C.17

July, Present Day—Thursday Afternoon

Edwards AFB

The modified van, Scowl at the wheel, passed out through Edwards gate security without incident, without even an ID check—General Brewster’s office had obviously communicated with the checkpoint to order the deviation from procedure. Jerry and Mary sat in what would have been the third row of seats, though in this vehicle there was no second row—just an open area that Scowl used to maneuver from the driver’s position to the van door and lift. Where the front passenger seat would have been was a rack of military weapons—assault rifles, grenade launchers, handguns.

“We’re going to see how well Scowl copes with variations in what should be the normal procedure,” Jerry said, his tone a little lofty.

Mary finished checking the battery gauge on and status of the tape in the camcorder she held. She eyed Jerry suspiciously. “What does that mean?”

“I’ve instructed him to stop in at a liquor store in Mojave. We can pick up some picnic supplies. Such as wine.”

“Not a good idea. What if someone in the parking lot sees Scowl?”

“The instant we pull in, we put the fold-out sun screens in the windshield and side windows.”

She frowned. “And then there’s the fact that that would be a serious violation of operating procedures. Phil Sherman would hang us out to dry, and then General Brewster would set fire to us.”

“Phil’s on vacation, and Brewster’s too busy with this virus problem to worry with micromanaging the programmers.”

“Well…” she sounded uncertain. “You’re buying.”

“I’m buying.”

“And this assumes that the Terminator doesn’t object. What do you say, Scowl?” She looked up at the driver and froze.

Scowl didn’t have its optical sensors on the road. Its upper body was half turned around, its head completely turned to face the two of them.

In its hand was a Beretta M9 handgun.

Mary said, “Jerry—”

Scowl fired. The 9mm round hit Mary just over the left eye and created an exit wound the size of a large egg in the back of her skull. Her head snapped backward, resting against the seat’s neck brace, and she stared sightlessly at the van’s ceiling.

“Oh, my God. Oh, my God.” Jerry didn’t stop to wonder about the enormity of the malfunction that had just caused Mary’s death. Nor was he frozen into inaction by fear. He leaped for the side door, aware that a tumble from a vehicle doing 60 mph was almost as likely to kill him as a Terminator that had just decided he was a target.

Scowl’s second bullet punched through his rib cage before he got his hand on the door handle, and the third severed his spine a split-second later. Jerry slammed into the door. His last sight was of California highway scenery zooming by. Then he slumped to the van’s floor.

Scowl snapped around, resuming full observation of the road ahead. It checked off another event on the list of tasks it had to accomplish.

Next was arrival at a specific site near the settlement designated Bakersfield, followed by determination of the location of the human designated Daniel Ávila and its elimination.

August 2029

The Grottoes

John paused before the outer door into Daniel’s enclosure. The enclosure was a small rectangular building, not more than eight feet high, large enough to enclose Daniel’s bedroom and the observation room but nothing more. It was windowless and a somber, almost featureless dark gray—the gray of the sheet lead that had been assembled over every surface.

Above the one exterior door was a socket with two lightbulbs, one green, one red. The red one was lit, indicating that the project was under way—Daniel was in dreaming contact with the past. But the presence of the red light did not mean that he could not enter, did not mean that entering or leaving would cause a burst of EMR or other quanta to exit. At John’s request, the entry had been set up like that of many darkrooms of the twentieth century. The door was actually a cylindrical chamber about the size of a phone booth, covered in lead, with one narrow portal. He stepped through the portal, grabbed a handle screwed into the entry’s side, and rotated the cylinder around him. Once it had gone through a 180-degree rotation, the portal opened into the enclosure. He stepped into the observation room.

The windows into the bedroom were open. He saw Danny on the bed, his daughter Kyla seated beside it. Mike, standing nearby, turned as John entered. She came out into the observation room, closing the bedroom door behind her.

“How’s it going?” John asked. He looked at Daniel again. “His eyes are open. He’s awake?”

“Well, yes and no.” Mike seemed uncertain. “He’s in a different state than he was in the earlier sessions. I don’t know whether he figured out a new way to do things, or the stroke itself had some effect on the way he contacts his younger self. He’s basically awake at both ends. I can talk to him, I can talk to Young Danny; they can talk to one another.”

“What’s Kyla doing here?”

“She just helped him to hot-wire and steal a pickup truck.”

John laughed. “My teenaged daughter is corrupting someone nearly thirty years ago. Wait until I explain that to Kate.”

Mike managed a faint smile. “He’s also doing better in terms of stress and blood pressure, I think. I want Tamara to come up here and look him over during this session.”

“Good. So you’re recommending we continue.”

“Yeah.” Mike didn’t sound happy about it.

“Look, I know you’re not feeling too cheerful about this whole operation. But I think we have to rate it as a qualified success so far. And that suggests that we need to be looking for other people who might have the same facility.”

“It’s going to be hard to find them. People don’t always remember their dreams. Someone may be able to do what Daniel can but not even know it.”

“I know. So the sooner we start looking, the sooner we may be able to find the next Daniel Ávila.”

She sighed. “I’ll draw up a procedural document for the various compound leaders and medical chiefs. Give them an idea of what to look for.”

“I also want you to tell Daniel that Tom Carter has been able to put together a working T-800 from the two damaged ones we brought away from the attack on Hornet Compound. That means Danny’s got a job ahead of him—programming it to serve our purposes. When he’s done with this operation, he has something besides physical therapy to keep him busy … and useful.”

“Good.” She looked back through the window, where Kyla was talking once more, and apparently miming the proper use of an assault rifle’s grenade-thrower attachment. “Now that he’s on the verge of getting back what he lost so long ago, I want to be sure that he has more to look forward to. That regaining some of his memories isn’t the only goal left in his life.”

July, Present Day—Thursday Afternoon

Ávila Property

The burgundy van carefully navigated the rutted gravel road from the highway to the front of the Ávila house. Behind the wheel, Scowl cycled through all its visual sensors as it scanned the property around the vehicle, looking for moving shapes and heat signatures. The trouble was that the ambient temperature was close to that of standard human blood temperature, rendering the infrared range less than normally useful. But there did not seem to be any humans in the fields between the highway and the house; it did detect human shapes moving among the straight rows of trees hundreds of yards back from the house.

Scowl pulled the van to a stop just in front of the steps up into the house. It activated the wheelchair lift mechanism. Moments later, it was rolling off the lift and up the wooden steps to the building’s front porch. In its hands was a weapon well-suited to the current phase of its mission, a Heckler & Koch 9mm MP5-N submachine gun. The compact black weapon was fitted with a stainless steel suppressor that would muffle the sound of each gunshot, limiting the likelihood that others would hear its use and come to investigate.

Crashing through the screen door and the windowed front door just beyond would have been quicker than a less destructive entry, but Scowl’s orders were currently structured for caution, including remaining comparatively silent and leaving a minimum of evidence that could be attributed to a Terminator. It carefully opened the screen door and front door, then just as precisely maneuvered into the building.

This was some sort of atrium allowing access to many of the residence’s other chambers. Ahead and to the right, a staircase led up to the residence’s second story. Ahead and to the left, a hallway penetrated deeper into the building. Right and left were openings into side chambers. Scowl rolled into a position to look into both chambers. It saw soft furniture and wooden floors in the chamber to the right, hard plastic-backed furniture and linoleum floor to the left, no human beings in either.

The Terminator’s audio sensors detected a tap-tap-tap corresponding to walking footsteps emanating from the doorway ahead. It rolled forward and had not quite reached the doorway when a human-size heat trace appeared there.

The Terminator switched its camera over to the visual range. The picture showed a human, approximately five foot four, wearing a single garment in blue plus footwear. Its stature was below average for a human male, and its configurations were also wrong for a male. Scowl concluded that it was a human female, and a comparison of its facial region to the scan of Danny Ávila’s face in its memory also turned up an insufficient number of points of comparison. Scowl noted that its face was unusually rigid.

It held a metal object in its hand, a heavy iron disk-bowl with a protruding handle. Scowl’s threat register ticked upward a couple of percentage points, but not to the level that it concluded it was in danger of significant damage.

It activated its voice simulation technology. “Where is Daniel Ávila?” it said.

The female gripped the metal object more tightly. “He’s not here. He’s dead.”

“Proceed to his body.”

She shook her head. “No.”

The learning component of Scowl’s operating system noted the fact that this human practiced redundancy when imparting information.

Scowl’s options were few. Its mission was retrieval of Daniel Ávila, dead. It could not kill this human and then convince the human to lead it to Ávila’s body. Therefore it must cycle through a list of secondary options Skynet had provided.

It said, “I am an automated investigative unit of the United States Air Force. Daniel Ávila is in very serious danger. You must take me to him so that I can protect him.”

The female shook her head again. This time, trickles of clear fluid leaked from her eyes. “No, you’re not. You’re a Terminator. You’re going to kill my boy. And everyone else.”

Scowl analyzed this response. Nothing in its mission parameters indicated that any human not immediately associated with CRS could be aware of its existence, and none alive could be aware of its current operational objectives. It transmitted a burst of code back to CRS, asking for orders.

It got them immediately and implemented them. It asked, “How do you know that?”

“I see you in my dreams,” she said.

It took Scowl an additional second to evaluate the information it had gathered. The human female had referred to Daniel Ávila as “my boy.” This suggested a formal or informal parent-child relationship between them. The probability that she was Teresa Ávila was eighty percent or better. She knew Scowl’s mission. The odds that she would cooperate were nearly zero.

With the MP5-N, Scowl fired a three-round burst into her chest. Even before her body and the frying pan she’d held hit the floor the Terminator switched back to infrared mode and began scanning the house.

There were two other significant heat sources in the building. One was in a room past the doorway the human female had occupied. Its height, cubical shape, and great heat intensity suggested that it was not a living being; it was probably an oven. Another was on the upper floor, and its near-perfect cylindrical shape suggested that it, too, was an inanimate object, probably a water heater.

Scowl rolled out through the front door. Its programming mandated that it investigate all humans in the vicinity. It would inquire of each one about Ávila’s location, and then dispatch each one to reduce the likelihood that its nature and activities could be transmitted to others. Skynet would manage matters pertaining to the subsequent human investigation into the incident.