by Timothy Zahn
“About what?”
“Wright,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it, and about the Thetas here. Valentine didn’t want to do what Skynet wanted, but she still did it. Oxley seemed to really like the power he had. Jik—I don’t know what the hell Jik was thinking.”
“I think he really believed he was John Connor,” Blair said.
“Could be,” Barnes said. “You see what I’m saying. None of them, not even Valentine, could break the programming. Not without an arrow in the back of the head.”
“They couldn’t break from Skynet,” Blair murmured as she saw where Barnes was going with this. “But Marcus did.”
“Marcus did,” Barnes acknowledged. “He broke his programming, saved Connor’s life, and helped us get all those prisoners out so we could blow the place.”
“Yes, he did all that,” Blair said, a fresh lump forming in her throat. “But that was all him. What did you mean that I was right?”
Barnes snorted. “You were right about him,” he growled. “You saw something—damned if I know what—that told you he could be trusted. If you hadn’t seen that and done something about it—” He shook his head. “I don’t know how it would have turned out. But probably a hell of a lot worse.”
He waved a hand. “So anyway, there it is,” he went on. “You wanted to know why I was mad at you. Now you do.” He shrugged. “And I guess if he was worth your trust, he was worth mine. I guess.”
“Yes, he was,” Blair agreed. “As it turned out. And I am sorry about making you look... you know.”
“Forget it,” Barnes said. “I asked Preston why he put up with Halverson. He said keeping his town running was worth a little wounded pride. I figure if he can do it, so can I.”
“I think sometimes we forget what’s really important,” Blair said. “Right now, the important thing is that taking out all three of the Baker’s Hollow Thetas may persuade Skynet to abandon the project.”
“Just in time, too,” Barnes muttered.
“What do you mean?”
He hissed out a sigh. “I mean we were wrong,” he said heavily. “You and me, when we were trying to figure out the test sequence for the Thetas. We got the part about Lajard and the others infiltrating a bunch of humans, and the part about Jik coming in with a whole set of false memories. But we missed something.”
“What?”
“The bit where Skynet snatches someone from town—someone everyone already knows—and puts in a replacement,” Barnes said. “You didn’t see it, but there was a brand-new Theta half buried inside the cabin that the H-K wrecked. I don’t think it was ready to go yet, but it looked damn close. The body they were using wasn’t perfect, but they’d done a lot of work on the face.”
“Who was it supposed to be?” Blair asked. “Could you tell?”
“Oh, yeah,” Barnes said, an edge of cold darkness to his voice. “It was going to be Hope Preston.”
A hard knot settled into Blair’s stomach.
“We’ve got to win this thing, Barnes,” she said quietly. “We’ve got to beat Skynet back, and we’ve got to break it and every single one of its Terminators into scrap metal.”
“No argument here,” Barnes agreed. “I wonder what it’ll come up with next.”
Blair took a deep breath. She and Barnes would probably never be friends, she knew.
But now that the barrier she’d unwittingly built between them was gone, they could once again be comrades in arms.
And she could settle for that. In the midst of the fires of war, she could settle for that.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m sure we’ll find out.”
The End
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TIMOTHY ZAHN has been writing science fiction for over thirty years. In that time he has published thirty-nine novels, nearly ninety short stories and novelettes, and four collections of short fiction. Best known for his eight Star Wars novels, he is also the author of the Quadrail series, the Cobra series, and the young-adult Dragonback series. He is currently working on the third book of the Cobra War series and a ninth Star Wars novel.
The Zahn family lives on the Oregon coast, where only a tsunami can ruin a perfect day.
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This is the must-read story that reveals the incredible events leading up to the hit movie Terminator Salvation.
In post-Judgment Day LA, two lost kids named Kyle and Star keep watch for Terminators; a jaded Marine struggles to keep his rag-tag community together in the face of unrelenting danger; and John and Kate Connor assemble their Resistance team for a brutal assault on a deadly enemy.
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Russia 2003. When it appears that the United States has unleashed its entire nuclear arsenal upon the world, Captain Dimitri Losenko, commander of the nuclear submarine Gorshkov, has no choice but to retaliate. His target? Alaska.
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