Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt Page 21

  What he hadn’t known, what he hadn’t guessed was that it was also a more ordinary radio transceiver. Eliza could communicate with it directly—once they were both close enough, since both of them had had their long-range antennas clipped. She could even broadcast data to supercede what his senses were actually observing. His eyes had seen the Sarah Connor face, his implant had superimposed Eliza’s face, and the two images had duked it out, causing his vision to blur.

  Nor had he realized that he had been programmed for certain types of behavior. To fall asleep on command. To flush his short-term memory when obliged to.

  Knowing what had happened made it better. He concentrated on the physical sensations he was feeling, the vibration of the handlebars in his hand, the bike between his legs.

  He roared up behind the dune buggy and opened fire once more.

  * * *

  The T-X reconfigured her hand into her most formidable weapon: her plasma cannon.

  This was not the comparatively weak plasma weapon used by the Resistance and by Skynet’s own assault troops. The cannon she carried could destroy a small building or the most formidable armored vehicle with a single shot. A good shot was certain to eradicate a T-600 Terminator and would cripple or destroy later models as well.

  Through the hole where her windshield had been, she aimed the weapon at the Hummer ahead. Atop the vehicle, a man—no, a T-850—was struggling to brace himself and bring his own weapon, a carbine, into play.

  The T-X heard plasma gunfire from behind. Simultaneously, the dune buggy’s rear end slewed to the right. She fired as it happened, and her pulse blast went high, far to the left of the Humvee.

  With her right hand configured as a cannon, she had only her left to control the dune buggy, and this time it wasn’t enough. She tried to turn into the skid but the world tilted up toward her. Suddenly her surroundings were a blur of sky and pavement, of mountainside and loose rock.

  Patiently, she waited for the inconvenient ride to end.

  * * *

  Glitch leaned down to peer through the driver’s-side window. “Scalpers-Two is rolling,” he said. “Suggest we proceed in our current direction at full speed.”

  “Thanks,” Carter said. “I’d never have figured that out by myself.”

  “You are welcome. Tell me more about your thinking processes.”

  * * *

  The dune buggy’s mad roll took it leftward, toward the mountain slope. Paul angled around it to the right, blasted past the moving obstacle, and roared on another hundred yards in the Humvee’s wake. Then he downshifted, slowed, and turned to look.

  The dune buggy was a burning ruin.

  Eliza climbed out of it, seemingly undamaged. Her right hand was gone, replaced by spiky, angular apparati with blue energy crackling around the tips. Paul did not find this view at all comforting.

  She looked at him, then began running toward him.

  Slowly, carefully, he braced the plasma rifle on the handlebars, leaned down to sight along its barrel, and fired.

  His plasma burst caught her in the thighs and knees. She went down hard, skidding half a dozen yards in his directions. Now she was only eighty yards away.

  She stood. She seemed a little the worse for wear. There were small craters in her thighs, and one knee was blackened, with a flap of what looked like skin hanging loosely from it. But her face was impassive. You’ve proven your point, Paul. You’re a formidable fighter. I’m impressed.

  “That’s an emotion you’re incapable of,” he shouted.

  As an emotion, yes. As an objective analysis, it is valid. Having proven your point, you should have nothing left to prove. I invite you to return to us.

  “Does the offer come with a bubble bath?”

  She stood silent for a moment. I don’t know what that is.

  “Then I’ll have to decline.”

  She charged him again. He fired a second time, his burst catching her in the torso, in the gut.

  Eliza twisted and went down, again skidding for yards from the sheer momentum of her run. Now she was fifty yards from him.

  Then she stood up. Her body was decorated with plasma damage. He could see portions of her endoskeleton. No more blue light danced around on her arm. Her hand slowly returned to its human form.

  Another few times and I’ll destroy her.

  The humor of it took him as hard as a blow to the gut. He bent over, laughing.

  What is funny?

  “What you just tried to do. Maybe I’m stupid, Eliza, but I’m not that stupid.”

  She frowned, a very human expression of confusion, and took a step forward. I don’t understand.

  “Sure you do. You have the Terminator world’s best internal systems. Somehow, they’re not repairing the damage I’m doing to you … and yet your clothes aren’t being torn to pieces by all the pavement surfing you’re doing. Because your autofixing routines are automatically repairing your fake clothing except where my so-called battle damage is. You’re trying to fake me out—”

  She charged again.

  He pointed the barrel of his plasma rifle down, at the motorcycle’s gas tank.

  Eliza stopped.

  “As I was saying, you’re trying to convince me that you’re picking up a lot of damage. But that’s not the truth. You’d let me think that I shot you to pieces, and you’d ‘die’ almost within arm’s reach. Then you’d get up, finish me off, and use this dirt bike to catch up to the convoy. Because you can’t do it on foot. This dirt bike is your only chance.”

  Now she spoke aloud. “If you damage the machine, I promise I will kill you. I will pull your arms and legs off. I will tourniquet the stumps. You will die in as much pain and misery as your species can endure. But if you give me the machine, I swear I will not harm you. I will give you one day’s head start. You can find your way to a human nest. You can survive.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “If you turn and flee, I can shoot you down before you get out of range. Your only options become to destroy the machine and die or give me the machine and live. Don’t you want to live?”

  “Sure I do. But I want something else more.”

  “What?”

  “To beat you. For what you’ve done to me. Every second we wait here, that convoy gets farther and farther away. You’ll never catch up to it. When you finally give up trying to figure out how to get this dirt bike and you jump me, I blow it up and you lose. Get it?”

  “I get it,” she said.

  Then her face deformed, her head snapping back as though it had been struck by the baseball bat of the gods. Paul saw a crater erupt in the liquid metal of her skin, revealing the case of the endoskeleton skull beneath. She staggered backward.

  Then Paul heard the crack of a rifle in the distance.

  He turned, and it seemed impossibly slow to him. Almost a half-mile away, a bright yellow because of its engine heat, was the front end of an SUV, stationary on the road. Behind the open passenger-side door stood a human figure.

  He couldn’t make out details at this range, but the figure’s posture changed, arms lowering, cradling a long pipelike object—

  Kyla and her sniper rifle.

  There was a clang as Eliza’s body hit the pavement. Paul spared her a look. The liquid metal was taking shape again over her skull, restoring her face to its impassive original beauty. Her eyes were blank, her head turning back and forth as though she were sightless.

  Rebooting.

  He didn’t think Kyla’s rifle could destroy the T-X, but it could delay her. He spun the bike’s rear end around and accelerated toward the SUV.

  He was halfway to it when he saw Kyla aim again, bracing her weapon in the passenger door window. Paul leaned to the left, hugging the mountain slope.

  Kyla fired. Paul saw a flare of whiteness from her rifle barrel and heard a ripping noise as the bullet passed close to his ear. Ahead, Kyla leaped into the passenger seat and the SUV, lumbering, turned around.

  Paul flashed past t
he slower-moving vehicle at full speed. He caught a glimpse of Mark Herrera in the driver’s seat. Then he was far ahead of it. The SUV accelerated in his wake.

  PART 3: OPERATION BLOWFISH

  c.17

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  Stinger Compound, like Home Plate, was a human habitat lurking beneath the ruins of what had once been a site of human luxury.

  In this case, that luxury was the rapid elimination of disposable income. The center of operations of Stinger Compound was a nexus of tunnels connecting the subterranean levels of what had once been the biggest, gaudiest, and wealthiest casinos of the Strip.

  And even today, decades after the notion of income, much less disposable income, had faded to the stuff of legend, the people of Stinger Compound were surrounded by memories of those colorful days. The deep tunnels of the compound were decorated with slot machines, some of them still functioning. Old blackjack and poker tables, the felt on them flaking and stained, were still in use as mess hall and conference tables. Walls were decorated with posters advertising acts performed by long-dead entertainers.

  The coordinators of the compound had given John Connor and his retinue a wing set aside for visiting dignitaries. It was a narrow corridor lined with rooms: secondary security offices, a smallish conference room, men’s and women’s bathrooms, an old money-counting room now stripped of irrelevant machinery. By the standards of visitors’ quarters in the Resistance, the corridor was lavish.

  These quarters didn’t even smell bad. The officer in charge of the compound had a thing about cleanliness. Everything smelled like old cleansing chemicals and primitive lye soap.

  Paul didn’t care. He sat in a comfortable high-backed chair and waited for John Connor and Kate Brewster to tell him his fate. They sat on the opposite side of the conference room table and whispered to one another. Glitch sat at the end of the table, steadily regarding Paul from behind sunglasses.

  Paul, John, and Kate were the only humans in the room. Paul appreciated that. It was good to have a little privacy with which to receive his sentence.

  Finally John and Kate looked toward him again. “All right, Paul,” Kate said. “Thanks for the report. I think we’re done here.”

  Paul half-rose, then, confused, sat down again. “Um, I think I’m missing something.”

  “Such as what?” she asked.

  “Such as what? Uh…” He struggled for the words. “Such as what I need to do now. I can’t fix anything I’ve broken, so…”

  Kate nodded. “So you need to know how to pay for it.”

  “Yeah.”

  John said, “Were you lying to us just now?”

  “No, sir.”

  “About anything? Even self-deception? Even slanting words so that your role in things sounded a little better than it should have?”

  “I don’t think so.” If anything, his debriefing session had been more in line with a confession than anything else.

  “Well, if you were telling the truth, the absolute truth, then you’re not to blame for your actions. Are you?”

  “I don’t think anyone else will have that perspective on it, sir.”

  John nodded. “You’re right. Your actions, however far they were from your wishes, cost the lives of two special operatives, and a third is being patched together now for injuries that will keep him out of action for weeks or more. They also cost us the T-X, the goal of the whole mission. And because we didn’t get the T-X, the four additional lives we lost in Santa Fe were thrown away. The survivors of those six people are not going to be charitable, even if it wasn’t your fault.”

  “I guess maybe I need to ask your advice about that.”

  John took a long breath and considered. Finally he said, “If you, pardon the cliché, put your nose to the grindstone, and do very good work for the rest of your life, and keep your head down, those people aren’t going to hate you any less sixty years from now than they do today.”

  “Oh.”

  “So I suggest you give up trying, worrying about it.”

  “Or,” Kate said, “find some way to make them think differently about you. The people you’re worried about are going to hate you until they can’t hate you anymore. So what’s going to change their minds?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We don’t either, Paul,” she said. “But let me ask you something. All the way on the trip back, you’ve been feeling the guilt of what happened. I’m curious as to whether it’s what you would have felt if it had happened just after you were rescued. Or just before Skynet caught you.”

  He thought about that. What would he have felt before?

  The answer came to him without trouble. Sorry for himself. He would have felt sorry for himself.

  And he didn’t. Now he was just worried about …

  … getting on with his life.

  He was able to look her in the eye. “I suspect it would have been a lot worse. Thank you, ma’am.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Paul threw them a civilian’s half-salute and left.

  * * *

  In the compound medical ward, Paul sat in a wooden chair beside the bed where J. L. lay. The teenager was restless in sleep, probably from the pain of numerous broken bones. His entire right shoulder and arm were encased in a plaster cast. A sheet covered his torso and legs, but Paul had been assured that there was only abrasion damage there—a nasty case of road rash.

  He’d been asleep since Paul had arrived. Paul decided to take the medic at his word that J. L. might not awaken until morning. He rose and headed out into the hall, pulling the door shut behind him.

  Entering the brightly painted hallway from a far door were Jenna the Greek and Lieutenant Sato. Jenna’s face twisted into an expression of anger when she saw Paul. Paul sighed and readied himself.

  She charged over and stood nose to nose with him. “I can’t believe you came here,” she said, her voice a hiss. A low-volume hiss, he noted. She might have been angry, but she wasn’t about to awaken her injured friend. “You goddamned disrespectful traitor. I ought to kill you right now. Isn’t it enough that you killed Smart and Nix? You have to come here and torment the one survivor?” Sato’s hand fell lightly on her shoulder, but she did not acknowledge it.

  “I’m no more a traitor than the guy who fails to raise an alarm because a Terminator has just torn his heart out,” Paul said. “A machine used me before I figured out how to keep it from happening ever again. And because of it, two of your friends are dead and another one’s hurt. And I’m sorry. But I’m not going to choose not to pay my respects to J. L. because of it. And I’m not going to be exiled from the human race.”

  “Yes, you are,” Jenna spat. “You deserve to be. You’re not human. You’re like Glitch. You’re like the T-X.”

  “What I’m not is your whipping boy.” He pushed past her and left.

  * * *

  Jenna watched him go, and when Sato spun her around to face him there was still an ugly look of vengeance in her eyes.

  “Give it up,” Sato said. “If the brass thought he was a traitor, they would have dealt with him on the trip back. It’s that thing in his head, the implant, and he says he’s on top of it now.”

  “He’ll never be on top of it. Respectfully request permission to go and put a bullet into the implant.” There was no humor in her voice, on her face.

  “Denied.”

  “I’m going to ask again the next time he gets someone killed. Or maybe next time I won’t ask.”

  He pointed past her, into J. L.’s room. “March.”

  * * *

  Paul woke up out of a dream. It was a nice dream. At least he thought so until he remembered who and where he was. He and Eliza lived on a farm with their three kids, and every year the wheat grew taller and better.

  He sat up as memory returned. It’s a lie, an awful lie, he told himself. I’d never become a farmer. Then he laughed.

  He looked around. He was once again in his tiny but gloriously private
room in Home Plate. Dim light from a single LED, inset in the door jamb to keep sleep time from being totally dark, showed him its contours.

  There were a few more items here now. He had the contents of the backpack he’d carried away from the Operation Fishhook debacle. He’d traded some repair work on a portable compressor for a wooden chair. The weapons he’d scavenged from the attack on the Scalpers leaned up against the wall by his head; no one had ever called for their return. The IR goggles from the truck cab hung, powered off, from a wooden peg in the wall.

  And miles away at surface level, in a depot set aside for officers, enlisted personnel, and technicians lucky enough to have personal vehicles, was his dirt bike.

  He had things. He was real again.

  He scooted back to lean against the wall and thought about what he was going to do.

  * * *

  It was the middle of the night, so there was only a skeleton crew on duty in the compound’s command and information center. He showed the ID card Tom Carter had given him to the guards at the perimeter, then made his way through the labyrinth of halls that had once been a government-building bomb shelter to the set of rooms he was looking for. Power cables and data cables snaked through these halls, signs that he was near what he wanted.

  The door had GEO/POLIT stenciled on it, and the only reason it could close was because someone had thoughtfully cut a hole in its base for cables to run through. He pushed it open and looked in. Like many of the offices he’d worked in, it was lined with desks, tables, and equipment racks, all of them heavily loaded with computer gear.

  There was someone seated in front of one of the computer setups, a thirty-something woman, lean almost to the point of emaciation, her long brown hair in a braid. She peered over at him through wire-rimmed glasses that were probably older than she was. “Yes?” she said.

  He entered and handed her his ID card. “I need some help. I’m trying to find a place. I know what it looks like and kind of where it is.”

  She looked over his card and then shot him a look. “You’re—”