by Timothy Zahn
Sure enough, a few seconds later the running footsteps slowed to a more cautious walk, and Barnes and two other men came into view.
For a moment the big black man and the Hispanic Marine locked eyes in the mutual look of men who knew what had just gone down, and therefore had no need to actually mention it. Then Barnes jerked his head toward the mass of metallic body parts that had recently been five of Skynet’s killing machines.
“Don’t just stand there,” he growled to Orozco. “Split up the pieces before they try to put themselves back together.”
“Right,” Orozco said. Looking back at the fountain, he gestured to Grimaldi and the others to stay put, repeated the gesture to the two grenadiers beside him, then made a wide circle through the very northern edge of the archway and out into the street. A moment later he had joined Barnes and the others in their task of throwing chunks of smoking metal to the four winds.
He did note, though, that Barnes made a point of examining the Terminators’ five miniguns, putting aside the two that still seemed functional.
“I guess that’ll have to do,” Barnes said as he surveyed their handiwork. “Nice little bombs you got there.”
“They’re not bad,” Orozco said. “All things being equal, I’d rather have a few bricks of C4.
Thanks for the assist.”
“Glad to help,” Barnes said, his face hardening. “Yeah, a little C4 or thermite and we could do a real job on the damn things. Too bad. If Skynet can collect all the pieces, it can probably hammer one or two of ’em back together.”
“Does Skynet even bother with retrieval?” Orozco asked. “I thought it had automated factories putting these things out.”
“And we’re doing every damn thing we can to put those out of business, too,” Barnes said with grim satisfaction. “Yeah, it’s been picking up wrecked Terminators wherever it can. Especially these T-600s.”
“Nice to know Skynet has to scrabble for resources just like the rest of us,” Orozco said with a grunt. “Maybe we can keep it too busy to bother with this particular batch of parts.”
“We’ll get the busy part, anyway,” Barnes said, cocking his head to the side. “Hear that?”
Orozco frowned. As far as his still only half-functional ears could tell, the streets around them were completely silent.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“You got it,” Barnes agreed. “All the T-600s that were out killing people have stopped.”
Orozco’s stomach tightened. “And have all been retasked to us.”
“Yeah,” Barnes said. “Fact, that’s kind of what we had in mind.”
“Wonderful,” Orozco growled. “Does the bait get to hear more about this plan? Or do we just get to be bait?”
“Hey, pal, you were already dead,” Barnes pointed out. “If this batch hadn’t taken you out, the next wave would have.”
Orozco glared at him. But the man was right.
“Point taken,” he acknowledged reluctantly. “Let’s try it again: you mind sharing the plan with the rest of the class?”
“Better,” Barnes said, lowering his voice. “Here’s the deal. We think we know where Skynet’s staging area is for this operation. Most of our people have moved in and are ready to attack it.”
“Only you need to make sure no one’s home to spoil the surprise,” Orozco said, nodding as it all became clear. “So we make noise and trouble out here so that all the machines will come out to play.”
“Yeah, but don’t worry—we’ll be doing everything we can to help you,” Barnes promised.
“Thing is, if we can clear the staging area and then hold it so that the T-600s can’t get back in to reload, we should have enough breathing space to take them out permanently.”
“Until Skynet sends in more, anyway,” Orozco said.
“Shouldn’t be any,” Barnes said. “That’s what a staging area’s for. Skynet moves a bunch of Terminators in so it can mass them for a major op—”
He broke off as, without warning, a Hunter-Killer abruptly shot into view around the corner, its Gatling guns roaring.
Orozco dived for cover beneath the edge of the archway’s overhang, Barnes and the other two men right behind him. The HK angled itself upward, braking to a hovering halt in front of the building. It swiveled around, bringing its weapons to bear on the four sitting ducks.
And made a hard skid to the side as a shredding volley of automatic fire slammed up into it from down the street. The HK spun around, its quarry suddenly forgotten as it clawed madly for altitude and distance. It reached the end of the block and disappeared from sight, fire hammering it the whole way.
“Damn,” Barnes muttered as he and Orozco got cautiously to their feet again. “Thought we had that one for sure. Skynet’s usually smart enough not to send them down into city streets where someone with a high-power weapon can—”
“Barnes!” one of the other Resistance men snapped. He was kneeling over the other man, and in the dim starlight Orozco could see a dark stain spreading across the downed soldier’s chest.
Barnes stepped over to them, grabbing at his combo earphone/wire-mike. “One down,” he snapped. “Kate, Pavlova—get over here.”
Orozco looked south as two women appeared from the overturned bus and headed toward the Ashes at a dead run. “What can I do?” he asked.
“If you’ve got a medic handy, send him over,” Barnes said, squatting down beside the injured man. “If not, we got it covered.”
The two women arrived and deftly shouldered the men aside as they broke out medical kits.
Orozco watched them work, and it was only as one of them turned briefly into the glow of a small flashlight that he realized it was Kate Connor, the woman who’d made that dramatic appearance earlier on the Ashes’ balcony.
“Snap it up,” Barnes said, looking around them. “We need to get under cover.”
“You’re not going to try to use that bus again, I hope,” Orozco said. “Skynet knows you were in there. It’s probably already got a T-600 or two on the way.”
“You got any suggestions?”
“Right there,” Orozco said, pointing to the building across the street. “We’ve got a sniper’s nest up on the second floor overlooking our entrance. We knocked out the walls so that it runs all the way along the building’s eastern side, including the two corner apartments. We also put in a bunch of extra shielding, mostly scavenged stone and brick.”
“Sounds good,” Barnes said, running a quick eye over the building. “We’ll take it.”
Turning toward the bus, he waved. A moment later, a man loaded with heavy machineguns and ammo boxes slipped out of the front and headed toward them, staggering under his load. A grunted order from Barnes, and the other uninjured Resistance man headed back to help him.
Orozco looked down at the wounded man. The two women had finished with him, at least for now, and were packing up their gear. “Is he going to make it?” he asked.
“He should,” Kate said. “He’s stable, at least for now.”
“You need any help carrying him inside?” Orozco asked.
“We got it,” Barnes said.
“Okay,” Orozco said. “Oh—very important. If you decide you need to come in here for any reason, stick to the edges of the archway, the places where it’s too low for a Terminator to get through without ducking.”
Kate’s eyes flicked upward to the archway.
“Understood,” she said.
The two men arrived, puffing under their load of munitions. At Barnes’ hand signal, they headed across the street and disappeared into the sniper nest building. “I guess this is it,” he said, nodding to Orozco.
Orozco nodded back. “See you on the other side.”
Barnes slung the two captured T-600 miniguns over his shoulders with his other weapons. Then, stooping down, he carefully lifted the injured man in his arms.
Orozco must have looked as astonished as he felt, because Kate chuckled. “Clean living,” she e
xplained dryly. “Good luck, Sergeant.”
“And to you, Ma’am.”
She and Barnes headed across the street. Orozco checked both directions, then made his way carefully back through the archway and returned to the fountain.
“Who were they?” Grimaldi asked. “It was too dark to see.”
“Nobody special,” Orozco said. “Just the people you drew down on this morning.”
He had the minor satisfaction of seeing Grimaldi’s eyes widen.
“Oh, hell,” the chief muttered.
“Yeah, well, don’t panic,” Orozco advised him. “They’re here to help.”
Grimaldi looked over at the building across the street…and for the first time, Orozco saw some actual hope creeping into the other’s eyes.
“I hope you thanked them,” he said.
“I did,” Orozco said. “You’ll get a chance later to do that yourself.”
“I hope so,” Grimaldi said. “You want me back on watch?”
Orozco shook his head.
“No need. When the next batch gets here, we’ll know it.”
There had been a couple of bad moments along the way, the worst being when Fido made it through the Death’s-Head barrier before Kyle and Star had quite reached the building they were heading for.
The Terminator managed to unload a couple of bursts of fire before they could get inside, but the distance and piles of rubble protected them.
And then they were through the sagging doorway, Kyle pulling Star to the side as the machine behind them uselessly hammered a third burst of fire into the concrete wall.
“That was close,” Kyle muttered, breathing heavily as he eased back to the doorway for a look.
The Terminator was still coming, of course. If there was one thing about Terminators, it was that they didn’t give up.
He stepped back out of the doorway and looked around. He and Orozco had checked out this place a few months ago, hoping to increase their farming area. But the structure had turned out to be too dangerous, with the flooring in particular badly decayed in far too many places.
One of the worst of those places was right here on the first floor.
He returned to where Star was huddled against a sagging wall, wheezing a little as she panted, an uneasy look on her face as she glanced around. She’d stepped though one of the floor’s weak spots on that last visit, and would probably have fallen all the way to the sub-basement if Orozco hadn’t grabbed her arm in time to pull her out.
“Come on,” Kyle whispered, taking her hand. “Don’t worry—I remember where the safe paths are.”
Star looked doubtful, but she nevertheless allowed Kyle to help her to her feet and lead the way around flaking concrete pillars and decaying wooden walls.
The building’s wide central corridor was just as Kyle remembered it: a single two-foot-wide line of solid tile running above an under-floor girder, with five feet on either side of equally solid-looking tiling that rested on utterly rotten joists and floorboards. Kyle led Star along the safe path to the far end of the corridor and settled her behind a rusting stove.
“Stay here,” he told her, taking the shotgun and handing her the rifle. Grabbing a length of half-shredded copper tubing that lay partly buried in dust beside the stove, he returned to the corridor.
He walked back to the middle of the central path and poked a couple of holes into the flooring, one on either side, with his knife. Bending the tubing into a U-shape, he pushed the ends into the holes he’d made, turning it into a sort of copper rainbow and what had to be the world’s most obvious tripwire. He returned to the corridor’s far end and then worked his way through the row of half-shattered rooms flanking the corridor until he’d reached a spot directly across from the tubing.
Settling himself near a large hole that looked out into the corridor, he pressed his eye against a much smaller hole and waited.
He had barely gotten in position when the Terminator appeared.
For a long moment the machine stood motionless at the end of the corridor, its head panning back and forth as its blazing red eyes assessed the situation. Kyle watched, wondering whether the machine might just walk carelessly ahead onto the rotten floor and end the problem right there.
But no such luck. Either the Terminator had sensors that warned it of the floor’s hazards, or else the presence and positioning of the copper tubing in the middle of the floor was enough of a clue for it to come to the logical conclusion. With one final sweep of its head, it stepped forward onto the safe path. The tiles creaked ominously under its weight, but held. Holding its minigun ready, the machine started forward.
Keep going, Kyle urged it silently, fingering his shotgun as he watched it picking its way carefully along. It reached the tubing—
And stopped.
Kyle held his breath, knowing there were two ways it might choose to deal with the obstacle facing it. The most obvious would be for it to merely reach down and pluck the tubing out of the floor. In that case, Kyle and Star were in big trouble.
But the machine—and the Skynet computer that controlled it—had no way of knowing how long the tubing had been there. For all Skynet knew, it might have been there for hours or days, connected to some immensely clever, immensely destructive booby trap.
Which left option number two…and as Kyle watched, the Terminator lifted one foot high and started to carefully step over the tubing.
It was in mid-step, its entire weight balanced on a single foot, when Kyle lined up his shotgun with the hole in the wall and fired two shots squarely into the machine’s massive torso.
The Terminator reacted instantly, dropping its airborne foot back to the floor in an attempt to reestablish its balance. Unfortunately for it, the only floor within reach was useless for the purpose.
With a loud snapping of broken wood and tile, the Terminator crashed through the floor and vanished from sight.
Kyle retraced his steps as quickly as he safely could, to find that Star had abandoned her refuge by the stove and was standing at the end of the corridor, peering at the huge hole in the floor.
Is it dead? she signed.
Her answer was a burst of machinegun fire from the subbasement below them.
“Not unless there are miniguns in hell,” Kyle said grimly, grabbing her arm and pulling her out of the line of fire. “Let’s get out of here.”
And go back to the Ashes? she signed, looking closely at him.
Kyle grimaced. He’d hoped the run-in with Fido might have changed her mind, that she would realize how useless they would be in a straight-up fight and let him take her away from the death and hell their neighborhood had become.
But if the look on her face was anything to go by, she was more determined than ever.
Star’s instincts regarding Terminators had never been wrong yet. He would just have to trust that she was right this time, too.
“Sure,” he said, taking the rifle from her and slinging the shotgun over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
“Tee two: first swing double eagle.” Barnes’ voice crackled through Connor’s earphone. “Teeing up for swing two.”
The earphone went silent, and Connor took a careful breath. So Skynet’s first assault on the Moldavia had been beaten back, and Barnes’ team was getting ready for the Terminators to try again. That was good.
But all the preliminary success in the world couldn’t help soothe the churning in his gut.
One of Barnes’ team had gotten hit…and Barnes had called both Pavlova and Kate in to help him.
Which implied that Kate had been right there with them, despite Connor’s specific instruction that she was to stay in the temp base.
The question was why the hell had she been there?
But he couldn’t ask her that question. Even if it hadn’t been vital that he and the others lurking near the staging area maintain radio silence, he couldn’t put a question like that on an open channel.
Because he knew full well why she’d sneaked off
and joined Barnes’ squad. He’d seen the expression on her face when she realized he was letting Leon and Carol Iliaki go into danger together while Kate herself had to stay behind.
The children of the Moldavia, and her need to prove herself a worthy leader, had apparently been stronger than the constraints of obedience to her commander. And husband.
He took a deep breath, forcing his anger away. There was a time for emotion, and the middle of combat wasn’t it.
But assuming they all survived the next few hours, he and Kate were going to have a long, serious talk.
“Movement,” McFarland murmured from beside him. “East door.”
Connor peered between the broken boards that shielded his squad’s position, gazing across the patch of open ground at the sagging warehouse. The east door, which had been shut a minute ago, was now open. A moment later, two T-600s strode out into the moonlight, heading southeast at full speed across the open area.
Connor watched as they headed toward the protective mounds of rubble ringing the warehouse, feeling an unpleasant tingle of suspicion. The Terminators weren’t heading anywhere near his squad, and were showing no indication that they were even paying attention to anything in this direction. But there was always the chance that Skynet was playing it cute, that the T-600s were planning to climb over the rubble, circle south, and come up on them from behind.
Bishop was the squad member currently farthest to the rear. Connor caught her eye and nodded his head behind her. She nodded an acknowledgment and silently slipped away to play scout and rear guard.
“Funny,” McFarland murmured in his ear. “I’d have thought Skynet would have had to lose at least one more round before sending in the reserves.”
“And then send more than just two of them,” Connor agreed. “Maybe those two are on some different errand.”
McFarland grunted. “My condolences to whoever’s at the other end.”
Connor nodded. “Agreed.”
The last of the HKs spun around, its starboard engine sending up clouds of thick smoke, and crashed to the ground, bursting into flames on impact.
