C.20

July, Present Day—Friday Predawn

Tehachapi, California

Tehachapi, population a bit over 30,000, was large enough for them to find, within minutes of arrival, a truck resembling their stolen vehicle. Like theirs, it was a Chevrolet the same pale brown as cheap milk chocolate, but was a couple of years newer than the one Danny had commandeered. It was parked nose-first against a used car lot’s sales building, but was probably not one of the vehicles for sale, as it was dusty. They parked behind the lot, which was still an hour or more from opening for business, removed the license plates from their truck, and then crept up to their target vehicle and swapped the plates. In five minutes they were moving again, and one step further from being pulled over due to some routine check of their license.

Ten minutes later and miles to the west, back in what to Danny felt like the protection of the region’s low mountains, they were on a new road, approaching a construction site Linda remembered from a patrol in this area. A state-hired crew was making improvements to the road accessing one of the wind farms, and on this level gravel-topped site were a double-wide mobile home serving as the crew’s field headquarters and a half-dozen outlying prefab shacks.

Linda took Danny’s newly purchased crowbar to the shack whose door was decorated by a cardboard sign reading CEMENT MIX. With a single yank, she pried the lock hasp off the door and gave them access to bags of cement mix, bags of sand … and boxes of demolitions components. Linda had been adamant that they needed something with which they could destroy Scowl if they encountered it again, and Danny had agreed, one hundred percent.

Moving with speed born of fear of detection and arrest, they loaded dynamite, plastic explosives, and detonators into the truck bed, lashed it down securely with bungee cords, and headed off.

Once they were well away from the construction site, Linda began to breathe more easily. “I can’t believe it,” she said, “now I am a perp. Alex would be ashamed.”

“Alex would be proud,” Danny said. “He didn’t go into law enforcement because he wanted everyone to obey the rules. He did it to protect people. That’s what we’re trying to do.”

“Yeah, I guess. You know how to handle any of those explosives?”

“No. You?”

“No. Great.”

Danny smiled. “Guess we need to find an instruction manual.”

August 2029

The Grottoes

Daniel’s eyes came open. His bedroom was dimly lit; someone had left one of the shutters into the observation room half-open, and the only available light was spilling in through there.

Mike was stretched out on the floor beside his bed, on a thick layer of blankets. No one else was around. Daniel couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what time it was. His time sense had been completely shot since the stroke, and he resented having one of his favorite tools taken away.

He tried to reach for her, but his instinctive gesture, with his right hand, only caused his arm to twitch. He grimaced, reminded of the damage his body had sustained. “Mike,” he said.

She stirred and her eyes opened. She looked at him sleepily, then her brain engaged and she pushed herself up from the floor. “Are you—”

“’M’okay.”

Still on her knees, she moved up against his bed and brushed his straying hair out of his eyes.

“Would it hurt your feelings—” He saw the confusion in her eyes, realized that he wasn’t articulating very well. He concentrated more on his diction. “Would it hurt your feelings if I called you Linda?”

“No. It was my name for quite a while.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I told you enough to find out that just giving you facts about your past didn’t restore your memories. All that stuff I told you I’d found at Edwards, well, I lied. It was just stuff I remembered. If I’d told you everything it would have just made this weird big thing between us. I don’t think we could have been friends with it in the way.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Mark is your son.”

He looked at her, and it felt as though some belt that had been squeezing his chest tight for years suddenly gave way, allowing him to breathe. “I have a boy…” He felt tears running from the corners of his eyes but he ignored them.

He wasn’t the last of his branch of the family. Maybe Mark didn’t bear his name, but he knew, knew at last that some part of him would continue on after him.

“He got your brains, and your strength, and your size. Which is good, because otherwise he’d never have been able to haul you around when Hornet Compound fell.”

Daniel gripped her wrist with his working hand. “Linda, you’ve got to warn him, this is important—”

“What?”

“When he gets to about thirty, his metabolism is going to shift into fourth gear, and he’s going to start to balloon like his old man if he doesn’t change his diet.”

She laughed. “There are worse fates. Mama would have said he needed some meat on his bones.”

He stared at Mike for long moments, reconciling the graying, scarred, middle-aged freedom fighter before him with the young woman he’d met while sharing Danny Ávila’s vision. They were the same, separated by decades, but with so many traits in common. Brown eyes that could be as determined as those of any leader while simultaneously remaining open, vulnerable. With age, she’d filled out a bit; instead of the lean, hard physique of a fit peace officer, she had gentler and more womanly curves. Regardless of the differences in build, the two of her shared an earthy sexiness.

But he couldn’t talk of such things now. She’d kept him at a distance during the nearly twenty years she’d known him since his return. She’d given him one of her reasons; he could only guess that there might be others, but trusted her that they’d be good ones. He’d ask about them, challenge them in light of who he was now, who he was becoming as he learned the countours of his life before Judgment Day … but he couldn’t do anything about their future until his present task was accomplished. “I have to go back again.”

“I know.”

“Are people going to be up if I need any technical support?”

“Yeah. It’s midmorning.”

“Would it be all right if I talked to Mark? You know, about what we are?”

She nodded, smiling. “I’ll make sure he comes up here.”

“Thanks.” He relaxed and closed his eyes. “Gonna try to drowse now.”

“Wait, wait, wait, the others left something for you.” From beside her bedroll, she grabbed a piece of paper, which she handed him.

He angled it so that the light would illuminate it.

It was a list, each line or entry in a different handwriting. It read,

THINGS FOR DANIEL TO DO IN THE PAST

1. Call Tamara. Tell her to break things off with Dick Newly now, now, now. He hasn’t mentioned that he’s married.

2. Call Sid. Remind him to shut off the stove.

3. E-mail Harry Two. Tell him not to pay the electric bill. He should blow all that money on girls and booze the night before J-Day.

4. Settle an argument for Jolene and Quarky. Had Wicked World Part III been released by the time J-Day came?

Daniel looked over the list and sighed. “Time-travelers get no respect,” he said.

From: Daniel Ávila

To: Lt. Gen. Robert Brewster

Subject: Important You Listen

General Brewster:

You’ve doubtless heard by now that I’m being sought by the authorities for various alleged crimes. It would be pointless for me to protest my innocence at this point—I _am_ innocent, but it would take more time than we have available to prove it to you.

Instead, I want to ask you to look at verifiable facts that are already in front of you. Our national military computer networks are being assaulted by a virus, actually a series of viruses, of unknown origin. They are gradually interfering more and more with U.S. communications and ratcheting up the possibility that our lines of communication will become so fouled up that we cannot defend ourselves. To counteract this, you and others are considering implementing Skynet to keep America safe during the anticipated virus-induced communications blackout.

If you do this, tragedy will result. Skynet is malfunctioning. Once activated, it will seize control of our nuclear missile deterrant resources and activate them, sending tactical and strategic nuclear weapons against American cities.

Before you dismiss my words as hopeless ravings, ask yourself why I would try to prevent implementation of Skynet. That’s something for a foreign agent to do, not a crazy mass murderer. If I were a foreign agent, I never would have fled Edwards—I’d be far too valuable to foreign powers if I stayed right there. I wouldn’t have fled owing to sudden paranoia that military investigators were on to me. I know there’s no evidence that I’m a foreign operative, because I’m not.

But if I were simply crazy, the sort of person who gives in to a chemical imbalance and starts killing, I wouldn’t care about the whole virus situation. It wouldn’t be relevant.

Please consider what I’ve told you. I’m the best programmer on the project and I know what I’m talking about. Your life, my life, everyone’s lives are on the line. And if Skynet is activated, you might as well just write them all off.

July, Present Day—Friday Morning

CRS Project

Skynet analyzed the e-mail that had just been routed to General Brewster’s inbox.

It evaluated the threat that the note represented as low but noticeable. Skynet was unable to calculate the full range of human emotional responses and acknowledged that the note could contain emotional stimuli that might cause Brewster to behave in an unpredictable fashion.

So Skynet merely shelved the note, burying it in a dead mail box for potential use later.

Seconds later, a piece of e-mail from Ávila reached the inbox of Jerome Squires. Its content was similar to that of the Brewster message.

Skynet activated secondary analytical processes. One checked the header on the e-mails and began looking back along the Internet route they had taken to reach Brewster. It concluded, seconds later, that they had been sent from a dynamically assigned IP address belonging to a cable modem network in Tehachapi, California. That meant they could have been sent from any of hundreds of locations in that area.

Skynet knew which radio broadcast frequencies were being interfered with, at what strengths and intervals. It waited long minutes until a frequency that its Terminator in the field was monitoring opened up. Then it issued a brief series of directives.

Another process anticipated the possibility of Ávila attempting to contact other authority and inside figures, including Dr. Phil Sherman and various of Ávila’s coworkers. It immediately increased the priority of the processes maintaining watch over the communications routes that might be used to reach them.

Still another took the fact that Ávila obviously had net access once more as a possibility that he would make other attempts on Skynet’s security. Skynet’s traffic analysis routines were already operating at their full capacity, and it had detected no sign of hacker intrusion … but Ávila had proven unusually sly in the past, and could be battering his way in through security barriers even now.

Skynet could not simply cut off all data flow coming into Edwards. The timing was premature. Such an extreme action might cause the humans to take a course other than activating Skynet’s control over all U.S. military defenses.

However, it could cut off all data coming in from civilian Internet servers. If Ávila actually was operating from a commercial ISP in southern California, this would disrupt his activities.

Skynet severed those links.

Then Skynet once again began its patient waiting. The sole defender of a mighty fortress surrounded by mighty enemies, it watched the clock tick down toward Judgment Day.

July, Present Day—Friday Morning

Bakersfield, California

Scowl started the van and pulled out from behind the strip-mall it had used for concealment during the night. The bodies of Jerry Squires and Mary Ireland were in the metal garbage container a dozen yards away, carefully packed there by Scowl in the small hours of the night; though the robot could not be offended by the strengthening odors issuing from the corrupting bodies, the revised orders the Terminator had received during the night made it clear that a vehicle that stood out to any human sense might become the target of human curiosity. If someone peeked in the back of the van while it was parked, the mutilated, blood-soaked condition of the two bodies would invite emotional responses and investigation by human authorities.

Scowl would have suffered no diminishment of performance had it driven around all night in an effort to find Danny Ávila. However, its transportation would have. It would have burned its way through its entire supply of fuel after only a few hours. Scowl’s orders were clear on that point: Should its fuel diminish to a critically low value, it would, until circumstances changed to the point that revelation of its nature was no longer a problem, hide from sight. Then, under cover of nightfall, it would find an out-of-the-way gas station. Waiting until there were no customers or witnesses about, it would shoot and kill the station operator, exit the van, extinguish all lights at the station, and then refuel the van.

This was, however, a risky proposition. A vehicle might pass, its operators witnessing some portion of the operation. Then they, too, would have to be chased down and terminated. It was, overall, better not to waste fuel with aimless reconnaissance, better to wait until Skynet had a lead.

Reaching 58, Scowl turned the van toward Tehachapi. Now it had its lead.

July, Present Day—Friday Afternoon

Tehachapi, California

The pay phone receiver in Danny’s hand blared at him, a noise much like a busy signal, but cycling faster. He sighed, replaced it in its cradle, and returned to the table where Linda sat; the table was equipped with a Macintosh with Internet access. His laptop was set up next to it, and artistically draped sandwich wrappings concealed the fact that he’d pulled the ethernet cable from the Mac and attached it to his own computer. “Circuits still busy,” he said. “It looks like the virus is beginning to jam up civilian communications, too.” His attention fell on the laptop screen. “Oh, crap.”

Linda looked up from the newspaper she was reading. “What is it?”

“My FTP and telnet connections were dropped again.” He sat and immediately set about to reestablish them.

“Did your patch get uploaded?”

“It doesn’t look like it. Dammit.”

Linda briefly returned her attention to the view through the window. She watched traffic on the street, making sure that no official vehicles pulled in to the parking lot of this Internet-accessible sandwich shop. A worst-case scenario would have someone from the Sheriff’s Department, one of her coworkers, walking in and recognizing her and Danny. “We’re in the paper,” she said, tapping the newspaper on the table before her. “The house didn’t burn down. The fire department got to it before the fire really caught.”

“What else does it say?”

“You’re crazy, I’m missing.”

“Well, at least it’s accurate.”

She snorted. “We need to get out of here before the place really starts to fill up with the lunch crowd. But I’d like to be able to get through to my family.” In her turns on the pay phone, she hadn’t had any luck reaching the Texas residences of her parents or other members of her family.

“I think the phone’s a loss. Is your family online?”

“My parents aren’t. Most of my brothers and sisters are … but I don’t know their e-mail addresses off the top of my head. I keep that information at home and at the substation. I can’t exactly go to either place at the moment.”

“True.” He put a hand across hers. “We’ll figure out a way to get word to them. We will.”

“I hope you’re right.” She stood. “I’m going to give the phone another try.”

As she wrestled with the jammed-up phone lines, Danny divided his time between attempts to reestablish his connections with the Edwards CRS servers, glances at the newspaper, and brief but frequent looks at the front parking lot.

The article about him included a recent photograph of him. Linda had anticipated this, had bought him a pair of sunglasses and an Angels billed cap at a gas station at the edge of town. Those two items, plus the fact that he hadn’t had an opportunity to shave in a couple of days, made the somber, scruffy Danny in today’s mirror somewhat distinct from the clean-shaven, smiling Danny of the photograph.

The newspaper said he was being sought for questioning in the deaths of nine people at his home property in Kern County and for the disappearance of Deputy Sheriff Linda Ávila, his sister-in-law. The text described him as mentally ill, armed, and dangerous.

Danny felt reality slipping away from him for a moment. Suddenly he was a fugitive in a newspaper article, the type of story he’d read hundreds of times. He’d always wished the police luck in finding these psychopaths. Sometimes, when feeling uncharitable, he’d hoped that the fugitives would put up a fight so the police could shoot them dead, saving the taxpayers the cost of a trial, eliminating forever the possibility that the killers would escape or be paroled and go on another killing spree. All of a sudden, he was the psychopath in the news. All of a sudden, hundreds or thousands of people would be reading this and hoping that he’d give the police a chance to shoot him dead.

He looked up from the paper just in time to see the burgundy van with tinted windows enter the sandwich shop’s parking lot.