The Future War t2-3

by S. M. Stirling

  Her cabin was small and half-buried, but looked snug and well made. A pair of elk antlers decorated the area above the doorframe. There were a few chickens pecking in the yard. Two dogs— huskies—sprang to attention, barking furiously at the motorcycle.

  They must be well trained, he thought. They haven't eaten the chickens yet.

  Ninel put her bike on its stand and went to them, speaking softly and mussing their ruffs. They greeted her with waving tails and hanging tongues but kept a weather eye on John.

  "Spike and Jonze," she said, pointing at one and then the next identical dog. John looked at her askance and she shrugged. "I like his work. C'mon in."

  The space was small and somewhat cluttered, but it was clean and as neat as it could be given the crowded conditions. The bed looks comfortable, he thought, glancing at the fur-covered double bed. He resolutely turned his eyes and mind away.

  "Anything I can do to help?" he asked.

  "Yeah. Sit down and stay out of my way." She went to a camp-stove setup and got it started. "You can keep me entertained. Tell me about yourself."

  If only I could, he thought automatically. Then: Hey, wait a minute, it's post-Judgment Day! I can tell her about myself.

  Well, except for the part about his father not being born yet.

  Which actually was a big part of the story.

  "I was raised by my mom," he said. "Mostly in Central America and points south. She, ah, she never got along well with the authorities. I never knew my father."

  But I will! In fact, I'm going to set him up with my mom, which is weird stuff.

  "Um, grew up all over the place, never finished high school…"

  This sounds depressing, but it was actually kinda cool, most of the time. Not the times we were being pursued by Terminators, or my time in foster care, but a lot of the time.

  "Sounds a lot like my folks!" Ninel grinned at him over her shoulder. "What was your mom in trouble for? Environmental work? Peace activist?"

  "Ah… blowing up computer factories, mostly," John said, and hastily added: "But she didn't hurt people. She got blamed for a lot of stuff… other elements… did."

  "It works—well, used to work—that way," Ninel said sympathetically.

  He shook his head. "I don't really like talking about myself."

  Because even now some well-meaning individual might think I'd look better in a straitjacket. "You could tell me more about yourself," he suggested.

  "I'm cooking. Tell me what you've been doing since Judgment Day."

  This was the first time he'd heard the term outside his own family, and it chilled him. "What?"

  She looked up from what she was doing. "Judgment Day?" she said. "That's what my friends call it."

  "Oh."

  It had come from Skynet? Just when he thought he couldn't hate the damn thing anymore, it got, well, judgmental on him.

  The first slab of bread hit the hot pan with a sizzle and he grinned in anticipation. "Thank you for this," he said.

  She smiled at him. "My pleasure."

  They gobbled most of a loaf of bread. Well, I'm gobbling most of a loaf, liberally covered with really rad wild-blueberry syrup. Again, the only thing missing was butter, but who cared, it was fantastic.

  "I'm glad you liked it," she said, clearing the plates.

  "Let me do the washing-up," John offered. "It's the least I can do."

  "I will," she said, grinning at his surprise. "I'll just stoke the woodstove so we can have some hot water."

  He'd noted the chill in her house, but had said nothing, understanding her desire to be thrifty with the wood. It was backbreaking labor and he wondered if there were enough trees out there to keep the fires going this winter. Well, in Alaska, yeah…

  He washed, she dried, and they talked and joked companionably. Ninel fed her dogs, much to their ecstatic gratitude, while John watched from a polite distance. Huskies were a little too close to wolves to take liberties with, in his opinion.

  When they went back in she brewed some rose-hip tea.

  "Tastes like math paper," he said with a grimace.

  She laughed and put a pot of honey on the table. "We're probably the last generation that will know what that means. At least for awhile."

  He drizzled honey into his tea, looked up and met her eyes, and slowly smiled. She blushed and lowered her eyes, then looked up at him through her lashes.

  He sipped his tea and smiled. "That's better."

  Biting her lips, she took the honey pot and drizzled honey into her cup, then broke up laughing.

  "Are we thinking the same thing?" he asked, grinning wickedly.

  "Yes, I'm terribly afraid that we are," she said, still laughing.

  "Don't be afraid," he said. He took her free hand in both of his. "There's nothing to be afraid of."

  * * *

  John held her in his arms and looked down at the bright head resting on his shoulder, feeling her soft, rhythmic breath upon his chest, and felt… wonderful. More relaxed than he had felt in a long time. He caressed her shoulder with his thumb and smiled.

  He liked her. He knew it wasn't love; he'd had that with Wendy and he'd recognize it if it came to him again. But he really liked this girl, and who knew what that could lead to? He admired her self-reliance and enjoyed her sense of humor. He sensed, though, that she was one of those lost souls casting about for a noble cause. He'd like to be the one to give it to her…

  "Where did you get the scars?" she said drowsily, tracing the lines down the left side of his face.

  "Would you believe a cybernetically controlled leopard seal slashed my face?"

  Ninel laughed and poked him in a sensitive spot. "If you don't want to tell me, that's okay. But I like your sense of humor!"

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ALASKA

  Luddites?" John said, peering at the screen.

  A trainee—he showed real promise at scout work—brought in another armful of split wood and pitched a few billets into the woodstove. It thumped and gave a muffled whoosh as he adjusted the air intake, and the day's damp chill receded a bit.

  "Yes, sir. That's our intel," Jack Brock said.

  John rolled his eyes. Jack was still completely enamored of military parlance, while John Connor was already sick of it.

  Better get over that, he thought with resignation. It was going to be the lingua franca for the next thirty years or more.

  And every calling needs a jargon. It helps keep the organization's purpose sharp and clear.

  "There must be millions of 'em," Brock was saying.

  Connor jerked his mind back to the matter at hand.

  "Worldwide," he agreed. "Hundreds of thousands, at least." He sat forward. "Good work, Jack. Congratulate Reese and Susie for me on a job well done. Out."

  "Thanks, John. Will do. Out."

  Luddites. He'd known that Skynet had human assistance, but he'd never expected it to come from that quarter. The progress-hating, machine-scuttling, science-despising Luddites would seem to be the last people Skynet could get to help. And yet…

  They share a lot of the same goals. Namely, reducing humanity in population and power. Of course I don't think that most Luddites want to reduce humanity to zero. But there would be some who would. He winced. Wendy would have hated this.

  Connor moved out onto the now bustling floor of the once abandoned building that his mother had acquired—it had originally been HQ and smelter for a series of gold dredges.

  They'd spent a lot of time and money improving the building from the inside before Judgment Day. Outside, they were well disguised as a semidilapidated series of aging buildings of unpainted pine. Inside, they were weather tight and roomy enough to provide barracks, offices, training areas, a canteen, and hardened storage for tons of electronic equipment.

  John still went home occasionally; he needed his alone time.

  But it made his heart swell with pride to see the people they'd recruited before Judgment Day pitching in and recruiting people
themselves. The resistance was really shaping up.

  It helps that we're not coming from behind this time, he thought. They'd drained Dieter's freely given fortune to build this. Exploited his every contact and resource, and it was paying off, visibly.

  Now they were in a kind of race, to see if they could prevent Skynet from building its army, or at least defeating it far sooner than they had the first time.

  Would that mean that Kyle Reese would never be born, or that having been born, he'd never be sent into the past?

  Will I disappear midsentence one day? John wondered. Who cares? What's one life if I can save millions by giving mine.

  He'd never liked the idea that he was destined to send his father to his death. If he could prevent that by ceasing to exist, well, C'est la guerre. He grinned. It isn't like I'd know.

  COMODORO RIVADAVIA, ARGENTINA

  "I'm not asking for anything like your full production," Sarah said. "I'm only asking for a slight increase to those countries you've already been supplying."

  "But all to the advantage of the United States," Senor Reimer said. "Do we really wish to see the United States once again so powerful?"

  Sheesh! Sarah thought. To hear people down here talk, you'd think we were the Roman legions; invading everywhere, stealing everything that wasn't nailed down— including the people— and then pretending it was a good deal because one day the remaining folks would be citizens. We have our faults, God knows, but we weren't that bad.

  Sarah's Spanish was virtually accent-free—with a tinge of Paraguay and Nicaragua—and she seldom bothered to mention that she was from California. It simplified things. Unfortunately, it was impossible to get this business done without being a bit more up-front.

  For a moment she looked out the window, controlling her temper. Comodoro was on the northern edge of Patagonia; steep ground fell to the cold-looking gray water, and oil storage tanks and pipelines and refinery cracking towers were everywhere.

  There wasn't much of a tang in the air because the wind blew constantly—she'd considered hiding out around here when she was on the run with John after the attack on Cyberdyne, but the perpetual howling and the bleak flat landscape didn't appeal to her. Comodoro's other buildings were mostly medium size and flat-roofed; one of the bigger ones had a ten-story-high colored Coke ad, something that sheep ranchers came miles to see.

  And they have to sell the oil, she told herself. Argentina hadn't been badly hit—no actual nuclear bombs, yet. That didn't prevent economic collapse, riots, regional warlordism, and general crisis. She'd have preferred to deal in Venezuela, but the Maricaibo fields there had been major enough to be on a target list.

  "It is unlikely that the United States will ever be that powerful again," she said aloud. "In the meantime, there are people there that need our help. And there are opportunities here for those with the vision to take them. South America is in a position to take its place as a world leader."

  Reimer looked thoughtful. "Ah, but which South American country shall lead? That is the question."

  Long training kept Sarah from rolling her eyes and yelling:

  "No, it's not, you idiot!"

  The United States never would have gotten powerful enough for morons like this one to resent it if the big question had been: Which state is going to be the most important? No wonder Simon Bolivar, South America's equivalent to George Washington, had died despairing and saying his career had been like trying to plow the sea…

  Things would have been tougher still, of course, if the early Americans had had Skynet to contend with instead of just the British. But telling Senor Reimer about a great computer menace would certainly end this already shaky interview.

  Poor bastard, she thought. Sooner or later Skynet's going to come after you, too— with nukes or plagues or HKs, or all of the above.

  She'd worked her way from Mexico to near the tail of Argentina reaffirming arrangements for food and other supplies to be shipped to their resistance cells in the United States. But suddenly some people she already had contracts with had begun to object that she didn't represent the U.S. government. Which was weird because she'd never claimed to. Since whipping out a pistol and blowing them away was not going to help, Sarah had applied diplomacy and the occasional—

  All right, more than the occasional bribe.

  Oddly enough, it was the criminals who had been most likely to stick to their agreements. But then, they knew she might whip out a pistol and blow them away. The certain knowledge that it was a possibility kept things conveniently civilized; not to mention that they knew she had backup who'd rescue her or at least avenge her death. Which was especially useful because she was a woman trying to work within a very macho society.

  The wise criminal knew that a gun didn't care if its user wore nail polish and perfume. But a lot of the politicians and business-men she'd dealt with were sexist goons who, if she drew down on them, might well mention how big the gun looked in her dainty little hand.

  So far, though, in spite of complications, her success rate had been pretty high. But fuel was the crucial element, and that was hard to pry out of the hands of oilmen. Particularly those who suddenly saw themselves as world leaders.

  If only she could tell them that they were in more danger than they imagined. But Skynet wasn't ready to make its move yet, so any attempt to reveal its evil plans would get her laughed out of South and Central America and possibly right into another mental institution.

  Never thought I'd wish to see a Terminator, Sarah thought.

  But I really, truly, wish one would crash in here right now and smack the smirk off Reimer's fat face.

  Reimer's assistant burst in from the outer office, his dark eyes shining. "Sir! An American submarine has just entered the harbor!"

  Even better than a Terminator, Sarah thought, though she was impressed by the timing. This might actually be something she could use. Assuming she could prevent the Argentine government from seizing it.

  By mutual agreement, she and Reimer ended the meeting, scheduling their discussion for another day.

  ***

  Captain Thaddeus Chu was not happy. He hadn't been happy since he'd disobeyed Admiral Read's orders to report to the nuclear cinder that was San Diego. Read had answered Chu's every request for confirmation with the proper codes, and the voice was definitely the admiral's. Other officers had agreed with Chu about that. But they, too, had noticed something not quite right with the way he spoke.

  Something besides his insane order to commit suicide.

  In addition, Chu had monitored a civilian broadcast by a woman named Sarah Connor, who had described the situation with terrifying accuracy. Unbeknownst to the general public, every navy ship recently refitted with a complex new cyberbrain had found itself firing missiles with no executive orders to do so and wandering the sea-lanes helplessly as their crews starved.

  His old lady had been at the bottom of the list to be refitted; she was an OWo-class missile sub originally equipped with Trident missiles, but converted to a commando carrier with a hundred SEALs aboard. They would have been in San Diego when the bombs dropped but for an accident that had required fairly extensive patching, delaying their departure from Okinawa for a critical two weeks.

  Chu had been looking forward to having a better job done at the naval facility in California; now it looked like she'd bear those scars on her nose for the rest of her days. And yet he was grateful for that accident; though he pitied those who'd lost family in California, he was not sorry to be alive himself.

  They were all but out of food now and other sundries. Most West Coast ports in the United States were so much rubble, and what research could be done from the ship indicated that the East Coast wasn't much better. Nor were the coasts in China, Japan, Russia, or Europe.

  South America, however, had possibilities. Which was why they were here in Comodoro Rivadavia—major city, good port facilities, and a history of friendly relations with the United States. Not that that necessaril
y meant much in these post-nuclear-holocaust days.

  Bob Vaughan, the XO, knocked and stuck his head through the door of Chu's ready room—which was about the size of a walk-in closet. A submarine was still a sub, even if it displaced as much as the HMS Dreadnought.

  "There's a delegation from the city to see you, Captain."

  "Right there," Chu said. He sat for a moment, collecting his thoughts, then picked up his hat and followed the executive officer up on deck. He'd decide about letting people through the hatchway later.

  Waiting on the dock were a number of impatient-looking men in good suits and one guy in a military uniform with some very impressive medals on his chest. They looked up at Chu, obviously waiting for an invitation. The temperature was chilly enough to make you remember that the seasons were reversed in the southern hemisphere, not to mention the gunk still circulating in the upper atmosphere.

  No honor guard or suchlike, Chu thought. He was surprised; they looked like the kind of men who enjoyed ceremony. He walked down to the end of the gangway—which did have armed guards, his own men—and nodded to the delegation.

  "Gentlemen," the captain prompted.

  "We'd like a few words with you, Captain?" a particularly sleek specimen said in excellent English.

  Chu wasn't sure if the question was a request for his name or confirmation of his rank. Both, probably. "I'm Thaddeus Chu,"

  he said. "Captain, USS Roosevelt. And I'll be happy to speak to you gentlemen. You're welcome to board, but I must remind you that if you do come aboard you are entering United States territory."

  The delegation stared up at him for some time without moving or speaking. Then their spokesman, who had not deigned to identify himself, took a step forward.

  "You must know, Mr. Chu," he said, with a frown that probably hid some inward glee, "that the United States has effectively ceased to exist."

  "It's Captain Chu, sir. And you may find that assessment to be premature."

  "Come, come, Captain. The U.S. is all but hammered flat, in all probability never to rise again. If you didn't think so yourself, you wouldn't have stopped here." He gave the captain a smug smile. "Would you?"