John noticed Amy’s brief smile and the respectful look she gave Jack.
“All right,” John said. “Let’s get this done. What happens if we encounter a Terminator?”
“Avoid it if possible, take it out if necessary.” Jack gave him a half-smile. “It would be something to dump the car-cass of one of those on a table at the congressional hearing.
But tonight, minimum exposure, minimum risk. We don’t confront.”
“Ready,” Amy said, suddenly bringing satchels forward.
Jack touched a series of buttons. “Recording on. Okay.
Pete?”
In silence, they went through the satchels. John recognized the bugs as a new type, self-camouflaging when placed. Pete quickly went over its deployment with John.
They could either scatter them at random or carefully install them. Once he understood the mechanism, John slipped the satchel onto his shoulders like a backpack, then pulled on a full-camo headmask.
“Pete?” Jack prompted.
Pete reached to a console and touched one button.
As they exited the van, John saw that the street lights all along Aviation Blvd and El Segundo were out. They 273
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moved in almost complete darkness, then, the wash of LAX
limning the northern horizon behind them, the glow of Lawndale to the south. Between these, the Cyberdyne facility shown brightly, powered by its own generators.
The hunter now becomes the hunted, John thought as they ran. The hour of the machines is fading…it’s ours now…mine…we’re wolves set to track and kill the dogs of war…
“We have five minutes,” Jack’s voice said through John’s earpiece.
The clothes they wore proofed against infrared detection.
John still sprinted as he had learned in action against hunter-killers and standard Terminators in the future, hunching to make as small a target as possible and moving swiftly from point to point. They made it to the street, then across El Segundo, skirting the fence line for nearly thirty meters before stopping.
Pete and Amy unraveled lengths of cable. With alligator clips, they attached the ends to the box, then, simultaneously, clipped the other ends to the fence. Jack watched the box on the ground. A green light winked on and he gave the go.
John watched Amy scale the chain link deftly, up to the edge of the razor wire that ran along the top. She took out a spray can and began coating the deadly steel. The foam expanded and hardened into a flexible but impenetrable cushion along a three foot section. She waited another minute, then climbed over, dropping to the far side.
John followed, then Jack. Pete came over last.
They ran toward the low, long building just across the road leading from the north gate, which was visible in its own bright light. Except for a few lights along the roofline of the building, nothing illuminated this patch of ground.
They reached the corner, waited briefly, then continued on east, across another road, and to the corner of the L-shaped building that was their first target.
Jack led them to a door locked with a keypad security box with a card swipe. He produced an ID card, ran it down 274
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the track, and punched in a code. The light turned from red to green.
The lock clicked open.
They found themselves in a corridor that ran the length of the outer wall. The door closed.
“How the hell…?” John asked.
“Hunch,” Jack said. “They only had possession of the base for three months. I assumed they wouldn’t have changed everything yet. Individual codes, sure, but they wouldn’t have thought to block override codes. Like mine.”
John could hear Jack’s grin under the mask.
“Okay, we work in two teams,” Jack continued. “We meet back here in ninety minutes. No leeway. That’s when the next brownout is scheduled. I want this place surveyed and bugged thoroughly. Go.”
When John looked around, Pete and Amy were gone.
“Come on,” Jack said.
Several meters along the corridor, they came to a stairwell. Jack headed up to the next floor.
Over the next ten minutes, they worked their way through a succession of offices, store rooms, conference rooms, and rooms in various states of transition from one thing to another. In silence, they installed the bugs in phones, wall sockets, under desks that were clearly in use, and in restrooms.
In the basement, they found a direct access to the next building.
Here they found more workshops. Computer labs, small machine shops, more conference rooms, and offices assigned to project managers. John recognized none of the names, and as far as he could tell there was nothing unexpected in any of it. No half-built Terminators, no stacks of data processing equipment like that he saw in Skynet’s buried and nuclear-hardened bunkers, nothing to indicate anything sinister.
They ascended to ground level before hearing voices.
Jack eased open a fire door at the first floor landing.
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John peered past his head, through the narrow crack, and saw a shallow alcove leading to a much larger space. He heard big ventilators in the distance, muffling the sounds of motors and people. Jack opened the door further until he could slip through. John followed a few moments later.
At the end of the alcove, John pressed against the wall opposite Jack and looked up at the three or four story high ceiling crossed by beams and crane tracks, dotted by bright sodium vapor lamps. On the floor, a semi was being loaded.
John counted about fifteen people working. Crates and canisters stacked against the walls; forklifts navigated the maze of people and material.
As they watched, four gurneys appeared from another hallway. Each one bore something covered by plastic sheeting. They were loaded into the back of the semi.
“All right, all right, no gawking,” came a familiar voice.
Oscar Cruz came out then, clapping his hands as he ordered people back to work.
“I want this delivered to the site ASAP,” Cruz said. “No witnesses, everybody return here for reassignment. Come on, let’s move, we don’t have a lot of time.”
Workers quickened their pace.
Jack drew back toward the door.
In the stairwell, he pulled off his mask. “I want him. I had that son of a bitch locked away in solitary. The idiots that let him out—”
“Not now,” John said. “We’re in and out tonight. That’s it. That’s what you said.”
Jack stared at him. “Right. But I want that truck.”
“You finish on this level, I’ll do the truck. Then we leave.
We’ve got less than fifteen minutes.”
“Fine.”
He pulled the mask back on and went through the door again. When John looked, Jack was gone.
What the hell did I just volunteer to do? he wondered, looking at the truck.
He edged around the corner and began the slow process 276
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of making his way around the interior of the bay without being seen.
Sarah rolled through the blasted door to the left, coming up in a crouch, rifle aimed. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Portis mirror her move to the left.
Workbenches, desks, and stacks of electronic equipment filled the room. The splinters from the door settled as if in slow motion around the two moving shapes before her.
Sarah identified Bobby as he tried to run away from the other form. She shifted aim to that one—Casse, she guessed—and squeezed the stud.
Brilliant energy coursed across its shoulders and head, steam rising immediately where the beam washed over it.
The entire upper torso flexed impossibly, twisting into a new configuration. It writhed, spreading and shrinking, and started toward her. Another spray of particles danced over it, driving it back, from Portis’s gun.
“Bobby!” Sarah shouted. “Get away from it!”
; The boy straightened, scanning the scene.
Almost too swiftly to track, Casse moved on him. Before Sarah could fire again, the TX-A wrapped itself around Bobby Porter. Bobby struggled, stretching the now silvery material as his arms flailed. Within seconds, though, the liquid metal stiffened, reducing Bobby’s efforts until he could no longer move. It became a human-shaped column, atop which a face formed that was almost human.
“You are Sarah Connor,” the face said. It looked at Portis.
“I don’t know you, but I will assume you are the one who damaged our organization in New Mexico. I won’t waste time on either of you now. I intend to leave. I’m taking this one with me.”
Below the head, the silvery surface rippled, then parted to reveal Bobby’s face. Tears flowed freely down his cheeks.
“Why? What do you want with him?” Sarah asked. She aimed at the TX-A’s head.
The machine’s face melted and the material flowed down behind Bobby’s head.
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“Shoot and kill him,” Casse said.
Sarah began to argue, but a pulse of energy struck Bobby, bursting the head in a spray of blood and bone. Sarah jerked backward, stunned. She looked to the right, at Portis, who then continued to fire short bursts.
The TX-A released the body, letting it fall forward to the floor. The Terminator shrank into a tight ball of matter, then, light dancing across it, poured around furniture and equipment, disappearing.
Portis ran forward, chasing after it.
Sarah stared at the headless corpse on the floor in front of her. Whatever she had expected to happen when they fired on the locked doors, this never entered her calculus.
She looked up as Portis came walking back toward her. He paused at the foot of the body, frowning. Then he held up his left hand. He turned it over, studying it, an expression of profound bewilderment on his aged features. He saw her then, and for a moment she thought he would kill her, too.
Instead, he stepped over the body, came toward her, and knelt. As she watched, tears glistened, broke free, and ran down his face. He let the rifle fall to the floor.
“Lee…?” Sarah reached out uncertainly, then held back.
“Jeremiah?”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand. Why am I still here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe…”
He waited, his face hopeful for a moment.
“I don’t know,” Sarah said finally.
“Things must be more fouled up than I thought.”
John remembered sliding under the front axle of the big Peterbilt and placing the bug, pressing it into the wheel well. He remembered putting a second one further back, on the power train. He remembered checking for feet around the cab, then pulling himself out on the passenger side, climbing up on the running board, and dropping another through the open window onto the floorboard.
He remembered starting to return—
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But he stood outside the base now, watching Pete and Amy remove the alligator clips from the fence, fold up the apparatus that had sent the current coursing through the fence around that section, isolating it and allowing them to climb it without tripping alarms.
He looked up and saw the plastic that had coated the razor wire beginning to melt after Jack sprayed it with something that looked like water. By morning there would be no trace of it. Or any trace of them.
But he remembered nearly getting caught within the base, separating from Jack, running, desperately trying to avoid—
The building erupted in flame. The walls burst out, releasing a brilliant orange ball, the shockwave pushing across the field toward them—
The building stood, still dark, intact. John stared at it, trying to reconcile the two images, and find the missing components of the past—
The memory was fading. Their mission was a success.
There’s something else, he thought, and wondered if any of the others felt it. It was as if the universe, at least the part around them, concerned with them, had skipped ten minutes—or more. Two separate frames had somehow spliced together, bypassing a series of events that would have led to a different outcome.
He stood there, watching the other three work, feeling the odd memories fade, but knowing that time had just jumped for him.
Jack, Amy, and Pete finished. Jack patted John’s arm.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re done, we have two minutes before the lights come back on.”
Then John noticed that once more the streetlights were out. Except for the wash from the base lights, they stood in near total darkness.
“What’s wrong?” Jack asked.
“I don’t—didn’t you feel it?”
Jack hesitated, then lightly pushed John. “Move.”
They ran back to the abandoned part of the old air base, found their vehicles, and climbed into the van.
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John stripped off the mask and the stealth gear, struggling to keep the memory of the shift in mind. Jack glared at him.
“All right, what?”
“You didn’t feel anything?” John asked.
“No, I—like what?”
“I did,” Amy said. In the wan light of the van she looked pale.
“What?” Jack demanded.
“It was—I don’t know, like lost time or something. I remember finishing the rounds, planting the bugs, then linking up with Pete to head back—then we were outside the fence. I don’t remember getting there, though.” She swallowed audibly. “I thought the building…”
“The building what?”
“Nothing.”
“We missed a beat,” John said. “Pete? You?”
“I don’t know what you mean. I didn’t feel anything.”
But he did not look at John—or at Jack or Amy. Instead, he busied himself stowing gear. Then he climbed into the front, behind the wheel, and stared out the window.
“We’ll go over this when we’re back at your place,” Jack said. “We need to get out of here now.”
“We leave by separate routes,” John said. “I’m going to Destry-McMillin. I’ll let you know when I get there what the status is.”
“Right. I’ll wait at the office.”
As John got out of the van and went back to his car, he wondered if Jack would willingly have that conversation.
For an instant, reality no longer made sense. The mind was compensating by offering up explanations, true or not, but logical certainly, to explain the inexplicable.
For now, though, they needed to be away from Cyberdyne. John started his car, wishing he could keep driving and get away from it forever.
Deirdre McMillin sobbed in short, heaving bouts. Sarah knew the look. The shock would let her feel nothing soon 280
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enough, then everything, then nothing again. In time, she would find equilibrium of some kind, but it would never be right.
McMillin came up to her. “I’m having Dr. Jaspar rig something to explode, make it look like an accident. There’d be no explaining it to the police otherwise, and we have to explain it to them somehow.”
So we’re all to be accomplices to murder, Sarah thought.
“Where’s Portis?”
“Next room.”
“Let me know when my son gets here.”
She left the conference room. They had one body and a serious injury to explain away now. Bobby Porter was dead, but Paul Patterson would live. Sarah wondered if the
“accident” Stefani Jaspar devised could account for the four-inch-wide stab wound that ran all the way through Patterson’s body. He had bled out on that table while everyone waited for her to arrive. They had expected her to save Bobby, she knew, and instead she had brought his murderer into the room to kill him. She doubted Deidre would ever forgive her. She wondered if she would forgive herself, though that did not bother her nearly so much anymore. She had many mo
re lives than these two on her conscience.
Lee Portis—Jeremiah Porter—sat alone in a small office, an untouched cup of coffee on the desk beside him. He looked up, eyes hollow, when she entered.
Sarah closed the door. “What just happened?”
“I’m remembering.”
“I don’t give a shit about your personal problems! I want to know what you just did!”
“You don’t understand. I’m remembering! What I just did triggered it. I’ve been remembering since it happened.”
Sarah restrained herself. She wanted to hit him, shoot him, hurt him somehow. But she waited.
“There were two possible paths,” he said. “I was sent back to keep myself from being taken by Cyberdyne. I would have worked for them, willingly or not, if they had gotten 281
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me. But it wasn’t clear what action would be appropriate.
So I was sent back memory-impaired in order to assess the situation as objectively as possible and select the right course as rationally as could be expected. I had to learn what this world was like, what might happen to it, and how it might happen. When I saw Bobby—myself—I realized what needed to be done. I’d chosen correctly. I found you, I set things up to get myself away and hide. I could then fight Cyberdyne with you, and keep myself safe, out of reach.
That would lead to the world I came from. But I wasn’t altogether myself.”
He shifted uncomfortably, scowling.
“The other possibility was that I did work for Cyberdyne, that I completed the work begun by Dyson and Monk, and brought Skynet and functional time travel into existence.
I worked for the enemy, then, and I therefore was the enemy. In that instance, my survival meant the destruction of the human race. So I was sent back to kill myself.”
“Why?”
“Because of the logic of time travel, Ms. Connor. A Terminator couldn’t do it. Casse tried. His only option was to capture Bobby—me—and reprogram him to work for Cyberdyne, just as had been done to Monk. But a native of the frame could. Even more so, there’s no actual barrier to suicide in this configuration. I would cease to exist altogether. At least, I should.”
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