Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt Page 6

  But it had happened again—and again. When John had been in middle school, his mother institutionalized because of what the authorities concluded was paranoia about machines coming to kill her, another, better Terminator had arrived to kill both of them. Again the Resistance had sent a savior, a Terminator almost identical to the one that had first endangered Sarah. Again they had survived. Years later, the pattern repeated itself a final time, as Skynet dispatched the first T-X to kill the now-adult John Connor and the young adults who would someday become his trusted allies and associates—most important, Kate Brewster, daughter of the Air Force general who had helmed the project that created Skynet in the first place.

  The first Judgment Day survivors to garb themselves in decades-old radiation suits and venture forth into the blasted vistas that had once been the world’s proudest cities heard the broadcasts from Crystal Peak. John told them about Skynet and about the Terminators—the bulky T-1, T-5, and T-7 models that now seemed so quaint and crude. But in the early twentieth century those old Terminators had been nearly unstoppable agents of destruction when pitted against humans. He told them how to lie low, to find and grow food in underground hydroponic arrangements, to find or build Geiger counters, make weapons, hide their resources, and dig deep.

  Most important, he convinced the stubborn, the fearful, the justifiably paranoid to help one another. When each person’s instinct was to keep low and hoard resources for one’s own family, John managed, with heartfelt words that carried surprising power, to persuade people to venture out into the danger zones, to carry precious foods and medicines to one another, to bring strangers into their already-overfull homes. It was a gift John hadn’t realized he possessed, a gift Kate did not share, and it was that gift that made John first the leader of a loose confederation of survivors in California and Nevada, then of the growing human Resistance movement there, and ultimately the undisputed Resistance head in North America.

  Even without that gift of persuasion, Kate was invaluable to John’s efforts; daughter of a general, acquainted with many of the surviving Air Force officers in the American West, she brought John a legitimacy and a network of trusting allies he might never have won otherwise.

  It helped that, in those early days, the survivors caught a break not even John had expected. Skynet, charting the plunging numbers of human survival, did not even bother to monitor human transmissions. The machine network was content with knocking down every human community it could detect, a bug-bomb approach to human extermination. When, many months after Judgment Day, Skynet came to the realization that there was a level of human coordination at work that pointed to regular communication and a central leadership, John and Kate had already fled the too-vulnerable Crystal Peak, had taught the other survivors they were in contact with how to broadcast with a reduced chance of being detected or found.

  Now, decades later, they were still leading, still teaching. Things were different. The human population in the Resistance had stabilized. Children were being born at about the same rate their parents were being killed. Human missions of sabotage were denying Skynet resources at about the same rate the machine network was creating new ones.

  But John thought they were winning. Every year the Resistance made new incremental gains—establishing new habitats, subverting Skynet technologies, and creating new technologies of its own. If things continued this way, the humans might someday win a complete victory. But the Resistance was still so fragile, stretched so thinly, that a succession of disasters could doom it and, by extension, the human race. There was a prevailing belief that just the loss of John Connor would be the eventual end of the Resistance.

  So John and Kate did whatever they could to prevent those disasters.

  And now the Hell-Hounds had returned with tales of a mystery, and to John, “mystery” suggested “potential disaster.”

  They sat in a conference room that looked much as it must have in the 1970s when it was built. Spacious, the room accommodated a large circular conference table, a dozen comfortable chairs, side tables, a bank of drapes that covered bare wall but suggested that the chamber was up aboveground instead of forty feet beneath the earth.

  Of course, every item of furniture in the room was aged and worn. The leather-bound chairs had suffered mold damage at some point in the past; every time John moved, rancid smells were squeezed out through the tattered leather covers. The tabletop, once gleaming and shiny, was now scuffed and worn by countless elbows, plates, polishings.

  There was still a shiny spot near his left elbow, and John could lean over it to see his reflection. He decided that, had the history of the world not taken a lethal turn with Judgment Day, he would never have stood out from a crowd. Of average height, he had blue eyes that always seemed dark in muted light and good looks that were better suited to carrying a lopsided, self-deprecating smile than to riveting the attention of followers. There were faint scars on his forehead and cheeks, though nothing to compare to the scar tissue hidden by the camouflage field uniform he was wearing. One did not fight a brutal war of extermination for decades without picking up extensive scars. He was lean, though that was normal in a time when calories were hard to come by; the fact that he had decent muscle tone told anyone meeting him for the first time that he had access to an unusually healthy regular diet, that he was a man of some importance.

  At least he still had all his hair—a silvering brown, it was thick, even shaggy when he spent weeks in the field without paying attention to it. He was glad he still had it, a practical consideration rather than a matter of ego. Even today, some otherwise-rational people unconsciously preferred lending their support to a leader with a full head of hair. And his wife liked it. For those reasons, he was glad that he’d been able to retain it.

  He ran his fingers through that hair, took one last look among the other faces gathered around the conference table and the sideboard where food for the conferees was set up, and said, “All right, break’s over. Now we go to Part Two. Ten, do you have anything to add about the raid?”

  Ten Zimmerman slid into his chair directly opposite John and shook his head. He’d been the focus of attention for the first half of the special meeting, describing in typically meticulous detail the raid on the San Diego Naval Medical Center. As the others seated themselves, he said, “Only that repairs on our T-850 are proceeding; it’ll be mostly functional again within a few days.”

  “All right. Mark. Your thoughts.”

  Mark Herrera, who affected to be less disciplined than Ten, sat slouching in his chair. Now the center of attention, he straightened. “I’ve done some basic analysis of the files we captured from the facility. A lot have to do with the modifications made to Paul Keeley.”

  Kate Brewster, seated beside John, tossed back her graying brown hair and glanced over at her husband before returning her attention to Mark. Her features, at rest, were deceptively girl-next-door pretty, with narrow eyebrows in a graceful curve over dark eyes, a broad nose that humanized her rather than detracting from her appeal, lips that seemed just on the verge of curling up into a smile.

  But they didn’t, not at this moment. She asked, “What modifications?”

  “Some physical. The files and Dr. Lake agree that he’s been implanted with an apparatus that feeds into the sensory interpretation centers of his brain. Basically, it gives him input into the five basic senses. It also includes a radio transmitter and receiver, including a wire antenna that is sort of laced through his scalp. It’s all powered by his body heat. Very sophisticated.”

  “What’s it for?” That was Luis Castillo, head of security here at Home Plate, the Resistance base deep beneath Beverly Hills, California—the center of Resistance organization for all of North America. A stocky, powerfully built Latino, Castillo sported jet-black hair and a thick black mustache, despite his age, which John knew to be around sixty. Castillo was never one for concealing his emotions, and the notion that a man had been modified by Skynet into a transmitter and then brought
into Home Plate obviously distressed him.

  “It’s an interpreter that allows him to experience fictitious situations as though they were real,” Mark said. “I caught a glimpse of what I think was one of those scenarios on what initially appeared to be a security camera. At the time I didn’t recognize the man as Paul, since I’d never seen him without a beard, and I didn’t recognize the woman as the default T-X appearance, as I’d only seen her face on a sketch. In this scenario, the two of them were sitting in a twentieth-century bar, chatting, like he was trying to pick her up. Anyway, the files suggest that he experienced this immense number of these scenarios, in most of which he met this woman and interacted with her in different ways. Each time, he was made to forget the encounter so they could start over with the next one.”

  Michaela Herrera, who went by Mike and was one of John’s scientific advisers, looked troubled. A tall, fair-skinned Latina woman with dark hair, she had a faint set of burn scars on her right cheek, graduating down to her neck, that were commonplace decorations of valor among the members of the Resistance. She was Mark’s mother and retained much of the beauty that had drawn Mark’s father to her in the years before Judgment Day. She said, “So he’s been brainwashed.”

  Mark nodded. “That’s right. Though I don’t know if there was any specific goal or behavior programmed into him, other than causing him to forget his true history so that he’d react naturally and without suspicion to these scenarios they placed him in. I do know that he’s bouncing back from the brainwashing. He’s remembering bigger and bigger pieces of his life in Home Plate, though it’s all still mixed up with his fictitious lives in pre–Judgment Day California. He’s been allowed to read all but the most classified portions of our report on the raid.”

  “What was the purpose of the brainwashing? Of that whole project?” Kate asked.

  Mark shrugged. “It isn’t stated in the files I got. But I have a theory.”

  “Let’s hear it,” John said.

  “The only other T-X whose activities we’re certain of was the one sent back in time to kill you, Ms. Brewster, and your lieutenants-to-be just before Judgment Day.”

  Mark said the words casually, but John felt anything but casual as they were spoken. The hours leading up to the destruction of most of the world’s human population by Skynet were seared into his memory. It took an effort for John to keep emotion out of his voice. “Your point?”

  “The T-X is a specialized design. It has human appearance and chameleonlike abilities so that it can pass among humans. It has advanced and versatile weaponry to destroy humans and Terminators alike. It really only exists for two possible purposes: to infiltrate human compounds here in the present and to be sent back into time and deal with both humans and Resistance-controlled Terminators sent after it. I think Paul was being used to train the T-X to pass itself off as a human far more successfully, far more transparently, than the one sent back to Judgment Day.”

  “Why?” Castillo asked. “That one did all right.”

  Mark nodded. “Sure it did. But it was on a short-term mission.”

  John felt his heart sink. “Meaning you think this T-X is being sent back in time on a long-term mission.”

  “That’s right.” Mark spread his hands, palms up, as if both to apologize and to suggest that this was the only reasonable answer. “If I understand things right, Terminators have been sent back into the past on previous occasions to eliminate you or your mother at points in time where your locations could be precisely determined. My suspicion is that this T-X is being sent back to hunt you down during those periods when you were on the run, much harder to find. It’s a task that might take years to accomplish.”

  “Right.” John looked down and rubbed his neck as if experiencing a sudden pain there. It gave him a moment to think. “Did you get a sense of what precise year they might be selecting?”

  “Not really,” Mark said. “Or, rather, I think they were instructing the T-X in a range of years from the time your mother was a child to the time just before J-Day. I suspect that they’ll send the T-X back to the earliest of those periods and then just let her roam free for the next forty years or so.”

  “Forty years to accomplish her mission.” Kate sounded pained. “That’s an awful lot of time. Hundreds, thousands of points in your chronology when she could kill you or your mother.”

  “Yeah.” John straightened. “So. Recommendations?”

  “Sending a T-850 back to counter her probably wouldn’t be the best solution,” Kate said. “It wouldn’t be able to pass for human for that long. It doesn’t have the learning potential a T-X does.”

  I don’t know, John thought. The 800s and 850s can learn an awful lot, very fast. But he recognized that not all the members of his staff had his mixed feelings for the Terminators. Some had helped him, saved him. None had done the same for them.

  “We need to get rid of Keeley,” Castillo said. “He’s been brainwashed by Skynet. He’s an immediate danger to all of us.”

  “No, that would be a mistake,” Mark said.

  Castillo cut him off with a curt gesture. “Maybe you should wait outside. This part of the discussion might be best performed by John’s inner council.”

  Mark gave him a frosty smile. “Not when that inner council has thinking processes as clogged-up as yours.”

  Silence fell around the table. All present glanced between Mark and John—all but Mike, who covered her face with one hand.

  John sighed. “Mark, that was gross insubordination. Neither your exemplary record with the Hell-Hounds nor your mother’s role in this council can save you from disciplinary action. Unless you can prove to Luis’s satisfaction, not mine, that you’re right and he’s wrong.”

  From the corner of his eye, John saw Kate, recognizing his strategy, smile at him. The expression transformed her into a beacon of good humor.

  Castillo, put off-guard at being put in charge of evaluating Mark’s argument, was suddenly obliged to listen to it. Frowning, he sat back in his chair. He gave Mark an impatient go-ahead gesture.

  “Paul knows where Home Plate is,” Mark said. “He always had. He’s been in Skynet’s hands for a year. That means they either tried to extract the information from him and failed—or never tried. The files on his programming only go back six months—either the older set wasn’t present or I didn’t find them—but I find it inconceivable that Skynet didn’t try to trick or coerce that information from him. Knowing where Home Plate was would have allowed Skynet to terminate the Resistance leadership in one stroke. So Paul never gave that information up. I don’t mean to say that what was done to Paul hasn’t made him potentially dangerous, but when you were saying ‘immediate danger,’ I was hearing ‘traitor.’ Correct?”

  Castillo neither nodded nor shook his head. “Continue,” he said, his voice tight.

  “Since he’s neither an immediate danger nor a traitor, elimination—which I interpret as ‘execution’—is inappropriate. He’s a potential danger. That means he needs to be studied. And since he spent so much time in Skynet’s hands, he’s also a potential asset—in addition to the technical asset we already know him to be. Also correct?”

  Castillo gave up. “Correct.”

  “All right,” John said. “Instruct Dr. Lake to sever the antenna that’s been implanted into Keeley and to set him up with whatever he needs to help his physical and emotional recovery along. Mark, insubordination is insubordination—even if your cogent argument reduces it, in my mind, from gross to minor. I’ll leave it to your commanding officer to implement a suitable punishment.”

  Mark’s face fell just a little.

  “That’s all for now,” John said, ending the meeting.

  Kate’s expression was grave as she watched the other attendees file out. “What do you think?” she asked, her voice pitched low enough that the others couldn’t hear her.

  “I think we’re in trouble.”

  “I think you’re right.”

  Bot
h knew, though neither had mentioned it before the others, that the Resistance would know approximately when and where Skynet sent the T-X. The Continuum Transporter, the time travel apparatus situated in Navajo Mountain and used by Skynet, had a counterpart deep in the ruins of Edwards Air Force Base in California. The Edwards apparatus was in the hands of the Resistance and had been used to send Kyle Reese, a T-801 Terminator, and a T-850 Terminator into the past to counter Skynet’s time-traveling operations.

  What Skynet did not know is that both the Navajo Mountain and Edwards Continuum Transports used the same power source, a power-collecting satellite in geosynchronous orbit above North America. By analyzing data on the power fed by the satellite to Navajo Mountain—its duration, its precise intensity, minute instructions transmitted to the satellite during power discharge—the technicians of the Resistance could determine, to within a few hours and a few dozen miles, where Skynet was sending its robotic agents. And Skynet, still carrying operating code that caused it to ignore certain types of data that it routinely gathered, could not return the favor, could not determine the location of the Resistance Continuum Transport. It was one of the Resistance’s rare, life-saving advantages.

  Only in recent weeks had it been determined that Skynet’s blind eye to the Resistance’s use of the Edwards facility and the power-gathering satellite were the results of programming performed just before Judgment Day by a man named Daniel Ávila. Ávila had caused many cave and cavern systems, military vehicle and equipment reserves, and other resources to disappear permanently from U.S. government databases, meaning that even today Skynet was not aware of their existence.

  But those previous time launches had offered the Resistance another advantage, one they did not possess this time. Since the Skynet Terminators were being sent to places and times where they knew the location of Sarah Connor or John Connor, they could be counted on to go to those locations. This time the T-X would be sent to a place and time from which it would have to begin a slow, meticulous investigation. Instead of heading straight for one of the Connors, it could move in any one of an infinite number of directions. It could not be predicted, and so its movements could not be intersected. Then there was the fact that the movements of the Connors were not as meticulously recorded in some periods as they were for the three arrival times Skynet had already used. John had no idea where exactly he was during some periods.