The Future War t2-3

by S. M. Stirling

  "Mom and Dad," she said. Then she faltered for a moment and Tom knew she was thinking of Jason.

  "We need to get out of here first," he said, and gave her a gentle push.

  He pulled the camouflaged, dirt-coated door closed behind them, hoping it wouldn't burn. Just inside, he pawed at the doorframe and found the flashlight he'd placed there. He shook it to charge the battery, then hastened Peggy down the passageway in the dim light.

  The passage wasn't that long, really, about a hundred feet, but it had seemed the length of Route 66 before he'd been finished.

  At the end, where he'd placed another hidden door, he'd also stowed some clothes and weapons, carefully wrapped in plastic to protect them. There was food here, too. He sat Peggy on one of the chests.

  "Get dressed," Tom ordered, "and stand ready. I'm going to find out what's going on. I might end up sending some of the other women and children down here. Take care of them." He grabbed a shotgun and thumbed in rounds—solid shot, cylindrical rifled slugs.

  Then he turned off the flashlight and placed it in his wife's hand. Feeling his way carefully, he opened the door into the natural cave.

  When he reached the creek he squatted down and smeared some mud from the bank over his face and hands, then crept forward. Peering over the bank, he saw that the whole village was in flames. He could see forms moving about; by their postures he could tell they were armed. Then one stood before the flames of a burning house and he caught his breath, his eyes widening in horror.

  Like something from a horror movie, it was skeletal. It turned its head slowly, like a gun turret searching for a target. Light gleamed from the metal dome of its skull and through the cage of its ribs; red light blazed from its eye sockets. Tom sank slowly, until he'd dropped onto his butt.

  Shit! he thought.

  Slowly he became aware that he was hearing screams. Tom squeezed his eyes tight shut, wishing he could do the same with his ears. Of course he heard screaming. They were trapped in burning buildings, and the only way out was certain death. If he hadn't provided a way out for himself and his family, he'd be screaming, too.

  There was a sound off to his right. Not footsteps but the result of stealthy footsteps, crackling leaves and breaking twigs, unavoidable in the deep woods. Tom pressed himself deeper into the dirt of the bank and prayed, making all sorts of promises to God if He would only let him live. He pulled the rifle against his chest, up under his chin, waiting.

  He had no idea how many of those things were up there trolling the village for survivors, but he knew one shot would have them all down here looking for him. That would draw them toward Peggy and Lisa, and he wouldn't let these things have them. They wouldn't take them like they'd taken his son. My boy

  ! he thought in anguish, and pushed the feeling away, forcing anger into its place, overriding the grief with fury. The machines would not succeed. He wouldn't let them.

  The soft, methodical sound of footsteps came closer.

  * * *

  The Terminator scout came to the end of its designated watch zone and turned away. No humans appeared to have escaped the assault. The enemy had been caught completely unprepared. It appeared that there had been 100 percent enemy casualties.

  It stopped every five feet to scan the woods all around, then proceeded on its way. No humans seemed to have escaped the assault.

  Terminated, it transmitted to Skynet.

  ALASKA

  John Connor was worried.

  I suspect that's going to be my natural state from here on out, he thought.

  The PDA in his hand showed the terrain, his location, and the jump-off points of the other attack parties. The factory was located in a low wooded valley surrounded by spruce-clad hills…

  And this is the first big operation I've personally commanded

  , he thought nervously, looking around at the confident faces.

  Maybe I am the Great Military Dickhead of Mom's dreams, but right now I feel more like a confidence man. Not that that's my only worry.

  By the time they'd moved out, he hadn't heard from Tom Preston in Iowa. Unusual. Tom was one person who could be relied on to report regularly. He'd remarked once that having young children kept you awake and alert and therefore on time.

  But not today.

  Hope it's not an omen. Maybe that was an ill-omened thought. So far everything had gone extremely well. Almost suspiciously well. Could it really be that the computer was arrogant enough to not protect its most important assets?

  Because there was, as yet, no sign that the resistance fighters had been seen. He couldn't help it; continuous good fortune raised his hackles.

  Ninel was back with the various transports; also there was Ike, who'd arrived in Alaska yesterday. He appeared to like Ninel, but had looked askance at John when he found out she was going with them. It hadn't been necessary for him to comment; John knew the older man well enough to have gotten paragraphs of meaning out of that one look.

  The two of them would come up to the factory once John was sure the place was secured. Although with Skynet, secured tended to be a relative term.

  There was a fence around the installation and about twenty yards of cleared ground all around the inside. The building was a metal frame affair with steps leading up to a second level. From the blueprints there was a small office there. But most of the interior was pure machinery up to forty feet high. There were spotlights at each corner of the building and on each corner of the fence at the top of tall poles.

  John crouched beside the crew with the TOW antitank missile. "Can you take out the antennae?" He gestured toward the dish atop the square building.

  "Yes, sir," the gunner said, already looking through the eyepiece on the side of the long tube; shrubbery protected the emplacement and the tripod, but the thing had a ferocious back-blast and you needed a dozen men to move it. Apart from that, it was easy to use…

  "Do it," John told him.

  Thadump!

  The rocket blasted out the front of the launch tube, and half a dozen of his resistance fighters went to work with shovels and curses, beating out the fire that the jet of flame to the rear had caused.

  WHZZZZEEEEEEE… like the whistle of an angry young god; the rocket was a blur as it streaked out over half a thousand yards.

  Seconds later the dish exploded in a satisfying flash of fire.

  John grinned. Now Skynet couldn't contact its plant; they'd checked carefully for backup communications links. This really was going to be a piece of cake.

  The first soldiers started moving out from the cover of the wood toward the fence. As soon as they were visible, a recorded voice rang out: "Halt! You are approaching a government installation. Trespassers will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The nearest military facility has been notified of your presence and troops will be on the way momentarily. Go back.

  Do not pass the fence or you will be fired upon."

  Gun ports opened all over the surface of the building, indicating that trespassers would be riddled with bullets if they proceeded. The resistance soldiers hunkered down, waiting for John's signal. John himself was waiting for the small hydro generator to be blown. He suspected that it wouldn't affect the automated weapons; they had battery backup according to the plans Snog had found, but at least the factory would be shut down.

  There was nothing to show that it had been rigged to blow itself up, but anything he could do to thwart such a plan would be a good thing. There was an explosion by the stream where the generator was located and John signaled the soldiers at the fence to set their charges. Once that was done, they retreated at a run.

  Again John signaled and the charges blew the fence.

  Sharpshooters began peppering the building, and in return the automated weapons fired into the woods. Blindly, for all the good they seemed to be doing…

  Short-range weapons, he thought. Hmm. Yeah, light machine guns on hydraulic mounts, mostly, 5.56mm stuff.

  Maybe Skynet's as short of
everything as I am— it's trying to do a lot more at the same time, of course.

  A man screamed and a corpsman came running, dragging him away from the area where he'd been hit, an area on which the building's weapons now concentrated fire. The corpsman himself shouted as he was clipped by a bullet.

  This can't keep up, John thought. There's no battery in the world can keep this up. Besides, the damn things had to run out of ammo sometime.

  Not that we're going to wait.

  "Let them have it!" he snapped into the button microphone.

  His snipers went methodically to work; they were using Barrett rifles, big thirty-pound things that fired .50 caliber armor-piercing ammunition. One by one the automated weapons pods went silent; a few went up in spectacular gang fires as hot metal punched into their ammunition drums.

  "Forward," John said again.

  This time far fewer weapons fired. He gritted his teeth as the casualty reports came in. Get used to it, GMD, he told himself.

  Skynet would have killed them later anyway. We win, or everybody dies, it's that simple.

  Eventually the fire was suppressed. He moved forward with his command party across the fence and up the exterior stairs.

  "Have Ike take a look at that machinery," John said to a woman who'd accompanied him up the stairs. "We're gonna be taking this away from here." She gave him a dubious look, but hurried out. "And send Ninel Petrikoff up."

  "Yes, sir," came back to him as the soldier clattered down the stairs.

  John Connor took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

  Anticlimax, he thought. There wasn't even a window looking out over the plant floor, just white particleboard walls and a set of terminals and flat-screen displays.

  He sat down at a console and put Snog's disk into the reader.

  And hit enter, which seemed as good a place to start as any.

  * * *

  Ninel entered the little control room cautiously, looking all around with wide eyes.

  "It's all right," John said, and grinned when she jumped.

  "Sorry."

  "I didn't see you," she accused. She gave the computer a more matter-of-fact look and moved to stand beside him. "What are you doing?"

  "Trying to figure out if the info in the computer is good. I probably should leave it to Snog. He'll kill me if I do something to screw it up."

  Ninel frowned. " Snog?"

  "I have no idea if he knows what it means, I never asked,"

  John said. He rolled the chair down the console to a video screen.

  "Look at this."

  She went and stood looking over his shoulder at the monitor.

  "What am I looking at?" Some kind of assembly line; that was obvious. It looked like it was manufacturing dress dummies.

  "You've attacked a mannequin factory?" she asked in disbelief.

  John snorted a laugh and turned to look at her. "Would all of us get together and train for months to attack a mannequin factory? Not to mention that such a place would be unlikely to be defended by machine guns or to be located in the wilds of Alaska."

  With a huff of annoyance she put her hands in her pockets and frowned. "So, then what? What am I looking at?"

  "They're robots," John said, watching her reaction. "They're called Terminators and they're designed to kill humans."

  "What?" She narrowed her eyes and looked at him scornfully.

  "Killer robots? Isn't that a little far-fetched?"

  Okay, so it's not gonna be easy. He tapped a few keys and changed the view. Now the monitor showed a storage room with what looked like at least a hundred of the things standing in neat rows, gleaming and complete and utterly motionless, their eyes dark.

  "Weird," she breathed from over his shoulder. "Do they work?"

  "I have no intention of finding out," he said. "If they're already programmed, then they'll start killing the minute they're turned on."

  "So who's making them?"

  He turned the chair so that he was facing her. " Now is when it gets weird," John said. "The U.S. military developed a computer to run their war toys. It was, without question, the most advanced computer run by the most sophisticated software ever developed. And then it became sentient."

  "How could you know that?" Her voice was both scornful and accusing.

  I know because I pressed the button that made it so, he thought.

  Aloud he said, "I have privileged information. It was my mother who first found out about Skynet. That's the computer's name, by the way. We've tried and tried again to prevent them from using it, but there was nothing we could do. They finished the damned thing, put it on-line, gave it complete control of our missile systems"—he waved a hand—"et cetera, and the next thing you know, Judgment Day."

  "Huh," she said, eyes on the Terminators on the screen.

  "They're not dress dummies, Ninel, honest."

  She looked down at him, her eyes troubled, then away. He turned his chair and pushed himself back to the workstation he'd been using when she entered. Clearly, some people were just incredibly hard to convince.

  * * *

  Ninel glanced at John, a worried look on her face, then leaned forward, tapping keys to change the view in the storage area.

  Behind the rows of robots were boxes, the kind of boxes that looked like they were designed to hold rifles or ammunition. She hissed thoughtfully and put her hands on her hips.

  What was going on here? Weapons. This was some kind of weapons factory, probably something set up by the government, and now it was in the hands of John and his friends. These people didn't seem like murderers. Although one or two had come across as paramilitary, antigovernment nut jobs, not one of them had spoken about killing innocent civilians as though it was something they felt they had to do. In fact, she'd heard Luddites more inclined to say socially unacceptable things about killing people.

  As she clicked the enter key, the view kept changing, from the storage area to the factory itself, to exterior shots. She paused to watch the wounded being treated by one of the corpsmen. Had these people attacked the transports she'd been sending into Canada? Not one had indicated in any way that they had done such a thing. Not that she supposed they would tell such a thing to a new recruit.

  She glanced over at John intensely working the keyboard.

  Since that one night they'd never shared that level of intimacy.

  He'd made a point of talking to her, and others had noticed and commented on his attentions, but otherwise… Well, otherwise she'd kind of been twisting in the wind, wondering what she meant to him, if anything. Wondering, in fact, if he was capable of using sex to recruit followers. Because it had very quickly become apparent that this resistance thing was John Connor's property. The others looked at him like he was God or something.

  Killer or savior? she wondered, glancing at him from the corner of her eye. Time to make up her mind. People that she trusted insisted that he was a mass murderer. And here he was attacking some kind of automated weapons factory. Why would a savior want a weapons factory? She hit enter two more times and thought, Time's up. Time to act.

  Hands in her pockets, mouth dry, her heart beating in her throat, she walked back to where John was working. "What are you doing?" she asked, leaning forward.

  He held up one hand. "Just a second," he said, preoccupied.

  Ninel yanked the sap out of her pocket and smacked him across the back of the head. Goggle-eyed, swaying, he turned to look at her, his mouth open in astonishment. Terrified, she hit him again, this time on the side of the head, and John slid bonelessly out of the chair. She let out her breath in a gasp, reached toward him, then aborted the gesture. Turning, she rushed to the door and opened it.

  Balewitch and Dog Soldier came barreling in, Dog with a soldier lying limply across his shoulders. Dog dropped him carelessly in a corner, and together with Balewitch advanced avidly on John as he lay helpless on the floor.

  Ninel recognized the soldier as one who'd worked with her, and starte
d toward him, to at least untangle his body from the heap he'd landed in.

  "He's dead," Dog said over his shoulder. "No need to worry about him."

  "Whaaat?" Ninel said, horrified.

  "Uh, had to," Dog said, annoyed. "We're slightly outnumbered here, in case you didn't notice."

  "Not for long," Balewitch muttered. She reached for the keyboard above John's head.

  "He said there were robots," Ninel blurted as she watched Bale-witch type.

  "Yeah," Dog said, nudging John with his toe.

  "He said they were designed to kill people." She heard her own voice sounding wild and desperate and hated it, but something was going wrong here. "He said a computer called Skynet made them; he said Skynet caused Judgment Day."

  "Well, duh," Dog said. He looked at her. "We could hardly let them fall into this guy's hands."

  "What are you doing?" Ninel said, snatching the keyboard away from Balewitch.

  "Give me that," the older woman said calmly.

  "Tell me what you're doing!" Ninel insisted. She raised the keyboard as though she meant to smash it. "I mean it!"

  Balewitch took a deep breath and huffed it out. "I'm activating those robots so that they can take care of these resistance types."

  Ninel could feel herself going pale. "But they'll kill them."

  "Ye»-ah," Balewitch said, smiling. "That's the idea, honey.

  Just think of all those innocent, unarmed refugees if you think we're being too tough."

  This didn't seem right, it didn't! Then it hit her. "How do you know how to wake them up?" she asked, her lips numb.

  "Ron gave us the codes," Dog said. He moved a step closer to her.

  "Back off!" she snarled. Furiously thinking, she waved the keyboard; its cord stretched tight in her hand and would go no farther. "I don't believe that Ron Labane would approve of killing people, even misguided people. He's always preached doing things the legal way. Always!"

  Balewitch, clearly annoyed, moved slowly toward her, her hands outstretched for the keyboard. "Things are different now, honey. You know that. Give me the—"