Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt Page 17

  “I’ll just bet. Gwendolyn, if you’d do me a favor, head over to the door Lieutenant Carter pointed out. We have a little present for you.”

  “A present.” The T-X cycled through possible emotional responses. She settled on continued curiosity merged with dubiousness.

  “Really. You’ll love it, I promise.”

  “Uh-huh.” The T-X headed in the indicated direction.

  She was halfway across the gymnasium when that far door opened and a man entered. The T-X’s visual scanners picked out his face, analyzed it, and returned a match.

  John Connor. She was within sight of her supreme priority.

  She broadcast a compressed message: JOHN CONNOR AT THIS LOCATION. COMMENCING TERMINATION. MOVE IN ALL UNITS FOR CAPTURE AND TERMINATION OF SECONDARY UNITS. Then she adjusted her body language so that her walk would suggest uncertainty and disbelief, adjusted her vocal patterns likewise. “Uncle John?”

  “Gwen, thank God.” John Connor did not look surprised. Of course he did not. He was expecting her. His bodyguard unit was bringing her to him.

  But he was still standing too close to the exit. If she revealed her weapon now, he might have the opportunity to run through the doorway, to be out of her sight for a moment. That was unacceptable. Her tactical display came up with an option that had a high probability of dictating John Connor’s response. She accepted the recommendation and, in an authentic simulation of a human woman momentarily overcome by emotion, sank to her knees, causing her face to register relief and shock.

  John Connor hesitated for a moment in the doorway, which registered to the T-X as a curious anomaly. Then he moved forward, walking slowly, his eyes searching her as if looking for a physical cause for her own hesitation.

  She reached out toward him. Her months of interaction with Paul Keeley had demonstrated that humans responded strongly and instinctively to such a gesture. And John Connor did pick up his pace.

  He was ten paces from the door now. He could not escape in time. She caused the liquid metal sheath to withdraw from her right arm, revealing the mechanisms beneath, and caused them to reconfigure into her plasma cannon.

  Then fluid cascaded across the T-X from above.

  Secondary objectives, including self-preservation, asserted themselves. A visual sweep of less than a second’s duration would not give John Connor time or opportunity to escape her and could therefore be accomplished without endangering her primary objective. She glanced up.

  A broad net made of metal cables, trailing more cables, landed upon her.

  Though heavy enough to hinder a human, it would not hinder her. Though it was made of durable metal materials, she calculated that she could tear through it in a matter of moments. She would not do so until her primary objective was accomplished, however. The net would not prevent her from taking aim and incinerating John Connor, even though he was now in mid-turn and preparing to flee.

  She broadcast a quick indication that her current situation was an ambush and that all remote unit activities she had called for were still to be implemented. Then she aimed, blue electrical discharges dancing around the end of plasma apparatus.

  * * *

  Far overhead, in the wooden platform hastily built to give her a safe perch among the ceiling girders, Kate Brewster pressed a rocker switch to touch off the first of the detonators.

  They weren’t connected to conventional explosions. Instead, they were wired to a series of capacitors, each of which could discharge enough voltage to blow the circuitry of a good-sized office building.

  Below, the disguised T-X jerked and spasmed as the first blast of electricity coursed through her. No blast of superheated matter emerged from her right arm. For this second—and this second only—John Connor was safe from incineration.

  Kate threw the second switch.

  * * *

  John made it to the doorway, ducked through, and snatched up the plasma rifle waiting there, propped up against the door jamb. He turned to look.

  First he saw the broad back of Mark Herrera, who had interposed himself between John and the T-X, a living shield who, if the T-X recovered, would absorb the first plasma blast and die to give John a chance for escape.

  Not that he’d do so passively. He had an M-25 plasma pulse rifle at the ready. With his skill and experience Mark would probably get a few licks in before her first plasma shot eradicated him.

  More Hell-Hounds and Scalpers were moving in, forming a semicircle. Most carried plasma rifles or rocket-propelled grenades. Kyla had her sniper rifle at the ready, its iron sights up.

  The air was filled with overlapping roars: the sound of the T-X’s batteries maintaining their charge prior to the plasma cannon firing; the sound of the electricity pouring through her body, causing the water beneath her, water that grounded her, to superheat into steam; and a shrill, sirenlike wail that seemed to come from the T-X’s mouth—one of her nonverbal vocal forms of expression, its volume reaching its maximum level as the damaging electricity caused her to malfunction in countless ways.

  Above it all came Kate’s voice, a barely audible shout: “Three!”

  Tom Carter joined the line of security specialists, an object like a brushed-aluminum briefcase in one hand, a handheld device that looked like an old-fashioned stun gun in the other.

  “Two!”

  The T-X toppled to one side, still jerking and jittering like a bug on a frying pan.

  “One! Zero! Clear!”

  The sounds of electrical discharge and the T-X’s involuntary shriek ended. Tom Carter dashed forward, slipping as he hit the patch of water. He ran right up onto the metal net, heedless of the danger it represented were it to carry another electrical charge, and knelt straddling the Terminator.

  He set the aluminum case down and threw it open. He set the smaller device against the T-X’s neck and triggered it.

  A small blue spark emerged, a much tinier manifestation of the plasma energy that had threatened John’s life, and sliced into the T-X’s skin.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t skin, not in the traditional sense. It parted under the tremendous energy from the plasma device and shrank away, liquid metal that had just been instructed by a strong heat and power source to flee the vicinity.

  The retreat of the metal bared the T-X’s endoskeleton, a silvery gleaming metal thing that was as inhuman and menacing as the T-X had just appeared human and inviting.

  Carter cut into the endoskeleton just under the neck, severing whatever locking mechanism held protective plates in place, and raised a hinged piece about the size of a saucer. Even at this distance John could hear sputters and zaps from within that housing, the sound of the Terminator’s internal systems desperately working to come back on-line.

  Carter pulled wires from the aluminum case and set them within the T-X’s body cavity. With a calm sureness that was more and more maddening to John as the seconds ticked by, he methodically connected them to components within the Terminator’s torso.

  The T-X’s eyes, so much like those of John’s mother, snapped open.

  Carter reached into the aluminum case and flipped a switch. The T-X jerked a final time and then lay there, limp, staring up at her captor. Carter raised his hands like a rodeo cowboy who’d roped and thrown the world’s deadliest calf.

  Members of John’s security teams applauded.

  John lowered his rifle and joined them. “Everybody deserves congratulations,” he said, “but we don’t have time for them, not yet. If there are any Skynet forces within two hundred miles, they’re on their way here. Prep her for transport.” The bottom end of a rope ladder, ten feet too long, thumped onto the floor beside him. He ignored it and switched on his radio. “Target acquired,” he said. “Prepare for incoming. Prepare for withdrawal.”

  There were no confirmations. He didn’t want his outposts to give away their number and locations. His location, by contrast, was no longer a secret.

  The T-X’s eyes remained active, turning to look at Carter, at
John, at Kate in turn. Carter continued at work, making quick, sure modifications to the machinery inside the Terminator. He stood aside briefly for the Hell-Hounds and Scalpers to draw the metal-cable net off the robot and for a pair of technicians to roll in a twentieth-century ambulance gurney. The two technicians, joined by Mark Herrera and Charles Smart, lifted the T-X’s heavy frame onto the gurney, but the gurney’s metal construction held up well to the weight. Then Carter got back to work.

  Finally Carter stood back, a small amber-colored oval, like an inexpensive piece of jewelry, in his hand. “I think she’s still broadcasting,” he said, “though I’ve insulated her transmitting center from the frame of her body, meaning that I’ve deprived her of her primary and backup antenna. So her effective range should be very limited. And here’s her tracer.”

  Kate held out her hand and Carter passed the object to her.

  “All right,” John said. “Implement Withdrawal Phase One.”

  * * *

  The Hunter-Killer was the first Skynet unit to close in on the T-X’s position.

  Its immediate ancestors had been conceived of as flying cars—long carlike bodies with two sets of ducted rotors at either end, they would become the upscale replacement for the family car at some point early in the twenty-first century.

  The Department of Defense helped fund the research into evermore-efficient ducted rotor systems, automated navigation systems, and gyroscopic stabilization systems, and developed its own design from the concept. Narrower and more insectile than the never-completed flying automobiles, the Hunter-Killer was intended as a fully automated, low-altitude aircraft with roles as a reconnaissance aircraft and tank-buster. Armed with sophisticated sensory gear and a number of air-to-ground and air-to-air missiles, it would have excelled at that task.

  Now it was used exclusively to hunt and kill humans, and as it neared the civic center that was the T-X’s last known location, it began to detect numerous signs of human activity.

  Several blocks away, a pair of light recreational ground vehicles, of the sort designated “dune buggies,” moved away from the civic center at high speed. Because they were outbound and possessed no useful contiguous line of sight on the H-K, the H-K designated them as no immediate threat. The T-X’s tracer signal still emanated from the civic center, so the dune buggies were also not transporting that unit away. For the moment, they were irrelevant. The H-K transmitted data on the dune buggies to Skynet and continued its progress.

  The civic center was surrounded by houses, and many of them were indicating heat traces, all near exterior windows. The H-K concluded that the hotter traces corresponded to one or more Resistance fighters currently stationed at window positions.

  From a distance of three hundred yards, it targeted the nearest of the high-heat traces and fired a missile.

  In an instant, the 1970-era two-story home around the heat trace exploded, the heat generated by the missile washing out all other video data from that direction. The shock wave was insufficient to buffet the H-K at this distance. The H-K transmitted a report of one Resistance combat position terminated.

  A split second later, the H-K detected a new heat trace lighting up a street-level engineering element: an open manhole. Because the heat trace began there and then stretched at tremendous speed toward the H-K’s position, the H-K concluded that it was a missile.

  It did not have time to transmit this information to Skynet. The missile hit its forward port rotor housing and detonated, sending shredded remains of the H-K on a ballistic descent into a dozen houses below.

  * * *

  Corporal Ted Burnett ducked back down into the manhole. “Scratch one H-K,” he told his partner. “Not to mention one space heater and battery pack.”

  His partner, Private Jane Connell, kept her attention on the storm drain stretching north and south from their position. “We’ve got more.”

  * * *

  The Presidential Party—John, Kate, the Hell-Hounds, the Scalpers minus Jenna and Smart, Tom Carter, a nervous-looking soldier hefting a wriggling bag, and the two technicians rolling the T-X’s gurney—reached the civic center’s basement and the hole a C-4 charge had blown in one of its walls early that morning, long before the T-X or Skynet had known that Santa Fe was the Terminator’s destination. Again, four of them were required to lift the gurney over the rubble from the detonation and into the storm-drain tunnel beyond the blast hole.

  * * *

  The helicopter, a meticulously maintained Chinook transport helicopter, approached the combat zone more cautiously than its predecessors had. Those predecessors, two H-Ks, now lay at the center of two zones of burning residences, one on either side of the civic center.

  The caution didn’t result from a sense of self-preservation on the part of the helicopter’s flight crew. The flight crew was a single assault robot, a gleaming silvery skeleton with a gleaming, grinning skull that was the stuff of nightmares for Resistance fighters.

  Nor were the passengers concerned. A dozen more assault robots and a T-600 Terminator were the sole occupants of the helicopter’s personnel bay.

  But they had a specific goal and would not be able to carry it out if destroyed. They would be delayed in carrying it out if they were shot down.

  The pilot assault robot read its full range of sensory data and calculated the probable tactics utilized by the destroyed H-Ks. Then, still half a mile from the engagement zone, it set the twin-rotored Chinook down in the middle of the street and broadcast an authorization for the T-600 and its troops to deploy from this point.

  One of its sensor inputs, the tracer signal from the T-X, abruptly ceased. The pilot did not wonder whether she had been destroyed. It merely sat and waited for new instructions.

  * * *

  Sgt. George Mathison, situated behind the second-floor window desk that John Connor had occupied only an hour before, saw the Chinook set down well outside of the engagement zone. He cursed. As a twenty-year veteran of human-machine conflicts, he knew it was too much to hope that wave after wave of Skynet troops would fall for the same tactic, but it sometimes happened, so he always hoped. He kept his eyes open, kept the rocket-propelled grenade launcher firmly on his shoulder.

  Far ahead, even through the smoke drifting across the street from one of the H-K burn sites, he saw movement: two silvery forms advancing fast. Well, that was all right. He had more than one RPG at hand. He felt himself go from a state of readiness to a high internal idle, nervousness that he would have to restrain, for the thousandth time in his life, if he were to remain effective with his weapons.

  In the distance, he heard the chatter of assault rifle and plasma rifle fire. He thought it was from his left, around the side of the building. That meant the assault robots were probably approaching from multiple directions.

  The two he could see were now increasing their rate of approach. Abruptly a stream of plasma pulses erupted from below and to the left of Mathison’s position. That would be the soldiers stationed at one of the exterior sets of doors. Their job, more dangerous than Mathison’s, was to exchange fire with the oncoming units, to keep them busy until they were well within range of Mathison’s RPGs.

  They were getting into range now. Mathison sighted in on the rearmost of the two. Another five seconds, four—

  Mathison’s view of the scene changed. He found himself looking up at the top of the window frame and at the ceiling on this side of it. There was a tremendous, searing pain in his head, but he could do nothing about it, could not even moan.

  The view of the ceiling whipped back down to the street outside and the approaching robots, then to the desktop he’d been leaning against.

  He never saw the sniper robot who had killed him.

  c.13

  John, Kate, and their escorts raced along the storm drain, toward the creek bed where their vehicles had been left and were, if all went well, still being guarded.

  They had a mile or more to travel and only a few minutes to do it in. The farther t
hey were away from the civic center, the better, but as more time passed, more Skynet units would be in the vicinity, reducing their chances for escape. It was a trade-off they had faced many times in their lives.

  Of course, they did everything they could to improve their odds.

  They reached the tunnel turnoff that would lead them to their vehicles. At this juncture, a metal ladder led up to a manhole that had already been opened. The technician with the wriggling bag gave John a brief salute, then climbed the ladder one-handed.

  At the summit, he carefully poked his head out to survey the surrounding street, then lifted the bag up. He untied the closed end, then began to invert the burlap mass.

  He didn’t need to. Even from this vantage point John could see the coyote leap free of its confinement.

  The technician shimmied down the ladder as fast as nominal safety would allow. “Decoy away,” he said.

  “And the collar?” John asked.

  “Still attached.”

  * * *

  Ahead, the entire south face of the civic center was smoking. There were bodies at various windows and doors, humans who had been caught unawares by the improved tactical package of the T-600 commanding the mission. But that Terminator did not enter through the south-end door on the heels of its assault robots. It paused to evaluate new sensory data it was receiving.

  The tracer signal from the T-X had been restored. The T-X was moving. The T-600 requested—and received—triangulation data from all appropriately equipped Skynet units in the vicinity. It called up a map of the region and superimposed the tracer location data on it.

  The T-X was a few hundred yards north of the civic center and proceeding on an erratic northwesterly course. Its pace was not steady. This suggested that it was accompanying one or more humans who themselves did not progress in an efficient manner or that it was stalking them. The T-600 broadcast a new query on her frequency, but as before, there was no response.

  The T-600 broadcast all this data to Skynet in the blink of an eye, and the machine intelligence’s new orders came back in almost that amount of time. The highest probability was that the T-X was either being abducted by John Connor or was stalking him. Either way, the Terminator’s goal was to find the T-X and John Connor.