Trial by Fire E-Book

Timothy Zahn

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 403

Beschreibung

Trapped underground, Kyle Reese struggles to stay alive and prevent the ultimate Skynet infiltration. Amidst the ruins of the VLA lab, Resistance fighters Barnes and Blair sift through the remains of their fallen comrades, searching for the body of Barnes's brother. On the forested slopes of the mountains, a man battles through the trees relentlessly pursued by the Terminator.

Leseprobe

Also available from Titan Books:

TERMINATOR

SALVATION

From the Ashes

By Timothy Zahn

TERMINATOR

SALVATION

The official movie novel

By Alan Dean Foster

TERMINATOR

SALVATION

Cold War

By Greg Cox

TERMINATORSALVATION

TRIAL BY FIRE

TIMOTHY ZAHN

TITAN BOOKS

Terminator: Trial by Fire

ISBN: 9781848569362

Published by

Titan Books

A division of

Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First edition July 2010

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Terminator: Trial by Fire is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Terminator Salvation ™ & © 2010 T Asset Acquisition Company, LLC.

Visit our website:

www.titanbooks.com

Did you enjoy this book? We love to hear from our readers. Please email us at [email protected] or write to us at Reader Feedback at the above address.

To receive advance information, news, competitions, and exclusive Titan offers online, please register as a member by clicking the “sign up” button on our website: www.titanbooks.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States.

For James Middleton,

who brought me into the Resistance and guided

those first tentative steps.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

CHAPTER ONE

His name was Jik.

That wasn’t the name his mother had given him, back in those quiet, peaceful times before the horror of Judgment Day. But it was the name everyone had always called him, ever since his first week in school. It was what his classmates had called him, and his teachers, his friends, and eventually even his college professors. Everyone called him Jik.

Even the thing that was stalking him through the tangled woods of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains called him Jik.

The thing that was trying to kill him.

“Jik?” the gruff voice called through the fading light of evening. “Jik? Come on, friend, this is ridiculous. I’m not going to rob you—I promise. All I want is to talk.”

You’re not my friend! Jik wanted to shout back. But he knew better. Making any noise, giving any hint of where he was, would be suicide. Besides, his throat still hurt from that branch he’d run into two days ago. Pressing his back a little harder into the thick bole of the tree behind him, he tried to think.

There really wasn’t much thinking left for him to do. There were just the two of them out here in the forest. The thing back there wanted to kill Jik. Jik didn’t want to die. All very simple, all very cut and dried.

Jik swallowed hard around his sore throat as he resettled his grip around the big handgun that was all that stood between him and death. This particular section of mountains hadn’t suffered much from the missiles of Judgment Day, and the trees and shrubs were thick enough to give him plenty of cover.

Unfortunately, plenty of cover for him also meant plenty of cover for his stalker.

“Jik?”

Jik hunched his shoulders, wondering for the thousandth time what the hell kind of Terminator that was back there. It wasn’t a T-600—that much he was sure of. The rubber-skinned T-600s barely had faces, let alone voices. It wasn’t a T-700, either, the nightmarish dark-metal skeletons that Skynet used these days as their basic ground troops. This was something new.

“Jik?”

Jik peered up through the canopy of matted tree branches above him. The cloud cover was a mottled gray-white, and had gotten visibly darker over the past half-hour as the sun continued its slide behind the mountains toward the distant Pacific Ocean. In other circumstances, darkness would be a friend, giving him a chance to slip away.

But darkness wouldn’t help against a Terminator. Darkness would just be one more enemy.

Which meant Jik had to have this out right now.

He lowered his eyes, focusing once more on the gun pointed toward the sky in front of him. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 29, an eight-inch barrel wrapped around a .44 magnum cartridge. More like a small cannon than a regular gun, really, a copy of the weapon Clint Eastwood had carried in Dirty Harry and which had been the pride of his father’s collection. A single round could probably take down a small buffalo, if there were any buffalo nearby that needed taking down. Hopefully, a single round could also take down a Terminator.

If it couldn’t, he was in trouble, because he only had three rounds left.

“Jik?”

Jik grimaced. From the direction of the voice, it sounded like the Terminator had moved to the base of the small defile that Jik himself had climbed earlier, a deep crease in the earth’s surface that led up to the tree Jik was currently hiding behind. On both sides of the gap were trees and thick stands of bushes, impossible to get through without making a lot of noise. If the Terminator back there was smart—and so far it definitely seemed smarter than the T-600s Jik had tangled with back in Los Angeles—it would probably move up the pass instead of trying to climb the bank.

But not until it was sure Jik was up there.

“Jik?”

Taking a deep breath, keeping as quiet as he could, Jik worked his way back up from his crouch into a standing position. Getting to the next large tree should make enough noise to attract the Terminator’s attention, while still leaving Jik able to cover the top of the defile. He stepped away from the tree.

And suddenly a figure burst into view, charging up the defile toward him, its feet scattering dirt and rock. Spinning around, Jik squeezed the trigger.

The blast hammered across his ears, the recoil of the gun jamming his arm back into his shoulder. The Terminator’s charge stopped in mid step with the impact as the big bullet slammed into its chest.

It was as Jik fired his second round that his eyes caught up with his brain, and he saw that his pursuer wasn’t a Terminator at all.

It was just a simple, normal man.

But the horrifying realization had come an eternity too late. The slug slammed into the wide-eyed human, boring through the hole the first round had blown in his chest and pitching him backward down the defile. He slid halfway down and then ground to a halt, the tips of his scuffed shoes still visible.

Jik stared at the man’s unmoving feet, his breath coming in little gasps of relief and bitter shame. His knees fluttered and gave way, and he dropped into a crouch amid the soft matting of dirt and pine needles, his stomach churning and wanting to be sick.

He’d just killed a man.

Minutes passed. Jik never knew afterward how many. Enough that his knees hurt when he finally straightened up again.

He’d killed a man. Not deliberately, really. Certainly in the belief that he was acting in self-defense. But the fact was that a human being was now dead, and Jik had done it, and there was nothing he could do to change that.

All he could do now was give the man a decent burial. That was what made men different, a Resistance fighter in LA had once told him. Terminators left their fallen on the streets. Human beings buried theirs.

Sliding the .44 back into its holster, he walked tiredly over to the dead man. The human had landed flat on his back, his arms flung over his head as if he was trying to surrender. His chest was soaked with blood, and Jik could see the ends of a couple of broken ribs sticking out.

If the man’s chest was a nightmare, his face was even more so. There was a long jagged scar trailing out from beneath his right eye, and the entire left side of his face was a splotchy, sickly white, as if he’d been burned by acid.

Maybe he’d absorbed a massive dose of radiation during the hell of Judgment Day, though how he could be walking around after a jolt like that was a mystery. Still, radiation poisoning might explain the insanity of his trying to chase down and kill a perfect stranger.

And then, Jik spotted a glint of metal protruding from the gaping wound.

He leaned closer, his heart suddenly starting to pound again. He hadn’t imagined it: the broken rib ends weren’t made of bone. They were made of metal.

What the hell?

He snatched out the Smith & Wesson again, pointing it at the body as he knelt beside it. Gingerly, he pulled back the layer of skin and peered into the wound.

There was a heart in there, all right, or at least there had been before the .44 slug had torn through it. He could see a pair of lungs, part of a stomach, and what seemed to be a somewhat truncated circulatory system. There were blood vessels going upward from the heart, which implied there was a human brain tucked into the skull behind those staring eyes.

Or maybe not. The T-600s got along just fine with computer chips for brains, and there was no reason he knew of why this thing couldn’t do so as well. The skin seemed real, too.

But between the skin and the organs, everything else was metal. Metal ribs, metal plating behind the ribs, metal spine, metal shoulder blades.

Jik had been right the first time. The thing chasing him through the mountains had indeed been a Terminator. Some chilling hybrid of man and machine, straight from the back porch of hell.

He looked up at the darkening sky. He was still a couple of days out from the little mountainside town of Baker’s Hollow that was his goal, the town where his uncle had once lived and where Jik had spent a couple of weeks each summer when he was a boy. If the town still existed—if Skynet hadn’t already found it and destroyed it—maybe someone would remember him and let him stay.

He looked at his watch, then slid off his backpack and pulled out the precious radio he’d lugged all the way from Los Angeles. It was nearly time for John Connor’s nightly broadcast to the world, and there was no way that Jik was going to miss that.

The message tonight was brief.

“This is John Connor, speaking for the Resistance. We’ve won a major battle, struck a vital blow for humanity against the machines. I can report now that Skynet Central, the enemy’s big San Francisco hub, has been utterly destroyed, as have large numbers of Terminators.

“But this victory has come at a horrendous cost. Now, more than ever, we need you. Come to us—look for our symbol—and join us. Humanity will win. I promise you that. All of you who are listening to my voice, you are part of us. You are the Resistance. Stay safe, keep fighting, and survive.

“This is John Connor, for the Resistance, signing off.”

Jik waited a moment, then shut off the radio and stowed it away in his pack, his eyes drifting once again to the abomination lying in the leaves and twigs beside him. The difference between humanity and the Terminators, the words whispered through his mind, is that humans bury their dead.

Ten minutes later he was on the move again, picking his way through the growing darkness, hoping to find someplace hidden or at least a little more defensible where he could spend the night. The body he left covered by a thin layer of dirt, stones, and leaves.

Maybe the saying was right. But the dead man back there wasn’t one of theirs.

Not anymore.

CHAPTER TWO

The T-600 was in bad shape.

Really bad shape. One leg was completely gone, the other had been twisted and then mashed flat, and the minigun still gripped in its hand was long since empty and useless. Its eyes still glowed their malevolent red, but there was nothing to speak of behind the glow, not since the Skynet Central command structure that had once controlled it had been reduced to slag. The T-600 was more pitiful now than actually dangerous.

Barnes shot it anyway.

He watched with grim satisfaction as the light in the machine’s eyes faded to darkness.

“For my brother,” he muttered.

Not that the T-600 cared. Or would have even if it had been functional.

We bury our dead, the old defiant Resistance claim ran accusingly through Barnes’s mind. We bury our dead.

There was a burst of gunfire to his left, and Barnes looked up from the empty Terminator eyes. Kyle Reese was over there, and even at this distance Barnes could see the grim set to the kid’s jaw as he blew away another of the crippled Terminators. As Barnes watched, Reese stepped over to another twitching machine and fired a half-dozen rounds into it.

Shaking his head, Barnes swung the barrel of his SIG 542 assault rifle up onto his shoulder. Glancing around at the rest of the clean-up team scattered across the half-slagged debris field, he headed toward Reese.

The kid had just unloaded another third of a magazine when Barnes reached him.

“Hey! Reese!” he called.

Reese paused in his work. “Yes?”

Barnes gestured down at the twisted mass of metal at the kid’s feet.

“You think that’s the one who got Connor?” he asked.

“What?”

“Or that one?” Barnes asked, pointing back at the last Terminator Reese had blown apart. “Or that one over there?”

“No, of course not,” Reese said, a wave of anger and pain flickering across his face.

“Then stop taking this personally,” Barnes said firmly. “Stop taking them personally. They’re machines, nothing more. Skynet’s your enemy the way a thunderstorm or earthquake is your enemy. It isn’t taking this personally. You can’t, either.”

For a moment Reese just glared up at him. Then, reluctantly, he lowered his eyes.

“I know,” he said.

“Then act like it,” Barnes growled. He pointed again at the Terminator at Reese’s feet. “One or two rounds into the skull is all you need. More than that and you’re just wasting ammo.”

Reese nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Barnes said, feeling a small tugging at his heart as he gazed at the kid’s solemn face. How many times, he wondered, had he had to hear that same speech from Connor? Enough times, obviously, that he now had the whole thing memorized.

Distantly, he wondered how many times his brother Caleb had had to hear it.

“Just go easy,” he told Reese. “You’ll get the hang of it.” He pointed to the gun in the kid’s hands. “Just remember that if it takes three or four rounds to do the job, go ahead and spend those three or four rounds. Saving ammo is just as stupid as wasting it if saving it gets someone killed. Especially if that someone is you.”

For a second he saw something else flick across Reese’s face, and waited for the obvious retort: that maybe Reese’s own life wasn’t worth saving anymore. That maybe it would be better for everyone if he did just let himself get killed. God knew Barnes felt that way himself a couple of times a month.

But to his surprise the kid didn’t go that direction.

“Okay,” he said instead. “Sorry. This whole thing is still...” He trailed off.

“Kind of new,” Barnes finished for him, impressed in spite of himself. Maybe Reese was actually smart enough not to base his ideas and future plans on how his emotions were churning at the moment. Barnes had known plenty of people who’d never learned that lesson.

Or maybe it was just that the kid didn’t have the guts to say something that self-pitying to someone who’d lived through more of Skynet’s indifferent savagery than he had.

“But you’ve got lots of good teachers here,” Barnes went on, waving around at the other men and women moving across the field and blowing away damaged Terminators. “Listen and learn.”

Behind them a high-pitched whistle sounded, the noise cutting cleanly through the scattered gunfire. Barnes turned to see a Chinook transport chopper settling to the ground.

“Shift change,” he grumbled to Reese, promising himself once again that he was going to find whoever had come up with this stupid whistle code and kick his butt. “Come on—a little food and sleep and you’ll feel better.”

“Okay,” the kid said, his voice neutral.

Barnes grimaced as he headed toward the chopper and the squad spreading out from it, come to continue the clean-up work. That last had been a lie, and he and Reese both knew it. All the food and sleep in the world wouldn’t ease the kid’s pain. Not yet. Only time would soften the loss of his friend Marcus Wright, and his memories of how that hybrid Terminator had risked his life for Reese and his young friend Star, and then had sacrificed himself to save John Connor.

Just as only time would help Barnes’s own memories of his brother. The memories of Caleb’s last encouraging smile as he climbed aboard the chopper with Connor and the others for that ill-fated mission to Skynet’s big desert lab.

But maybe there was a way to help that process along a little.

The main camp was a fifteen-minute chopper ride away. Barnes waited until his team had turned over their heavy weapons to the armorers for inspection and cleaning, then sent them over to the mess tent for a meal.

And once they were settled, he headed to the medical recovery tent to talk to John Connor.

“Barnes,” Connor said in greeting when Barnes was finally allowed through by the door guards and entered the intensive-care recovery room. As usual, Connor’s wife Kate was sitting at his side, a clipboard full of reports and logistics requests propped up on the edge of the bed between them. “How’s the clean-up going?”

“It’s going okay,” Barnes said, wincing a little as he eyed the bewildering collection of tubes and monitor wires sprouting from Connor’s arms and chest. Barnes had seen plenty of people die, most of them violently, but there was something about medical stuff that still made him a little squeamish. Probably the feeling that all patients who looked like this were dying by degrees, the way it had happened to his and Caleb’s own mother.

“Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Kate soothed.

Guiltily, angrily, Barnes wrenched his attention away from the tubes and bottles. He’d sort of gotten used to Connor reading his mind that way, but he hated it when Kate did, too.

“Yeah,” he said. “I have a request.”

Connor nodded. “Go ahead.”

“You told me that Caleb was on the surface when Skynet blew its research lab,” Barnes said. “That means he wasn’t underground with the others.” He braced himself. “I want to go and bury him.”

Kate stirred but didn’t speak. “Are you sure?” Connor asked. “It’s been a couple of weeks, you know.”

“It’s a desert,” Barnes growled. “He’ll still be... You know that thing Kowlowski used to say? That Skynet leaves its fallen lying on the streets?”

“But that we bury ours,” Connor finished, a flicker of something crossing his face. Maybe he was thinking about Marcus Wright, too.

“The clean-up’s going fine,” Barnes said. “It looks like the outer sentry line were the only Terminators that survived the blast, and most of them are pretty smashed. You’ve got more than enough people to clear them out—”

“All right,” Connor said. “You can go.”

Barnes stopped, the other four points he’d been planning to make fading away unsaid. He hadn’t expected talking Connor into this would be that easy.

“You’ll need a pilot,” Connor continued. “I’ll have Blair Williams check out a helicopter for the two of you.”

A knife seemed to twist in Barnes’s gut. Williams?

“Can I have someone else instead?” he asked.

Connor shook his head. “You two have been avoiding each other ever since San Francisco,” he said. “It’s time you cleared the air.”

Barnes clenched his teeth.

“All due respect, this isn’t the right time to do that,” he said.

“Let me put it another way,” Connor said. “You go with Williams, or you don’t go at all.”

If the man hadn’t been hooked up to a hundred tubes and wires, Barnes reflected blackly, he would have considered hitting him. Not that he actually would have hit him, but he would definitely have considered it. As it was, he couldn’t even have that minor satisfaction.

We bury our dead.

There was no point in stalling. Connor had him, and they both knew it.

“Fine,” he bit out. “If she’s willing. Otherwise, I get someone else.”

“She will be,” Connor promised. “I’ll make sure of that. Go eat and then get some sleep. You can leave in the morning.”

Barnes nodded, not trusting himself to say anything else, and stomped out of the room.

He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

CHAPTER THREE

The eight-point buck was nibbling on the ends of some tree branches when it suddenly froze.

Hope Preston felt her cheek twitch. So the animal had heard them. She’d been afraid it would. Hope herself was more than capable of silent stalking, but this was the first time out for Hope’s new hunting partner Susan Valentine, and the older woman simply wasn’t experienced at moving through the twigs and dead leaves that matted the forest floor beneath their feet.

But it was too late now. The deer had been alerted to their presence. One more suspicious sound or movement and it would be out of here, escaping from the clearing into the deeply forested mountain slopes behind it.

Keeping her head motionless, Hope looked at Susan out the corner of her eye. There was an intent, grimly earnest expression on the woman’s face, and Hope had no doubt she was going to try her hardest.

But willpower alone wasn’t enough to send an arrow to its target. Susan’s bow was less than rock-steady in her left hand, and the taut bowstring was wavering visibly as she held the fletching close beside her right cheek. Already she’d held position longer than should have been necessary to aim, and there was no indication even now that she was preparing to release.

It wasn’t hard to guess why. That wasn’t a simple softwood target out there, like the ones Hope had spent all those hours training Susan to shoot at. It was a living, feeling creature, something that would gush blood, go limp, and die. Some people simply couldn’t handle that.

Hope, born and bred out here in the mountains, had a different take on the ethics of the situation. That buck out there was dinner. For the whole town.

And she was not going to let it get away.

Her own arrow was already nocked into her bowstring. Measuring the distance with her eyes, keeping her arrow pointed at the ground in front of her, she drew back the string as far as she could without being obvious about it. If Susan was going to stay in Baker’s Hollow, she was going to have to learn how to do this. Hope could take the shot, and she would if she had to. But she would rather give Susan every reasonable chance to do it herself.

Maybe Susan sensed that. Maybe she’d come to the same conclusion about this being her make-or-break moment. A small whimper escaped her lips, and with an odd sort of abruptness she released her arrow. It flashed between the small branches of their blind and buried itself in the animal’s side.

Too far back. The buck jerked with the impact, but instead of falling dead it twisted around and leaped for the pathway that led out of the clearing.

It was crouching into its second leap when Hope’s arrow drove into its side, dropping it with a thud onto the ground.

Susan’s bow arm sagged. “Sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” Hope replied, lowering her own bow and pulling out her whistle. “Watch your ears,” she warned, and gave her personal signal: one long, four short. “Come on—let’s make sure it’s dead.” She stepped out from behind the bushes and headed across the clearing. With only a little hesitation, Susan followed.

The buck was indeed dead.

“Good shooting,” Hope said, drawing her knife and starting to dig out the arrows.

“You’re very kind,” Susan said, an edge of weary bitterness in her voice. “But we both know better. I missed, pure and simple.”

“It’s not easy to hit the heart,” Hope responded diplomatically. “Especially your first time out.”

Susan exhaled a quiet, shuddering sigh.

“This is my last chance, Hope,” she said. “I can’t sew, I can’t tan, I can’t cook worth anything. I barely know which end of a hammer is which. If I can’t learn to hunt, there’s nothing left.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Hope soothed her, barely noticing the oddness of a fifteen-year-old mountain girl comforting a forty-year-old former world-class scientist. Maybe because it wasn’t girl to scientist anymore, or even teacher to student. Maybe because it was now friend to friend. “Or else you’ll find something else you’re good at,” she added. “Maybe something you don’t even know about yet.”

Susan sighed. “I just hope I can find this mystery talent before your father throws me out of town.”

“He won’t do that,” Hope said firmly.

But that was a lie, and she was pretty sure Susan knew it too. Hope’s father Daniel was the mayor of the small, tight-knit community that had built up in Baker’s Hollow through the dark years following Judgment Day. From the very beginning one of his jobs had been to make sure that everyone who ate their food pulled their weight.

And right now, Susan was the only one who wasn’t doing that. Nathan Oxley had been a molecular biologist, and his general medical training was also augmented by a leather-working hobby. Remy Lajard had been a computer programmer, but he’d also dabbled in microbrew beers in his spare time, a skill he’d brought with him to Baker’s Hollow. That had made him very popular among the residents, even more popular than Oxley.

But Susan had nothing. She’d been a metallurgist, dealing with high-tech alloys and materials that were miles beyond the iron, copper, and steel that were the best anyone here had or would ever hope to have. Up to now, she’d demonstrated no other skills except the ability to put an arrow into a piece of soft wood fifty yards away. If she could parlay that into the ability to hunt, great. If she couldn’t, it would be useless.

Hope’s father wouldn’t want to send Susan away. But he wouldn’t have a choice. Duke Halverson would insist that she be expelled, and Halverson had enough clout to get his way on things like that.

Hope had seen him do it at least once before, five years ago, when that clothing store manager had stumbled half-dead into town. Three months later, having exhausted every attempt to make him useful, he’d been taken to the edge of town and ordered to leave. Halverson had seen to it personally.

Three months was Halverson’s rule of thumb... and Susan’s three months were nearly up.

It wouldn’t be just Halverson who would insist, either. There were still fair numbers of deer and elk out there, but the wolves, coyotes, and cougars had also been coming back and were starting to seriously compete with the humans for those precious resources. Hope’s hunting party had had to travel nearly seven miles from town to find this buck, and that was going to translate into a long and wearying trek back home.

A trek the town’s best hunters were getting royally tired of. From the bits and pieces of her father’s conversations that Hope had overheard, some of the hunters were starting to talk about abandoning Baker’s Hollow and striking out on their own. Their argument was that a group of five or ten experts could survive far better alone than they were doing right now.

Which was undoubtedly true. Unfortunately, while that plan might work fine for them, it would devastate the town. Baker’s Hollow only had about fifteen good-to-excellent hunters, with another ten who Hope could charitably call competent. Skimming off ten or even five of the best would leave everyone else in serious trouble. The remaining woodsmen would have to scramble like mad to bring the competent hunters up to speed, and they would absolutely have to add new people to the rolls as quickly as possible. And they would have to immediately dump anyone and anything that constituted a drain on the town’s resources.

One way or another, Susan’s time was running out.

Hope had finished cutting the second arrow out of the deer when she heard footsteps in the undergrowth behind them. Not the quiet and stealthy movements of fellow hunters, but the casual strides of men and women on their way to collect a kill.

“Hope?” Ned Greeley’s deep voice called.

“Over here,” Hope called back, standing up and waving her bow.

A minute later the big man stepped through the trees and joined them.

“Nice,” he said, looking approvingly at the dead buck. “How’d she do?”

Hope suppressed a grimace. Ned was one of the expert hunters, as well as being a decent blacksmith. But if you weren’t one of his inner circle he had a bad habit of talking about you as if you weren’t there, even if you were standing three feet away. If Halverson ever decided it was time for the top hunters to strike out on their own, odds were that Ned would be the man right behind him when they hit the trail.

“Susan did fine,” she said.

“Um,” Ned rumbled, tilting his head and gazing pointedly at the marks of two retrieved arrows in the deer’s side. “Good save, anyway. Signal the others again, will you? It’s pretty thick there to the west, and Pepper may have drifted off target.”

Hope nodded and reached for her whistle.

Everyone had a talent, her father always said. That meant Susan had one, too. All they had to do was figure out what it was.

Hopefully before she was sent back out into the forest and the mountains to die.

CHAPTER FOUR

They’d been flying for nearly three hours, and Blair Williams had watched the landscape sliding beneath the Blackhawk helicopter gradually change from forest to sparse grassland and finally to desert. Above her, the sky was mottled with a mixture of feathery white cirrus clouds and long dirty gray stratus ones, interspersed with occasional patches of blue sky. All around her the air was filled with the hum of the Blackhawk’s engines and the rhythmic throbbing of its rotors.

Beside her, scowling in the copilot’s seat, was Barnes.

Blair sighed to herself. She hadn’t wanted to take on this mission, and it had been abundantly clear that Barnes hadn’t wanted her along, either. But Connor had insisted, and John Connor wasn’t the sort of person you said no to.

Especially when the only reason Connor’s dark eyes were even alive to gaze at, into, and through you was because Marcus Wright had given his life to save him.

Marcus Wright. The man who in a few short days Blair had learned to love.

Not the man, a bitter-edged corner of her mind corrected mockingly in Barnes’s voice. The machine you learned to love.

Blair shook her head sharply. Stop that! she ordered herself. Yes, Marcus had been mostly machine by the time Blair met him, a hybrid of man and Terminator that was far beyond even Skynet’s usual blasphemies. And yes, he’d been created for the express purpose of luring Connor into Skynet Central to die.

But buried somewhere beneath all that machinery had been a man. A man with a living heart, a determined mind, and an unquenchable spirit.

There was no way to know if he’d still had a soul. Blair hoped that he had.

“There!” Barnes’s voice growled into her headphones.

Blair blinked away the bittersweet reverie. Ahead on the horizon she could see the still smoldering remains of the massive Skynet dish array and hidden underground lab that the Resistance had hit over two weeks ago.

And in doing so had walked squarely into a devastating, multilayered trap.

Blair still winced whenever she thought about how close they’d come that day to losing everything. The self-destruct explosion that had taken out the lab and killed the entire assault team—except Connor—had been the first, most obvious trap. The data download that the techs had managed to transmit before they died had been the far more subtle, far more dangerous one. Buried inside that data had been a radio kill code that had promised a way for the Resistance to simultaneously shut down Skynet’s vast armies of Terminators, T-1 tanks, and H-K Hunter-Killers.

But the promise had been a lie. The code had worked perfectly in Connor’s small-scale tests, perfectly enough that Command had given the order for a massive, simultaneous transmission to be followed by a scorched-earth attack on Skynet’s huge San Francisco hub.

But when the multiple signals were sent out, the supposed kill code morphed into a homing signal, allowing Skynet to pinpoint and destroy most of the Resistance cells worldwide.

Of all the leaders only Connor had smelled a rat in time, and had shut down his team’s transmitter before it could join the party. Only Connor’s group and the ones who had heeded his plea for more time were still alive and functioning.

And only Connor’s group was back there in the remains of San Francisco, cleaning up the remnants of Skynet’s once massive forces.

So far, the clean-up had been relatively easy. A duck shoot, even, at least the mopping-up part that Barnes had been engaged in. Nearly all the surviving T-600s and T-700s were hopelessly crippled, and their demolition was giving some good firearms practice to the new recruits who’d joined up from among the civilians Connor’s pilots had rescued before the balloon went up.

But the duck shoot wasn’t going to last much longer. Blair had heard rumors that there was some kind of prophecy wrapped around Connor, that he was destined to lead the Resistance to victory over the Terminators. She didn’t put a lot of stock in such things, and she couldn’t imagine Connor himself taking it very seriously either.

But considering the time and resources Skynet had poured into luring the man into his own private corner of the trap, it was clear that the big computer wasn’t ready to dismiss Connor or this so-called prophecy nearly so quickly.

And that meant Skynet wouldn’t simply write off western North America as a loss and content itself with trying to dominate and wipe out the rest of the world’s population. It would be moving resources here, as many as it could, as quickly as it could.

They’d won a major battle. But the war was far from over.

“Well?”

For the second time in ten minutes, Blair found herself jolted out of private thoughts. “Well what?” she asked.

“You going to take us down?” Barnes demanded. “Or you just going to circle around up here looking at the pretty scenery?”

Blair felt her cheeks warm. She had indeed been flying with her brain on autopilot, running them in a lazy circle around the western periphery of the remains.

“I was trying to find a spot that wasn’t actually still on fire,” she countered, hoping the excuse didn’t sound as pathetic to him as it did to her. The big pit in the ground where the team had rappelled down to the lab... okay, there it was. Connor had told them Barnes’s brother Caleb had been on the western side when Skynet blew the lab.

She frowned as something caught her eye. It was a small, slender hump in the ground, like a tree root that had been forced aboveground by some obstruction beneath it.

Only there weren’t any trees nearby. Not for miles around.

“There,” Barnes said sharply, pointing toward the edge of the pit. “I see some bodies. Take us down.”

“Okay,” Blair said, feeling a shiver run through her. This was not going to be pleasant.

It wasn’t. The bodies were in bad shape, burned and mangled by the massive explosion that had taken out the lab. What was left had had two weeks’ to begin decaying, though the dry desert air had alleviated the effects somewhat. The human remains were scattered amid tangled debris from the antenna array and the metal skulls, torsos, and limbs of the Terminators that had been defending it.

There were a lot of those pieces, too, along with plenty of T-600 miniguns and the big G11 caseless-round submachineguns that Skynet was arming its T-700s with these days. A lot of the weapons were useless, though a few of the miniguns looked in decent shape and some even had ammo belts still attached. Clearly, Skynet had thrown a huge number of resources into this battle, and Blair found herself wondering how much of a role that desperate-looking defense had played in persuading Command that they were genuinely onto something.

Slowly, methodically, Blair and Barnes continued their grisly task. Each face had to be looked at closely, with the body often first having to be turned over. Here and there Blair spotted someone she recognized, either one of the people from Connor’s original team or someone she’d gotten to know in the months since they’d been pulled out of Los Angeles and put under General Olsen’s overall command. Each time, she felt a tug at her heart, and a small diminishing of herself. Some poet, she remembered vaguely, had once written about such things.

Caleb wasn’t in the first group she and Barnes checked out. Nor was he in the second, or the third, or the fourth. Midway through the fifth Blair’s aching heart and churning stomach finally got the better of her, and she had to move away for a few minutes to settle both of them.

Barnes, predictably, didn’t seem to notice her distress. He certainly didn’t say anything as Blair stood a dozen paces away, breathing shallowly through her mouth. He continued on, as emotionless and machinelike as any Terminator, checking each broken body before moving on to the next.

He was so silent and straightforwardly determined in his quest, in fact, that he had unhooked his entrenching tool from his pack and started digging before Blair even realized that he’d found his brother.

Gingerly, feeling like she was setting off across a minefield, she walked over to him.

“May I help?” she asked.

“No,” he said flatly, not looking at her.

For a minute Blair watched him jabbing the tool into the loose sand and throwing it to the side, wondering if she should just take him at his word and go wait in the Blackhawk. Then, moving a few feet away from him, she started to dig.

She half expected him to order her away. But he didn’t. Maybe he realized that she’d been Caleb’s friend, too, and deserved the chance to help him to his final rest.

Maybe he just didn’t consider her worth the trouble of yelling at.

The sun was dipping close to the western mountains by the time they finished the grave. Again, Blair expected Barnes to order her away as he picked up his brother’s body and laid it gently in the hole. But again, he simply ignored her as she stood quietly by. He spoke over the grave for a few minutes, his voice too low for Blair to catch more than a few words of the farewell. Then, straightening up, he threw his brother a final salute. Blair did the same, holding the salute for probably half a minute until Barnes finally lowered his arm to his side and again picked up his entrenching tool.

Ten minutes later, it was done. While Blair waited by the grave, Barnes constructed a cross out of his brother’s rifle and a slightly warped Terminator leg strut. He dug the cross into the sand, and for another minute stood gazing at the grave and the marker. He took a deep breath, and for the first time in probably an hour he looked at Blair.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“All right,” Blair said, her mind flicking to the hundreds of bodies still lying out beneath the open sky. But there was no way she and Barnes could deal with so many. All she could do was put them out of her mind as best she could. “Before we go, I’d like to check out something I spotted on our way in.”

He eyed her suspiciously. “What was it?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t worry, it won’t take long.”

He glowered, but gave a reluctant nod. “Where?”

Blair turned around, mentally superimposing the image from the sky on top of the landscape stretched out in front of her.

“About a hundred meters that way,” she said, pointing northwest. “You want me to go and get the helo?”

With a snort, he strode past her and headed off in the direction she’d indicated.

Blair grimaced. Easy for him to say. He hadn’t gotten shot during her attempt to free Marcus from the prison Connor had put him in.

Fortunately, the wound hadn’t been as serious as she’d first thought. It had probably been a ricochet, and though it had hurt like hell at the time and half paralyzed her leg, it had done a good job of healing in the week and a half since then.

It still wasn’t completely well, though, and too much exertion was bad for it. Barnes probably knew that.

And he obviously didn’t care.

With a sigh, Blair hurried to catch up to him.

The mysterious hump Blair had seen had been reasonably visible from the air. From the ground, with the western sun exaggerating every shadow, it was even more obvious.

It wasn’t a root that had been forced up out of the ground. Instead, it was a root-sized cable.

“Coaxial type,” she commented, pointing to the central core and surrounding shielding where Barnes had sliced through it with his trench knife. “Outer shielding pretty sturdy.”

“Okay,” Barnes said, restlessly turning his knife over and over in his hand. “So?”

“So it was obviously designed to be at least semipermanent,” Blair said, trying to think it through. “And yet it was buried barely thirty centimeters under the sand.”

“Okay,” Barnes said again. “So?”

“So I’m guessing it was an add-on,” Blair concluded, squinting northwest across the glare of the sunlight reflecting off the sand. “Something Skynet laid down after the main lab was set up.” She gestured down. “And the fact that this is a data cable and not a power cable tells us it was sending information.”

“Maybe it was going over the mountains to San Francisco,” Barnes said. “Can we get out of here now?”

“That’s an awfully long way to string a cable,” Blair pointed out, the annoyance she’d been sitting on ever since leaving Connor’s camp starting to bubble up into anger. Was Barnes really too stupid to see what that could mean? Or was he playing dumb just to irritate her? “Especially when they had a dish array right here that could probably punch a signal anywhere on the planet.”

“Fine,” Barnes growled. “You’re the smart one. What do you think it was?”

“Well, let’s see,” she said, for once making no effort to suppress her sarcasm. “You think maybe Skynet might have set up an outlying satellite base out in the mountains? A backup facility in case—oh, I don’t know—we managed to take out this one?”

“If there’s something out there, what’s it been doing since then?” Barnes shot back. “Didn’t make a peep while we were blowing up San Francisco.” He pointed toward the mountains. “Or maybe there’s a whole bunch of H-Ks heading toward us from the place right now. You see a bunch of H-Ks heading toward us?”

Blair ground her teeth. “Of course not,” she said. “But I still think it’s worth checking out.”

“So write it up,” Barnes growled. “Connor loves getting stuff like that.”

“Or we could just check it out ourselves,” Blair said. “See if there really is something out there before we bother him with it.”

For another moment Barnes glowered at her. Then, reluctantly, he shifted his glower toward the mountains. Whatever the man thought about Blair, he was hound-dog loyal to Connor, and even in his current grouchy state of mind he couldn’t help but see the logic of not burdening his commander with extra stuff during the man’s recovery. Especially if, as he obviously thought, there turned out to be nothing out there at all. “Fine,” he agreed at last. “A quick check, and then we go.”

“Thanks.” Blair braced herself. “But we’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

Barnes twisted his head back around to look at her.

“Tomorrow?”

“We need to be able to see the loops where the explosion forced the cable to the surface,” Blair explained hurriedly. “I know there are more of them—I saw at least three on our way in. But we’ll need the shadows from an early-morning sun to see them. At night, we’ll lose the trail completely.”

Barnes snorted. “This is ridiculous. It probably just connects to one of the perimeter sensors.”

“Maybe,” Blair conceded. “But we won’t know unless we check it out.” She waved a hand. “Look, it isn’t that big a deal. We take off as soon as the sun is up, follow the cable, turn the Blackhawk’s machineguns loose on whatever’s at the other end, and go home.” She cocked her head slightly. “Caleb would have wanted to make sure.”

The instant the words were out of her mouth she knew she’d crossed the line. But it was too late. Barnes’s expression went rigid, and for that first frozen second Blair felt she was staring death squarely in the face.

“Don’t do that,” he said, the utter lack of emotion in his voice more terrifying than any scream or curse he could have snarled at her. “Don’t ever use my brother’s name that way again. Ever.”

“You’re right,” Blair said, her mouth suddenly dry. “I’m sorry.”

For another moment she faced into the bitter iciness of Barnes’s gaze. Then, he exhaled quietly, and the moment had passed.

“I’ll be sleeping on the right-hand side of the chopper,” he said gruffly. “Shoot anything that comes near that isn’t me.” Turning, he stalked back toward the distant Blackhawk.

“Right,” Blair called a bit timidly after him. “I’ll take the first watch, then?”

Barnes didn’t bother to reply.

Blair gave the new grave a final look. Then she set off after him.

She had the first watch, all right. And given that it would be her job to wake him up for his turn, chances were very good that she was going to have the only watch.

She sighed. It was shaping up to be a long, lonely, chilly night.

Jik had just settled for the night into his chosen tree when he heard the faint whining sound in the distance.

CHAPTER FIVE