The Future War t2-3

by S. M. Stirling

  "They seldom do once the firing starts," John assured him.

  "You've rid the world of your share of HKs. And your commander tells me you're a good sergeant. It's my humble opinion that without good sergeants we'd be up shit's creek without a paddle.

  Sometimes we do lose a little. But we win more than we lose. And ultimately we're going to win this war and take this world back from the machines. And it's men like you who are going to do that. So you rest, and you heal, and you get back in there."

  Kyle swallowed and nodded once. "Yes, sir."

  John's lips jerked in an attempted smile. Then he laid the picture on his father's stomach.

  "My mother," he said in explanation, and watched the young man's eyes go wide. Sarah Connor, the legend, he thought wryly.

  Christ, I'm setting my dad up with my mom.

  * * *

  Kyle picked up the picture and was caught. Sarah Connor was young in the photo; she looked soft, and feminine, and terribly sad. More than once he'd felt as sad and alone as her expression showed she was feeling. He felt a kinship with the woman in the picture, as though she was someone he could talk to.

  Reluctantly he lifted his hand to give the picture back, but Connor was gone. Puzzled, Reese looked around, but the commander was definitely nowhere around. Still, he wasn't sorry that he didn't have to give the picture back. He looked at the young woman's face, studying every line, every angle. A sense of longing overcame him, a desire to know her. Kyle closed his eyes, and fell asleep, and dreamed of Sarah Connor.

  RESISTANCE COMMAND CENTER FOUR YEARS

  LATER

  "John, my man, wait till you see what I've got for you!" Snog said. He was imitating the happy-talk excitement of a ginsu knife salesman.

  John smiled wearily. His somewhat rough-and-ready treatment of his old friend had certainly smoothed out some of the wrinkles, but— But Snog is always going to be a goof. God, he makes me feel younger and older at the same time!

  At least he wasn't completely crazy anymore, just productively weird. And he even fit in here at Regional HQ, which was as normal an environment as the world had to offer—rock and concrete, yes, but at least they weren't living on gruel and fighting Infiltrator units all the time.

  "So what have you got for me?" Connor asked.

  "I have the treasure of the Sierra Madre, King Solomon's lost mines, Atlantis, the missing link! You name it, man! We have discovered, here in the wilds of darkest Canada, the salvation of the human race! Hallelujah brother! Can I get an amen!

  In the background, shouts of "Amen!" could be heard from offices down the rock-hewn corridor.

  "With a buildup like that, Snog, this better be good."

  "Oh, it's better than good," his old friend assured him. "Check this out." He clicked a few keys and his smiling face was replaced by a picture of what looked like aircraft.

  John leaned forward. It was aircraft! B-2s, if he wasn't mistaken. And they're in perfect condition.

  "Fuel?" was his first question.

  "Tons," Snog said. "Literally. But that's not all. Lookee here!"

  The B-2s were replaced by what John at first thought were planes, but were actually drones. Bomb-carrying, radar-evading, farseeing drones.

  "My God," Connor whispered, "it's the mother load."

  "You bet your ass it is!" Snog crowed. "Look out Skynet, here we come!"

  John felt himself smiling. "And we can take 'em?"

  "Now that the defense grid is smashed, yeah," Snog said.

  "Take 'em and fly 'em."

  "And Skynet isn't that distributed," John said. "With this, we can root out the central units."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  SARAH'S JOURNAL

  The years went by with a horrible sameness. We fought, we died, we learned, we struggled, we won. After an eternity, we won more than we lost. Children were born and grew up fighting the machines. It was all turning out much the way Kyle Reese had described it to me.

  They were good kids, these children who had never known peace and security, and good soldiers. I honestly don't think that it even occurred to most of them to blame their parents for the nightmare they were living. But then they had no idea that there was any other way to live.

  One day the war will be over, and when they've rested, then they'll start asking the hard questions.

  "Here's where my head starts hurting again," John Connor murmured to himself, taking a sip of his herbal tea. "Christ, I wish we could get more coffee in."

  A few of the technicians in the underground command center—once a Skynet facility—looked at him oddly. Those were the ones who hadn't been assigned to the Command Assault Group for very long; a couple of the others grinned as they bent over their workstations. The chief's oddities were legend.

  John sighed, rising and walking over to the big display screen.

  Just before it came alive, he caught a glimpse of himself—the long hard face still marked by the long V-shaped scar the cyberseal had inflicted on him, the hard wary eyes and grim-set mouth.

  I'm forty-two, he thought, disoriented for a moment.

  It still caught him by surprise sometimes, overlaid on the face a part of him expected to see—the laughing teenager with a black cowlick across his forehead.

  When did that happen? I have indubitably become the Great Military Dickhead of Mom's dreams, the one Kyle described to her… and I'm older than he is.

  "Head definitely hurting," he said quietly as the screen came live.

  Sarah and Dieter moved to stand on either side of him; his mother put a hand on his arm, for just a second, understanding as only she and Dieter could.

  I'm forty-two; they're old, he thought.

  Faces wrinkled, the great muscles of Dieter's frame gone gaunt; an encounter with an HK had given him a limp that he'd take to his grave, a limp that got a little worse every year. Active, strong, infinitely experienced oldsters, but quite definitely old.

  Humans didn't usually live into their sixties anymore. The sheer fact of their survival made them objects of awe, even with Sarah's new identity.

  "Display, schematic," John said.

  The screen flashed a Mercator projection of the earth, with color-coded symbols—live human-held territory, dead Skynet zones, a Crosshatch of contested areas, smaller skull symbols for places where radiation or bioweapons still lingered.

  And there were a satisfying series of X marks—smashed elements in Skynet's defense grid. With control of the surviving satellites gone, the remains of the grid were all that was keeping Skynet alive at all.

  "If it lives," he murmured.

  "It is conscious, it consumes energy, it seeks to fight entropy and survive," Dieter said.

  "Don't go all philosophical on me now," Sarah Connor said, leaning a little closer to him.

  "We know Skynet is working on its time-travel program, here

  ."

  John said, pointing to the Los Angeles basin—mostly dead zone, or contested. "It's getting close to the time."

  Sarah stiffened slightly. She knew about Kyle, but she'd managed to avoid ever seeing him face-to-face; with communications as limited as they were, even a VIP like Sarah didn't have her image all over the place the way images had been displayed before Judgment Day. And, of course, since her

  "death," the few available images of her were of a younger woman.

  "Well, let's go meet history," John said. "We can't chance anything else. If we don't counter what it's doing…"

  Both of the elders nodded. John touched a button at his throat. "Major Nakamura," he said. "Operation Chrono is now active."

  * * *

  Sarah kicked Snog's butt, hard.

  "Hey!" he snapped. "What the hell are you doin'?"

  She got up in the programmer's face and spoke through clenched teeth. "Get one of these things up and running, Snot!"

  "That's Snog."

  "And do it fast!" Sarah barked over his protest. "Time is literally of the essence right now."


  " 'Kay," he muttered.

  He opened the Terminator's scalp and popped open the channel that led to its CPU. This Terminator's unit had been fried during the first few minutes of their attack. It was now just so much inert metal and flesh. Until, that is, Snog installed the new CPU with the fresh programming that didn't include Skynet.

  Snog sealed off the conduit and laid the flap of flesh back in place, sealing it with a bio-adhesive. "Done," he said. Then,

  "Stand."

  Sarah licked her lips; she couldn't help it. The sight of a young, naked Dieter clone turned her on. She shook her head.

  Sick, you're sick, Connor.

  "Follow," Snog said, and they began jogging toward the time displacement device on the other side of the installation.

  * * *

  John fired and ducked down behind a machine, then rolled several feet away from where he'd been. His heart was slamming against his ribs as if this was the first time he'd faced one of these monsters.

  I want to stop this! I want to stop this now! Maybe if he could prevent the Terminator from going through time he would have prevented all this from happening. If Cyberdyne hadn't gotten that chip, they never would have been able to build Skynet in the first place.

  Of course, then he wouldn't exist, but so what? Several billion other people would continue to live. If that wasn't worth dying for, what was?

  He could see the Skynet scientists working frantically to make the time displacement device work and he willed them to fail. He saw the naked Terminator step up onto the platform.

  "Shit!" he said, and rose from his place. With one shot he took out the heavily armed Terminator and began to zigzag his way through the complex. Two of its brethren turned toward him and began to fire. All around John his own troops moved in, throwing their own lives away in an attempt to save his. Even as he ran he could feel himself going pale. He wasn't worthy of this much sacrifice; no one was.

  "Spare the scientists!" he shouted.

  There was a blinding flare of light and the Terminator was gone. Failed, John thought in despair, dragging in air in ragged breaths. A nondescript man stepped onto the platform, his figure oddly ill-defined; John closed his eyes, remembering the T-1000

  and how close it had come. Behind his eyelids he registered the flare that told that the T-1000 was gone. A beautiful young woman stepped onto the platform. John recognized her and took aim. She turned toward him and smiled. He fired and the flare of time displacement blinded him once again. John turned away, and someone knocked him to the floor and fired over his head.

  John could feel the heat of a near miss on his arm and smell the scorched fabric of his sleeve.

  "Sorry, sir. Are you all right?"

  John looked up at the soldier, blinking as multicolored spots danced in his vision. After a moment he saw the soldier's face and gasped. It was Kyle!

  "Yes!" he snapped, and slid away. John picked up his weapon and moved forward. Unable to avoid the shudder that racked his thin frame.

  Ahead of them, the last Terminator turned its weapon on the Luddite scientists who stood waiting for death. From every part of the lab, resistance fighters fired, destroying the Terminator before it could kill the humans.

  John moved forward, terribly aware of Kyle at his back. He stopped before the two men and one woman who had betrayed humanity. They looked at him with contempt.

  "We've won," the woman said. She licked her lips nervously and attempted a smirk.

  One of the men turned toward the machine, diving toward the keyboard. John shot him in the leg and the man fell screaming.

  His two companions jerked and moved away from him. John reached out and grabbed the woman's arm, yanking her off balance and shoving her behind him. Then he thrust the plasma rifle's barrel up under the chin of the remaining male. Two of John's soldiers dragged the wounded scientist away from the console.

  "You haven't won," John said between his teeth. The Luddite choked and raised his head as Connor pressed a little harder.

  John gestured with his head for more of his people to take charge of the scientist. He turned to the woman, who looked back at him defiantly. "And you're not going to win," he finished.

  "Oh, yes we will." She sneered. "In a few moments you will disappear." She snapped her fingers. "Like that!"

  "And why is that?" he asked. He felt as if he was reciting lines in a play. Not even a very good play.

  "Because that Terminator is going to kill your mother!" She glared at the soldiers surrounding her. "Your precious Sarah Connor! And there's nothing you can do to stop it!"

  John looked at her, a muscle jumping in his jaw. He wanted to pulverize this woman, to break her bones and reduce her to a weeping pile of jelly. It was rare for him in these later years to feel this much emotion, this much pure hate. It almost felt good.

  Slowly he reined it in.

  Still looking at her, he said, "I need a volunteer!" And as John had known would happen, Kyle stepped forward without hesitation.

  "I'll go," he said.

  John looked at him. "You might not make it," he warned.

  Reese shrugged. "We'll never know if we don't try, sir." He nodded. "I want to do it."

  The male scientist snorted in contempt. "You'll never figure out how this machine works. Not in time."

  "Oh, I don't know about that," Snog said. He breezed up to the console and stretched his knuckles like a pianist about to play a sonata; then he sat down in one of their vacated chairs.

  This was the one place in which they'd cheated. John had told Snog and his group that they had intel that Skynet was working on a time machine and had assigned them to see if they could learn anything about it. Just that, a mere hint. But the techies had run with it and they'd followed almost every step of this team's progress. Snog probably knew as much about this machine as the Skynet team did.

  "What date did you say, John?" Snog asked over his shoulder.

  Not taking his eyes off the scientists, John told him, enjoying their disconcerted expressions. He glanced over at Kyle Reese.

  "You'll have to go through naked," he said. "And it's going to be a one-way trip. We'll be destroying this after you've gone through."

  Reese nodded, then he began to strip. "Weapons?" he asked.

  "Only flesh can go through," Snog said. "Or items encased in living flesh. So unless you can fit a plasma rifle up your own ass, you're on your own, buddy."

  John stepped closer to Reese, leaning toward him so that the others wouldn't hear. "I have a message I want you to give my mother," he said. "Thank you, Sarah," he began.

  * * *

  In the darkness at the far edge of the factory, Sarah waited, the dormant Terminator by her side. Her vision grew blurry as she watched her son telling Kyle what to do. Giving him the precious message that had sustained her in her loneliness for so many years. She caught her breath in a sob, then dashed the tears from her eyes, and swallowing hard, waited for her part in this drama to begin.

  The machine began to whine. John made Reese repeat the message, then nodded. "Remember," he said, "we have no fate but that we make for ourselves."

  Reese looked at him as if in wonder and nodded. John held out his hand and the young soldier took it, lifting his chin in pride.

  "Time!" Snog called out.

  Reese looked at him, then climbed up onto the platform.

  "Luck, man," Snog called out.

  John closed his eyes, saw the brightness of time displacement, and when he opened them his father was gone. He took a deep breath, and when he'd finished letting it out his mother was standing beside him.

  He looked down at her. Tears ran unchecked down her cheeks.

  John placed his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him.

  Sarah laid her head against his chest for a moment, then sighed and pulled away. She tipped her head toward the Terminator beside her.

  "Snog," John said, looking at the Terminator who would become Uncle Bob, his savior from the T-1000. "How
do I do this?"

  * * *

  When it was gone Sarah touched John's shoulder and he looked down at her. "John," she said, her voice heavy with unshed tears, "we have to go. This place must have a failsafe."

  He nodded and turned to lead the way.

  "Sir?" a soldier said. "What do we do about them?" She tipped her head toward the Luddite scientists.

  John's lips thinned and he reached for his sidearm.

  "Allow me," Sarah said in a voice like the hiss of a knife sliding from its sheath. Before anyone could move, she took aim and shot; the scientists fell like puppets whose strings had been cut.

  That is a disturbingly accurate metaphor, John thought.

  And I've been in this business too long. Killing people is starting to seem routine.

  Then she turned and started walking, passing her son, who stood stunned behind her. "Let's go, people!" she shouted. "This place is gonna blow!"

  John got himself walking with difficulty. That was the thing about this war. For the most part, it was machines they were fighting. But at bottom, it was people who had made it possible for Skynet to come as close to succeeding as it had. But this was the first time he'd seen his mother kill. He was genuinely horrified— and at the same time, deeply proud.

  Outside, there was a small fleet of choppers waiting to take them away. He caught up to Sarah as she bent below the blades and put his hand on her shoulder. She turned to look at him.

  "Thank you," he said. She couldn't hear him over the rotors, but she knew what he'd said.

  Sarah touched his face. "You're welcome, son."

  Inside the chopper there was no possibility of conversation, but he held her hand and ignored her tears as he knew she'd want him to.

  After a long while they landed and Dieter was there to greet them. Sarah walked up to him and into his arms. He held her, saying nothing. John had been accosted by a soldier, who gave him a message; with a nod he thanked the woman and walked over to his mother and Dieter.

  "The complex is destroyed," he said.

  Sarah took a deep breath and turned toward him. "Good," she said wearily. Dieter stroked her arm and she looked up at him and smiled. "So," she said, "I guess it's all over but the shouting."