Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire

by Timothy Zahn

  “Hang on a second,” Kyle said, looking behind them. “I think I saw a door frame back there.”

  “Yeah,” Zac said. “It was... there it is, over there.”

  The frame was partially buried in concrete chips, but it took only a little effort for the three of them to dig it out. A minute after that, they had it in place beneath the ceiling crack, lying on its long side.

  “Perfect,” Callahan said, testing its balance. “Wide enough to stand on, and all you two have to do is brace it to keep it from falling over. Okay, hold it steady.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait until the Terminators have made their next round?” Zac suggested. “We don’t want you making scraping noises while they’re on their way in.”

  “Right,” Callahan said reluctantly, sitting down beside the frame. “I just hope we can get this done before they blast through into the camp.”

  “We will,” Kyle said firmly. “We have to.”

  It took an hour for the people of Baker’s Hollow to gather the equipment Jik had asked for, and to then make the necessary modifications for what he had in mind. During that time Halverson’s runners brought in three reports from the men tailing the T-700 on the east bank of the river, which seemed to be tracing out a sentry line half a mile north of town that ran from the river to a couple of miles east.

  The obvious inference was that the Terminator was guarding something. But neither Preston nor Halverson could think of anything up there that Skynet might be hiding, unless it thought Jik was still out there and was searching for him.

  Finally, with the equipment prepped and their ambush positions chosen, they were ready.

  Jik had already decided to lean the main, riskier attack. With Halverson and several of the others, he headed north to intercept the Terminator on their side of the river. Preston and the rest went to reinforce the guard at the ford, and to prepare for the moment when the other T-700 returned and tried to cross the river.

  And as Jik and Halverson headed toward the spot they had chosen for their ambush, Jik found himself thinking about Barnes and Williams. Thinking, and wondering.

  Mercenaries or paramilitary gang members he could understand. They might have spotted Baker’s Hollow and come in to scope out its resources for theft or barter. Con artists he could similarly understand, though how a pair of scammers could have gotten hold of a working helicopter he couldn’t guess. Still, in either scenario it would make sense for them to come in masquerading as Resistance fighters.

  But in neither scenario was there any reason why they would be so stupid as to claim Jik was a fraud.

  It made no sense. Even if Jik had been a fraud, why would they open themselves up to suspicion and the risk of serious consequences, consequences that had now in fact rained down on them? Why not keep quiet, pretend to be from a distant Resistance unit which had never had any direct contact with Jik, and try to get through the rest of their agenda before anyone figured out who they really were?

  There was more depth to this thing than Jik had yet been able to sort out. But he would sort it out.

  In the meantime, there were Terminators to be dealt with.

  They reached the ambush point to find a man and woman waiting for them, the woman crouched beside a tree, the man pacing nervously back and forth.

  “About time,” the latter said as Jik and the others came up. “This is the path Singer says it’s been walking.” He gestured, indicating a roughly east-west direction.

  “But it doesn’t trace out exactly the same path each time,” Jik said, eyeing the tall grass that covered most of the ground area between the trees. “Otherwise it would have worn a more well-defined furrow.”

  “That’s right,” the woman confirmed. “Will that be a problem?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Jik said. “How soon before it comes back this way?”

  “Probably ten minutes,” the man said. “At least ten. Maybe fifteen.”

  “Ten should be plenty,” Jik said, gesturing to the men lugging the equipment. “Let’s get to work.”

  Eight minutes later, they were ready. Three minutes after that, Jik felt the first subtle vibrations through the ground as the T-700 approached.

  “Get ready,” he murmured to the others.

  And then, there it was, pushing aside low-hanging branches and wading through knee-high grass as it walked its solitary sentry path. Its G11 submachinegun was held ready, its metallic skull and glowing eyes swept methodically back and forth.

  Jik crouched a little lower behind his tree, one hand gripping each of the two long ropes he and the others had strung around two other trees, watching the Terminator closely as he tried to track its precise path.

  “Needs to go a little north,” Halverson murmured from beside him.

  Jik nodded and pulled gently but firmly on the rope in his left hand. Twenty meters in front of the approaching Terminator the grasses shifted slightly, the subtle movement camouflaged by their general wind-induced sway. Jik eyed the T-700’s path and gave the rope another few centimeters’ worth of last-minute tweaking. The machine continued forward...

  With a startlingly loud crack, the Terminator’s right foot hit and triggered the bear trap Jik had maneuvered into its path. The machine came to a sudden, awkward halt, its momentum forcing it to take one final step forward with its left leg. There was a second crack as the second bear trap snapped shut around its other leg—

  “Now!” Jik shouted. Letting go of the rope in his left hand, he shifted both hands to the one in his right and pulled. All around him, the other men and women leaped into position from the bushes, grass and trees, some hauling on Jik’s rope, others joining with Halverson in pulling on the other one.

  Terminators were incredibly strong machines. But their servomotor musculature hadn’t been designed with this sort of movement in mind. The T-700’s legs were yanked apart, pulled in opposite directions into a gymnast’s splits by the two bear traps now clinging to its lower legs.

  And with its balance base suddenly gone, it toppled forward to land on its gun and its outstretched arms.

  “Belay!” Jik shouted. Not waiting for the others to secure the thick ropes, he snatched up his borrowed G11 and braced the barrel against the side of the tree. He would have just one shot at this.

  The Terminator shifted position, leaving its left hand on the ground and bringing up the G11 in its right. It aimed the weapon down and to its right, targeting the bear trap and attached rope.

  And with his own gun on full automatic, Jik fired everything he had into the magazine on the Terminator’s weapon.

  Sometimes, he knew, a sustained blast into that much caseless ammunition would cause a spontaneous cascading that would cook off the close-packed rounds. That would create a multiple explosion that would wreck the weapon and usually the hand or entire arm of the Terminator holding it.

  In this case, Jik wasn’t that lucky. But he was lucky enough. The G11 broke apart in the T-700’s hand, its firing mechanism shattered and useless.

  And with its gun gone and its legs still being held, the machine was helpless.

  Halverson was already on his way, running across the grass with Barnes’s SIG 542 gripped in his hands. Dropping the empty G11, Jik grabbed the Mossberg shotgun they’d also taken from the visitors and sprinted after him.

  He caught up with Halverson twenty meters from the Terminator, which was now trying unsuccessfully to reach the traps pinning its legs.

  “Arms first?” Halverson called.

  “Arms first,” Jik confirmed. “And then we’ll see.”

  “See what?”

  Jik grimaced. What he knew, and the townspeople didn’t, was that this was the moment of truth. If their ensnared T-700 and the one he, Barnes, and Williams had tangled with across the river were the only two machines Skynet had out here, that second Terminator should even now be charging to the rescue, trying to get here before Jik and Halverson reduced its compatriot to rubble. Two Terminators working together were always
more effective than one alone, even if one or both of them were damaged.

  But if Skynet still had other resources available or close at hand, it would be foolish to waste the other T-700 in an attempt to save this one. In that case, the other Terminator would remain hidden and out of range as it waited for the reinforcements.

  And Terminator reinforcements would be bad. Very bad.

  “See what?” Halverson repeated. “Then we’ll see,” Jik said, “which part of it we want to destroy next.”

  Connor had warned Preston that the last remaining Terminator would probably show up before there were any warning sounds of gunfire from Connor’s own position north of town. Sure enough, Preston’s team had barely gotten themselves prepared when the bushes across the river parted and the dark figure of a T-700 strode into view and headed for the ford.

  It was not, Preston noted, nearly as fearsome a sight as he remembered it from earlier that day. The fingers of its right hand were bent and twisted where Williams’s shotgun slug and the Terminator’s own exploding gun had damaged it. Its left shoulder also looked a little odd, and Preston wondered if it had been damaged by the fall into the ravine during the later fight with Connor and Williams. The limb might even have broken off and had to be magnetically reattached. There were some serious dents on its torso, as well, where Williams’s shotgun blasts had nailed it at close range.

  But the Terminator’s legs, at least, were working just fine. The machine reached the edge of the swirling water and strode in, leaning against the current to keep from being knocked over.

  Preston shot a quick look to his left. Three meters away, Hope was standing straight and ready beside her own covering tree, her arrow nocked, a look of nervousness tinged with determination on her face. To Preston’s right, Half-pint Swan also stood ready.

  Preston turned back to the river, gripping the heavy rope noose in his hands, making sure the rest of the rope trailing from it was free of any entanglements in the undergrowth around him. The Terminator was nearly to the trap now...

  It reached the position, then continued past it. Preston hissed viciously between his teeth, wondering what they were going to do now.

  And then, the Terminator jerked to a halt, nearly pitching forward onto its face. Apparently, Preston had been slightly off in his estimation of where the bear trap was actually positioned.

  But Connor and Halverson were using bear traps against their Terminator, too. With the two T-700s linked via short-range radio telemetry, that meant this one already knew how to deal with bear traps. It didn’t waste any time trying to pull out the chain, but simply leaned over at the waist and reached its metal arms into the whitewater to get a grip on the trap’s jaws and pry them apart.

  And as its eyes shifted downward, Preston leaped out of cover and raced toward it, holding the noose straight out in front of him.

  Even with its eyes turned away and the roar of the water in its auditory sensors the Terminator must have sensed Preston’s approach. It looked up as he neared the river, its glowing red eyes staring, its useless teeth clenched, its skeletal face an image out of human nightmares.

  But there was no turning back now. With the Terminator’s leg trapped, its body hunched over as its fingers tried to pry the bear trap open, and its head turned upward, the machine was at this moment the most unmoving it was ever likely to be. Baring his own teeth in defiance, Preston picked up his pace.

  The Terminator was still glaring cold death at him when Preston heard a sharp double twang from behind and to either side of him.

  And the twin red glows of death abruptly vanished as a pair of arrows jammed themselves into the machine’s eyes.

  Terminators didn’t scream, in pain or rage or anything else. Nor did they get angry. The machine merely jerked back with the double impact, then straightened up, abandoning the task of freeing its leg, and grabbed at the aluminum shafts sticking out of its skull.

  It had succeeded in pulling out one of the arrows and snapping off the other when Preston reached it. Jumping into the frigid water, he threw the noose over the machine’s head, gave a quick tug on the rope to tighten the loop around its neck, then leaped backward again out of the Terminator’s reach.

  “Go!” he shouted.

  For a single, awful second nothing happened. The Terminator’s hands reached toward the noose, fumbling for a grip—

  And then the trailing rope snapped upward toward the sturdy branch it was looped over as the men behind Preston hauled on the loose end. The noose twitched out of the Terminator’s groping fingers and closed solidly around its neck.

  Preston looked behind him as the two big men hidden in the tree leaned backward, one of them above the other, and fell toward the ground.

  And as they did so, the rope wrapped around their waists snapped taut, their combined weight pulling upward on the Terminator’s neck, stretching the deadly machine between the bear trap around its leg and the noose around its neck.

  Instantly, the machine abandoned the noose now snugged too tightly around its neck to be gripped and shifted its attention to the rope itself. But its damaged right hand was unable to get enough grip for it to simply tear the rope apart.

  It was still trying when Chris, Dowder, and Pappas came running up and opened fire with their shotguns and Barnes’s long sniper rifle. Twenty seconds later, its arms severed from its shoulders, the Terminator was helpless.

  Five minutes after that, it was dead.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  “Not too close together,” Preston warned as Half-pint started to set one of the Terminator’s legs down beside the other. “Magnetic reattachment, remember?”

  “Oh. Right.” Half-pint took a couple of long steps farther to the side and set down the leg.

  Preston looked over the scattering of Terminator pieces spread out on the riverbank. It was an impressive array, all right. Rather like a live-action version of the exploded-machine diagrams from his auto mechanic days.

  “So what do we do with all of it?” Half-pint asked.

  A movement caught Preston’s eye, and he looked over to see Connor and Halverson coming through the trees, their team lugging pieces of their own wrecked Terminator.

  “I think we’re about to find out,” he said.

  “Excellent job, Mayor,” Connor said as he and the others arrived at the riverside and dumped their fragments of Terminator onto the grass. “Clean sweep. And the fact that Skynet sent in yours to try to rescue ours means it hasn’t got any other resources in the area. Good news all around.”

  “Doesn’t mean it won’t put together another group and send them in,” Halverson warned.

  “Life is uncertain,” Connor conceded. “But at the very least we’ve bought ourselves some time. And it’s still possible that Skynet will decide you’re not worth the effort of rooting out. That certainly seems to have been its assessment up until now.”

  “Except that things have changed,” Halverson pointed out. “For one thing, we’ve just wrecked four of its Terminators. For another, you’re here.”

  “Nothing we can do about the first,” Connor said. “As to the second, I won’t be here for long.”

  “What about the base you said you wanted to set up?” Preston asked.

  “That’s something I still want to explore,” Connor told him. “But later. When I return, it’ll be with a full Resistance force.”

  “Why not just stay here and send for them?” Preston persisted. “Skynet’s probably expecting you to move on. In that case, staying here might be safer”

  “We know you’ve got a radio you can call them with,” Hope added, coming up beside Preston. “You’ve been making broadcasts.”

  “A small one, yes,” Connor said thoughtfully. “An interesting suggestion, and one I’ll have to think about.” He looked down at the scattered Terminator pieces. “But first we have a lot of junk we need to dispose of. I don’t suppose you have any thermite back in town?”

  “We have a pretty decent forge,�
� Halverson offered.

  Connor shook his head.

  “I doubt it’ll melt T-700 alloy. Our best bet is probably to dump the pieces into that ravine west of the river.”

  “You and Williams already did that,” Preston reminded him. “The machine got out just fine.”

  “Only because it was more or less intact,” Connor said. “As long as we make sure to scatter the pieces far enough apart, we shouldn’t have a problem.”

  “Well, whatever we’re going to do, let’s do it,” Halverson rumbled, looking up at the sky. “I want to be back in town before it gets dark.”

  “Good point.” Connor raised his eyebrows. “Mayor?”

  “I guess the ravine’s as good a spot as any,” Preston agreed reluctantly. “Fine. Everyone? We’re heading across the river. Grab something, and let’s go.”

  “We don’t need everybody,” Halverson said as the men and women began picking up the dented and scarred pieces of metal. “Connor and I can handle this. You can take whoever we don’t need and head back.”

  Preston was used to Halverson throwing his weight around, and he’d more or less become accustomed to it. But doing it in front of John Connor himself was proving far more embarrassing than it usually was.

  But until and unless Connor actually brought in his Resistance group—his group, and the food supplies he’d mentioned—Halverson would continue to have all the weight that his expert hunter status gave him.

  And in this case he also happened to be right. There was no point in everyone tromping off into the woods if they weren’t needed. There was plenty of other work to be done in town.

  “All right,” he said. “But take a few guards along, too. In case you run into something you can’t handle with your arms full.”

  “Fine,” Halverson said. He walked away, tagging a few of the armed men and women who weren’t currently hefting a piece of broken Terminator.

  “Speaking of which, Mayor,” Connor said, “I wonder if I might borrow that sidearm of yours. The .45 you loaned me is empty.”