C.23

July, Present Day—Friday Night, Saturday A.M.

Scott’s Shooting Range

It was a lengthy job. Danny spent most of his time in the early hours up in the main observation towers, setting up a large number of timing sequences for the pop-up targets. Meanwhile, Linda prowled the weird environment of Silhouette City, dealing with flares, duct tape, wires, and servos. Later, Danny joined her at ground level to finish the preparations among the buildings. Throughout, Daniel was on hand at the other end of their cross-time link, and with him was a growing crowd of experts—Mike, John, Kate, Mark, others.

Finally their initial preparations were done. “What is it, about two-thirty?” Danny asked.

Linda checked her watch. “Two-thirty-eight A.M.”

“I kinda figured the A.M. part.” Danny looked up. From here, miles out from any large community, he could clearly see a sea of stars overhead, nearly from horizon to horizon. “Damn, that’s pretty.”

She snickered. “Good to see you can still take time out to smell the flowers.”

“Better than smelling myself. Anyway, we need to get some sleep. Probably ought to get up as early as we can manage in the morning and do whatever it takes to lure Scowl in.”

“I’ll get the bedrolls.” She loped off into the darkness. They’d returned the pickup to the road just off the shooting range property. Mark Herrera had recommended that it be left outside Scowl’s probable initial search radius. If Scowl found it, the Terminator was likely to disable it. They couldn’t have that.

You’re doing good, kid.

“Yeah, sure. So what’s this burning in my stomach?”

That’s from all the junk food you’ve been gulping down the last couple of days. Let me give you some advice. Lay off the junk food.

“Daniel, I’m going to have to ask you to take a hike for a while.”

What, cut off contact now? That doesn’t make any sense.

“It makes perfect sense to me. It’s my last night with Linda before Judgment Day. I don’t know what all’s going to happen and you refuse to tell me. So I’m going to have some private time with her.”

I … can’t argue too much with that. But you’ll have to get some sleep before you get going in the morning. Otherwise I might not be able to reach you again.

“I’ll find some way to doze off. Trust me.”

Adios, Danielcito.

“Adios, abuelito.” Farewell, Grandpa.

August 2029

The Grottoes

John and Kate, in the outer chamber, heard Lake’s recitation of Daniel’s condition: “Subject is returning to full lucidity and awareness. Blood pressure dropping. Heart rate dropping, one hundred beats per minute, ninety…”

Then there was Daniel’s voice, stronger than when he was in his dreaming state, slurred from his condition, testy: “For God’s sake, woman, do you have to narrate me?”

Mark Herrera emerged from the inner chamber. “Gonna get some sack time,” he said. He flipped a switch beside the outer door. “Going to green light status.”

“You staying here or going back into town?” Kate asked.

Mark stepped into the cylindrical exit. “Here. I don’t want to be more than a few seconds away.”

“Good man,” John said.

July, Present Day—Saturday A.M.

Scott’s Shooting Range

Under the stars, in the moonlight, Danny and Linda made love, comforted one another, drifted off to sleep.

Had they been able to go home tomorrow, go back to work, marry, it would have been the perfect ending. The thought made Danny choke up. There was not going to be a happy ending, and at some point—maybe tomorrow, maybe a year from now, the older Daniel wouldn’t say—Linda would be snatched from him.

The rest of the world would go first.

On that somber thought, Danny slept.

August 2029

The Grottoes

John and Kate sat, their backs against ancient mountain stone, just yards from where the indoor waterfall coursed down the rocks. Fine spray accumulated on their hands and faces, began a slow soak of their clothes.

“Right now, miles south of where they are, I’m wiping out on my bike headed out of L.A.,” John said. “Or already on the back of a truck, my leg bleeding, headed back into the city. In a couple of hours, I break into a veterinary clinic. About half an hour after that, you show up.”

“And thirteen hours after that, the world goes to hell,” Kate said, her voice low.

“That’s not what I was leading up to. I was going to dwell on the ‘you show up’ part.”

They were in near-total darkness; only a bit of green from the bulb over the entryway into Danny’s enclosure illuminated this place. John couldn’t see whether Kate was smiling, but did feel her lay her head against his shoulder. “Okay,” she said, “you can dwell on that.”

Minutes later John was jarred by the the rumble of the door into Daniel’s enclosure. He came upright, uneasily aware that he’d drifted off to sleep, and felt Kate moving beside him.

The bulb cast a long shadow from whoever had stepped out of the enclosure, but now it was red, not green. “John?” it called. It was Lake. “Kate?”

“We’re here.” John got to his feet, extended a hand for Kate, but she was already up.

“Daniel’s in again. Danny and Linda are on the go.”

July, Present Day—Saturday Morning

Judgment Day
Scott’s Shooting Range

The sun was glaring at them from the east, not yet high enough to pour its heat on them but bright enough to induce headaches. Danny glared back at it, then shouldered his way into the shooting range’s main building, which served as office and a store for various calibers and grades of ammunition, for cleaning and reloading supplies, for how-to manuals and recreational shooters’ magazines. He and Linda had forced the lock last night, had denuded its shelves of ammunition in the calibers they were using.

Linda was waiting in the office. She looked as weary as Danny felt. She suppressed a yawn as he came in. “The map’s ready, and I have your script.” She pointed to a single sheet of paper with her handwriting all over it. “But you’re sure about what Scowl saw.”

“It saw the rear end of our truck after it fell off,” Danny said. “Which means it saw the license plate. It will have recorded everything it saw and will have sent that image on to Skynet. Coordination of information is what Skynet is all about—what it was supposed to be about. We announce it, and Scowl will come fast. But since it’s not the same license plate as the one of the truck I stole, the authorities aren’t going to match it with the theft, so the cops won’t come in any hurry.”

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

Danny read over the words she’d written, spent a few minutes familiarizing himself with them. Then he switched on the CB radio set situated on the corner of the desk. Freddie Scott, owner of the range, wasn’t a survivalist, but he did believe in preparation and redundancy; he had phones, citizen’s band radio, shortwave radio, food stores, bottled water, and, of course, plentiful ammunition at this site. Alex had told Danny that the man had a shack somewhere on the property, someplace to live in the unlikely event that some emergency made the cities untenable.

Danny hoped Scott would be able to make it out here when the bombs started dropping.

The CB blared to life with voices, unusually heavy traffic. It was set to the standard motorist’s channel, 19. Danny and Linda listened for a minute; it was all familiar reports of traffic obstacles such as collisions, reports of peace officer movements, sleep-deprived ramblings by motorists who’d driven all night. But there was also griping about cell phones not functioning, unusually heavy police and military traffic for this hour, other signs that made Danny’s shoulders tighten.

He switched over to the comparative peace of channel 9 and squeezed the transmit button on the mike. He made his voice sound younger, uncertain. “Hello? Anyone there? I’m looking for the Sheriff’s Department.”

Silence.

He prepared to repeat himself, but a staticky female voice came across the speaker: “This is the Kern County Sheriff’s Department. Is that who you’re looking for?”

“Yeah, I’m in Kern County.”

“What’s the nature of your emergency?”

“Well, it’s not an emergency. But I can’t seem to get through to you on the phones to report it, so I tried this.”

“That’s all right. The phones are all messed up this morning. What’s your name, and what did you want to report?”

“I’m Billy Day, and I’m opening Scott’s Shooting Range for business this morning, and there’s an abandoned truck right in the middle of our skeet range.”

“Ah. Well … sure.” The Sheriff’s Department dispatcher sounded distracted. “Go ahead and give me the information on that and we’ll get someone over there, probably this afternoon.”

“Thanks.” Danny gave her the make, color, and license number of the stolen pickup, which was actually parked nowhere near the skeet range.

The false report done, Danny switched off the CB. “Now we get into position and wait.”

“And fast,” Linda said. “Just in case it’s only a couple of miles down the road.”

“Yeah.” Danny sighed. He’d much have preferred for a platoon of soldiers to be where he was right now. “Showtime.”

*   *   *

Scowl was a second-generation Terminator. It had hands instead of chain guns, a voice synthesizer, a vocal interpreter that could process spoken words into data and analyze their meaning.

But the vocal interpreter was nothing like the ones later Terminator models would receive. It could not analyze stress patterns. It could measure peaks and troughs in pitch and volume and make rough calculations as to whether two samples of speech had been produced by different humans, but it could in no wise recognize a specific voice.

So in its monitoring of communications traffic along official radio frequencies it heard and correctly interpreted Danny’s words, but did not recognize the voice as belonging to Danny Ávila. Instead, it added the fictitious Billy Day to the list of humans peripherally involved with its investigation … the list of humans who would probably have to be exterminated.

It brought up a map and business phone listing for the county, found Scott’s Shooting Range, calculated a route from its current location to that destination, and headed in that direction.

*   *   *

Danny Ávila had plywood over his head and dirt all around. He sat in dirt, illuminated only by the glow from his laptop screen. “Not exactly a dignified position for a guy who’s about to face death,” he said.

I have to agree with you there, kid.

Danny leaned back against one dirt wall of the pit, keeping his eyes on the laptop. The only thing on the screen was a small gray bar on which were ten gray circles in a line.

One of the circles, the one at far left, went from gray to green.

Danny picked up the walkie-talkie beside him. “Linda, signal strength one,” he said.

“I hear you.”

They’d agreed to keep transmissions simple, their language coded so that Scowl wouldn’t understand their words even if it heard them. Danny had shown her the signal strength gauge on his computer and explained what it meant. Now he’d told her that he’d just received a weak signal from Scowl’s wireless transmitter. Scowl could only be a few miles away. As he got closer, the signal strength would increase and he’d begin to receive camera transmissions from Scowl and its van.

He felt his heart pounding.

Better get a grip on that, kid. There’s high blood pressure in our family.

“Yeah, I know.”

*   *   *

Scowl turned into the driveway past the sign reading Scott’s Shooting Range. The parking lot beyond was empty, and there were no heat signatures to indicate that any humans were about.

The extensive range of maps in Scowl’s memory and operations files did not include a diagram of the shooting range, so Scowl did not know which area constituted the skeet range where the truck had been abandoned. Scowl’s van, though it had shock absorption and tires capable of carrying it over the rough terrain of the range, did not have the clearance of an off-road vehicle, so the Terminator opted to park and begin explorations on its own tracks.

Exiting the van, Scowl crashed through the office front door and took a look around the office. It seemed to be unoccupied; the lack of operating electronic equipment, air conditioning, or significant heat traces indicated that Scowl’s targets were not present.

On one wall was a diagram labeled with the name of the business and indicating the relative positions of the property’s various subcomponents. It took Scowl an extra moment to perform optical character recognition on the letters labeling those subcomponents; the map seemed to have been produced in such a fashion as to resemble hand-drawing and hand-labeling. An irregular blob north of OFFICE was labeled SKEET RANGE. In the middle of SKEET RANGE was a much smaller blob labeled ABANDONED TRUCK.

Scowl took the opportunity, on leaving the office, to open the oversize door into the large metal bin labeled ICE FOR SALE. The bin’s interior registered a temperature well below that of the ambient air, but was empty both of ice for sale or humans. Scowl noted that a padlock that had held the door closed had recently been cut and discarded on the ground. The detail seemed irrelevant to Scowl’s mission, so the Terminator filed and dismissed it. The machine labeled ICE COLD DRINKS was full of machinery and cylindrical dispensable products. It could not possibly hold hiding humans.

The Terminator turned to roll northward.

*   *   *

“Uploading my package to Scowl’s internal memory,” Danny said, his voice low.

Is there any chance of you taking control of Scowl? That was Mark’s voice.

“Yeah, sure. If I remain in contact with it for a few hours and run through several thousand possible password combinations. This package upload will work because Scowl’s always open to receive archived images from the van’s computer, big bundles of one-frame-per-second camera views and instrument readings. I’m disguising the patch for the Continuum Transporter power satellite program as one of them. The Terminator series mainframe at CRS automatically opens, processes, and stores these packages, so it’s going to slide in without anyone noticing.”

Good man, Mark said.

Danny switched the view on his laptop screen from his upload window to the robot’s camera view. Now he could see Scowl’s progress. The robot was leaving the vicinity of the office and rolling straight toward the southwest corner of Silhouette City.

He spoke into his walkie-talkie: “Incoming.”

He got no reply. Nor was he supposed to. Unless something went wrong, Linda was to let him do all the transmitting. Scowl’s crude radio detectors would eventually be able to home on transmission sources. Danny needed to be found. Linda didn’t.

*   *   *

Scowl approached the area bounded by plywood buildings. It could not see the region’s interior to detect the abandoned pickup truck. It did scan right and left, confirming that it was roughly between a long pile of grass-covered earth, corresponding to its internal dictionary’s definition of berm, on the right, and a stand of trees on the left, both of which had been on the crude map in the office.

The region it knew as Skeet Range had two elevated constructions beside it, one to Scowl’s right, one ahead. It elevated its view. One was at approximately the ambient air temperature. One was slightly cooler. Neither registered a heat trace indicative of humans.

Its optical sensors detected movement at ground level ahead. It redirected its attention toward the plywood there. That section of ground was characterized by wood of two-by-four construction supporting plywood painted in green, with darker decorative motifs Scowl was not programmed to interpret. In its normal vision, a tan figure had popped out from behind one of them. It looked something like a human being, though Scowl’s recognition software put the probability at only forty-eight percent of it being alive. If it was human, it was wearing a dark garment concealing its facial features and carrying a handgun. It was, however, not moving.

Scowl clicked over to infrared. The figure was warmer than the surrounding air. The heat signature did not match the size of the figure but it was growing bigger and warmer.

Scowl aimed the chain gun in its right hand and fired. Depleted-uranium rounds tore through the figure, shredding it. It dropped back out of sight behind more plywood. The heat trace continued to build.

Scowl advanced, knocking plywood trees out of the way.

Another target with an anomalous heat signature appeared among the tight-packed rows of plywood constructions. Scowl put a few rounds through it, but it remained upright, so the robot continued its fire. Finally it fell.

Scowl rolled forward to study this target as well. The robot’s movements knocked more of the construction over, so plywood fell down atop the target. The collapse of wood was almost flush with the ground. Scowl concluded that neither target could have been human; humans were more than an inch thick.

Now most of this section of construction was down, and some of it was catching fire. Evidently the first target had been incendiary. Scowl rolled out into the central area of Skeet Range and took a look around.

There was plywood construction in almost every direction. Scowl performed optical character recognition on the signs it saw posted: FIRST NATIONAL HOSTAGE SUPPLY. DANNY ÁVILA WAS HERE. DOMESTIC DISTURBANCEVILLE.

The register of Ávila’s name kicked that location up to the very top of Scowl’s current list. The Terminator spun and headed toward the door into the plywood convenience store.

*   *   *

Linda sat on a tarpaulin that itself was spread across a bed of rapidly melting bags of ice. Her butt was cold, and her eye was pressed to a hole she and Danny had drilled in the side wall of the observation tower last night. She decided that this was not a dignified or comfortable place for someone trying to help save the human race.

Below, Scowl rolled toward the One-Stop Robbery Shop. Linda leaned back and peeked over the lip of the table where the tower’s computer system was set up.

The computer wasn’t running Windows or a Macintosh operating system or any system she was familiar with; Daniel had taught her the basic functions of its proprietary text-based interface last night. She quickly typed in the command that activated the One-Stop Robbery Shop timed sequence Danny had put together. As Scowl crashed through the plywood door into the simulated convenience store, she hit the Enter key.

Then she heard it, the shouted command: “Daniel Ávila, we have you surrounded! Come out with your hands in the air!”