by Timothy Zahn
The bus was a shambles, all right. Its edges had been splayed outward by a seriously healthy blast, its empty windows and other openings flickering with light from the small fires the explosion had ignited inside it.
And Joey was, indeed, still clutching the squad’s last grenade.
Connor had no idea what had happened, but this wasn’t the time to try to figure it out. From the look of the bus, the explosion had been strong enough to rattle the Terminators’ electronics and temporarily stun them. But unless it had been powerful enough to dismember them, they would soon be up and running again.
Someone had to get to them before that happened, and put them out of action permanently.
“Joey, Tony: take them out,” Connor ordered, jerking his head back at the other four T-600s who had suddenly stepped up the tempo of their attack. “Bishop: you’re with me.” Without waiting for acknowledgment, he zigzagged through the debris of the store, dived through the east-facing window, and sprinted toward the bus.
He was nearly there when he suddenly realized he and his team weren’t alone. Half a block away, at the next street to the south, he could see two figures: a child and young adult or teen, cowering against a building that was being steadily demolished around them. More Terminators on their way into the battle zone, with the two kids caught in the middle of it.
He had reached the bus and was leaning in for a closer look when Bishop caught up to him.
“How many?” she asked, panting.
“Two,” Connor told her. The word was barely out of his mouth when the crunching blast of a C4 grenade came from behind them. “You take close,” he added, “I’ll take far.” Ducking his head, he stepped inside the vehicle.
The two Terminators were lying on the ground, unmoving, their miniguns momentarily silenced. Great sections of their rubbery skin had been torn away by the blast, and a couple of joints on each one were no longer looking quite right.
Mentally, Connor threw a salute to whoever it was who’d put together this particular explosive. Even considering the concentrating effect the confined space would have had on the blast, it had still been one hell of a bomb.
Stepping over the first Terminator, he placed the muzzle of his MP5 against the dented skull of the second and squeezed the trigger.
It took two three-round bursts to batter through the tough metal. But when the echoes had died away, the last hint of red glow had faded from the machine’s eyes.
Terminated.
Connor looked back at Bishop, gave her a thumb’s-up and got one in return, then grabbed hold of one of the skeletal seat frames and climbed up to the top side of the bus. Hoping it wasn’t too late to save the two kids he’d seen out there, he eased his head cautiously through one of the windows.
He had had long experience with the kind of firepower Skynet had put into the hands of its T-600s, and he’d seen what that firepower could do. But even Connor found himself in awe at how the scene outside had changed during the handful of seconds he and Bishop had been inside the bus.
The structure the kids had been huddling beside was gone. All of it. There were still a few sections of wall standing, but nothing taller than half a meter and most considerably shorter. The roof, what was left of it, had collapsed into the house, and was lying in broken pieces across broken furniture and other unidentifiable bits of material.
And with the building no longer in the way, Connor could now see the two T-600s approaching from fifty meters away.
“There,” Bishop said from the next window, jabbing a finger over Connor’s shoulder.
Connor looked where she was pointing. Sure enough, the two kids were still there, hugging the ground in front of one of the few remaining pieces of wall.
“Can we take them?” Bishop asked.
Connor grimaced. Bishop was experienced enough to know that the answer to that was no. Not just the two of them, not with the weapons they had available.
But if they didn’t do something, those two kids were dead.
“Let’s find out,” Connor said. Hauling his MP5 up through the window, he pointed the muzzle at the approaching T-600s and opened fire.
He hadn’t expected the fire from their two guns to stop the T-600s, and he had been right. But he had expected that the disruption in the machines’ balance would throw off their aim, and he was right again. The Terminators jerked from the multiple impacts as Connor’s and Bishop’s slugs slammed into them, the machines’ own fire going wild.
“Come on!” Connor shouted toward the two kids. “Come on—now!”
The older of the two, the teen, eased up onto his side and looked cautiously over the remains of the wall at the two T-600s. He looked back at Connor and Bishop, peered north along the street, then leaned over and said something to the child beside him.
The two gathered their feet beneath them and bounded up.
But to Connor’s surprise, instead of running for the bus they instead dashed straight across the street and disappeared behind some ruins on the northwest corner there.
“What in—?”
An instant later he got his answer as a hail of gunfire slammed into the bus from the north.
Instinctively, he dropped back down, Bishop hitting the ground a quarter second behind him.
“You all right?” he asked her.
She nodded, then jerked her head and gun around toward the rear of the vehicle. Connor swung his MP5 around as well—
Just as the Tantillo brothers dived in through the opening.
“Sorry we’re late,” Joey said, breathing hard as he gave each of the dead T-600s a quick look. “They’d moved too far apart for the grenade to take them all out together. I had to drop the wall on them instead, but then we had to go blast each of them before they could dig themselves out. What did we miss?”
“Never mind what you missed,” Connor said. “What’s going on at the other end of the street?”
“More company,” Tony said, peering cautiously out the rear doors. “Probably not happy about losing their handy City Transit bunker here.” He rapped his knuckles on the side of their flimsy sanctuary.
Connor mouthed a curse. Which meant Barnes was still being blocked from going to Orozco’s assistance. He hadn’t expected Skynet to be able to get fresh Terminators into position that fast.
“Kate?” Connor called into his mike. “What’s your sitrep?”
“We can’t get across,” his wife’s voice came back taut-ly. “Not unless we can par-six it.”
“Not a chance,” Tony murmured, covering his own mike. “They’re standing right in the middle of the intersection. No way to sneak up on them without being spotted.”
And meanwhile, there were probably Terminators slaughtering their way through the Moldavia. Connor looked around the bus, thinking hard. Barnes was pinned down; Connor’s team was pinned down; David and Tunney had their hands full dealing with the warehouse.
And then, Connor’s eyes fell on the miniguns still clutched in the T-600s’ hands.
“Hickabick?” he called into his mike. “Hickabick?”
“Hickabick,” Blair’s voice came back. “Sorry—been a little distracted.”
“No problem,” Connor said. “Where are you?”
“Off the course,” Blair replied. “Got invited to a game of Brooklyn tag.”
Which meant she was somewhere way south of the mission grid Connor had set up.
“I need you and your game here,” he said. “Tee two off Gulliver.”
There was a brief pause.
“Check,” Blair said. “You do realize the course is closed, right?”
“Understood,” Connor said. “Soonest.”
“Check,” Blair said again.
Connor looked over to see the rest of the squad eyeing him with varying degrees of bafflement.
“You thinking she can bluff them off the street?” Tony asked.
“Slipstream won’t take them out, will it?” Bishop offered doubtfully. “They’re supposed to be
too heavy for that.”
“No, to both of you,” Connor said as he started climbing toward the top of the bus again. “Tony, Joey: you have two minutes to get those miniguns free and ready to fire. Bishop, up top with me—we need to find out where those other two T-600s went.”
He reached the line of windows and eased his head up for a look. But for once, caution was unnecessary. The Terminators at the north end of the street were evidently saving their ammo to keep Kate and Barnes out of the Moldavia, and the machines that had been firing on the two kids had disappeared.
Disappeared back onto their tail, no doubt. But there was nothing Connor could do about that now. Turning toward the south, he looked upward.
Nothing.
He checked east and west, then south again. Still nothing.
Had Blair lost her macabre game of tag with that last remaining HK? Connor checked east and west again, and even north, just in case she had gotten disoriented.
And then, there they were: a pair of shadows framed between the city’s broken buildings to the south, heading toward them across the moonlit sky.
Abruptly, Connor tensed. Blair was coming toward him, all right, exactly as ordered. But she was coming in way too high for what he needed. He had to get her to drop to strafing level.
Only there wasn’t anything in the mission code for that.
Beside him, Tony popped his head out of the next window over.
“Got ‘em,” he announced, tapping the muzzle of the minigun he was holding just out of sight. “Still got plenty of ammo—they must have figured they were here for the long haul.” He peered up into the sky. “If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, aren’t they coming in too high?”
“Yes, they are,” Connor said through clenched teeth. There had to be a way for him to clue in Blair without tipping his hand to Skynet at the same time.
And then, he had an idea. A completely crazy idea.
“You and Joey get ready,” he told Tony. “You’re only going to get one shot at this.”
***
They had made it two blocks past the corner with the bus when Star suddenly grabbed Kyle’s arm and staggered to a halt.
“What’s wrong?” Kyle asked sharply as he grabbed her around her waist. “Were you shot? Are you hurt?”
She shook her head. Tired, she signed.
“Oh,” Kyle said, relief flooding into him. After all that shooting back there, he’d feared the worst. “Over here,” he said, leading her to an angled piece of broken concrete and helping her sit down. She was worn out, all right, her chest heaving as she gasped for breath, her face shiny with sweat, her legs trembling with fatigue. He should have noticed that earlier, he told himself guiltily.
Still, under the circumstances, there hadn’t been a lot he could have done differently.
Though he had the discomfiting sense that Star had a different opinion on that one. The look on her face was one he’d seen before.
“What?” Kyle asked warily.
Why didn’t we go with the people in the bus? she signed.
Kyle grimaced. What could he say? He’d seen the line of Terminators moving into the street to the north, clearly preparing to march on the people who’d blown up their buddies. The man and woman in the bus were as good as dead. If he and Star had joined them, they would have been dead, too.
No, he couldn’t tell her that. Not after those people had saved their lives.
“We need to get back to the Ashes,” he said instead. “Orozco needs our help, and the people on the bus had it under control. Besides, we don’t even know who they were.”
He really should have known that Star wouldn’t buy that one. We didn’t know Nguyen or Vuong, either, she reminded him pointedly. But we went with—
Abruptly, she broke off, her face going rigid.
Kyle froze, his eyes darting through the pale moonlight around them. Had the Terminators back there caught up with them already?
But no. That pair should still be somewhere to their east. The lone figure he could see striding along the street toward them was coming instead from the west. It seemed to notice the two kids sitting on the slab and changed its course to head toward them.
Kyle whipped his rifle up to his shoulder, uncertainty flicking through him. The figure was big, but he’d seen humans who were nearly that size. And so far, it hadn’t opened fire on them.
And then, as it passed through a patch of moonlight, he saw the glint of metal from the minigun in its right hand.
“Go north,” Kyle muttered at Star. “Go.”
The girl nodded and took off, her legs pounding the pavement as fast and hard as they could. Aiming at the Terminator’s leg, Kyle squeezed the trigger.
The machine staggered with the impact, pausing as it fought to regain its balance. Kyle fired a second shot, and a third, each one briefly stopping the machine in its tracks. So far, the barrage seemed to be keeping it back.
He frowned suddenly.
Or was that what Skynet wanted him to think?
He squeezed off one final round, then abruptly leaped to his feet and took off after Star.
And as he did so, a burst of minigun fire slashed through the space he’d just vacated.
The other two Terminators had caught up.
Kyle threw a quick look over his right shoulder. They were both still half a block back, but they were taking every opportunity to fire at him as he darted in and out of their view past rusting vehicles, piles of rubble, and clumps of weeds.
But though they were firing, neither Terminator seemed to be making any effort to close the distance between them. In fact, they were actually retreating, backing toward the street they’d just passed.
Kyle looked over his other shoulder. They weren’t chasing him for the simple reason that Skynet had already put the other Terminator on that job. It was striding toward him, all traces of its earlier unsteadiness gone.
He turned forward again, putting everything he had left into increasing his speed as he realized what Skynet was up to. Guessing that Kyle and Star were on their way to the Ashes, it had pulled the three Terminators from somewhere with the hope that the two from the east would drive him and Star straight into the arms of the one to the west.
Now that the plan had failed, Skynet was going to try the same thing, but in a slightly different way. The single Terminator was now going to chase him and Star until they either dropped from exhaustion or else turned east and tried to get back home. Only they would never make it, because the other two Terminators would be paralleling their run along the next north-south street over, which would put them in position to intercept him and Star if and when they tried to turn in that direction.
It was a good plan, and with anyone else it probably would have worked with lethal efficiency. But there was something Kyle knew that Skynet didn’t. Something that might just get him and Star out of this alive.
He glanced over his shoulder again. Terminators weren’t all that fast, and the one back there was starting to fall behind. But he wasn’t falling behind fast enough. Reaching into his shoulder bag as he ran, Kyle pulled out his last pipe bomb. He’d hoped he could save at least one of them, but he needed to slow the machine down and there was no other way he could think of to do that without having to slow down himself.
Lighting the fuse, he let it run down to just the right length, then hurled the bomb behind him.
It exploded with the usual thundercrack, lighting up the cityscape and peppering Kyle with bits of shrapnel. He looked back again, to see that the blast had knocked the Terminator off its feet. The few extra seconds it would cost the big machine to haul itself back up and continue the chase ought to be enough.
They would have to be enough.
Star had made it nearly to the next corner when Kyle caught up with her.
“Come on,” he told her, grabbing her hand. “I’ve got a plan.”
The bursts of minigun fire echoing through the hallways had become more and more spora
dic over the past few minutes. Either the Terminators moving through the building were running low on ammo or, more likely, were running low on people to kill.
And as Orozco reached the lobby he discovered why. Everyone who had managed to evade the killing spree up to now had apparently gathered here, those with guns crouching on the far side of the barricade the fire teams had put together, those without huddling together behind them. Some of the people were whimpering or crying, and Orozco could hear at least one quiet stream of curses being repeated over and over.
They were facing death, and they were terrified. But they were still holding.
Grimaldi rose from the center of the barricade as Orozco approached.
“Thank God—I thought they’d gotten you,” the chief said. His eyes dropped to Orozco’s blood-soaked sleeve—
“I’m fine,” Orozco said, forestalling the obvious question. “What have we got?”
“A dead end,” Grimaldi replied, his voice glacially calm. “Terminators have moved into position on the street about half a block north. Some of our people made a run for it, but were cut down before they got even halfway across. I was wondering if we might be able to set up enough cover fire to let at least some of them get out.”
It was a pretty futile hope, Orozco knew. But it would be better to try something than just sit here and wait to be cut down.
He was opening his mouth to say so when the roar of miniguns erupted from behind him, and Grimaldi’s chest exploded in a spray of blood and bone and flesh.
Orozco threw himself to the side, the bullets that were tracking along the top of the barricade stitching a line across his left shoulder and sleeve as he fell. He hit the ground and rolled over, trying to pull his M16 out from beneath him, where it had landed. Another burst slammed into the barricade just above his head, and with a gurgling scream the man standing behind it toppled forward, dropping his rifle across Orozco’s ribs and clutching at his own shattered legs.
For a second he teetered, and then pitched forward to sprawl across Orozco’s head and shoulders.
Orozco gasped in pain as the man’s weight slammed against his injured left arm. His right arm was pinned beneath the man’s torso, and he fought furiously to work free enough to at least shove him off.
