by Timothy Zahn
He was still gazing at the carnage when one of the Terminators stepped into his field of view.
The machine was a mess. Its skin and clothing had been almost entirely burned away, exposing not only its entire metal body but also dozens of small dents and blackened scorch marks. It was limping badly, hardly able to walk, its right leg bending oddly with each step. Its left leg wasn’t much better, and its entire right arm up to the elbow was a twisted mass of torn metal.
The Death’s-Heads might have lost the battle, but they’d given a good account of themselves along the way.
Kyle felt a stirring inside him. With its weapon gone, and with that limp, this was one Terminator that wasn’t going to be chasing down anyone any time soon. This might be his and Star’s one chance to make a run for it.
He was still trying to decide whether or not they should try when three more Terminators strode into view. Two of them were in the same shape as the first one, nothing but skinless machines with broken leg servos and mangled right arms.
But the fourth Terminator stood in sharp contrast to its fellow machines. It still had most of its skin and clothing, with no perceptible limp and all its limbs intact. More importantly, it still had its minigun.
Kyle grimaced. It was just as well that he and Star hadn’t tried to run.
Star touched his arm. Carefully, Kyle turned his head beneath the jacket to look at her. What’s happening?she signed, her face drawn and anxious.
They’re still there, he signed back.
Her lip twitched. So we stay here?
For the moment, Kyle signed, trying to smile reassuringly. Don’t worry, we’ll get away soon enough. Just be patient.
He turned back to the Terminators. The three damaged ones had opened up a pack of tools they must have found somewhere in the compound, and in complete and eerie silence each was starting repair work on itself.
Kyle felt his lip twist. What, were you expecting them to sing? he told himself sarcastically. Of course they were fixing themselves in silence. They were machines, not living beings.
More to the point, they were machines that could be damaged—and even destroyed.
And that was what Kyle needed to focus on. Not on all the dead bodies lying on the ground out there, but on the fact that the Terminators themselves could be killed.
No battle plan,Orozco had once told Kyle, ever survives contact with the enemy. That being said, though, a plan is always the place to start.
Reaching beneath the jacket to take Star’s hand, Kyle settled down to watch the Terminators making their repairs, and began working out his plan.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dusk had faded to full night when Orozco finally heard the distant sound of minigun fire.
He stood up from the fountain rim where he and Wadleigh’s fire team had been sitting and crossed to the archway. The Terminator fire was coming in short bursts, he noted grimly, the rhythm that would typically be used to clean out a house after a successful breach. So far he hadn’t heard any answering fire, but maybe that was just being swallowed up by the louder sounds of the miniguns.
Or maybe all the victims were dying before they had a chance to shoot back.
There was a movement at the corner of his eye, and he turned to see Grimaldi come up beside him.
“So it’s started,” the chief said quietly.
Orozco nodded. “So it would seem.”
“Yes.” Grimaldi paused as another burst of minigun fire split the night, this group coming from a different direction. “So you were right.”
“Yes,” Orozco said flatly. “I was.”
“So that’s it,” Grimaldi said, an agonized ache in his voice. “We’re all dead. Because of me.”
Orozco looked at him. The chief was staring out the archway, his face drawn, his eyes wet with tears of regret or anger or frustration. And for a long moment Orozco wanted to tell the other that, yes, this was all his fault.
But he couldn’t. He couldn’t kick a man who was watching his world-view crumbling right in front of him. “We’re not dead yet,” he said instead. “If you’re finally ready to help, you could go check on the fire teams on the balcony. Make sure they’re ready.”
Visibly, Grimaldi pulled himself back together. “Yes, I can do that,” he said. “Do you want me to go look at the loading dock area, too?”
“Sure,” Orozco said. There wasn’t much to do back there that hadn’t already been done, but he could understand Grimaldi’s sudden burning desire to do some-thing. “Then come back here and I’ll set you up with one of the flanks. Any more of your allies sitting it out?”
Grimaldi winced at the word allies. “Probably,” he admitted. “I don’t know how good most of them will be in a fight, though.”
“Trust me, there’ll be plenty of work for them to do,” Orozco assured him. “We need people to carry ammo, patrol the inside perimeter, carry messages, move and assist the wounded, build and repair barricades and fire stations, and eventually move the dead.”
A muscle in Grimaldi’s cheek twitched. “You want all the children here, too?”
“Anyone who can help, yes,” Orozco said. “No one gets a free pass tonight.”
“I understand,” Grimaldi said. “I’ll go get them.”
He moved away.
Orozco watched him go, then turned back to the darkened street outside the archway. Listening hard to the minigun fire, he tried to estimate the position of each of the groups of Terminators. And to estimate when one of those groups would arrive at the Ashes.
Full night had fallen, and the team was indeed ready, when Connor finally heard the distant sound of minigun fire.
“That’s it, people,” he said. “Time to move.”
The other men and women in the room didn’t need to be told twice. Already they were grabbing their packs and guns and doing their final weapons checks.
“One minute,” Connor said.
Sixty seconds later, they were ready. He cracked the door and took a careful look outside. All seemed clear.
“Remember: radio silence if at all possible,” he said. “David?”
David nodded, and he and his demolition squad slipped past, disappearing into the night as they headed out toward the access shaft where they would enter the tunnel that ran alongside the Skynet warehouse. Tunney was next, his squad slated to follow David’s group as rearguard until they split off to approach the staging area from the west.
The newcomers were with the latter group, Callahan and the Iliakis and young Zac. They had wanted to go with Barnes’s squad, but Connor had judged Tunney’s to be the one where they would be in the least danger, as well as where their inexperience was least likely to get someone else killed.
Ideally, of course, he would have preferred to leave them here with Kate in the relative safety of the temp base. But they’d made it clear that they were going to go out there, either with Connor’s people or by themselves. Better they at least go with someone who could look out for them.
The Iliakis were the last of the squad out the door, and Connor felt a twinge of guilt as he watched them go. Carol had quietly insisted on going into danger with her husband, exactly as Kate had wanted to do with her husband.
Only in her case, Connor had said no.
And then it was Connor’s turn. He gave Kate a silent nod good-bye, got one in return, and led his team out into the night. Distantly, he wondered if Kate was thinking about the Iliakis, too.
The gunfire had slackened somewhat, he noted as he and his four teammates moved quickly but cautiously through the deserted streets on their way to the staging area’s southern edge. The Terminators must have finished off one of their targets and were in the process of moving on to the next one.
Fortunately, the recruitment tours they’d made of the neighborhood had marked most of the inhabited buildings, where the Terminators were going to be gathering. Hopefully, the routes Connor and Tunney had mapped out would get them all where they needed to be with a minimal
chance of running into trouble along the way.
“Shh-shh!” Someone behind Connor hissed a warning.
Instantly, Connor dropped into a crouch, the rest of the squad doing likewise. Minimal, the thought flashed through his mind, doesn’t mean zero.
Half a block to their right, striding away from them down the street, were a pair of T-600s.
Connor eased his hand away from his rifle and onto one of the blast grenades at his belt. The Terminators were facing away from his squad, their attention clearly elsewhere. But that didn’t mean they might not suddenly decide to look behind them.
Especially given that Skynet’s spotters were already in the air. The HKs drifting over the city were playing it cool, running with spotlights off and minimal turbofans. But Connor could hear their rumble as they watched for any refugees who might try to slip past its ground forces.
But like the T-600s themselves, the HKs were evidently focusing for the moment on their own map of targeted buildings, leaving the neighborhood’s uninhabited areas alone. The two T-600s came to the end of the block, turned the corner, and vanished from sight.
Still watching the corner, Connor rose from his crouch.
“Damn, that was close,” Tony Tantillo muttered. “Where’s our air support, anyway?”
“It’ll be here,” Connor assured him.
Somewhere down the street, from the vicinity of the Moldavia, the miniguns opened up again. All those children, Kate had said earlier, troubled by the thought of leaving them to die. All those children....
But it was out of Connor’s hands now. Signaling to his team to follow, he continued on into the night.
Yoshi was strapping into his A-10 when Blair finally made it to the hangar.
“Come on, come on—the call came three minutes ago,” Yoshi called impatiently. “What’s the holdup?”
“Ninety seconds,” Blair promised as she sprinted toward her own fighter. “Wince? Yo—Wince?”
“Right here,” the old man said, popping into view around her plane’s nose. “You’re all set. I think.”
“What do you mean, you think?” Blair asked as she stopped beside him.
“I got you an extra 150 rounds for your GAU-8, just like you wanted,” he said, patting the Gatling gun protruding from the plane’s nose. “But I have to tell you: there’s a chance—a really small chance—that the gun will jam up first thing off the chocks.”
“Really,” Blair said. “Let me get this straight. My options are either I get to completely snooker the HKs with extra firepower, or else I get to be flying toast?”
Wince made a face.
“Something like that.”
“Good enough,” Blair said, grabbing the cockpit ladder and heading up. “I’ll let you know what happens.”
The hangar doors were open, and Yoshi was jockeying his A-10 out into the wide street beyond by the time Blair got her engines up to power. She gave Yoshi a thirty second head-start, then followed him out.
To her mild surprise, both planes reached the end of their avenue airstrip and made it into the night sky without any HKs appearing overhead to argue the point.
“Hickabick?” Yoshi’s voice crackled in her headset. “How you doing?”
“Smooth and hungry,” Blair replied, glancing over her board. The GAU-8’s counter, she noted, still indicated her ammo load at 1100 rounds, which implied that Wince’s extra one-fifty weren’t being registered. She would have to remember that as she watched her fire count. “Ready to kick some?”
“You bet,” Yoshi said. “You’re on cleanup—follow me in.”
His A-10 turned left toward the Skynet staging area. Blair matched the maneuver, falling back far enough off his tail to make sure he had all the fighting room he might need. There were four HKs in the air over there, running dark and probably quiet, drifting along over the multi-block region like vultures waiting for something to die.
Little did Skynet know.
She and Yoshi had covered about half the distance when the HKs suddenly seemed to notice that they had company. Two of them veered suddenly out of their lazy search pattern and turned toward the A-10s, jumping like scalded frogs as they kicked their turbofans to full power.
“Watch it—two more coming in from the north,” Yoshi warned.
Blair peered in that direction, to find that the two new bandits were also coming in dark. Big surprise there.
“I see them,” she confirmed. “Which ones do you want?”
“You know how my vertigo is,” Yoshi said.
Blair smiled tightly.
“Happy hunting,” she said. Twisting her stick over, she sent the A-10 into a hard turn north toward the incoming HKs, a turn that would certainly exacerbate the imaginary vertigo of any pilot.
The two newcomers were coming in fast she noted as she settled into an intercept course. Way too fast for a typical dogfight. Had Skynet analyzed her performance over the years and concluded its best bet was a highspeed skimmer attack?
Or had it conceded the point of her combat record and decided to simply ram her and be done with it?
There was one way to find out. Aiming her A-10 squarely between the two incoming aircraft, she nudged up her speed.
The hardest part about playing chicken, the old saying went, is knowing when to flinch. But the HKs didn’t seem to have heard that one. Neither aircraft veered so much as a degree off their intercept course as they all rushed toward each other. Blair gave it three more seconds, and then it was time to flinch.
But not the kind of flinch she would normally do in this situation. Not her usual tight evasive turn to left or right. Doing the same thing over and over against Skynet was a guaranteed way of getting yourself killed. Instead, she jammed the stick forward, dropping her nose and throwing her A-10 into a power dive toward the streets below.
She was instantly vindicated as the two HKs split formation, twisting to right and left as they shot past overhead. Had she turned in either of those directions, she would have ended the evening inside a massive fireball.
Which might still happen. For the second time in three days, the dark streets were rushing up at an ungodly speed. Gotta stop doing this, she told herself firmly as she hauled back on the stick, twisting her fighter up again just in time to avoid splatting herself all over the landscape. Setting her teeth as her plane switched from power dive to power climb, she waited to the near-stall moment and rolled over into her signature Immelmann turn.
She leveled off, eased back on the throttle, and searched the sky for her opponents.
She’d half expected the HKs to try to take advantage of her vulnerability during the dive by turning around and attacking. Instead, the two aircraft were speeding away from her at full speed, curving around toward the northeast and continuing to angle apart to keep her from taking both of them in a single one-two shot.
In the absence of a one-two shot, a one-one shot would do just as well. Lining up her nose with the HK on the right, she keyed for the GAU-8 and squeezed the trigger.
Wince had been concerned that his upgraded system would jam. Blair hadn’t had any such doubts, and as usual she’d been right. The Avenger roared to life with all its throaty glory, spitting a river of 30mm destruction at the enemy aircraft. The river reached the HK, and in the fiery light of the machine’s explosion Blair continued her turn and nailed the second one as well.
The two groups of flaming debris rained down on the long-suffering city. Blair put her A-10 into another curve back around toward the west. There was a third bonfire on the ground in the distance over there, where Yoshi had apparently taken out the first of his two targets, and Blair could see the faint flickers of gunfire flashing back and forth as he engaged the second. Beyond the dogfight, the two remaining HKs were still gliding over the staging area neighborhood, playing spotter duty for the mass slaughter going on in the streets below.
She gave the sky a quick scan, and then a more careful look. Far to the south, faintly silhouetted against the moonlit
clouds, were two more HKs, probably part of Skynet’s Capistrano radar tower defense. Either the neighborhood slated for tonight’s destruction was a particularly important one, or else the computer figured it could afford to spend a few HKs for the chance to take out a couple of Resistance A-10s.
Blair smiled tightly. If burning through HKs was Skynet’s plan for the night, she would be more than happy to accommodate it.
Turning her A-10 onto an intercept vector with the newcomers, she headed in.
The Terminators who had destroyed the Death’s-Head compound were finally on the move.
Though not very well, or very quickly, Kyle noted. Even after a couple of hours’ of running repairs, the three skinless machines were still limping badly as they headed toward the gap in the north barrier where he and Star had entered the compound earlier. Limping badly enough, in fact, that the three machines were actually shuffling along together as a group, with the two outer ones supporting the third. Their red eyes glowed bright in the moonlight, the faint sheen from their metal bodies looking strangely like human sweat.
But if those three no longer posed a serious threat, the fourth Terminator most certainly did. It walked a few paces behind them, matching their speed but with no trace of their limping. Its own eyes swept the compound alertly as it herded the damaged machines toward the gap, its minigun poised and ready.
Kyle tensed, holding himself as still as he could. If any one of the four Terminators happened to look into the cars they were passing...
But none of them did. One by one, they maneuvered through the gap and disappeared into the night.
Kyle took a deep breath, feeling the tension running out of him like rainwater off a collector gutter.
“They’re gone,” he whispered to Star.
There was a pause, and then she tugged gently on his sleeve and started signing.
“Wait a second,” Kyle said, pulling the jacket away from their faces so that he could see her better in the dim light. The full chill of the night air struck him like a slap across the face. “What did you say?”
Where did they go?Star signed.
