C.10

August 2029

Hornet Compound

The explosion hammered at the ears of the men and women in the security station and surrounding chambers. John stepped out into the access cross-tunnel and looked toward the main tunnel. Smoke was drifting along it. Kate, beside him, took his hand.

“Go on ahead, John,” shouted Kaczmarek. “My crew will bring up the rear.” He addressed the young security officer. “Prescott, you go with them, get them wherever they need to go.”

The young man nodded, rose.

John grimaced. He hated running from a fight. Not that he hated escaping danger; it was just that, as many times as he’d been sent on ahead to lead an escape action while others held the rear against pursuit, often sacrificing themselves, it still amazed him that he was able to command anyone’s respect.

He and Kate, Prescott following, reached the intersection with the main tunnel. To John’s left, he could see the ruins of the concrete plug and the stain, black in this dim light, spreading beneath its largest component. There was no Terminator in sight yet. To his right, the main tunnel led into the mine’s depths; there were men and women there, paused in uncertainty.

The three of them charged toward the compound’s residents. “Get to your evac points,” John shouted. “Compound defenders to the hardpoints. Go!”

They went. John, Kate, and Prescott followed.

*   *   *

The footbound Terminator and the airborne Hunter-Killer were well past Wanda’s position. Now the helicopter was close, flying several hundred feet over the main road.

Wanda didn’t know what variety of helicopter it was, only that it was big, suited for carrying dozens of soldiers—or Terminators—and painted blue or black. It was readily visible, its running and warning lights on, all according to government protocols that had been made irrelevant a decade before Wanda was born.

She lay wrapped in her insulating blanket and cursed herself. Some sentry she’d been tonight. She hadn’t defended anyone, hadn’t earned her daily ration of food.

Well, she still could.

The helicopter was past her now, the eyes in it, all mechanical ones, probably trained on the mine entrance ahead. She pulled the blanket off herself, rolled up to a sitting position, and raised her ancient AK-47.

Helicopters couldn’t carry much in the way of armor, and could have none on their rotor machinery. She steadied her aim, sighting in on the stabilizing rotor at the helicopter’s rear.

She fired, one short burst. Her tracer rounds showed her that she was hitting the fuselage just below her target. She adjusted, fired another short burst, then a sustained burst.

The helicopter slowed and rotated in place, its front end facing her; then it continued its rotation, revealing the door now sliding open on its starboard side. Wanda scurried backward until she was behind the cover of a tree.

The doorway framed men. No, some were man-shaped Terminators, others were silvery Skynet assault troops, similar to Terminators but lacking humanlike skin and clothing. One of the assault robots began to sight in with some sort of advanced assault rifle, a bullpup design Wanda didn’t recognize.

Then the aircraft made an odd noise, a peculiarly animalistic whine, and the helicopter wobbled. It resumed its rotation, swinging the robot in the door around out of Wanda’s sight, and the rate of rotation increased.

Out of control, the helicopter tilted, each new rotation causing it to drift in a new direction. Finally, it slewed over in Wanda’s general direction, picking up speed as its angle of descent grew steeper, and slammed down onto the stink box. It sounded like a giant dropping a large double handful of junkyard.

Wanda ducked fully behind her tree as it happened. She heard and felt something hit her tree with a considerable impact. Orange light sprang up in her peripheral vision as the helicopter’s remains rolled down the slope to the main road and caught fire.

Wanda let out a whoop of victory.

Then she saw gleaming robots and flaming men clamber out of the helicopter wreckage—one, then three, then ten. The Terminators did not bother to roll on the ground, did not worry about patting out the flames consuming their clothes and their flesh. Some of them looked up in Wanda’s direction.

She choked off her victory cry. Wanda sprang to her feet and raced back into the forest.

It was time to run.

*   *   *

John, Kate, and Prescott waited with the crowd clustering in ever-greater numbers around Shaft 2. The open elevator had descended moments ago, overburdened with Hornet Compound dwellers fleeing to their muster points, but it had not been large enough to carry everyone waiting. Nor would it be large enough for the current crowd.

The three of them were well-armed. The operations center armory, one of several caches of weapons and gear in the compound, had been only a few paces from the first hardpoint in the main entry tunnel. Each had a field pack, generic in its arrangement and contents—preserved food, water, handgun, ammunition, field phone, survival gear. John now carried an ancient M16A1 assault rifle, equipped with a 40mm M203 grenade launcher; Kate had a rocket-propelled grenade launcher in her hands and another across her back; Prescott held an AK-47 assault rifle and now wore a vest whose front was heavy with small cans that looked roughly like denuded aerosol containers with the letters WP stenciled on them.

John knew what they were. He had taught enough people to put them together. They were white phosphorous grenades. They were far better against personnel than against Terminators, but a lucky strike with one could get it jammed in a Terminator’s machinery, allowing its high-temperature load to burn its way clear through circuitry.

Gunfire erupted from the long tunnel behind them. Many in the crowd turned to look.

“That’ll be the first cross-tunnel,” Prescott said. “Where the offices are.”

“How long do you think they can hold there?” Kate asked.

Prescott shook his head. “Not long. Our defenses were set up assuming that the front door would hold for a little while. We haven’t had time to move up anti-Terminator forces.”

All three of them were pushed off-balance as the crowd surged a couple of feet forward. John finally heard what others in the crowd must have, the sound of the elevator returning to this level. “This is not good,” John said. “Their forces will be here long before the elevator can get everyone down—”

“This is worse,” Kate said. Her attention was on the shaft, on the elevator rising into place. John turned to look.

Kyla, her two dogs alongside her, the Barrett sniper rifle in her hands, was on the elevator.

The crowd surged forward more. It was obvious to John that they were going to crowd in as soon as the elevator gates lifted, perhaps crushing his daughter, at the very least keeping her from getting where she intended to go. He opened his mouth to issue a command he wasn’t sure the panicky citizens of Hornet Compound would hear or obey.

But Kyla spoke first. As the elevator finished its climb, she said, “Grrr.”

Both her dogs flattened their ears, bared their teeth, and growled. The growls cut through the crowd noise, and the manner of the dogs suggested that they would be happy to eat their way through the crowd. As Kyla lifted the elevator gate, the leading edge of the crowd spilled into the elevator only to her side, well away from the dogs. Kyla marched out of the elevator, her dogs still flanking her, and the crowd melted away in front of her, flowing around her. As she reached her parents, the dogs came within reach of Kate and broke their pretense, wagging their tails.

John and Kate didn’t enter the elevator. “Why the hell are you getting off on this level?” John asked.

Kyla patted her sniper rifle. “Doing my job, Daddy.”

“Did Ten tell you to come up here and play Custer’s Last Stand?”

“Earl is helping Ten out through one of the escape tunnels. I don’t know where Mark is. I’m on my own, ’cept for Ripper and Ginger.” Kyla was using her reasonable voice. It was the same as Kate’s reasonable voice, in fact. John hated that. It was so hard to argue with.

“Kyla—”

“I’ll take orders from John Connor, but not from Daddy. John Connor would tell me to do exactly what I’m about to do. I have maybe the one weapon in the compound that can sometimes eighty-six robots without blowing everything up in a thirty-foot radius.”

John forced himself to cool down. He counted to three. He couldn’t afford to waste time by counting all the way to ten. “John Connor would want to know your escape plan.”

“Take the second cross-tunnel from the front entrance up into the Old Workings, follow it to the Angle Shaft, follow that up to air shaft E-5, which is the third shaft without mine car rails on the way up. It exits on the south slope at about two hundred feet up. That’s the long route, but the dogs don’t do so well on vertical climbs, so I can’t take the main shaft route.” At John’s perplexed look, she said, “I always know the escape routes, even if I’ve only been in a place a few minutes. My daddy taught me that.”

John felt himself redden. Inside, John Connor the leader was locked in a wrestling match with John Connor the father.

John Connor the father was the first to weaken. He knew his little girl was right. Admitting it felt like taking a knife in the guts.

Kyla read her father’s face. “I’ll be all right, Daddy.” She gave her father a quick kiss, accepted a hug and a kiss from Kate, and then turned to trot back along the tunnel.

“She argues just like you,” John said. “It’s not fair.”

“For once, you’re right,” Kate said.

The elevator was now descending, once again too crowded with escapees, and the crowd here was thickening. “Air shafts,” John said.

Kate looked confused. “What about them?”

“We can make sure her escape route stays open. Prescott, do you know the air shaft she was talking about?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Lead the way.”

Prescott slung his AK-47 over his shoulder. He moved to the edge of the shaft but away from the elevator loading zone, where a waist-high wooden rail kept the unwary from accidentally stepping out over a drop of more than a thousand feet. He stepped across the rail, turning around as he did so, and clung to the rail with one hand as he reached over with the other to grab a support John and Kate couldn’t see from their angle. He swung out over the emptiness, got his feet on the rungs, and began climbing.

Kate and then John followed.

*   *   *

Kyla and her dogs moved at a trot up the tunnel toward the main mine entrance. There was no foot traffic headed her way. Anyone left behind would now be invaders or defenders. The crowd at the elevator was still growing as more evacuees arrived by way of side tunnels.

She passed a cross-tunnel. To the left, she knew, it led to a ramp leading up into the Old Workings, the portions of the mine that had been played out in the 1890s. That was her escape path.

There was more gunfire from ahead. It was sustained fire. That probably meant a robot or Terminator was doing the shooting. Ammunition was too valuable a commodity, and assault rifles too prone to jam, so you fired in short bursts if you didn’t want John Connor to chew you up one side and down the other.

Ahead, the tunnel sloped up and slightly to the left. That was good. Intruders headed this way would have to expose themselves progressively without having a good look at the section of the tunnel they were approaching. Somewhere, yards beyond the turn, would be the compound’s first hardpoint, a heavily defended station set up with weapons that would slow or destroy invading Skynet troops … in theory.

Kyla knelt where she was, extended her rifle’s bipod legs, and set up, lying at full length. She rapidly disengaged the scope and pocketed it. At this short range, the scope was worse than useless. She flipped up the front and rear iron sights that Tony Calhoun had meticulously affixed to the barrel and receiver before she was born. “Listen,” she said.

Ripper harumphed and lay at her feet. Ginger took up her preferred position alongside Kyla. In normal sniper setups, whoever was doing her spotting, usually Mark, was there, so Ginger always appreciated the times when there was no spotter present.

Kyla concentrated on slowing her breathing as she waited.

*   *   *

The air shaft was not large enough for walking purposes. Prescott, Kate, and John crawled across rough-cut stone in a tunnel no more than four feet in diameter, and John could feel his knees being reduced to bloody mulch through the material of his pants. Electrical cables ran the entire length of the tunnel.

They reached a booster fan that filled the whole tunnel. It was powerful enough that, at a distance of a few feet, John could feel it tugging at him, could feel the air flow behind pushing. Like most such obstacles in a Resistance compound, the fan was designed to open. Prescott pulled a lever at the fan’s base, unlocking it, and swung it aside. When Kate and John were past, he reset the lever, followed them through, and pulled the fan back into place. John heard it lock as it resumed its normal position.

By the time they reached the exhaust fan at the tunnel’s end, John’s knees were bleeding through his garments, and though it was dark, he knew Kate’s had to be, as well. She hadn’t made any comment to suggest that she was in pain. Prescott undogged the exhaust fan, and a few yards farther, they were able to look out over the mountain’s slope and the old mine workings.

In the middle distance, something was burning. “That’s the helicopter,” John said.

“That’s about where the contact point was, the stink box,” Prescott breathed.

Kate went flat and crawled up to the lip of the air shaft so that she could look straight down the slope. “I don’t see anything moving.”

“Up, up.” John pointed.

Perhaps half a mile away, the Hunter-Killer hovered. It was about three hundred feet off the ground, a tiny artificial light that constituted Skynet’s eye on the scene.

“Can it see us, sir?” asked Prescott.

“Yes. But we’re a tiny infrared blip it’ll interpret as one to three people. And at this range, it’s not going to worry that we can do it any harm—most of our weapons are too weak or inaccurate at this distance, and those that aren’t, we’d be using with radar targeting, which it could detect.”

“But we have to eliminate it,” Kate said. “So we can escape, so Kyla can escape.”

“Which means drawing it in,” John said. He knelt beside his wife and gauged the slope below. In the moonlight, which he knew was often deceptive, it looked manageable. “I’m going to go down there, fire on it, draw it to me. You two move back so that your heat signatures begin to dissipate. It’ll assume I’m the only one. When you hear gunfire, get back here and open on it with the RPGs.”

“Sir,” said Prescott, “let me do that. I know the face of the mountain a hell of a lot better than you, no offense meant.”

“None taken.” John clapped him on the shoulder. “Good luck.”

*   *   *

The shooting had been over for about thirty seconds. Now Ginger growled quietly.

Kyla forced herself to remain relaxed. Though neither could see one another, she and the robot descending the tunnel were each aware of the other. She knew it was coming because Ginger said so. The robot knew that she, Kyla, was here because it could detect reflections of her heat signature even around the curve in the tunnel. Now it was just a question of whether the robot did what she wanted it to … or she did what it wanted her to.

Ahead, she saw shadows move. Then a red light appeared, descending as the Terminator whose eye it was came down the tunnel toward her.

She cursed to herself. The Terminator had been burned or damaged to the extent that one of its mechanical eyes was exposed, but not both. As it was still in shadow, she couldn’t make it out well enough to know whether she was seeing its right eye or left, so she couldn’t estimate the contours of its head.

“Ginger,” she whispered.

Ginger’s head came up.

“Run.” She hated to do it, to use her own companion as bait, but the curve of the tunnel meant that Ginger would be exposed only for a fraction of a second.

Ginger wheeled and fled. Kyla knew the dog was happy to be running. This was a game, and she’d be rewarded for playing.

The Terminator opened fire, the muzzle flashes from its assault rifle illuminating it and the tunnel around it. Kyla, far enough away not to be dazzled by the display, could see its outlines.

She squeezed her trigger. The Barrett kicked back into her shoulder, most of the recoil absorbed by the weapon’s heavy weight, its muzzle brake, its bipod, and the thick padding of its stock.

The Terminator lurched backward and fell mostly out of sight; Kyla thought she could still see the outline of one leg. It stopped firing.

Kyla whistled. Ginger happily trotted back up to her, lay down beside her again. Kyla picked up the expended brass from the tunnel floor—reloadable cartridges were a precious resource.

She racked the bolt to chamber another round, then waited. If the Terminator was only damaged, it would be up again within a few seconds, half a minute, after it rebooted and its internal repair circuitry did whatever power and data rerouting it needed to. Even if it was dead, one more kill for Kyla’s record, there would be another soon.