Some of the internees were in the last stages of exhaustion or starvation.
Tunney surveyed the unfortunate detainees with a jaundiced eye. As he contemplated a situation that, based on experience, made no sense, movement at the far end of the room caused him and his companions to hastily raise their weapons.
Almost as quickly, they relaxed. David even smiled. A larger compliment of their colleagues had broken into the chamber from another corridor.
Pushing his way through the internment area, Connor forced himself to ignore the pleading and extended hands. He was making his way toward a set of illuminated screens that fronted compact consoles. The latter, thankfully, were still functioning—but for how much longer it was impossible to tell. One thing he did know—they’d better work quickly. Hefting his communicator, he spoke into the pickup.
“Olsen, objective located. There’s something else you have to see.” Putting up the hand unit, he moved to the computation complex.
The general arrived soon after. Taking one glance at the glowing, living complex, he turned and barked a name.
“Barbarossa!”
Immediately, the team’s lead technician hurried to join the two men. Soldiers moved around them, sealing the location. The tech halted, stunned by what he was seeing.
“Come on, man,” Olsen prodded him. “We don’t know how much time we’re going to have here. Get to work.” Nodding silently and slightly dazed, the tech drew his battlefield laptop and began fumbling with a handful of cables. Down here they didn’t dare risk broadcasting their presence or any attempt at entry by trying for an over-the-air hookup.
“Spread out,” Olsen told his troops. “Secure the perimeter.” He pointed. “I’ve got a big gap over here. We’re busy and I’m not in the mood for any surprises.” Turning back to the silently watching Connor, he lowered his voice. “Why didn’t we know about this?”
The tech chief interrupted him.
“I’m in. Looks like the central server cluster. I think it’s still intact.” Like a wasp assaulting a termite hive, he tore into the protective programming to expose still active links, circuitry diagrammatics, relays. Some of it was like nothing they had ever seen before, incredibly advanced and distressingly incomprehensible. Some of it was familiar.
Enough of it was familiar.
Overall, the hack was accomplished with admirable speed. Imagery soon filled the brightly lit screen directly opposite the three men. There were no pictures, no accompanying music. No video and no shout-outs. It was all code and schematics, cold and disciplined. Sometimes it read right to left, sometimes top to bottom. Over time, the techs had learned how to interpret Skynet-speak.
So had Connor.
If you’re going to understand an enemy, you have to know how to speak its language.
“Here we go.” Barbarossa muttered as a flood of information began to spill across the screen. “Seems that these people here were to be taken to the northern sector for some kind of R and D project.” His fingers danced across the portable keyboard in front of him.
“There’s more.”
Something on the screen caught Connor’s attention.
Olsen turned. “Hardy! Front and center!”
Connor ignored the general, his attention focused on the screen and the tech chief.
“Wait. Go back.”
Barbarossa hesitated, realized who had made the appeal, and immediately complied. Connor’s eyes widened as the section he had requested reappeared and was played back more slowly. David crowded close to his commander for a better look.
“Jesus, Connor,” he muttered, “it’s just like you said it would be.”
“No.” Connor exhaled sharply. “It’s not. It’s worse.” He nodded at the tech. “Okay, I’ve seen what I needed to see. Resume.”
Noticing that Connor was paying attention to the readouts rather than the prisoners, the impatient Olsen turned back to him.
“Sir.” Staring wide-eyed at the screen, Barbarossa’s voice was almost inaudible as he tried to understand what he was seeing. “Sir....”
Olsen had moved closer to the other man.
“Connor, this isn’t your business. Get your nose out of there.” He jerked his head to his right, in the direction of the pleading prisoners. “Let’s cut these sorry bastards loose.”
Intent on the information that was pouring across the screen in front of him, Barbarossa finally managed to raise his voice even as his fingers continued to race over his laptop’s keyboard. Pausing the info flow, he glanced back at the general.
“I’ve found something else, sir. Looks like intel on our people.”
Olsen nodded dourly. Such a discovery was hardly surprising.
“This isn’t the time or the place to try extended analysis. Just send everything you find on to Command. Let them break it all down. We can’t do anything from here.”
Another pair of techs came forward and began compiling a temp surface feed utilizing the officer’s computer. With a number of satellite dishes on the surface still intact it was just a matter of locating a live contact within the cluster, hacking the feed, and taking over the uplink.
Those soldiers not engaged in freeing and assisting the prisoners or guarding the entrances crowded around to watch. Most of them couldn’t follow the procedure. Tech wasn’t their business—killing was. But it raised morale to see how efficiently the tech team was going about its work.
Olsen barked into his radio.
“Jericho! Come in!” The only response was static. Not good, the general knew. “Jericho,” he repeated. “Shit.”
The room shook. Not an earthquake. At least, not one that had been propagated by a tired Earth. Olsen snapped into his radio again.
“Jericho, what’s the damn ruckus up there?” The response was more static, which was soon drowned out by a second, louder roar that reverberated through the entire chamber. Dust and dirt sifted down from the ceiling; a slow earthy rain. The shouts from the remaining imprisoned grew frantic, the looks on the faces of the soldiers strained.
“Jericho, come in!” Olsen’s fingers tightened on his communicator.
Jericho didn’t come in. Neither did any of the captain’s colleagues. The communicator’s locked frequency was as silent as the grave. A bad simile, the general thought, especially considering his present subterranean location. As he had done on previous occasions, he found himself turning for advice to one particular squad leader. Unlike Jericho, he was not reluctant to do so. Like any good administrator, good soldiers are able to suborn their egos to necessity.
“Connor, get your ass topside and remind those men they need to answer me when I call, even if they’re dead. Connor!”
Solemn-faced as ever, Connor acknowledged the order and headed for the hatchway he and his men had blasted wide. Olsen followed him with his eyes for a moment, then gestured toward the holding pens as he turned back to his immediate subordinates.
“Let’s cut these people loose. Seeing them like this makes my stomach turn. Listening to them hurts my heart.” Nodding agreement, the small circle of officers and noncoms that had clustered around him dispersed to see to the opening of the last cells.
By this time the world was supposed to be swarming with inventions designed to make life easier, Connor thought to himself as he worked the hand-held ascender that was taking him up the cable. Jet packs and synthetic food. Colonies on Mars and rejuvenated oceans. Computers that could be controlled by thought.
Those things had not come to pass because of one unfortunate oversight: Machines that could be controlled by thought had indeed come to pass.
The problem was that they were thinking for themselves, not for their creators, and their thoughts had turned out to be not at all nice.
A tremor ran through the ground as he reached the surface. He hesitated there until he was able to identify the source of the deep-throated rumble.
Passing almost directly overhead, a huge Skynet Transporter thundered past. Part of it was
open construction, allowing him to see that the interior was crammed with more human prisoners. The ones who had been dumped in the top of the container were crushing the life out of the poor beggars trapped at the bottom.
On the other hand, he mused as he pulled himself out of the hole, those on the bottom might be the lucky ones.
Though he doubted there was anything he could do for them, he knew he had to try. Had to keep trying, until there was no more try and no more life left in him.
It was his destiny.
Scanning the battlefield and the remnants of the Skynet satellite array, his gaze settled on an apparently intact chopper idling nearby. Whatever it was, its original mission was about to be changed. Hefting his gear, he raced toward it and clambered inside. A glance showed the big Skynet Transport picking up speed as it angled northward.
“They’ve got human prisoners on board that thing!” he yelled as he pulled himself into the cockpit. “Get after it! If your weapons systems are operational maybe we can....”
He broke off. The chopper’s weapons might be operational, but its pilots were not. Both slumped dead in their seats, a single hole in their respective foreheads. Telltale Terminator work. A hasty look around indicated that whichever machine had killed them had moved on in search of other organics to exterminate.
The Transport full of hapless prisoners was nearly out of sight. One reason Connor was still alive was because he had learned to move fast. Linger too long over a notion and the machines, which were subject to no such hesitation, would splinter your skull before you could conclude your thought.
Working fast, he unbuckled the dead pilot from his harness, dragged him backward, and laid him gently if not reverently in the chopper’s hold. The steady whup-whup of the idling rotors rose to a whine as he threw himself into the now vacant seat and took control.
While the pilots had been coldly executed, the craft had been left untouched. No minion of Skynet would harm another machine, even a non-sentient one, without cause. Connor himself had seen tanks and other heavy vehicles from which their human occupants had been extracted left unharmed on the field.
The chopper was responsive, undamaged, and full of fuel. It rose obediently at his touch. Trailing the by now almost out-of-sight Transport, he accelerated in pursuit.
Far below, the work of Olsen and his troops was slowed as liberated prisoners threw themselves into the arms of their rescuers. Soldiers tried to comfort them as best they could while continuing to break locks and wrench open oddly welded cage doors.
Behind the sob-filled commotion, Barbarossa continued to probe the server cluster they had hacked. Frowning at something on the main monitor, he once again paused the flow of information. As he looked closer at what he had found, his thoughts surged back and forth between a steady flux of technical analysis and a serious attack of whatthehell.
“I’ve found something else, sir,” he called out. Seconds later Olsen was looking over the tech’s shoulder.
“What’ve you got, man?”
“I’m not quite sure, sir, but it’s readable.” His fingers flashed over the keyboard before him.
Buried within the reddish illumination that lit the chamber, a deeper crimson began to glow. An edgy drone unlike any human alarm began to rise above the continued wailing and crying of the freed prisoners.
Away from the techs and the civilian babble, Tunney looked at his friend David. Their eyes met. Having served together and been in the field a long time, their senses had grown battlefield sharp. Unlike the techs they were unable to interpret the flow of information that continued to stream across the multiple monitors.
Unlike the techs, they also knew that the flashing lights and keening whine that now enveloped them portended no good.
High above but insufficiently far away, Connor was banking the commandeered chopper when a few square miles of southwestern desert heaved upward, seemed to hang in the air a moment, and then collapsed back upon itself. Gouts of flame shot from depths unmeasured, volcanic eruptions of dirt and smoke, and a shockwave that sent the chopper careening off its axis. Hard though Connor fought to maintain control, the blast was of such magnitude that puny human muscles were helpless against it.
It was a miracle that he managed any kind of landing. Striking the ground at an angle sheared the rotors, sending potentially lethal metal blades screaming in all directions.
The engine died but Connor did not. Arms, legs, head—he was far more intact than the machine that had cushioned him from the crash. Staggering out of the harness and the now mangled helicopter, he found himself gaping at a gigantic depression that marked the limits of the obliterated subterranean Skynet facility.
It was all gone, entirely destroyed. A very good thing—except that his entire company, from commanding officers down to the lowest-ranking member of his own squad, were also gone. Friends, fellow fighters—there was nothing left.
Well, not quite nothing.
A grotesque mass of mangled metal, the T-600 he had put out of commission earlier, slammed into him from behind. Behind what remained of the battered skull, emotionless eyes glowed a deep, burning red.
His arm slashed, a surprised and dazed Connor stumbled clear. As single-minded of purpose as all of its brethren, the T-600 came lurching after him. Pulling his sidearm, Connor took aim and fired several times. He might as well have been throwing spitwads. The small-caliber shells pinged harmlessly off the T-600’s face, and Connor was unable to hit either of the eyes.
If the machine had been intact, Connor knew he would already be dead. But while they were both hurt, the machine was more badly damaged than the man. Staggering backward and trying to keep clear of the crippled killing device, Connor banged into something else unyielding: the downed chopper. Protruding from the nose, its mini-gatling gun drooped downward, but was still attached to its swivel mount.
Reaching into the cockpit, he fumbled at the controls, working from practice and relying on memory. Equally unbalanced, the Terminator lunged at him. Connor jerked to one side and the stabbing claw-hand just missed his face.
Recovering, the T-600 re-triangulated its apparently helpless target and came forward again. As it did so, the human used his other hand to swing the barrel of the gatling hard around. The muzzle slammed into the Terminator’s faux human jaws as Connor yelled and activated the trigger.
A shriek of metal-piercing rounds blew the T-600’s head into a hundred pieces of scrap metal. Breathing hard, Connor slumped back against the side of the chopper. Small flames from ignited circuitry flared from the neck of the decapitated machine—Terminator terminated.
When the voice reached him the shock of it was nearly as great as the reappearance of the T-600. But this was a recognizably human voice. The source was the helicopter’s radio. Garbled at first, the transmission gradually became fully intelligible as the operator at the other end worked hard to clear the frequency.
“Bravo Ten, come in,” the exhausted Connor was able to make out. “Bravo Ten, this is HQ. Anyone there? Respond, come back.”
Reaching inside the cockpit, he located the compact mike, brought it to his lips, and switched it on. What should he say after what he had just been through and had just witnessed? What could he say?
“Here,” he gasped.
There was a pause at the other end, as if the caller was trying to derive whole reams of information from the one-word response.
“Who is this?” the mike finally crackled afresh.
“Connor.”
“John Connor?”
“No. Lucy Mae Connor.”
That prompted another pause, followed by a query voiced in a stronger, no-nonsense tone.
“Is the target destroyed?” When Connor didn’t respond, the voice tried again, more forcefully. “Connor! You’re in a hot zone! You have no time. Acknowledge. Do you copy? I repeat—is the target destroyed?”
Gathering himself, Connor gasped out a one-word reply.
“Affirmative.”
The radio voice turned from demanding to anxious.
“You have a location on General Olsen? We can’t raise him.”
This time Connor took a deep breath before replying.
“Olsen’s dead.”
A longer pause.
“Proceed to ex-fil point. We’ll send pickup. How many survivors are there?”
Straightening, Connor regarded the new valley that had appeared where formerly there had been flat desert and a few low, scrub-covered hills. Still settling dust continued to obscure the view. The vast satellite array, the rest of the Skynet center, all the poor, pitiful human prisoners, every one of his comrades—dead and buried as the ages. Remembering that he was isolated only physically, he lifted the mike once again.
“One.”
The voice on the radio came back much subdued.
“Repeat—please.”
“One!” Connor snapped.
Perhaps surprisingly, nothing further was heard from the mike. After waiting to make sure the connection had been cut, Connor put it down, straightened, and started limping away from the chopper. Not because he had a destination in mind—he wasn’t even sure exactly where he was. Not because he feared a resurgence of the T-600 he had finally and definitively put down. He started walking because, if nothing else, he desired to put the scene of colossal devastation and destruction as far behind him as he possibly could.
If he was lucky, he mused as he trudged toward an increasingly stormy horizon, maybe he would find a lizard. In the world in which he now found himself, any companion not made of metal and circuitry was one to be cherished.
***
The storm brought darkness to the desert sooner that it would otherwise have arrived. Frequent flashes of lightning illuminated the scorched and shredded fragments of the day’s reckoning: bits of bone, limbs both human and metal that had been divorced from their owners’ bodies, pieces of machine that had served humans, pieces of machine that had been motivated by their own ruthless and uncompromising drive. Among the organic and metallic debris, nothing moved save clouds and bursts of torrential rain.