by Timothy Zahn
He was pretty sure he knew what it was. But it never hurt to get a second opinion.
“Nate?” he murmured, just loudly enough to be heard over the sound of the rushing water.
Beside him, Dr. Nathan Oxley lowered his binoculars.
“It’s a Terminator, all right,” he murmured back grimly. “T-700, probably. It’s not bulky enough to be a T-500, and it seems to be reflecting more starlight than a T-600 would.”
“Alive, I assume?”
“You mean active?” Oxley shrugged. “Probably. It’s facing the other way, so I can’t see its eyes. But it would be rather too much to hope for that a T-700 would get all the way out here in the forest and then just happen to break down half a mile from town.”
Preston grunted. “Probably also too much to hope that the river’s going to stop it.”
“Well, it’s not going to rust, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Oxley shook his head. “Beats me why you never put a bridge there.”
“Before Judgment Day everything over there was private property,” Preston said, eyeing the Terminator. “The owner didn’t want us walking on his land and absolutely wouldn’t allow anything like a bridge. Afterward, we kind of liked the idea of having a barrier between us and any predators that might want to wander this direction. So the water won’t hurt it at all?”
“Not at all,” Oxley confirmed. “There’s a ferrous component to their construction—that’s why they can pull their limbs back together if they get blown apart. But—”
“Wait a second,” Preston interrupted. “They can put themselves back together?”
“Of course.” Oxley waved a hand. “Sorry. I forget sometimes that you never worked with the damn things staring over your shoulder. Yeah, they can pull themselves back together. They can also stand up to anything but big-caliber, high-power bullets, and keep going pretty near forever.”
Preston squeezed his left hand into a fist. Terrific.
“So what’s it waiting for? I assume it’s not afraid of the dark.”
“No, of course not,” Oxley said thoughtfully. “And you’re right, that’s the part that doesn’t make any sense. I mean, aside from the question of what the hell it’s doing out here in the first place.”
“Any thoughts? On either point?”
Oxley shrugged. “You’ll recall I said I couldn’t tell if it was active because it’s not facing this direction. Not facing this direction may imply that it’s not interested in Baker’s Hollow, but is waiting for something to happen over on that side of the river.”
“Like what?” Preston asked.
“How should I know?” Oxley growled. “You want to go ask it, be my guest. But it’s definitely not standing there because it’s afraid of the river. Even if it was worried about the depth or the current, the ford’s right there in front of it.”
Belatedly it struck him. Of course. “It’s not waiting for something,” Preston said. “It’s waiting for someone. Someone who’s trying to get to Baker’s Hollow.”
“Someone trying to get here?”
“Why else guard the ford?” Preston replied.
“But who in the world would want to come here?” Oxley protested. “Who out there even knows Baker’s Hollow still exists?”
“I don’t know.” Preston nodded toward the Terminator. “And from the looks of things, odds are we never will.”
Oxley sighed. “You’re probably right. Poor devil.”
Preston nodded. Poor devil indeed.
But right now, he had more urgent things on his mind than some random migrant who might be wandering this way.
“Let’s assume for a minute it gets whoever it’s here for,” he said. “Will it just leave? Or would it decide to take out the town as long as it’s here anyway?”
“For starters, T-700s don’t decide anything,” Oxley said. “They’re wholly controlled by Skynet, and I have no idea what that means now that the lab is gone.”
Despite the seriousness of the situation, Preston had to smile at that. Gone. Like the massive explosion that had rattled buildings in Baker’s Hollow and lit up the entire sky to the southeast qualified as just being gone. Sometimes Oxley showed an awesome flair for understatement.
“Where would the next nearest Skynet center be?”
“San Francisco was the nearest command hub,” Oxley said. “But if Connor was right about that one being gone, I don’t know what’s left. There might be another hub in Missouri, or there might not be anything until the east coast.”
“Could something that distance away even get a signal this far?”
“Oh, sure,” Oxley said. “Shortwave would do just fine. Never fear—Skynet’s in complete control of any Terminators it’s got left out here.” He grimaced. “And will continue that control straight through a massacre of Baker’s Hollow, should it decide to go that route.”
“So what do we do?” Preston asked.
Oxley shrugged. “We wait.”
Preston peered out into the darkness.
“And meanwhile let whoever’s out there walk into a trap?”
“I know,” Oxley said heavily. “But the only other option is to try to take out the T-700 ourselves. That’s not easy to do.”
“So I’m told,” Preston said, eyeing the unmoving machine. So it had finally come. The confrontation he’d been afraid of ever since the fires of Judgment Day died away and the first rumors of killing machines began to drift up to their little refuge in the mountains.
Their town’s isolation had protected it for a long time. But the reprieve was over. Skynet had found them, and every man, woman, and child in his care was now in deadly danger.
Including his own daughter.
“You haven’t asked the obvious question,” Oxley said carefully.
“You mean whether or not you and your friends might be the reason for this visit?” Preston suggested.
“That’s the one.” Oxley hesitated. “Do you want us to leave?”
“Depends,” Preston said with a shrug. “You think your presence in town would hurt us, or help us?”
Oxley snorted. “Even asking such a question presupposes we were more than just cogs in Skynet’s giant machine. Unfortunately, we weren’t. As a matter of fact, if Skynet thinks of us at all it’s probably as deserters. Or whatever term it uses for humans who drop off its grid.”
“Most likely the same term it uses for all the rest of us,” Preston said grimly. “Dead men walking.”
Oxley sighed. “Sounds about right.”
Preston nodded, watching the other out of the corner of his eye. Oxley had always been vague as to what exactly he and the other two scientists had been doing down in that big underground lab. Lajard and Valentine had been even more tight-lipped than Oxley, saying only that they had been part of Skynet’s vast contingent of human labor.
But that had never rung exactly true to Preston. All three of them had the kind of high-class scientific credentials that should have lifted them well above the general mass of humanity they had described as being down there. Had Skynet put them to work doing something else? Some job they were too afraid or too ashamed to admit to?
Or maybe Skynet simply didn’t care about high-class scientific credentials. Maybe to it, all human slave labor was created equal.
“Well, whatever we end up doing, we’re not doing it tonight,” Preston decided. “Let’s go sleep on it. Maybe by morning we’ll have thought up some better options.”
“Maybe,” Oxley said. “You might want to post a guard here, though. Just in case.”
“I already have,” Preston said. Though what a lone guard could do against a T-700 he couldn’t guess. Probably little more than be the first of them to die. “Let’s get back to town.”
It was after midnight, and Blair was trudging her sixth weary and leg-aching walk around the perimeter of their camp when she heard a sound that chilled her even more than the cold desert air.
The sound of a distant Hunter-Killer.
&n
bsp; She froze in her tracks, her right hand dropping to the grip of her holstered Desert Eagle, her head turning slowly back and forth as she tried to locate the noise. Somewhere to the northeast, she decided.
She was staring in that direction, trying to figure out whether it was coming closer, when something grabbed her ankle.
Reflexively, she tried to jerk away. But the grip was too solid. Snatching out her gun, she looked down.
To find that one of the broken pieces of a T-700—a crushed skull, partial torso, and one arm—had inexplicably come back to life. The skull was half turned upward toward her, its red eyes glowing angrily, the bent fingers tightening around her ankle.
“Damn,” she snarled. Lining up the muzzle on the damaged skull, she squeezed the trigger.
The big gun bucked in her hand, the thunder of the shot slamming across her face and ears. The Terminator ignored the attack, its cold hand continuing to tighten its grip. Clenching her teeth, Blair fired two more rounds into the skull. This time, the machine’s grip slackened, and the glowing eyes faded once again to emptiness. Quickly, she worked her ankle free, then looked up again.
And caught her breath.
All around her, the desert was in motion. The scattered fragments of Terminators were on the move, crawling and clawing and hunching themselves across the sand like grotesque metal caterpillars. Their eyes, which had been blank and dead all afternoon, were once again spots of glowing red. As the echoes of her shots faded away, she could hear the faint clink of metal on metal as other scattered pieces began to magnetically reassemble themselves into some semblance of the once proud killing machines.
And all of those broken, deadly, grotesque things were heading straight for her.
CHAPTER SIX
Blair filled her lungs.
“Barnes!” she yelled.
His response was exactly what she expected: no startled words, no useless questions, just a pair of bursts from one of the Blackhawk’s two door-mounted M240 machine guns. The two Terminator segments nearest the helo blew into shards that went flying across the sand.
“Move it, Williams!” he shouted.
Another broken T-700 had crawled nearly to grabbing range. Blair considered shooting it, decided she had better things to do with her time and ammo, and took off instead in a dead run toward Barnes and the Blackhawk.
She damn near didn’t make it. There were a half dozen more Terminators between her and the helo, none of which had betrayed its functionality by moving, all of which now lunged up and tried to grab her as she raced past. One of them had managed to collect a pair of broken leg segments along with an arm and was able to rise to something resembling a kneeling position and actually throw itself toward her.
A shot from Blair’s gun staggered it back. Before it could regain its balance another burst from Barnes’s M240 blew it to pieces.
Ten seconds later, Blair was inside the Blackhawk.
“Strap in!” she snapped, ignoring her throbbing leg as she dropped into the pilot’s seat and keyed for quick-start.
“Just get us in the air,” Barnes snapped back, firing two more bursts. “I think I heard an H-K before all this hell broke loose.”
“You did, and it’s headed this way,” Blair confirmed, running her eyes over the gauges. To her left, a misshapen Terminator hand suddenly appeared, clawing for a grip on the edge of the door opening as a pair of glowing eyes lifted into sight. Snatching out her gun, Blair gave a quick cross-body shot that knocked the machine back into the sand. “Here we go,” she said, dropping the gun onto her lap and grabbing the stick and throttle as the rotors began to turn. “Strap in—I don’t want you falling out.”
“Forget that!” Barnes shouted. He fired another burst, then leaned in toward Blair and pointed out the windshield’s right-hand section. “That way—a hundred fifty meters. Go!”
“What?” Blair asked, frowning as she peered out the windshield. There was nothing anywhere in that direction but more desert and more crawling Terminator segments. “Why?”
But Barnes was already back at the door, firing more bursts at the metallic bodies still trying to overrun them.
“Barnes, we have to run,” Blair shouted over the noise. “I’m not sure we can get away as it is.”
“A hundred fifty meters,” Barnes insisted. “Do it.”
Swearing under her breath, Blair fed power to the engines and leaped the helo into the air. Swiveling its nose, she headed in the direction Barnes had indicated.
“Behind you!”
Blair spun around. Another T-700 segment was hanging off the helo’s portside door-jamb with one hand while it other clawed for purchase on the deck itself with the other. Blair snatched up her gun, but before she could bring it to bear Barnes took a couple of rapid steps across the cabin and kicked hard at the arm gripping the door. The impact dislodged its grip, and the Terminator disappeared into the night.
“There,” Barnes called over the engine noise, pointing out the windshield. “Another twenty meters, then put ‘er down.”
Blair nodded and threw a quick look to her left. She could see a faint red glow in the distance now, the telltale lights of a rapidly approaching H-K.
“Barnes—”
“That little mound,” he cut her off, pointing again. “Put us down next to it.”
Blair grimaced. The H-K was coming in fast, and even in the air the Blackhawk would be a painfully easy target. On the ground, it would be a sitting duck.
But it was already too late for them to get a real head start. Whatever Barnes had up his sleeve, Blair could only hope it was good. Braking beside the mound, she dropped the helo onto the ground.
It hit with a crunch of metal from beneath the wheels that made her wince. Barnes was already moving, dropping out the side door and disappearing to the helo’s rear. A few seconds later he reappeared and climbed back inside.
With a Terminator minigun cradled in his arms, the ammo belt triple looped over his arm and disappearing out the door behind him.
“Go!” he ordered, dumping the gun onto the deck and yanking hard on the ammo belt’s trailing end. It came free, and Barnes grabbed for the safety harness by the M240. “Go!”
Blair pulled on the throttle and once again took the Blackhawk into the air. She should have known Barnes would have taken note of where all the abandoned miniguns and other weapons were while the two of them were out searching for his brother.
But even with their newly acquired firepower, this was going to be seriously problematic. Fleetingly, Blair wished she was back in her preferred A-10 fighter, or that the Blackhawk at least had a couple of pylon-mounted Hydra 70 missile clusters.
But she wasn’t, and it didn’t, and they would have to make do with what they had. Climbing as fast as the Blackhawk could manage, she looked back toward the incoming H-K.
Only to find that it wasn’t there.
“Where’d it go?” she shouted, looking frantically around. It couldn’t have overflown them already—it hadn’t been that close. “Barnes?”
“There—left,” he shouted back.
Blair looked out the portside door. There it was, all right, speeding toward them with its searchlights off and its turbofans angled for maximum forward velocity. It must have swung around to that side while the helo was on the ground and she was distracted by Barnes’s weapons hunt.
Only that didn’t make any tactical sense. Why waste time circling around to a new vector when it could have maintained its course and charged straight down the Blackhawk’s throat?
Unless one of the broken Terminators down there had spotted Barnes loading his new minigun into the helo’s starboard door and Skynet had brought the H-K around to keep it away from that side.
If so, the time the H-K had lost in that maneuver might just be the breathing space they needed. Blair twisted the stick around, sending the Blackhawk into a tight turn. If she could get Barnes and his minigun into range before the H-K could line up a clear shot...
The
helo had barely started into its turn when a burst from the H-K’s Gatling guns disintegrated the windshield in front of her.
She twisted her face away from the flurry of flying glass, reflexively twisting the stick to spin the cockpit away from the incoming fire. She heard a shout from beside her, but with the wind suddenly roaring in her ears she couldn’t tell whether it was a shout of pain, anger, or encouragement. She blinked something out of her eyes— sweat or blood, she wasn’t sure which—and kicked the engines to full speed.
The enemy had gotten in the first punch, and her job now was to get away, get out of its crosshairs, and buy herself enough time to regroup. At least this was one of the older H-K models, still packing Gatling guns instead of the new plasma weapons some of the Skynet Central defenders had been armed with. Small favors.
Abruptly, the Blackhawk bucked, dropping like a rock, as if Blair had suddenly flown it into a downdraft. She fought the controls, trying to get the aircraft back in hand.
It was only then that she noticed that the wind was not only blowing in at her through the disintegrated windshield but was blowing down on her as well.
She looked up, squinting against the blast. The H-K had taken position directly above them, flying with its underside bare meters from the Blackhawk’s main rotor.
Instead of simply blasting them out of the air, like H-Ks usually did, the damn thing was trying to force them down.
Twisting the stick, Blair tried jinking to the left. But at these speeds the Blackhawk wasn’t nearly as responsive as an A-10 would have been, and the H-K easily matched the maneuver. She jinked the other direction, dropping her nose a few degrees to give herself some extra speed. Once again, the H-K stayed right there with her.
“Barnes!” she shouted.
“I see it,” he called back, and out of the corner of her eye Blair saw him pop his restraint harness. “Drop and dust.”
Blair made a face. Drop and dust—put the Blackhawk on the ground, or close to it, and immediately head up again. A standard enough tactic, but in this case it might prove fatal. If the H-K matched the move, she would end up virtually pinned to the ground, with nowhere to go and no maneuvering room at all.
