C.9

August 2029

Outside Hornet Compound

Corporal Wanda Dixon, age sixteen, grinned as she hung up the phone. Yes, the call meant there might be a Terminator in the vicinity. But the certainty of getting out of the stink box only partway into her shift outweighed the possibility of running into one of the murderous machines.

First, Wanda undogged the minibunker’s front hatch. If an intruder found it locked, after forcing his way in, he would conclude that there was another way out; if it were unlocked, no such conclusion was necessary. She squirmed to the back of the stink box and tugged at the fan inset into the wall there. It was the one source of comfort available to the sentries, but it was also the cover for the escape tunnel. It opened out on hidden hinges, revealing the ductwork that brought air into the stink box … and also the second hatch, this one set in the floor a mere two yards in. She slid feet-first into the duct, pulling her assault rifle and field pack with her, and pulled the fan door closed again. The fan continued spinning throughout.

Her rifle had a T carved in the stock, T for Terminator. A year ago, she’d put the kill in on a T-600 her unit had met in the field—her grenades had finished it. That gave her the right to carry a kill-marker. Maybe today would give her the opportunity to carve a second one. Guys appreciated a girl with lots of kills.

Twenty yards from the minibunker, she swung aside a set of what looked like bars permanently embedded into concrete. She was now well within the tree line. Quietly, she moved through the trees, up a slight ridge, until she could look down on the main road and the all-but-invisible front face of the stink box. She pulled her heat-retaining blanket around her, hiding all but her upper face, and waited.

Now she was baking again. Oh, well. At least the occasional stray breeze would cool her face.

She wasn’t too worried about being seen. Even if the intruder was a Terminator, her heat signature was now all wrong for a human, and the little bit of exposed face wasn’t reflecting moonlight—there were occasional advantages to being black in the modern world.

She didn’t have long to wait.

She saw the intruder first as a line—he was approaching from the south, and the rising moon in the east turned him into a shadow spilling across the roadway, disappearing when he was in deeper shadow but materializing in patches of moonlight, always coming closer.

Wanda kept still, straining her ears; there was no sound but the occasional distant animal call, the rustle of wind through the trees around her.

Then he was in plain view below her. A big guy, white, bare-faced, the reflectivity of his skin making a good target of him. He had a big nose and a strong jaw. Nice-looking, she decided. But she also saw that he was broad and muscular enough to be a T-600 or T-800. These days, big guys encountered in dangerous situations were Terminators more often than not. Natural selection was now selecting for leaner men … though that, too, would change, now that the T-X model meant that a disguised Terminator didn’t have to be burly.

Still, he could just be a special-forces guy returning late from a mission or reconnaissance, or even someone from a hidden pocket of survivalists who had stumbled across Hornet Compound. That would be nice.

The intruder passed Wanda’s position and moved on another dozen steps … then stopped and looked to his left.

Wanda bit back a swear word. There was nothing to the intruder’s left, nothing but a gentle slope that led up to the stink box.

There was certainly nothing a human could see. Not even a Terminator, equipped with infrared visual sensors, would be able to detect the heat trace of Wanda’s passage from hours ago when she had arrived at this duty station. But Lucas Kaczmarek, in a lecture Wanda had attended, had stressed the fact that wear patterns in open terrain, such as game trails and footpaths, could be detected by infrared. At the end of the last century, archaeologists had used satellites with infrared cameras to detect ancient roads. In the dark, Terminators could see footpaths and vehicle trails even if nothing warm had been on them recently.

The intruder looked up the slope, directly toward the stink box.

Wanda brought up her field phone and opened the alphanumeric keypad. In the abbreviated text code of the Resistance, she typed in her identification sequence and the letters BOG=T. Bogie is Terminator. She hit the enter button.

She looked back toward the road. The intruder was now a few feet up the slope, but had stopped. Now it was looking roughly in her direction. She gulped, suddenly not so anxious to work on getting a second T carved on her rifle stock.

*   *   *

“Upgrade our alert status to red,” John ordered. “Activate the bait house.”

Kaczmarek nodded at Prescott, who immediately cleared the screen of the pressure sensor readings, leaving behind a command line prompt. He began typing in commands.

Kate moved to a master intercom. She typed in the two-number key for Daniel Ávila’s quarters. “Tamara, you there?”

Lake’s voice came back almost instantly. “Shhh.”

“There’s no time for ‘shhh.’ We’re going to red. Wake Daniel up and get him prepared to move, just in case.”

“Right. Out.”

*   *   *

The Terminator’s head moved side-to-side, a thirty-degree arc. Wanda held her breath. The thing had probably detected her radio pulse, as short as it was, but could not detect her exact position without triangulation; so it was relying on other senses. And even though her heat signature was wrong for a human, it might be the only significant one in the direction of the radio pulse’s source.

In other words, she was in for it.

Then the robot’s head swiveled around to the northeast. It stared at the second slope of the mountain.

Wanda breathed a silent sigh of relief. They’d fired up the decoy house. Once a residence belonging to one of the 1960s-era owners of the Reid Precious Metals Mining Company, it clung to the south face near the peak of the second slope, affording its owner a spectacular view of the mountains. Now it was abandoned … but set up with equipment designed to activate on issuance of a remote control signal.

The button had to have been pressed in Hornet Compound’s security office. A generator in the decoy house would be starting up, creating vibrations and even radio emissions that nearby sensors could detect.

The Terminator would now march up the road, take the right-hand fork toward the decoy house, enter that dwelling, and possibly destroy it. The robot would catalog the state of the residence and determine that a pack of two to four humans had been living there, repairing its generator, and had probably fled at its approach. Once the Terminator was gone, John Connor could decide at his leisure whether Hornet Compound needed to be abandoned, or needed merely to stay dark and quiet for a few months.

The Terminator didn’t march up the road. It returned its attention to the slope it stood on and began climbing once more to the stink box. It entered the minibunker, vanishing from her sight.

Wanda resisted the urge to throw off the blanket and run, or even merely to turn around so she could see the approach to her rear. Even if the Terminator found her exit tunnel and followed it, once he emerged within the trees he would make enough noise crunching through the forest that she would have plenty of warning of his approach.

The Terminator emerged after a minute. It held the stink box’s land phone. As Wanda watched, it yanked the phone from the cable, removed a bulky object from one of its pants pockets, and began wiring the object to the cable.

It didn’t look at the job it was doing. It scanned the skies to the south, past Wanda’s position.

Slowly, slowly, Wanda shifted her attention to the south. She saw nothing unusual there—silhouettes of mountain slopes, with white caps illuminated by moonlight, and the usual spectacle of stars.

One of those stars was moving. She slowly tugged free her binoculars and stared through them.

It was a tiny reddish blip, getting bigger. Through the binoculars, it was more than a point; it slowly resolved itself into a Hunter-Killer, one of the insectile flying drones of Skynet.

Wanda glanced back at the Terminator. It had finished splicing its device into the phone cable and was now descending the slope.

Knowing it could give away her position, Wanda typed new letters into her field phone. HK also. T put gadget on land line. She hit the transmit button.

This time, the Terminator did not react to her transmission. It turned and continued its resolute march up the road, away from her.

Moments later, the device lying outside the stink box exploded. It wasn’t a normal explosion; it was as though ball lightning had decided to erupt there, flashing arcs of electricity in all directions. Wanda heard her field phone erupt for a brief moment in static.

*   *   *

“Gadget on land line,” Kaczmarek repeated. “What the hell sort of gadget?”

Ideas rattled around behind John’s eyes like pachinko balls, and one of them ended up where it belonged. “Get the sentry at the next guard station up to the communications junction box. He needs to cut the cables—”

The bank of land-line receivers against one wall erupted in sparks. The officer on duty there leaped away, hitting the floor, and sparks showered down on him. The monitors on several of the computers in the security office flared up and went black; some others wavered, then went dark as their systems rebooted.

“What the hell,” said Kaczmarek.

“The gadget was some sort of capacitance charge,” John said. “It fed major voltage into the land line. And I’ll bet my right leg that the HK the sentry warned us about was monitoring for electrical activity. It may have detected the surge here, or at least the path of the surge coming this way. The bait house is a no go; that Terminator and its HK are coming straight here.” John resisted the urge to hammer on the nearest table or face. “Lucas, prepare for a siege and evacuation.”

“Right.” Kaczmarek could have let John take over at this point; he was merely going to implement procedures that John had taught him years ago. But this was his compound, his command—at least for the few minutes or hours it took the invading Skynet forces to destroy it. He raised his voice so that all his officers could hear him: “Prepare for an attack and an evacuation to all outbound muster points. Send soldiers to all our internal hardpoints. Alert all sentries and send out word to the other compounds—Hornet Compound is compromised.”

The screen where they’d been receiving the main road sentry’s communications had survived the power surge, and it updated again. The new line of text read,

Persnel chopper fm south

Kaczmarek kept his voice mild. “Now,” he said.

*   *   *

Mike made no effort to sound soothing or reasonable. That time was past. The steady beeping of the compound alarm, which carried to this chamber and to every occupied area of the mine system, punctuated that fact. “Wake up and get your ass out of bed, Daniel.”

“I can’t. I’m really, really here,” he said. It was Daniel’s voice, not Danny’s. Danny seemed to have retreated, disappearing after Kate had left.

“Your stubbornness is going to get you killed. We’re evacuating.”

“But I can still think at both ends,” he continued. “I’ve got my eyes open. I really believe I can remember this time, Mike, everything’s different.”

Mike looked at Lake, and Lake nodded. Each of the women seized one of Daniel’s arms. They hauled him to a sitting position, but his eyes remained closed.

“There’s a mirror over the chest of drawers—oh, my God!”

Mike continued to hold Daniel upright while Lake got his legs swung off the edge of the bed. “What is it?”

“I’m so thin! I can’t believe it. Was I ever that thin? Good-looking, too.”

“You’re still good-looking. And egotistical as a cat. Wake up, Daniel.”

“No, I have to see more.”

Lake hissed in irritation as she pulled from his skin patches connected to wires that led back to the monitoring equipment. “I’m going to get someone who can haul his fat ass around.”

Daniel’s voice sounded hurt. “I heard that.”

“I know.” She dashed out through the door.

“There are Terminators coming,” Mike said, struggling to keep her voice reasonable.

“Dammit, Mike, this is my life.” There was pure anguish in Daniel’s tone. “The half of it that’s gone, it’s right here where I can see it. I need this, Mike.”

“Is it worth dying for?”

“Yes, it is.” His tone brightened. “Hey, a Slinky!”

*   *   *

At the mouth to Reid Precious Metals Mine #3, Tunnel 1, Warthog and Crazy Pete stood in front of the black, rough-surfaced concrete plug that served as the main entrance into Hornet Compound. Engineered to rotate on a vertical steel pivot, the door could be opened by a single person of average strength, but when it was shut and its locking bolts thrown, it was strong enough to hold a Terminator back—for half an hour or an hour, in theory. There was someone standing by behind it right now, ready to rotate it open if the two Scalpers needed a quick retreat.

Retreat wasn’t their plan. Warthog shifted the strap on her shoulder; it bore the weight of the chain gun, the man-portable Vulcan-style machine gun, that she gripped. Crazy Pete had a rocket-propelled grenade in his hands and another on a strap across his back. He grinned at her. He still wore the full beard that had been the style of choice among the bikers that had been his community before J-Day; now it was gray, and his face was seamed like old leather, but he was still capable of wreaking havoc on the enemy.

Warthog, only twelve when Judgment Day had come, had been with him for nearly twenty years now. They had a kid together, a son who, at the age of nine, could field-strip and reassemble any gun from their arsenal in full darkness. Warthog was still amazed that she had a kid. She knew she was as homely as the animal whose name she had taken as her nickname. She was uneducated and foul-mouthed. Before J-Day, these characteristics would not have made her prime wife-and-mother material. But J-Day had been a great leveler, putting survival ability well over beauty and refinement on the list of traits desired in a mate.

Crazy Pete tilted his head. Warthog could hear it, too, the distant thumping that heralded the arrival of the personnel chopper. “Showtime,” he said.

“There it is,” Warthog confirmed. She could see two moving lights in the sky; one had to be the Hunter-Killer the sentry had sighted, the other the helicopter. The ’copter was the greater threat. It could be bringing one, five, a dozen more Terminators. For Skynet, this was a major offensive. But if Crazy Pete could bring down the ’copter when it was still high in the sky, he might wipe out some of those killer machines before they even reached the mine.

“What the hell?” said Crazy Pete. One of the two lights in the sky had suddenly reproduced, splitting into two. The new light leaped out ahead of the others and was racing toward them.

Warthog shouted, “Get—”

The missile launched from the Hunter-Killer flashed between Warthog and Crazy Pete, hitting the concrete plug and detonating before their skin could begin to register the heat of its passage.

The detonation blew their charred remains out through the mine entrance. Warthog and Crazy Pete rained down the slope of the mountain, unrecognizable as human. The force of the explosion shattered the concrete plug, blowing it in pieces off the metal pivot that allowed it to serve as a door. Chunks of concrete cut like bullets and cannonballs through the man stationed behind the plug.