unstoppable force.

  Worldwide domination—benevolent domination—was possible for the first time in the history of man.

  Still Brewster hesitated. Maybe Mr. Watchdog—Congressman Stevenson—was right. Maybe turning over our entire defense network to a goddamn computer was nuts.

  But they had run out of options. The U.S. and her allies were, because of the virus, totally defenseless at this moment.

  Brewster reached out, almost languidly, and touched

  the y key on the Mainframe DO's console, and a moment later enter.

  The console monitor brought up the CRS logo, and the message skynet link established.

  The system began to shift and change, slowly at first, but rapidly accelerating as tens of thousands of Skynet links were established worldwide.

  "We're in," one of the techs at a computer console announced. "We're past the firewalls. Local defense nets, minutemen, subs—"

  It was moving too fast now for the technician to keep up with it verbally.

  "Skynet is fully operational," another of the techs reported. "Processing at sixty—now ninety terafiops a second—"

  "Sir, it should take less than a minute to find the virus and kill it," Patricia Talbot advised.

  Brewster glanced at the systems chief tech. He didn't know if he shared her optimism. "Let's pray to God it works," he said.

  The plasma screen and every terminal in the Mainframe Center and out in the main room suddenly went blank.

  It was as if someone had pulled the switch.

  Brewster looked up, his heart in his mouth. "What the—?"

  "Power failure?" someone asked.

  "Lights are still on," someone else observed.

  The monitors and the plasma screen suddenly came back to life, and for a few seconds Brewster breathed a

  sigh of relief. Skynet had merely been clearing its throat.

  But then it became obvious that something very wrong was happening. The screens and monitors were filling with line after line of some alien code, symbols racing across the videos at inhuman speeds.

  "What the hell is going on—" Brewster muttered. What indeed.

  c.25

  CRS

  T-X was ready to move now; the last of the operational robots on the floor had been reprogrammed.

  The door to T-l Storage Bay 3 opened, and Lieutenant Hastings stepped out into the corridor just as her boss Captain McManus got off the elevator.

  He was angry, and the moment he spotted her he charged down the hall like a bull on the rampage.

  "Lieutenant, where in hell did you go?" he demanded. "Where in hell is that police chopper pilot? And—" He glanced at the placard on the door. "What in hell are you doing here?"

  "How did you know I was here?" T-X asked without inflection.

  "Jones spotted you—"

  "Who else knows?" T-X asked.

  Something suddenly occurred to McManus, and he stepped closer. "Say, you're not Hastings." He looked again at the placard. "Who the hell—?"

  T-X grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off his feet. Opening the door to the T-l Storage Bay she shook

  him like a rag doll, breaking the vertebrae in h
is neck. She took his sidearm and tossed him in a corner.

  T-X stared at the dying captain for a moment, only his left leg still twitching, considering taking his persona to more easily reach the Computer Center.

  She looked up, her sensors attuned to the electronic emissions inside the building. There was a powerful interference here, strong electrical and electronic sources that dulled some of her sensors.

  But she could feel that Skynet was coming on-line now, and very soon it would be next to impossible to shut it down.

  She cocked her head. Next to impossible. But there was still a way to do it. General Brewster was the key.

  She turned without another glance at the chief of security and headed to the elevator as she began to morph out of her Lieutenant Hastings persona.

  A pair of Air Force security guards were stationed inside a bulletproof glass partition just past the front door.

  "Where would your father be if there was trouble with the system?" Terminator asked Kate.

  "Upstairs in the Computer Center," Kate told him. Her father had said that was the heart of CRS. But now that they had come this far she didn't know what to do the rest of the way.

  "Do you know how to reach the Computer Center?"

  Kate nodded. "Yes." She nodded toward the elevators

  across the lobby from them. "But they won't let us go up there—"

  One of the security guards slid a clipboard through the slot "Please sign in," he said pleasantly. "Someone will be out in just a minute to escort you upstairs to the general's office."

  "We're going now," Terminator said. He smashed the thick glass with his left fist, and shot both guards in the knee with a Glock pistol, dropping them to the floor with yelps of pain.

  "What... are you crazy?" Kate shouted.

  "There is no time," Terminator told her. "We must reach your father."

  He strode off to the elevator, while Connor took Kate's arm and followed after him.

  "He's been programmed not to kill people," Connor assured her. "Doesn't mean he can't disable them."

  All their terminals were locked out.

  General Brewster emerged from the Mainframe room out onto the Computer Center floor. His technicians were scrambling to regain control of the system. Doing everything they could to take back just one base, one military installation. Any satellite.

  But even the CRS complex power station and air-conditioning plant were no longer responding. Nor were internal communications, including telephones, working.

  One of the techs who had been trying to get through

  to a friend on the other side of Edwards looked up and shook his head. "Cell phones are all down too, sir."

  The only ray of hope in the entire mess was the virus they had been plagued with. Skynet was eliminating it, although it was taking more than the one minute that Talbot had promised.

  But at what cost?

  No one knew how long this situation would last, or where it was going.

  "Daddy?" a woman getting off the service elevator at the back of the center shouted.

  Brewster knew that voice. He turned on his heel as his daughter, Kate, came across the room toward him, her right hand extended as if she wanted to come into his arms and be held.

  But her being here now, at this moment, made no sense. Then he suddenly remembered that he had asked her to bring her fiance out today. Practically begged her, and he told his secretary to take care of security if and when she actually did show up.

  But not now.

  "Kate, honey, what are you doing here?"

  The main elevator to Brewster's left opened and he saw several people out of the corner of his eye coming toward him.

  He started to turn when machine-gun fire erupted, the noise shockingly loud. One part of his brain automatically registered the fact that the gun was a Russian AK-47. They had a distinctive sound.

  Another part-of his brain reacted in horror as Kate's body was hammered with bullets.

  She was shoved backward, crashing through a partition in a shower of glass, computers exploding in sparks and plastic and metal shards, Kate falling to the floor in a heap behind a console.

  Pandemonium erupted as technicians dove for cover, screaming in panic, trying to get out of the line of fire.

  This was some kind of a nightmare. All the air had gone out of the room, and Brewster could not breathe, let alone cry out his daughter's name.

  He started forward when a woman to his left shouted at him.

  "Get away from it!"

  It was Kate. He would know her voice anywhere. Behind him. But he could see her feet on the other side of the destroyed console where she had fallen.

  He turned in time to see his daughter coming toward him in a dead run. A young man in torn, bloody blue jeans and a scuffed-up suede jacket, a knapsack over his shoulder, came right behind her. He carried an AK-47.

  A large man, vaguely familiar, dressed in black leather, sunglasses covering his eyes, strode across the room. He dropped the AK-47 he'd just fired and unslung a Mk-19 grenade launcher from his right shoulder.

  A mass exodus out of the two emergency exits was taking place as technicians scrambled, some of them on all fours, to get out of what had become a battle zone.

  Kate was coming across the room toward Brewster,

  but that was impossible. He'd seen his daughter hit at least a half-dozen times and fall to the floor,

  He turned again in time to see a bullet-riddled figure rise up from behind the computer console quad. It was Kate, and yet it wasn't.

  Brewster staggered back a half step with the enormity of what he was witnessing.

  There was no blood. Something that looked like liquid metal was coalescing around the wounds, closing them, impossibly healing her injuries.

  But she wasn't Kate now. She was a blond woman dressed in rust-colored pants and a jacket.

  T-X raised the Beretta 9mm pistol she'd taken from Captain McManus's body, and fired two shots, both slamming into Brewster's stomach, shoving him back as if he'd been hit by a freight train coming at full speed.

  Kate screamed.

  At that moment Terminator fired the first 40mm grenade, hitting T-X squarely in the chest with a tremendous explosion that shoved her back several steps, almost off her feet.

  But she recovered, and had taken a step forward when Terminator fired a second grenade at her, which hit her chest again, shoving her backward.

  Not waiting for her to recover, Terminator fired again as he moved toward her. Each time she was pushed back several feet by the force of the blast. And each time before she could regain her forward momentum from the attack, Terminator fired again.

  With the last grenade T-X was pushed back into the

  broad louvers over the main ventilation shaft that shattered from her weight She disappeared through the opening.

  Alarms were ringing, sirens shrieking as technicians continued to get out of the Computer Center as fast as they could move.

  Kate raced to her father's side. He was spitting up blood, and obviously was in great pain. He could not talk above a whisper as Kate set to work checking the extent of his wounds.

  "Katie, thank God. I thought—"

  "Don't talk, Daddy," she said. She opened his blood-soaked blouse and shirt Black fluid leaked out of one of his belly wounds. He had to be taken to a hospital soon or he would die.

  Terminator walked over to the busted open ventilator shaft and looked inside. It ran straight down for a couple of stories, ending at the shattered blades of a large fan.

  Terminator turned to Connor and Kate. "She'll be back," he told them.

  Connor nodded grimly. He hunched down beside Kate and her father. "We have to shut down Skynet," he told the general. "Where's the system core, somewhere in this building?"

  Brewster had trouble digesting what the young man was telling him. It wasn't possible. "Who are you?" he whispered, the words gurgling in his throat "You can't know about that"

  Connor grabbed
his shoulder. "Cut the top-secret shit!"

  Kate batted his hand away. "Stop," she screamed. "You're hurting him!"

  Connor turned on her. "If he can't tell us what we need to know, we're all dead." He grabbed a handful of Brewster's uniform blouse. "Where is it? How can you shut it down?"

  "Skynet," Brewster mumbled breathlessly. "It's fighting the virus."

  Connor took a breath. His eyes never left the General's. "You don't understand, do you? Skynet is the virus," Connor shouted over the noise of the alarms and sirens. "It's the reason everything's falling apart."

  This was even more impossible to believe than anything else. "No, that can't be true," Brewster croaked. "I just gave the command to... link to all secure military systems."

  Terminator came over, reloading the grenade launcher. He'd retrieved the AK-47 and he slapped a magazine into its receiver.

  "Skynet has become self-aware," he said. "In one hour it will initiate a massive nuclear attack on its enemy."

  Brewster looked up. He knew this man. "What enemy?" he whispered urgently. He had to know what was happening.

  "Us," Connor said with bitter finality.

  There was automatic weapons fire from somewhere in the distance, but still within the building. Whatever kind of a weapon was being used, it sounded extremely fast and powerful.

  People started to scream, desperate sounds rising out of the stairwells from the floor below.

  Kate looked up. "Oh, God—"

  "It's the machines," Connor said. "They're starting to take over."

  Brewster reached up and grasped Connor's arm, finally realizing that this was no nightmare. The young man was right.

  "My private office," he said with great difficulty. "On this floor. We have to get there. The access codes, they're in the safe."

  Between Connor and Kate they managed to get the general to his feet.

  Terminator led the way as advance guard, his AK-47 and Mk-19 up and at the ready.

  CRS

  Brewster directed them toward the corridor to the right that led, he said, to his office and the offices of the principal engineers and administrators.

  The entire building was in a panic now. They could hear gunfire from every direction, some of which was the sharper sounds of the Ml6s the Air Force security troops carried.