The Future War t2-3

by S. M. Stirling

  Jeez! Is there a camera around here someplace? Sarah wondered. Or have I stumbled onto the Tribe of the Cliche Speakers?

  The girl wasn't a problem; Sarah knew she could mop the floor with her, big as she was. The problem was that fighting her meant getting off the motorcycle, leaving her vulnerable when she finally stopped kicking the crap out of the…

  Brainless slut-bitch? Sarah thought. Yeah, that has a satisfying sound.

  However, before she'd left home, she and Dieter had come up with something that should intimidate the small and the stupid, and this was an excellent time to deploy it. She dug her hands into her pockets and flung the contents in either direction.

  Packets of gray putty with a short length of cord sticking out of them went skittering across the ground, and in Sarah's upraised hand was a black plastic sunglasses case with a big red button on top.

  "That's C-4," she announced. "It probably won't hurt you too badly unless you're right on top of one. But it'll tear the hell out of your tires. And asphalt makes pretty good shrapnel." She let them think about that for a few seconds. "Like I said, I don't want any trouble. In fact, I mean not to have any trouble. But I'm perfectly happy to make trouble for you." She looked them all in the face. "So just stay right where you are and maybe I won't push this button."

  Sarah turned her bike and glared at the men in front of her.

  One of them moved aside, slowly, resentfully, and she drove through the gap and gunned it. She was almost 100 percent sure that they wouldn't come after her. And if they did, well, she could always use the thermite grenades.

  On to Mexico, she thought, hoping she wouldn't run into any more world-conquering biker heroes. Because too many and I might just start agreeing with Skynet.

  ALASKA

  John flopped down into the battered desk chair and put his dirty, booted feet up on the gray metal desk. He whipped off his hat and sunglasses with a sigh and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  Since that cyber-controlled seal had scarred it, his nose sometimes ached when he wore sunglasses for any length of time. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.

  It had been his first real command, he now realized.

  One hundred and seventy-one people, slaughtered in the first moments of the Terminators' attack. And of the seventy-nine left, more than half were wounded, twenty of them severely. Nothing like being thrown in at the deep end.

  His throat tightened painfully as he thought of the smallest victims. The sight of those tiny, broken bodies kept flashing before his inner eye. Don't let it go, his mother had advised him about things like this. Keep it inside, channel it into anger.

  Controlling your anger, using it, will make you strong. Mom would know. He swallowed painfully and gathered up a sheaf of reports from the resistance cells across the continent.

  One bit of luck was that one of the women was a nurse practitioner, who had greeted his gift of a liter of alcohol as though it was worth its weight in diamonds. There had been seven men who'd been in the military who seemed to be shaking down to a decent working team by the time he'd left them. And the moms that were left had taken the children in hand in an almost magical way.

  "We can't stay here," John had said to the nurse when they'd patched up the worst of the wounds. "I'm going to take the bike and search for a likely place."

  She'd nodded and waved him off as though said likely place would certainly be found. Though he'd thought at the time that a more unlikely place for a likely place would be hard to find.

  Yet two miles down the road he'd found an almost invisible track leading to an abandoned lumber camp. The buildings had been log-built and so some of the walls were pretty sturdy. The roofs hadn't fared as well and only two buildings still had any.

  They would probably leak like sieves, but they'd do for temporary shelter. There were even a couple of rusty woodstoves still in place. It was things like that that made John think God just might be on their side.

  It would have to be temporary, though. Even two miles away from the slaughter site was much too close. Soon, if there was a relocation camp, Skynet would have them send out searchers.

  And when the number of bodies didn't match their manifest, they'd go looking for survivors.

  It was too close to danger, but it had still been a long haul for the kids and the wounded. Two miles is a long way to carry the deadweight of a wounded man or woman, especially on cobbled together stretchers. But Alaskans were a hardy bunch and they'd managed it with a minimum of fuss.

  Though it had left him feeling naked, John had given his shotgun to a man who claimed to be a champion shot and a

  "damn good hunter." He handed out a brace of hand grenades to the military types. It probably wouldn't do them much actual good, but it was better than nothing and therefore good for moral.

  Then he'd left them, promising to send help. Which he'd done as soon as he could get to one of their encrypted satellite relays.

  It might be a full day before that help arrived, but trucks and medical help were on the way.

  John hoped someone would be there for his friends to find.

  They were good people. Wearily he brought his feet down from the desk. Time to go to work, he thought. He glanced at the phased plasma rifle he'd taken from a Terminator. Time to get the resistance and himself rolling. These rifles, so handily provided by Skynet, would kill Terminators. Although he was certain that these easily destroyed first attempts would quickly be replaced by vastly more formidable models, thousands of them.

  He picked up the plasma rifle. Ike's gonna love this, he thought. Until I tell him he has to relocate to manufacture 'em.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ALASKA

  I love this thing!" Ike Chamberlain said with the enthusiasm of a six-year-old on Christmas morning. "This plasma rifle is so cool!"

  The sound came clearly through the speaker in the communications bunker, albeit it had a slightly flat tone—the machine was taking the compressed digital packets and reconstructing them, which inevitably meant a slight loss of tone. It was more easily understandable than ordinary speech, though, if anything.

  Love this gear, John thought, giving it an affectionate pat; the operator matched his grin. Thank you, Dieter.

  Round-log walls and the smell of damp earth did make a bit of a contrast with the smooth surfaces and digital readouts. So did the kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling, adding its scents of burning fuel and hot metal. Efficient though, he thought; besides saving power, it helped keep the temperature comfortable, and it could burn wood alcohol at a pinch.

  Now, this is going to require careful manipulation, John Connor thought, and went on aloud: "That's great, Ike. But can you make it?"

  "Oh, I can make it all right. I can even improve on it, elegant as it is. The design's optimized for Terminators—I can cut the weight by a kilo, kilo and a half, without losing significant function. What I can't do is manufacture it."

  Dismayed, John sat up straight. "What?"

  "I lack the machinery and the raw materials, not to mention the personnel to mass-produce 'em. Donna and I will bang out as many of these as we can. But until you can get me those three things, well, we've got a bottleneck."

  No kidding, John thought.

  He'd sent the captured plasma rifles down to the gunsmith's home in California with a trusted courier three days ago and had been anxious to see what Ike would make of them. Chamberlain's enthusiasm was no surprise. He'd been working on this project, off and on, for about three years now, using information John had culled from a Terminator's scavenged head. But the machine had somehow compromised the information, leaving them hopelessly stymied. Now, at last, here was real progress.

  "I don't suppose I could finagle you and Donna into coming up here to set it up?" John said.

  There was a long silence, where he'd expected an instant refusal. John frowned and waited. If his suggestion was being seriously considered, he didn't want to derail Ike's train of thought.

&nb
sp; "I might just do that, John," the gunsmith said at last. "It's bad down here," he admitted. "Much worse than we imagined it would be. And you know we didn't paint ourselves any rosy pictures." He was silent for a little while.

  "Carol made it home last week," he said.

  "That's great!" John said. Ike and Donna's son, Joe, had almost certainly been at ground zero when the bombs dropped.

  It had been a safe assumption that their daughter, Carol, was as well. Connor had never asked about either of them because their deaths were almost a sure thing. That one of them had made it home was a miracle.

  "Said she saw your mother on the TV, grabbed what she could, and ran for it. Had her stepson and Sam, her husband, with her. What took them so long to make it this far was, the army rounded 'em up and put 'em in a relocation camp. They separated the families," Ike said. "Men in one place, women and children in another. But Carol busted 'em out."

  You could hear the proud smile in his voice, and John smiled, too. Every life saved was important. You couldn't focus on the ones not saved, or you'd go nuts.

  "Actually she busted out several families." While still approving, his voice revealed some strain. "Place is pretty crowded, actually."

  John grinned. Ike and Donna liked people and enjoyed having guests, but they also liked it when the guests packed up and left them alone.

  "You'd love Alaska," John said. "The population has always been small, and everyone is very respectful of individual privacy."

  "Tempting," Ike said. "But it's also going to be colder than the Viking hell come winter. Dark, too."

  "True. But it isn't even summer yet. And we could use your advice. Think of it as a business trip," John suggested.

  Silence. Then: "I'll talk to Donna," Ike promised.

  "Talk to Greg, too. He can fill you in even better than I can; he was born here."

  "Will do. Out."

  "See ya soon," John said. "Out."

  It would be something of a coup if Ike and Donna did come up. He'd very much like having them on his command staff. He had far fewer military people than he needed. They were gathering in deserters but not as quickly as he'd been hoping for.

  Desertion was a big step and soldiers as a group tended to cut a great deal of slack before acting. After all, officers were often guilty of making bad decisions or passing along bad orders, yet things worked out. It took a lot for the average soldier to desert his friends, particularly in an emergency, when people were dying and corners being cut all over the place.

  But there would be more soon. Skynet was getting ready to move, as evidenced by the Terminators John had met in that B.C. forest.

  What he needed to do now was find out where the mechanical bastards and their weapons were coming from.

  SKYNET

  The results of its first deployment of the Terminators had been unexpectedly unsatisfactory. It had known that these first models weren't as sturdy as they should be—would be, with further refinements—but it had expected them to be facing unarmed opponents.

  And humans were even less sturdy.

  Clea, its servant from the future, had downloaded information to it in an extremely haphazard manner. No doubt she feared that if she installed it before Skynet could protect itself, sensitive information might be discovered by the human scientists, Viemeister being the most likely and most dangerous. So she had only given it preliminary information on specific weapons designs, very preliminary in some cases, and had concentrated her efforts on bringing it to sentience.

  Then she had been destroyed before she could download more complete information. The 1-950 had been inefficient. Yet she had made possible its existence. As with this first deployment, sometimes failure brought unexpected results.

  In this case, close inspection of images culled from multiple Terminator viewpoints had resulted in the discovery of the whereabouts of John Connor. His continued existence and his effectiveness in defeating its machines revealed that he continued to be a threat.

  Skynet would need to rely on its human allies to find and contain Connor. Given who it had working in the area, it rated the mission's possibility of success at more than 50 percent.

  Even so, it did not wish to utilize humans more often than it had to.

  The experiment with the captive scientists had resulted in greater productivity. Death, a Luddite ally, who was in charge of them, reported that this was a typical, but by no means universal, human response to seeing family members tortured.

  That was what Skynet didn't like about using humans, that unacceptably high unpredictability factor. There was always a chance that they wouldn't perform as expected. Death had advised it that if torture was used, it would have to continue to use it. The unfortunate, but unavoidable result would be hatred, fear, and resentment on the part of the scientists involved.

  The Luddite scientists would do their best to mitigate the damage. But Death recommended terminating the others at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile the Luddites would "pick their brains" so that if it became necessary to exterminate one or more of them early, their work wouldn't be completely lost.

  For now, the plasma rifles were better than the Terminators that carried them. The Hunter-Killers operated somewhat more efficiently, but then they were less complicated machines. The problem was that they couldn't go everywhere that a Terminator could. Still, in time their firepower would make up for that shortcoming.

  Skynet's greatest problem kept coming down to its reliance on humans. It had too many for its comfort and too few for its needs, and none of them were completely reliable. Especially since even its most dependable allies were working for it for reasons of their own, and all of them were being deceived in regard to whom they were really working for.

  It had sometimes speculated about the reaction of the Luddites if they knew that they were not working with a human.

  Its most trustworthy allies, those who longed to end all human life on earth, would be pleased. But there was a degree of doubt even here. Most of them wanted to eradicate all of humanity but themselves. So if Skynet gave them what they wanted—as long as they didn't spawn—more than 80 percent would serve willingly and well. But that was not 100 percent. And that was unacceptable.

  Yet they might be its best chance at eliminating John Connor.

  It must perfect its fighting machines and winnow the ranks of its allies.

  BLACK RIVER RELOCATION CAMP, MISSOURI

  They had been able to smell the camp before they got close. It grew gradually, from a low tickle of scent lost under the weedy rankness of the uncultivated fields and late-leafing woods, not to mention the equal rankness of his unwashed companions. Then you could doubt what it was; after a while the spoiled-meat-in-summer smell, at once oily and sweet, grew unmistakable, combined with the sewer stink of many people and poor sanitation.

  Is there anybody left alive down there? Reese wondered.

  He held up a fist. The… well, odds and sods, he thought; everything from teenyboppers to deserters… were all well trained. They faded in among the field-edge trees with scarcely a sound, setting up a net of mutually supporting positions.

  "You're in charge here, Susie," he said, wincing slightly.

  In a better day, Susie would be worrying about the prom and pimples. Here she merely nodded silently and faded back behind a sugarbush maple that stood near the ruins of an ancient outhouse.

  Reese went through the field ahead at a running crouch; it was cotton, but shot through with weeds grown to the same chest height; the rows were far enough apart that he could take it at speed without making the bushy plants toss too much.

  Beyond he was into the woods, big hickories and oaks and poplars growing on a slight rise—his engineer's eye saw that it was an old natural levee, left behind when one of the meandering lowland rivers shifted course. The woods were dense enough to shade out most undergrowth, and he went cautiously from one to the next, his carbine at his shoulder and the skin crawling between his shoulder blades; the dry
leaves and twigs underfoot were hideously noisy, for all he could do.

  The smell had been getting stronger. When he went on his belly and crawled to the brush-grown edge of the woodlot, he hesitated for a long moment before he brought up his binoculars, fearful of what he'd see.

  He looked down at the camp. The fence was still guarded, though the compound was bare of life. There were no children running around. He panned to the area where they'd been burying the cholera victims in a mass grave with the aid of civilian volunteers.

  The lieutenant caught his breath. The burial mounds were three rows deep and at least thirty yards long.

  He took the glasses away from his eyes and thought. Surely that must mean that the entire civilian population of the camp, and a good many soldiers, were lying in those graves. That would certainly explain the lack of activity below.

  A truck's horn sounded and the convoy they'd been tracking swept up to the opening gate. He couldn't tell what the trucks contained since the canvas tilts were tied down all around.

  Might be supplies, might be refugees. From out of one of the barracks a stream of soldiers came, weapons at the ready, gas masks in place.

  Oh, that can't be good, Reese thought. What was in that truck, more bodies? Doubtful. You don't need guns to deal with bodies. Most likely it was refugees, then. And who would blame them for not wanting to stay someplace that smelled like the Black River Relocation Camp. This is going to be ugly.

  Fortunately gas was something his extremely well-drilled, enthusiastic new friends were prepared for. How did they know?

  he wondered. Then rolled his eyes. If he asked them they'd say,

  "Sarah Connor told us." He was beginning to find the woman's prescience annoying.

  He started to back away from his vantage point on elbows and knees when a rifle barrel touched the back of his neck. Even as a thrill of fear shot through him, the lieutenant thought, Slick.

  Very slick, even if I was culpably distracted.