C.13

August 2029

Sierra Nevada Mountains, California/Nevada

Mark Herrera moved up the mountain slope along a game trail. It had to be a game trail; it had started a thousand feet down the mountain in a little runoff pond and was still worn, still being used. There were no Human Resistance compounds near here, so the only alternatives were that it was being used by humans unknown to the Resistance or by animals.

The trees here were green but wilted, desperate for water. Even winters on these slopes were comparatively arid; summer was a waterless nightmare. Much higher, and there’d be little to no vegetation at all.

He took a look around. He was ascending this slope along its southwest face. The sun was setting but still well above the peaks behind him. It gave everything here—stone, tree, his own flesh—a golden glow. There was no sign of human or machine activity, no sign there ever had been.

He keyed his lapel mike. “This is Hell-Hounds Two,” he said, speaking slowly and distinctly. “Assemble on my position. We’ll camp here for the night.”

He received three verbal acknowledgments. It sent a shiver up his spine, taking two or three times as long as was absolutely necessary to send a radio message, but that was his mission.

Ten, Earl, Kyla and her dogs reached him within twenty minutes. They looked around a little longer, found a clearing that was admirably suited to camping, and set their packs down there. Then, as the sun dropped to and finally behind the western peaks, they went scavenging, spending a long hour dragging firewood back to the clearing. Ten didn’t participate; his ribs were freshly healed, and all the walking they were doing had already taken a toll on his energy reserves.

It didn’t take that long to find one fire’s worth of wood. In these dry summer conditions, they had enough fuel for one fire within minutes. But by the end of the hour, they had assembled wood for six fires around the clearing.

They set up tents—of ratty canvas and the poorest tarps that they’d been able to acquire from Hornet Compound’s survivors. When they were done, as twilight began to set and they lit off the fires, the encampment looked as though it had been set up for twenty or thirty people.

Their encampment last night had looked much the same.

Now, before it grew too dark to move, they headed out again, moving at a brisk pace despite Ten’s bruised ribs and Kyla’s minor gunshot wound, to a site two miles away—farther up the mountain, where the trees were far more sparse but the rock crests and overhangs were far more numerous, and made their own smaller, colder camp.

They looked down on the glows of the untended fires from the comparative safety and seclusion of a cleft beneath one overhang. Heat-insulating modern blankets were draped before them, leaving only narrow gaps through which they could see.

Earl, chewing unenthusiastically on a hunk of venison jerky, said, “Children, what we need is some marshmallows. And graham crackers and chocolate bars. We could make s’mores.”

Ten snorted. “You older folk ought to refrain from teasing the children like that. There’s no such thing as marshmallows. Or Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.”

Mark, lying atop his sleeping bag and almost dozing, his eyes closed, said, “And when they got home, the boy got out and went around to let the girl out of the car, and there, hanging from the door handle, was a bloody hook.”

Earl just shook his head. “So, so cynical.”

“No, that’s the only way the story makes sense,” Mark protested. “The guy with the hook for a hand is obviously a T-600 sent back in time to eliminate teenagers who will someday grow up to be a part of the Resistance. It goes on a killing spree and the police concoct this story of a maniac escaped from a mental institution. It has several run-ins with the police and gets damaged. By the time it catches up to the last couple, it has no weapons and it’s falling apart. It grabs for the girl’s door, the car speeds off and tears its hand away when it goes.”

Kyla, sitting against the stone wall at the back of the overhang, looked at him. In the darkness no one could see her face, but her voice dripped with an odd combination of wonder and revulsion. “Mark, keep that up and I’m going to have the dogs kill and eat you.”

“You’d never poison your dogs that way.”

“So what happens to the T-600 afterward?” Earl asked. “It wouldn’t stop there. It’d keep on coming.”

Kyla sighed. “You’re just encouraging him.”

Mark stretched and opened his eyes. “I’m not sure. Urban legends tended to end where they got their maximum scare. The bloody hook is the scare. But, you know, the detectives could show up and shoot it full of holes, or it could dash after the boy’s car and get flattened by an eighteen-wheeler when it reaches the highway. Or it could just have had a power glitch and fallen over in a ditch, only to be revived at some later time, for another urban legend, by some guy who finds it, takes it to his garage workshop, and repairs it bit by bit…”

“A cautionary tale about messing with technology you don’t understand,” Ten said.

“Now you’re getting it,” Mark said.

“Ginger, Ripper, kill them.” The dogs weren’t trained to respond to the word kill. They sat where they were, wagging their tails as Kyla stroked them.

“I’m not sure it’s that silly,” Earl said. He took a drink from his canteen and capped the container. “In the story, the bit about seeing the hook—the audience is supposed to get a thrill of horror. I’m not certain it’s all that different from what you feel the first time you see a machine that’s headed your way to kill you. And I’m also not sure that it’s a bad thing to have people used to that feeling by the first time it happens to them for real.”

Kyla said, “When was that for you, Earl?”

“Judgment Day.”

The others looked at him, though he was barely more than a silhouette. Ten said, “You saw a Terminator on Judgment Day?”

“Yep.”

“The T-X or the T-850, when they were tearing up half of Los Angeles?” Ten was familiar with the history of the Terminators sent back through time.

“Nope.”

“Oh, that’s right, you were stationed at Edwards. You were there when the T-1s went on their rampage and killed everyone on base.”

Earl shook his head. “Not then, either. It was that same morning, hours before the uprising at Edwards. By the time all those T-1s went on their rampage, I was at a hospital in Bakersfield with a hurt buddy and a box full of munitions. Not being on base saved my life then, and that box saved my life in the years to come.”

The others looked at him. They hadn’t heard this story before.

“So, what did you see?” Kyla asked.

“It was a T-1, I think. I didn’t get too good a look at it. It was shooting at me. I tend not to look straight at things when they’re shooting at me.”

“Good tactical sense,” Ten said. He stretched, then flinched as the motion tugged at his injury. “The T-1 was loose that morning?”

“Pretty much. I was—wait a second.” Earl leaned forward so his head protruded from between two of the hanging blankets. “Something’s going on down there.”

Mark scrambled over as the others did to peer out past their canopy of blankets.

Far down the slope, the fires of their decoy camp still glowed. But Mark counted seven of them, not six.

One of them, off away from the others, moved. Then a fireball erupted in the middle of all the others, joining them into a single blaze that reached up several hundred feet.

Moments later, the boom of the explosion reached them. They pulled back away from the curtain—all but Earl, who drew his head back within their enclosure, but still kept his eye to a gap. “Good,” he said. “I’ll take first watch, children.”

“You’re welcome to it.” Mark crawled back atop his sleeping bag and stretched out again.

For two days, they’d been moving roughly southwest through the mountains. During the day, they’d travel with the usual precautions that units in the field employed. At night, they’d set up large camps precisely in the hope that Skynet forces would detect and destroy them.

For if Skynet thought the Hornet Compound refugees were headed southwest, it wouldn’t look for them quite as hard in the areas they actually were traversing.

And that meant they had to do this again, and again, until they got a transmission from Tortilla Compound indicating that the Hornet refugees were safe.

*   *   *

Miles to the north, in a railroad tunnel cut clean through a mountain, John Connor stretched out on his own sleeping bag. A few feet away were the ties and rails that had once carried trains through this spot. Several feet deeper into the tunnel was the first of their trucks.

Connor’s command crew and numerous refugees were laid out in bedrolls and blankets all along the tunnel, and there were sentries at both ends. They were not quite as safe as if they were within a compound, not quite as exposed as if they were outside.

Not quite as exposed as Kyla was sure to be.

Kate knelt on the bag and lay down alongside him. “One of our radio operators heard someone say Hell-Hounds and a few other words he couldn’t make out a couple of hours before sundown. It didn’t sound like an emergency transmission. There’s been nothing since then. Daniel woke up for a couple of minutes, but he remembered having woken up before. He knows what’s happened to him.”

“How’s he taking it?”

“In the little time he was conscious, he was pretty depressed.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“How are you doing?”

“In the little time I’ve been conscious, I’ve been pretty depressed.”

She kissed his neck, then laid her head beside his. “Tortilla Compound is pretty close to Squaw Valley, right?”

“Right.”

“Want to go skiing?”

He laughed, then rolled over to hold her.

June, Present Day

CRS Project, Edwards AFB

Danny changed his computer desktop, removing the Terminator face and substituting a blank field of green. It was better not to have those eyes facing him, and the sterility of the green screen matched what he was feeling.

Now, hours after last night’s events, his emotions were still spinning like the unbalanced drum of a washing machine.

He was with Linda. Linda was with him. Not here at work, of course. But they were something. A couple. A relationship in its very first day of formation. He wanted to ride his rolling chair down the aisles of Cube Hell and sing Broadway tunes.

But everything else was disastrous. His future friends were gone, and the last few things they’d told him hadn’t been what he’d wanted to hear.

If they were right, at some point he’d lose Linda. Maybe it would be tomorrow, maybe ten years from now. That was … unacceptable.

And there was the question of whether he could, or even should, continue with this plan to subvert Skynet. The more time he spent away from the voices, the crazier it sounded. If he got caught, his future was gone. He’d spend time in a penitentiary, be unemployable when he was released, be the disgrace of the family. Linda would never have anything to do with him.

The fact that all these possibilities of shame and imprisonment depended on the notion that human civilization was not about to come to an end was not lost on him. He’d believed what the voices had told him, believed it with all his mind and spirit. But now Danny was adrift, a boat without a rudder.

If he continued with his program, it might have to be alone, alone to the end. The voices might not ever come back. He might never again experience their warmth, their praise, their appreciation for his effort.

That, finally, made him shudder. Not the notion of being friendless—the realization that some part of him had been doing this for praise, for a sense of belonging.

Well, that was gone. It was off the table. He’d have to decide whether to continue without that reward as a consideration. His weakness made his stomach turn. He hammered on his keyboad.

“What’s wrong, little trooper?” That was Jerry’s voice, floating over the partition between their cubicles.

“I’m having trouble with Scowl’s suppository program.” Danny made his voice flat, unwelcoming.

“His suppository program?”

“That’s the one where I convince Scowl that he’s a suppository, then send him to your cubicle.”

“Ouch! Will you scrap the program if I don’t talk to you anymore?”

“Yes.”

Silence was his reward.

It was time to become Danny the planner again. And the first thing to factor in was whether he still believed in Judgment Day.

Looking at it objectively, at the series of clues and indications he’d assembled earlier, he decided that he did. There was no hard evidence, but his intellect, working coldly and analytically for the first time in forever, agreed that all the data did support the machinations of a single mind pulling strings—and it could only be pulling strings from the CRS physical location of the project.

Could it be a human being doing all this, someone working from within CRS? It would have to be a brilliant programmer, not to mention someone who was insane. He ran through the roster of all the programmers on the project and came up with a handful of names of those who might have a chance of doing something this subtle and sophisticated. Curiously, the one who best matched the profile was Danny Ávila.

He considered for a moment that he might, in fact, be the perpetrator of a false Skynet threat without even knowing it. He’d had a blackout a few weeks ago, and immediately after that had begun to regard Scowl as a malevolent presence. He’d wondered about his own sanity since his dreams of the future began.

No, he decided. For this one, he relied on his emotions rather than his intellect. He just didn’t believe that there was any part of him that would do such a thing, not for any reason.

So it was Skynet.

That made the answer a simple one. He’d continue with his program.

The next question was a tougher one: Was he good enough to finish it without the help of his future friends?

He shrugged. If he wasn’t, no one was. Maybe the thought was pure arrogance, but he needed it, needed something, if he was going to get through this … get through it alone.

*   *   *

Mama was pretending not to know.

At dinner, Danny and Linda had smiles for one another that would be hard to misinterpret. After the house settled down for the night, Danny joined Linda in her bed, in her room decorated with NASA planetary prints and track trophies.

The next night, they did not dine at home; they dressed up and went into Bakersfield for a restaurant dinner and a movie.

Throughout, Mama just went about her business, bossing and feeding the farm’s itinerant workers, managing the household in her relentless fashion.

Danny decided that she was waiting. She wouldn’t react until he and Linda made some sort of announcement, official or unofficial. Ultimately, her choice to wait had to be a tactical one. If no one told her, then she had plausible deniability when it came to the nonmarital shenanigans going on under her roof, relations her church, some of the more old-fashioned members of the extended family, and many of her friends wouldn’t condone.

Ultimately, Danny had to reevaluate just how much of the calculating portion of his personality came from his mother. In retrospect, dozens of events where he, as a child, had privately scorned her for not recognizing what was going on under her nose became something else. If he assumed that she knew what she seemed not to, then each event became a demonstration of her peacemaking skills in the family, of her offering unspoken approval for things she could never officially sanction.

He’d have to spend some time figuring her out … once he had time to spend.