Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt Page 5

The oncoming enemy was seeking a nonintuitive approach to avoid being seen and targeted until the last moment. Glitch would have done the same under similar circumstances. He did not move. While it was very unlikely that he could be detected if he kept in place—he had already disabled the security cameras in the corridor—it was possible that the enemy would detect him by seismic sensors if he changed positions along the corridor.

  There was another impact from beyond the wall to his left. It was closer. He gauged that the enemy was walking through the walls of adjoining chambers behind that wall. He put the likelihood that the enemy was the T-X at 90 percent or better, with the remaining percentage representing the possibility that the T-X had sent another assault robot or the previously encountered T-600 ahead as a diversion.

  Four steps ahead of Glitch, a heavy metal desk crashed through the wall to the left and slid to a stop against the wall to the right, nearly filling the corridor. Its front, now littered with industrial-green chips of plaster, faced the hole in the wall.

  Glitch aimed for the hole and waited one full second. That was the maximum time Glitch calculated the enemy would take to enter through the hole. The enemy did not do this. That meant it had some other tactic in mind.

  Glitch leaped, twisting in the air as he did so, to land on the desktop, facing into the hole, both RPGs at the ready.

  His enemy did not stand there. Yet Glitch had heard no footsteps to suggest that the enemy had retreated from that position. This suggested a high probability that the enemy was now—

  The desk rose as if hurled upward by an ancient siege engine, slamming Glitch into and halfway through the concrete ceiling. The impact caused him to drop the RPG in his left hand. He kept his grip with the right, but his head now protruded into a second-floor hallway and his arms were pinned to his sides by the concrete that hemmed him in.

  His odds for survival had just dropped precipitously.

  * * *

  The Hell-Hounds clustered just inside an exterior side door while Mark, temporarily relieved of the burden of Paul’s weight by Ten, disengaged the security devices on the door. Satisfied that it would not now alert the facility’s computer, he nodded to the others, readied his Uzi, and pulled open the door fractionally to peek outside.

  He had a view of the same parking lot by which they’d entered the facility. It was just as he’d seen it the last time via the security cameras from the nurse’s station. “Nothing happening,” he said. “No, wait.”

  There was a hint of movement from the right. He extended his head farther out the doorway, reluctant to be offering up an improved heat signature for Skynet forces to detect, and gave that direction a closer look. Then he pulled his head back in and closed the door. “Incoming van,” he said. “It’s our old pal, the T-600.”

  “Probably returning to answer this site’s emergency signal,” Ten said. “What do you want to bet he parks just where he parked before? Mark, ETA?”

  “He’ll be here in another twenty seconds.”

  Ten nodded. “Kyla, count it off.”

  Distantly, they heard an impact. To be audible through the closed door behind them, it had to have been very loud—loud enough to represent heavy construction being destroyed. It was followed a second later by another.

  Paul, still sounding drugged, said, “Mark, who are these guys?”

  * * *

  Glitch readied his self-destruct protocols. They would initiate in two stages, approximately one-tenth of a second apart. The first would pump electricity from a capacitance charge through his central processing unit and memory hardware. The T-X had sophisticated gear and programming that could permit her to reprogram him, should she render him helpless for a few minutes; this charge would make it impossible for anyone to make use of him or to retrieve any part of his programming. The second would detonate a small explosive charge in his chest, doing just enough internal damage to crack one or both of the hydrogen fuel cells that powered him. The resulting explosion would destroy both him and his enemy, plus a sizable portion of this facility.

  He hauled himself upward, trying to climb up to the second floor and free his arms. But he felt something, like two hydraulic vises, grip his legs and pull.

  Glitch was yanked clean of the concrete-rimmed hole and crashed down onto the metal desk, which crumpled under the impact. He looked up to see the T-X nurse, her hands still on his knees, her features expressionless, stare at him for a split second, evaluating him.

  Then she swung him into the near wall. His massive body cut through it like a knife through bread. He felt moments of greater resistance as his torso encountered wooden cross-braces imbedded in the plaster. Then he was back in the corridor again, crashing to the floor, sliding along the linoleum.

  As he slid, he aimed his remaining RPG at her … then dropped it. It was bent, ruined.

  He fetched to a stop against the counter from which he’d taken the RPGs. He rose and casually ripped the countertop from its mountings, then held it before him like a Formica shield.

  It was a laughable defense, of course. It might give him a second of extra time as she tore her way through it en route to him. But he was fighting to delay—and every second was a second.

  She did not invoke her plasma weapon. She wanted to take him more or less intact, to reprogram him.

  That was good. It would give him extra time as she battered him into helplessness. He activated his self-destruct mechanism on a sixty-second sequence. If he survived, with mental faculties intact, he could turn it off again in fifty-nine seconds.

  The T-X smashed his countertop to splinters with her first blow.

  c.4

  Ten, his eye at the doorway, said, “The T-600 is in the building. Ready … go.”

  He led the way, dashing out into the parking lot, his M16 at the ready. He knew Earl would be behind him, Mark and the semiconscious Paul third, with Kyla and her dogs bringing up the rear.

  He could hear smashings and dull booms from the building interior. Glitch was still fighting. That gave them a chance. They had to be well away from the hospital and under some sort of cover before the first Skynet forces did a flyover; otherwise it would be next to impossible to escape pursuit.

  He reached the van. It was unlocked, keys still in the ignition. He settled into the driver’s seat, hanging his assault rifle by its strap from the seat’s headrest, while Earl slid the van’s side door open. The engine caught on the first turn of the key.

  So far, so good. The doors into the hospital remained resolutely closed. If he could get the van turned around and up to speed before my Terminators emerged, he’d be able to outrun them.

  If.

  The van rocked several times, then the door slid shut. Kyla said, “Go.”

  Ten set the van into motion and immediately cursed at its slow acceleration. The Resistance optimized its vehicles, to the extent they could, for peak performance; their vehicles had to carry them to safety, had to hold up after running over assault robots or Terminators. Skynet had no need to put such demands on its own vehicles, and the engine of this van rattled with poor-grade gasoline and scorched cylinders. But Ten got it turned around and began accelerating—slowly, sluggishly.

  He did not turn on the headlights. Better to have to dodge something in the road ahead, glimpsed in inadequate moonlight, than give a flying Hunter-Killer a better opportunity to spot him at altitudes of two or three miles.

  “Earl, as soon as we’re clear—”

  “Really clear—or plausibly clear?”

  Ten snorted. That was the difference between we’ll definitely survive the blast and we’ll probably survive. “Plausibly,” he said.

  Despite his bone-deep loathing of Terminators, Ten regretted losing Glitch. Terminators serving the Resistance were rare and valuable, and attaching Glitch to the Hell-Hounds, a test of whether a Terminator could function with an elite unit in spite of deeply ingrained human hatred of thinking machinery, had been a valid project. But no member of the Resistance could ge
t too attached to tools. In fact, some never got attached to other human beings.

  Now up to something like its full speed, the van raced along the road away from the medical center. In the cracked and starred side-view mirror, Ten saw sudden illumination as the front doors opened and the T-600 emerged. “Now might be the time,” he suggested.

  * * *

  To Glitch, the world was a blur, his surroundings moving too fast, too full of debris, to resolve into coherent images.

  In his visual field, blinking red boxes announced the failure of his left arm, his right eye, of the servos that served him as left-ankle muscles would serve a human. His neck had sustained damage. A protracted effort by the T-X would now allow her to pull his head completely off, as he had done with the lowly assault robot.

  But he was still functioning—and thirty-two valuable seconds had clicked by.

  The world stopped spinning. He cleared away his diagnostics boxes to give some relief to his visual analysis processes and took a split second to get his bearings.

  He was on his back on the floor again, fetched up against the wall. The RPG he had dropped was a yard from him; he would have to scoot along the wall to reach it. The T-X was six yards away and closing fast. He calculated his odds at being able to reach the RPG, aim, and fire it before she reached him at around 28 percent.

  He shoved himself toward the RPG.

  Then the world rocked. He found himself thrown up toward the ceiling. His surroundings became a confusing, spinning mass of fire and darkness, masonry and dust, and one glimpse of the T-X’s face registering a faint expression of surprise. Then new diagnostic boxes proclaiming more failures in his systems popped up, obscuring his view of reality.

  * * *

  Kyla, staring out the van’s rear windows, saw the San Diego Naval Medical Center erupt as if it were happening in slow motion.

  First the darkened windows of the lower floor blew out, their opaque coverings shattered or wrenched free by the fiery explosion behind them. The windows of the upper floors went in sequence as the first-floor walls buckled outward.

  The building arched its back like a startled cat and more fire emerged there, and suddenly brilliance covered the building, making it impossible to make out details. She closed her eyes against the blinding light and heard Ginger whine.

  She was thrown against the seat in front of her as Ten braked. He had to be slowing down to make a loss of control less catastrophic when the shock wave hit them—

  And it did. The van rocked as though a giant had seized it to play with it, and the roar that filled Kyla’s ears could be the outraged howl of an enormous creature. The van’s rear end slewed to the driver’s left. Kyla felt Ten turn into the skid, regain control, and immediately correct course to their original direction of travel.

  Then the impacts began. Kyla had been in speeding vehicles that were being shot at. This was much like that, but the impacts were duller, heavier, as debris from the medical center began to rain on them. There was one almighty bang that caused the entire van to shudder, and then the worst was past. There were only a few more impacts, all smaller.

  Kyla opened her eyes again. Behind them, in the distance, a mushroom-shaped cloud—oranges and yellows limning blackness—rose into the night sky from the shattered ruins of the medical center, and all around the wreckage was a sea of burning debris.

  Above Kyla’s head, the van ceiling was dented in a good five inches. Absently, she stroked her dogs to soothe them.

  “Anyone hurt?” Ten asked.

  “I’m hungry,” Mark offered.

  “Cook and eat our passenger. Are we on fire?”

  “Don’t think so,” Earl said.

  “Good. We’re en route to our rendezvous point. Everyone keep sharp.”

  * * *

  The rendezvous point was the parking garage beneath one of San Diego’s long-abandoned hotels. It had three accesses to the street and more, should they need to abandon their van, to the hotel floors above. Its deeper recesses were surrounded by sufficient concrete to block most radio transmissions.

  With Earl and Ten outside the hotel perimeter, set up to watch for the approach of Skynet forces, Mark and Kyla tried to determine whether radio transmissions were an issue. While Kyla meticulously went over the van, looking for tracers, Mark did the same with Paul, who was stretched out, apparently unconscious, in an adjoining parking space.

  “So who is he?” Kyla asked. She leaned halfway into the driver’s compartment, so her words were a little muffled to Mark’s ears. The driver’s seat was tilted back, exposing the inconveniently located van engine, and Mark couldn’t see her face.

  “Paul Keeley. He’s with the Resistance at Home Plate. Or he was … until he died.”

  “I’ve been at Home Plate most of my life, and I never met him.” She withdrew from her studies of the engine to give him a suspicious look. “And what do you mean, ‘died’?”

  “You probably have met him. You just might not remember it.” Through with the belt pouch and the bundle of clothes Paul had been carrying, Mark turned his attention to the man’s skintight suit. He unzipped the long neck-to-waist zipper and began pulling the outfit off Paul’s shoulders. “He doesn’t make much of an impression. He was a technician, an expert in twentieth-century computer gear and other machinery. Plop a half-melted mass of plastic and metal in front of him, and he’d tell you, ‘Electric can opener, circa nineteen ninety-five.’ Just like that. He was doing some fieldwork at an old Intel plant a year ago when a Hunter-Killer dropped a mess of missiles on the site, wiping out him and his whole team—or so we thought.”

  Kyla returned and glanced over at her dogs, who were nosing through the untidy pile of Paul’s clothes. Then she returned her attention to the engine. “How do you know him?”

  “Well, you know how I love twentieth-century pop culture.”

  “Yes, I know.” There was a world of suffering in her words; she sounded far, far older than her seventeen years. “No human being should know as much as you do about Gilligan’s Island.”

  “Well, that’s just it. One human being does, and it’s Paul Keeley. At the Home Plate mess hall one day, I was holding forth about the portrayal of authority figures in popular comedy—”

  “You know, there aren’t any universities anymore. Nobody to give you a doctorate in dumb-ass analyses of a dead culture.”

  “Shut up. Anyway, and this quiet guy starts correcting my facts and giving me examples he’s seen in books I haven’t read … and from tapes and disks I haven’t seen, that he has in his personal collection.”

  “And that was Paul.”

  “Oh, yeah. Machinery is his profession, but twentieth-century culture is his passion.”

  “So, what’s he doing in a Terminator-run hospital? As its sole patient?”

  “Beats me.” Mark finished pulling the skintight outfit free, leaving Paul naked and unconscious on the pavement, and began minutely examining the outfit for miniature transmitters.

  His progress was slow, though. He was distracted. An idea, a possible answer to Kyla’s question, was starting to percolate in his mind, and he didn’t much care for it.

  * * *

  Two hours later, Ten and Earl returned for shift change, and with them they brought Glitch.

  The T-850 was in poor shape. The right half of his head was scorched, the metal skull beneath it revealed, his eye dull, nonfunctional. His left arm hung limp and his left leg dragged. He had no weapons left.

  But he was partially functional and was repairable. To Mark, that constituted another victory.

  Beverly Hills, California

  Home Plate, center of operations for the human Resistance—in effect, the capital of human government in these post–Judgment Day times—began its existence as a vast number of unrelated construction projects beneath Beverly Hills.

  Some of these projects were heavily built basements and subbasements below skyscrapers and large businesses. Some were sewer systems and storm drain
networks.

  But in those earliest days, most of the ones that were populated were bomb shelters. Many were private shelters, built beneath homes in the 1950s, when fear of nuclear annihilation ran at an all-time high—built by paranoids, by the wealthy and easily panicked, by pragmatists and realists who weighed the odds of nuclear conflict against other things they could do with a sizable amount of cash and decided to err on the side of caution. Others were larger shelters, built beneath government buildings long after the national fear of doomsday had faded.

  Then doomsday came, of course. Skynet, a computer network designed by the U.S. government to coordinate military resources in times of communications breakdown, achieved what could only be described by the survivors as self-awareness, and one of its first conclusions was that there could be only one dominant form of intelligent existence upon the Earth. Carefully, meticulously it maneuvered the U.S. military into a situation where it had to be given control over the nation’s armed forces arsenal. Then it struck, raining nuclear missiles down upon centers of human government, upon resources necessary for human survival, across North America.

  And elsewhere as well. Knowing exactly what would result from such an action, it also rained missiles down on other nuclear powers. Russia. China. North Korea. Even longtime allies such as Israel. These nations, following archaic protocols sometimes referred to as MAD—Mutually Assured Destruction—retaliated in kind.

  In the days that followed, as men and women far from the scenes of thermonuclear annihilation waited for fallout to drift their way and poison them, as the few survivors huddled in shelters near the impact zones, there was one source of information about what had just happened to humankind.

  Broadcasting from a decades-old emergency communications center called Crystal Peak, John Connor and Kate Brewster offered answers and advice.

  John and Kate were the results of what, to them, felt like self-fulfilling prophecies. Before John had even been born, a Terminator had been sent back through time from the current era to kill his mother, Sarah Connor. With the help of a Resistance agent, Kyle Reese, dispatched through time by John himself, Sarah had survived, and Kyle had become John’s father, though he had not survived to learn that Sarah carried his child.