Terminator's optical sensors cleared and began to glow. Animation returned to his features by degrees.
He straightened up, took two steps backward, and then made a complete 360 to scan his immediate surroundings for any dangers.
But the flight line was empty of any live humans or robots.
In the distance to the east he detected the heat signature of a helicopter. In his still riot-fully-functional state it took precious seconds to enhance his optics while bringing up a data file.
The machine was a Bell UH-1E/N Iroquois military
helicopter. It was a unit primarily used by U.S. Navy and Marine forces. But he had seen this machine parked in the hangar earlier.
John Connor and Katherine Brewster had left in the general's Cessna 180. The only logical explanation for the pursuing helicopter was the T-X.
Terminator walked into the hangar where a much larger troop transport helicopter was parked. This one, according to his data bank, was a Boeing Vertol CH-46.
It was slow, but it would do.
Crystal Peak
They had been flying for more than twenty minutes and still there was no sign of the installation.
"Maybe we're off course," Connor suggested.
Kate checked her compass and shook her head. "Could be a head wind which would slow us down. I don't know."
"We're running out of time" Connor said, but then he spotted it, just ahead. There was a long, flat, grassy plateau halfway up a mountain pass. It was protected by what looked like a cyclone fence. A dirt road switching back and forth up the mountain was mostly lost in the trees. "There," he said.
"I see it," Kate said. She pulled the carb heat knob out and backed down on the throttle while keeping the airplane's nose up. Their speed rapidly dropped off and they began to lose altitude as she angled straight toward
the end of what at one time might have been a runway.
"Looks deserted," Connor said. He spotted what looked like the entrance to a tunnel bored into the side of the mountain. The dirt road passed through the gates and then straight across to the mouth of the tunnel.
Kate saw it too. "Looks like no one's been here in years."
"That's gotta be it," Connor said. As they got closer they could see that the top of the mountain above the tunnel entrance bristled with camouflaged antennae and satellite dishes. Whatever was buried in the rock was keeping touch with a lot of satellites and other installations. Probably CRS back at Edwards, and most likely Navajo Mountain, the big Air Force underground facility in Colorado.
They were lined up with the runway. Kate pulled up five degrees of flaps, and then ten and dropped the nose. The plane wouldn't respond as crisply as it had before because of the thinner mountain air, but the 180 was a beefy airplane with a lot of power to spare in case something went wrong on the first pass.
Connor instinctively tightened his seat belt. He'd never flown much, and as a result he didn't like air travel. Airplane accidents were usually fatal.
Kate pulled up fifteen and then twenty degrees of flaps, and as they crossed low over the fence, she chopped power and held the nose slightly above the horizon.
Connor caught a brief glimpse of a sign posted on the fence that read dangeru.s. govt. propertyno
TRESPASSING.
"Hang on, this may be a little rough," Kate warned at the last minute.
Connor braced himself as they set down on what turned out to be an overgrown concrete runway. But Kate's touch on the controls was light, and there was only a slight jolt when the wheels hit. She released all the flaps at once, canceling the last of the plane's lift, and they trundled down the uneven runway.
Connor grabbed the heavy knapsack and even before they had come to a full stop and Kate flipped off the master switch, he was out of his seat belt and had the door unlatched and open. .
Kate wheeled the plane into the wind with the last of its forward motion, set the brake, and she too yanked off her seat belt and opened the door.
Connor was right there to help her down, and together they raced across the runway, down a grassy swale, and up the other side to the tunnel entrance.
There were no buildings anywhere within the compound, only the runway, grassy areas, and a lot of boulders and pine trees.
Now that they were on the ground, and seeing the place up close, Connor got the even stronger impression that no one had been here in a very long time.
No human, that is.
Just within the overhanging rock lip, the tunnel was closed off by a large, aircraft-hangar-type door with windows above it.
The door was not locked, but its latching mechanism was heavily rusted. It took every ounce of Connor's
strength to pull it up and slide it free so that he could open one of the doors on its long neglected hinges.
The floor of the tunnel was concrete with a flood gutter covered by steel grating down the middle. Overhead, the rock was faced with big steel beams that formed curved walls and ceiling much like the inside of a very large Quonset hut
Lined up in long rows, like so many soldiers ready for an inspection that had never come, were military vehiclesjeeps, trucks, a bulldozer: all painted olive drab, and all old-fashioned, covered with dust and debris that had filtered down from the high ceiling for years.
There was a definite air of neglect and abandonment here. No one had been to this place for a long time.
Connor stopped in his tracks for just a moment. It had been twenty-five years since the first terminator had come back programmed to assassinate his mother so that she would never conceive and bear a son who would one day lead the human resistance.
It was possible that this place had been built as early as that time by the military in anticipation of a coming global thermonuclear conflict.
They were getting ready for Skynet or something like it as long as a quarter century ago.
That would explain the age and neglect that they were seeing here. The place was built for a Judgment Day that had not come. Yet.
He motioned for Kate to hold up. "Skynet," he said. There might be more of them."
He pulled out his pistol and fired into the darkness. The shots were shockingly loud here, the bullets ricocheting in the distance like angry bees.
But there was no answering fire. No T-ls coming out of the darkness. No H-Ks hovering just outside the doors.
Connor took the lead into the tunnel, Kate right on his heels, feeling their way around the parked jeeps and trucks when it got too dark to see.
He had no sense that the walls were narrowing, or that the ceiling was getting any lower as they penetrated farther into the mountain. But the air seemed danker, more stagnant. It smelled of rock dust, leaking motor oil, disintegrating rubber tires, and something else. Some distant odor that might have been electrical.
Maybe he was smelling electronic equipment that had been suddenly switched on after lying dormant for many years. It was not a comforting thought.
As best he could estimate they had gone at least one hundred yards into the tunnel when they came to a dead end. A wall made of steel with deep vertical grooves blocked their way.
Connor moved to the right, reaching the edge of the steel wall in five or ten feet, and feeling what he thought was a concrete lip, or edge.
"I think it's some kind of a blast door," he told Kate. He dug in his jacket pocket and found a book of matches. He lit them all at once. .
In the sudden glow he could see that he was right. It was a steel blast door set into the concrete, and meant to
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be raised or lowered into place with powerful electrical motors.
Large air vents, covered by steel bars, opened in the tunnel walls beside the blast doors.
But the entry looked impregnable.
"No way we can blow this open," Connor said, his spirits sinking.
"Maybe we don't have to," Kate said. She'd found what looked like an old-fashioned security station and card reader.
The
matches died as Kate slid open a panel that covered a small keypad. A dim light came on that provided just enough illumination for them to see what they were doing.
Connor looked over her shoulder. A small LED screen above the keypad flashed with the single word: standby. After a moment that word was replaced by the letters and numbers: blue 478.
"Now what?" Kate asked. She was just as conscious as he that they were running out of time.
"It's a code prompt," Connor said. He pulled out the red envelope they'd taken from General Brewster's safe back at CRS, and hurriedly flipped through the code cards. He found one tinted in blue, which contained one word and three numbers. "Here. Type in DAKOTA, seven-seven-five."
Kate entered the code and the LED screen flashed: | power on.
Lights came to life above the door and in the tunnel ceiling.
The keypad beeped and the LED screen lit up with the next prompt.
"We're almost in," Connor said excitedly.
They could see now that they were in front of a massive blast door. A notice posted to the right warned that this was a secure area. To the left the notice warned personnel to stand clear.
Connor was about to look for the proper code card when they both heard the distinctive thump of an approaching helicopter. But close. Behind them at the tunnel entrance.
They turned toward the sound. Now that the lights were on they could see all the way to the end.
A helicopter suddenly crashed through the hangar-type door with a tremendous racket, bursting into the tunnel on a trail of sparks and shooting flames. Pieces of the rotors and the tail section and landing skids flew off in all directions as the machine came to a halt, nose over, in front of a pickup truck.
The pilot's door opened and a woman dressed in a rust-colored outfit climbed out of the machine.
Kate took a step backward, her complexion turning instantly pale. "It's her"
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Crystal Peak
The T-X showing up here was the one thing Connor knew that he should have counted on, but had not.
Kate was losing it. The T-X had become her worst nightmare.
"Come on, come on, the next prompt," Connor shouted at her.
She looked at him. Her mouth worked, but no sounds came out. She remained frozen, but then she blinked as if she were waking from a trance, and turned back to the security screen.
"RED, one-seven-six," she replied.
Connor flipped through the cards, his hands shaking. He dropped them and had to scramble on his hands and knees to pick them up. He found the correct card. "AV-ALON, four-one-two."
Kate punched in the new code. The reader beeped twice, the prompt disappeared from the screen, and was replaced by a single word: authorized.
An alarm came to life, and red warning lights began d rotate as a powerful metallic bang reverberated in the
thick steel door. It began to rise on the hum of powerful motors.
But it was slow, ungreased metal on metal squealing in protest, a deep rumbling vibration spreading through the tunnel. Small rocks skittered down the walls and dust drifted down from the ceiling.
The T-X was halfway up the tunnel and moving fast. Too fast, Connor gauged. They would never make it through to the other side and get the blast doors closed and locked before she was on them.
They were so damned close.
Connor pushed Kate aside and reached into his knapsack for a brick of C-4 and a fuse. He might be able to buy them some time by setting off a charge as far down the tunnel as he could toss it. If the timing was right he might be able to bring down a section of roof on top of the T-X's head.
If he was off, he could bring the roof down on him and Kate.
A tremendous noise filled the tunnel. It was even louder than the rising blast door. It took Connor just a moment to identify what he was hearing. It was another helicopter, this one much larger than the one the T-X had crashed into the tunneL
He stepped back another pace.
T-X heard the same deep-throated thump of large rotor blades lifting a heavy machine, and she stopped and turned just as a large troop transport chopper crashed through the already breached tunnel entrance.
This one moved much faster than hers, its rotors
sheared off immediately on the tunnel walls and the fuselage dropped to the concrete floor.
Its weight and momentum carried it over and through the parked trucks, jeeps, and even the bulldozer, all of which exploded like firecrackers on a string.
Still it came, shearing past the Iroquois helicopter and careening down the tunnel like an express train on tracks of fire and sparks.
T-X spun on her heel and headed in a dead run down the tunnel toward where Connor and Kate stood momentarily stunned, rooted in place. The helicopter was right on her back.
Connor came alive first. He grabbed Kate by the arm and propelled her across the tunnel to a maintenance trench in the concrete floor. They leaped into it, and Connor shoved her below the edge, shielding her body with his.
The transport helicopter and vehicles it had picked up smashed into the T-X, engulfing the cyborg in twisted metal and flames. The chopper finally ground to a halt, pieces of burning wreckage flying down the tunnel and hammering off the blast door.
A different siren started to blare, and another set of red and yellow warning lights began to strobe.
Connor and Kate lifted up from the edge of the trench in time to see Terminator emerge from the twisted wreckage of the helicopter.
Half his skin and much of his clothing had been sheared away and burned off in the intense heat of the
aviation-gas-fed flames. His metallic endoskeleton was exposed, and even some of his hydraulics and electromechanical mechanisms were open to the air.
But he moved like his old self, with a smooth determination. And though much of his duraplast skin was gone or shredded they could recognize his usual sardonic expression.
Connor had never been so glad to see anyone in his life.
Terminator stopped in front of the trench and looked down at them. "I'm back," he said.
The blast door had only opened a couple feet, and then stopped.
Connor and Kate jumped out of the trench as the security keypad and LED screen began beeping. The screen was flashing a new message: abortemergency closure.
The blast door started to close with a tremendous squeal. The fire had triggered some emergency circuit. Connor had a feeling that there would be no way to override it.
Terminator brushed past Connor, got down on his hands and knees, and pulled himself under the closing blast door, catching the bottom part of it with his powerful shoulder.
The motors lowering the door hummed in overload, sparks flew from around the edges of the mechanism, and groaning gears stripped with loud cracks as Terminator put his back into the effort to not only hold the massive
steel blast door from closing, but to raise it one millimeter at a time.
Behind them, within the twisted, burning wreckage of the transport helicopter, T-X managed to shove an engine block off her chest. She raised her head and torso above the flames, her optical sensors locked on the bottom of the blast door.
Her infiltration covering was completely gone now, leaving only her battle chassis that itself was scarred and dented from the tremendous heat and forces it had endured over the past twenty-four hours.
But T-X's imperatives were still intact, her programs were still up and running, and her prime directive was still driving her actions.
She had been sent to eliminate twenty-two targets. John Connor and Katherine Brewster were at the top of the list.
They were here.
She would kill them.
Terminator's internal mechanisms were strained to their limits, exceeding even their built-in safety and redundancy engineering.
He knew that he would not be able to hold out much longer.
He was also aware that the T-X was struggling to free itself from the wreckage. There was
no time left. "Go!" he told Connor and Kate. "Now!"
The fire and smoke were getting thick in the tunnel, making it difficult to see, let alone breathe.
Connor tossed the heavy knapsack filled with C-4 under the blast door, sliding it all the way through to the other side.
He helped Kate crawl under the door. She paused long enough to give Terminator a grateful look, and then scrambled the rest of the way through.
Connor got down on his stomach and pulled himself under the massive blast door that vibrated like a live beast just above his head.
Terminator's body trembled with exertion. Connor could hear overloaded hydraulics and servo motors, and smell the stench of burnt electronic circuitry. A joint in Terminator's shoulder failed with a loud pop, and hydraulic fluid began to spurt from beneath the mechanism.
"Thank you," Connor said. He had lost this friend once before. It was very hard to go through it again. So much had happened, so much had gone on.
"We'll meet again," Terminator said with as much emotion as was possible for a cyborg.
Connor scrambled the rest of the way under the door, which, at the base, was nearly two meters thick.
Kate was there. She reached down for him when
something clamped over his left ankle, tearing into his flesh.
The pain was impossible to bear, and he screamed.
The T-X, her legs sheared off in the wreckage, held on to Connor's ankle with her right hand and began to inexorably draw him back under the blast door.
Terminator grabbed her wrist with one hand and her throat with the other in an effort to drag her away from Connor.
In the effort his shoulder turned away from the blast door that then inched downward, pinning him and the T-X like a hydraulic press.
The buzz saw morphed from the T-X's left hand, and she drove it into Terminator's chest, just above his one remaining power cell.
Terminator tightened his grip on her wrist, bending hydraulic joints out of position, causing her finally to lose her grip on Connor's ankle.
The door was pinning their torsos even more tightly now. Nevertheless the T-X managed to bring the saw up from Terminator's chest, into his neck, and then into his chin and cranial case.
Circuits shorted out and massive dumps of random data no longer under the control of subroutines cascaded like shivers through his CPU and servos.
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