He looked through the mesh-reinforced glass window in the door. Offices, workshops, and labs opened off the long corridor. The place was all shot up. The T-ls had already been here.
There were bodies on the floor, and all the rooms, especially the labs and workshops, were in shambles. But there was no sign of the robots. Connor glanced back the way they had come, half wondering if they shouldn't go back to try to help Terminator.
"What?" Kate asked.
"We can't get out of here without him," Connor said. Kate had followed his gaze. She knew what he was thinking. "Yes, we can," she told him. "I have a pilot's license."
Connor's left eyebrow rose. He nodded, impressed. "Good to have you around," he said, and he meant it. He was starting to appreciate her strength and resilience. She was good to have at his side.
"It should be the next wing from here," he told her. They stepped out into the corridor and raced to the end, . where they came to another emergency door with a reinforced window.
The situation here was the same as in the wing they'd just come through. Offices and labs opening off the main central corridor were in shambles. Bodies lay everywhere, and small fires burned here and there, the haze of smoke thick in the air.
But there were no warrior robots.
The entrance down to the particle accelerator complex was somewhere off this last corridor. Connor and Kate stepped through the door and pulled up short. The stench of shredded human bodies hit their noses at the same time, and they gagged.
Pictures and diagrams and artists' renderings of T-ls and H-Ks and other futuristic weapons systems were framed and hung on the walls in some of the offices and work areas.
"God, it's actually beginning," Connor said. This was the future his mother had worried about. The future she had fought so hard to prevent
They started down the corridor, passing a big, smoke-filled work area. There were a lot of bodies here, where the fighting and destruction seemed to have been more
intense than in other parts of the building. A pool of some flammable liquid had collected in the center of the room and was burning.
Connor took Kate's arm again and had started around the tire when they heard the distinctive whirr of a T-l moving their way.
Kate pulled back, but Connor bodily hauled her to the floor and scrambled as close to the fire as he could stand without being too badly burned.
The T-l, its hunched back and shoulders nearly reaching the ceiling, came around the corner, its treads crunching over debris and bodies.
It stopped short. A red laser targeting beam swept the room, avoiding the heat source of the fire.
The machine was searching for the heat signatures of still living humans. This unit was evidently part of a mop-up squad. Either that or the T-X had sent it ahead to search for them.
Either way the T-l presented a deadly menace. Connor eased closer to the fire, dragging Kate with
him.
"No," she whispered urgently in his ear. "It's too hot!" "The heat will blind it," he explained. "Don't move."
c.28
CRS
Smoke started to rise from the sleeve of Connor's jacket.
The heat was nearly impossible to bear, but he willed himself not to move a muscle as the T-l continued its methodical sweep of the room.
The machine sensed that someone was here; it may have heard them coming through the door. But it was unable to detect their heat signatures because they were so close to the open flames.
Its laser targeting beam swept over their bodies, came back, lingered above their heads for a second, and then began to angle directly at them.
The red targeting beam reflected in Kate's eyes, inches from Connor's. She was frightened, but she seemed resolute now. Something had changed inside of her. He could see it in her eyes, in the way she looked at him, in the way she clung to him, her will to survive fully as strong now as his.
He had the sudden urge to lean forward, just an inch, a half inch, and kiss her mouth. Her lips were slightly
parted, and her breath, after all they'd gone through, was still sweet on his face.
The beam played across their heads, then moved away to the left, sweeping up and down like a television raster, painting an infrared picture of the contents of the room,
line by line.
The rubber wheels of a small equipment cart had caught fire. Black smoke rose from the hubs. One of the wheels suddenly collapsed, sending the unbalanced table with its test instruments crashing to the floor.
The T-l swiveled with lightning speed, homing in on the noise and motion, and opened fire with its chainguns, completely destroying the cart
When it stopped firing the sudden lack of noise was
deafening.
The T-l swiveled again, its targeting beam sweeping the room for further movements or heat sources.
This time it ignored Connor and Kate as already classified nontargets, and after a minute turned away and trundled through the door back toward the R&D wing.
As soon as the robot was gone, Connor rolled away from the fire, and heedless of his burns helped Kate to her feet.
"Okay?" he asked. She nodded. "You?"
"I'll live," he said, and they skirted the fire and raced down the corridor in the direction of the entrance to the accelerator.
Terminator knew he had a double handicap: his model had lesser abilities than the newer T-Xs, and he had only a single remaining hydrogen power cell.
Already he was starting to feel the effects his efforts were having on his power circuits. If he ran down completely it could take an hour or more to regenerate sufficient power to operate. During that time he would be helpless.
The primary cause for concern, however, was his steadily diminishing abilities that were only offset by the double imperatives deeply imprinted in his CPU.
The T-X batted him aside again, but before she could step away, he leaped on her back, wrapping his powerful titanium alloy arms around her neck.
The tile floor and concrete slab beneath them finally gave way, and together they crashed through the crawl space and ceiling of the physical plant equipment room below in a hail of broken tile, shards of glass and porce-lain, and showers of water.
The sounds of running machinery, refrigeration units, water pumps, emergency generators, and servo motors for dozens of emergency controls such as fire suppression systems, fire doors, sirens, and lights, were very loud.
A row of boilers stood like sentinels down one side of the long room, while a dozen power distribution buses contained in large steel boxes were attached to the opposite wall.
Mazes of pipes and cable runs and microwave guides
crisscrossed the ceiling, an entire section just below the men's room bent out of place or destroyed.
The two cyborgs landed on their feet in the middle of the long corridor between the two rows of machinery. Terminator tightened his hold as he tried to force her cranial case off its mounts.
The lower half of the T-X's face peeled back, liquid metal retreating to expose steel jaws and alloy teeth that were harder than industrial diamonds. Her jaws opened, then clamped onto Terminator's left arm, just above the wrist, the teeth cutting and grinding and crushing their way through his leather jacket, his infiltration duraplast skin, and into his hydraulic and electromechanical systems.
Terminator tightened his grip around her neck, pulling up reserves of power as his action circuits kicked in the last of their electronic adrenaline.
The lower half of the T-X's body swiveled 180 degrees at the hips and she hopped up, clamping her legs around Terminator's torso. Her thighs began to squeeze together with the pressure of a hydraulic press.
The T-X released her grip on Terminator's arm, and spun her head 180 degrees so that her optical sensors were locked in to his.
Terminator staggered a couple of steps backward under her weight. His torso support cage and shielding began to shriek and groan under the relentlessly increasing
pres
sure.
Still Terminator refused to relinquish his steel grip on
her neck, or stop his efforts to wrench her cranial case off its support struts.
The T-X rotated her torso so that her entire body was wrapped around Terminator's in an almost sexual embrace, though neither machine had the slightest capability of considering such a thought.
She lifted her right arm, the skin peeling back from her hand and wrist to expose the plasma transmission head that she had jury-rigged after the fight outside the cemetery.
Terminator released his grip on her neck, grabbed her wrist, and started to bend it away when her plasma weapon fired point-blank at his face.
A large section of his duraplast skin immediately seared away under the intense heat, exposing almost the entire side of his cranial case, which was now pitted and scarred.
The blue glow immediately began to build at the weapon's tip as it rapidly repowered.
One section of Terminator's CPU was refiguring his odds of prevailing, lowering his estimate to less than two percent His double-imperative program spurred him into throwing the T-X that clung to him to the left, crashing into one of the high-voltage power distribution boxes on the wall.
The T-X did not release the pressure on Terminator's torso, and her plasma weapon continued to charge.
Terminator swung her against the power box a second time, the steel crumpling under the tremendous blows.
He swung her again and again, and on the fourth time
the metal box shorted across the 2200-volt copper bus bar in a shower of white-hot sparks.
Both cyborgs stiffened, their servos going into overload, delicate control circuits shunting to protected areas as the high voltage slammed into their metal skeletons and coursed through their electrical systems.
Terminator leaned against the T-X's body, pressing her against the high-voltage bus, forcing the issue that could, if allowed to continue for a sufficient time, result in the destruction of both their central processors.
Suddenly the T-X broke free, head-butting Terminator under the chin, sending him sprawling backward.
He took two steps, and then fell onto a steel mesh platform that extended over a sump trench beneath the
boilers.
Before he could raise up, the T-X was on him, slamming her foot into his cranial case that hung over the edge of the steel platform.
Something snapped in his neck.
The T-X smashed her foot into his head again, dislocating the second and third cranial case support struts.
Terminator was no longer able to raise his head, and many of his servo circuits providing power to his lower extremities were damaged or destroyed. His left arm jerked spasmodically.
T-X studied him for several long seconds, then she bent over his body, her right index finger morphing into a long drill bit, a blue glow surrounding the data transfer probe.
The "radiation danger" symbol was attached to the steel door at the end of the long corridor.
"That's it," Connor shouted. It was the entrance to the particle accelerator. "We can follow it out to the runway!"
They had one shot now, just one chance to get out of here, and Connor wasn't going to hang around to make sure that it was the right decision.
At this moment, with or without Terminator, it was their only decision.
A window in a row of windows along the corridor suddenly burst inward under the hail of machine-gun fire.
Connor and Kate looked over their shoulders to see an H-K hovering just outside.
They had been detected!
The H-K banked sharply to the left and tracked them up the corridor.
An air-to-ground missile dropped from the H-K's rail and ignited.
Connor dragged Kate to the floor as the missile rocketed through the window, shrieked a few feet over their heads, and blew out the steel security door that led to the particle accelerator.
The H-K spun tightly on its long axis, intending to line up on them again for a second missile shot.
Kate jumped up with a cry, grabbed the AK-47 from Connor, jacked a round into the firing chamber, flipped the safety catch off as she'd watched Terminator do, and opened fire on the approaching Hunter-Killer.
She was completely lost in her rage. Her fiance had probably been murdered by some remorseless machine.
Her father had been cut down by a machine. And still the monsters came on and on, seemingly without end. Heartless. Soulless. Emotionless.
She kept her finger depressed on the trigger, the heavy buck of the assault rifle shoving her backward almost off her feet.
And then the rifle was out of ammunition, and the H-K seemed to hover in midair for a second, before it exploded in an intense ball of flame, scattering wreckage in every direction, some of the pieces crashing through the windows and clattering down the corridor to land at her feet
Connor stared openmouthed at her. He'd not seen anything like that since his mother.
She turned to him, her eyes wild, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. She was covered with grease and oil from the floor near the fire, with black smudges of blowback from the AK-47, and with blood. "What?" she demanded, still hyper. "Nothing," Connor said, spreading his hands. "You just reminded me of my mom."
He looked beyond her out the windows, but the sky was clear for the moment, as was the corridor behind them. It wouldn't last It couldn't last.
"Let's go," he said. He took the AK-47 from her, and as they headed for the blasted accelerator entrance door he ejected the spent magazine and dapped in a fresh one from his knapsack. It was his last
They flew down two flights of stairs to the second subbasement, where they entered the particle accelerator control room. The space was no larger than the living
room in an average house, but was crammed with electronic monitoring and control equipment and a dozen computer monitors and keyboards.
A door was open to the accelerator tunnel, through which they could see a blue metal tube, about six feet in diameter, surrounded by mazes of wires and conduits and pipes, gigantic electromagnets every ten or fifteen feet, warning and ID tags everywhere, curving away into the distance.
A large placard was posted over the door.
warning: intense magnetic field.
Connor rushed over to one of the control positions, where he laid his rifle on the desk and hurriedly studied the display. He might never have been taught English grammar or history, but some of the weirdos his mother had associated with had been computer geeks. They'd taught him some things.
After a minute he started flipping switches and entering commands into the computer, following the prompts he brought up.
Kate turned her gaze from the stairwell they'd just come down to what Connor was up to. "What are you doing?" she demanded. She wanted to get out of there right now.
"Powering up," Connor replied distractedly. He keyed several more commands and then hit enter.
Kate noticed a bank of closed-circuit television monitors on which were displayed several locations within the CRS complex.
T-ls were hunting down the last of the humans, kill-
ing them indiscriminately. On other screens there was no movement, only bodies.
But on still another screen the T-X was moving very fast down a corridor. Kate backed up a step.
"Oh, God," she said.
The T-X passed the wreckage of the H-K that Kate had shot down. She was in the corridor just above them.
Connor looked up at the last minute and saw what Kate was seeing. He entered one more command on the computer keyboard, grabbed his gun, and headed for the accelerator tunnel entrance, Kate right behind him.
The big machinery was powering up with a tremendous noise. Super-cooled magnets were being hit with liquid nitrogen, power circuits were coming up, and powerful vacuum pumps were eliminating the air from the accelerator tube itself. It was like being inside someone's insane idea of a factory gone mad.
Over that noise t
hey could hear the T-X in the tunnel behind them.
Connor turned in time to see her less than thirty feet away, her outstretched right hand surrounded in a blue plasma glow.
There was no way that they could outrun her.
No way. He was sure of it.
CRS
Connor and Kate ducked behind one of the outcropping electromagnets as the T-X's plasma weapon fired, the intense blue beam missing them by inches.
The noise in the tunnel was increasing in volume and pitch as the coils around each of the toroidal magnets were cooled by liquid nitrogen. The closer to absolute zero the wiring got, the more electric current it could pass and the stronger the magnetic field became. It was building exponentially now.
Red warning lights began to flash as Connor charged his AK-47 and stepped around the magnet to fire at the oncoming T-X.
A klaxon began to blare, blotting out even the powerful noise of the vacuum pumps and the hum of the magnets.
The T-X was less than twenty feet away. The blue glow at the transmission head of her plasma weapon was so bright it was almost impossible to look at with the naked
Connor lined up on her head and started to pull off
a round when the AK-47 was ripped from his hands. It smashed into one of the electromagnets with a resounding metallic clang and held fast.
Connor looked from the T-X to his weapon. He stepped back a pace. "It's working," he shouted to Kate.
The T-X raised her weapon arm directly at Connor, but it was jerked violently to the left, dragging her to one of the magnets.
She looked at Connor, and then tried to pull her arm free, the metal shell around the accelerator tube distorting under the pressure she was putting on it
But she was caught fast, and as the magnetic field intensified her entire body was drawn to the tube, stretched out as if she were on some medieval torture
rack.
Even the T-X's tremendous power was not sufficient to free her, and as the field continued to build, her features began to distort, her mouth and eyes sliding to impossible angles, her entire body flowing toward the core of the magnet.
Her endoskeleton began to vibrate like a horribly stretched violin string, shrieking and squealing, as the artificial liquid steel that was used to lubricate her mechanical joints was slowly forced through her body and into the center of the magnetic field.
Terminator - T3 01 - Rise of the Machines Page 17
