C.7

June, Present Day

Ávila Property

Danny woke up and knew at once that he was insane.

Oh, it didn’t feel like insanity. He felt charged and powerful, as though an invisible cord connected him to the nearest wall-socket and kept him full of energy.

But all he had to do was think about the differences between the Danny of today and the Danny of a few weeks ago to realize that he was probably crazy.

Weeks ago, he hadn’t taken a sizable fraction of his savings, used it to buy books, data, and hardware, and buried them out by the orange grove. Weeks ago, he hadn’t had a presentiment that he had friends in the future, voices who spoke to him as he slept and told him about events to come—visions of middle-aged faces around a conference table and nuclear bombs devastating population centers. Weeks ago, he hadn’t been convinced that the work he did, the work for which he received praise, good money, and the likelihood of being at least a footnote in the history books and a trivia question of the future, was going to help lead the world to a catastrophe of such dimensions that he couldn’t stomach thinking about it.

He was partly responsible for the catastrophe to be, the voices admitted. But he was far more responsible for the subsequent efforts to reverse the catastrophe. The good outweighed the bad. Especially if he started now.

That was the craziest part, of course. Deep in his soul, he believed the voices. He knew they spoke the truth. And this conviction gave him strength and purpose. He’d put off until another day thoughts about what his family and friends would think of him when they decided he was crazy.

This morning, he dressed, combed his hair, practiced making a half-dozen roguish faces in the mirror, and dashed downstairs. Linda was deeply absorbed in another book; with her fork, she poked at a portion of her plate currently bare of food.

Danny plopped down opposite her. “Good morning, Professor.”

She glanced at him, then took a closer look. “Morning. You look better.”

“Better than Mel Gibson, or better than Ewan McGregor?”

She grinned at his display of ego. “Much better than recently, and slightly better than a mandrill.”

From the kitchen, Mama called, “What do you want on your omelet, Danny?”

“Mama, on the first one I want some jalapeños, and some bacon, and some beef, and cheese, and a full-grown bulldog. But I was thinking I wanted the second one to be kind of heavy.”

“How about just some chorizo and cheddar?”

“Well, okay.” He turned his attention back to Linda. “I think we traded. You look kind of tired.”

She nodded and couldn’t suppress a yawn. “I didn’t sleep well. I kept waking up out of strange dreams.”

“What sort of dreams?”

“Well, I was talking to you in some of them, but from one second to the next I couldn’t remember what we were talking about. Then I think we switched to talking about astronomy, because I remember you mentioning the terminator. Lunar terminator, I suppose. Then I had a dream about a big, muscular guy running on a treadmill. He introduced himself to me as Sergeant Candy.”

Danny forced himself not to freeze, not to knot up. A sudden paranoia told him that if he did anything out of the ordinary, Linda might notice, might remember it later.

He’d seen footage of Master Sergeant William Candy, USMC. Danny had been watching it just yesterday, had even mentioned it to the voices of his future-day friends last night. Candy was a physical model for human-appearing Terminators that would be built in years to come.

What was happening? Was he talking in his sleep, loudly enough for Linda to hear and remember even as she lay dreaming? He’d buy a cassette deck and record himself tonight to see if that was what was going on. But for now, he had to allay Linda’s curiosity, keep her from returning to this subject with him. Ever.

He let a conspiratorial smile creep across his lips. “Linda, it doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to figure that one out.”

She looked at him, puzzled. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, don’t be coy. Grown woman without a boyfriend dreams of a powerful jock, gives him a name like Candy? As in, good enough to eat?”

She snapped her book shut and brandished it like a club. The title on the front cover suggested it had something to do with the role supergigantic black holes played in the formation of galaxies. “I am going to give you such a beating…”

“Mama, save your baby boy, this mean woman is going to crush me into charcoal briquettes…”

Mama leaned out of the kitchen and gave him a cool look. “Make it a good beating, Linda. I haven’t had the heart to give him one in years.”

Danny threw up his hands in surrender. “All right, I take it back. You have no possible interest in heterosexual he-men—”

“I didn’t say he was obviously hetero—”

“Think back over the dream, I think you’ll find the clues are all there.”

She heaved a tremendous sigh. “You are so much like Alex.”

And that put the brakes to the conversation. She looked away, obviously not knowing how to continue from that point. Danny, though a little thrown by the suddenness with which their talk had ended, was grateful that he’d derailed her thinking about her dreams.

Terminator. She knew the word Terminator. Yes, he dimly remembered from school, it did describe something in astronomy. But if she were ever to speak it in front of someone from his workplace, Danny would immediately come under suspicion, either informal or formal, of being a security leak.

Which, in fact, he was.

*   *   *

At work, he handled his morning’s list of new operating system bugs in record time, then went to work installing subtle back doors into the networks Skynet was set up to routinely access.

He was certain these back doors, designed to allow him to feed programming and data into Skynet-controlled systems without Skynet’s approval, would not last very long. If the future voices were correct, Skynet would continuously revise and update its own code over the upcoming years. But for a few days, perhaps as long as months, his back doors would give him the access he’d need.

He would have to do some of his work from home, on his own laptop, where he was certain he would be free of outside monitoring … and have to do still more from all-night Internet cafés, public libraries, and other sources that had online access that would be hard to trace.

In college, he had done some proficient hacking—lighthearted romping through protected bank and government systems. Had he been caught at it, he could have been sent to a federal penitentiary. But the experience had sharpened his set of skills, an advantage that had helped him land his current job at the CRS project.

He had never been at the top level of hackers, but he had known a few people who were. Paflos, a classmate from Bulgaria, had gone home after graduation. Danny had, a few years later, spotted some of Paflos’s user names on taunting messages embedded in some of the cleverer and more virulent Windows viruses to come out of that country.

Danny could use Paflos’s skills now, and he would be in touch with his old college friend. He needed to write a virus that would infect a virus.

The voices from the future had told him the methodology Skynet would use to foul up American communications and panic the government into handing over the reins of its military power to Skynet. It would start with a virus that would increasingly disrupt communications, government computer systems, and networks. Ostensibly just the work of a hacker somewhere, it would prove impossible to eliminate—except, theoretically, by Skynet, which utilized a unique operating system that had been isolated from the outer world. Virus-proof, Skynet would be able to seize control of government computers and stamp out their infections. But that was not what it would do.

Danny, if he could pull it off, would attach secondary instructions to some iterations of that virus. They, too, would spread throughout government and civilian networks, causing recorded facts at hundreds of data sites to disappear or change.

Old missile bases, built in the 1950s but decommissioned forty years later, would vanish from the records, have their known locations altered, or be listed as having been collapsed and filled in with concrete. Cave systems all around the world would disappear from public records. Caches of military matériel would vanish from government inventories so that they might be found intact twenty and thirty years later.

The piggyback-virus approach had an additional advantage. It was triggered by the events of Judgment Day, by the appearance of the Skynet-designed virus. If that original virus never appeared, if for some reason Skynet did not launch the final phase of its plan to assume control of the U.S. military arsenal, then Danny’s sabotage would never activate. In the absence of a genuine threat from Skynet, he would neither become, nor be found out as, a traitor to his country.

Then there was the question of the Continuum Transporter, the time travel facility his friends had told him about. They had told him the physical location of the building on the Edwards site. He had glimpsed it once or twice; it was located not far from the CRS building, but well back from Edwards’s main roads. It had to have even more formidable security than the CRS project. He would see what he could do to find out more about that project. The more he knew, the more about it he would be able to erase from the files Skynet would eventually be able to access about it.

Maybe, if he were especially proficient, he would be able to find the engineering specifications for the project and put together another time capsule, a blueprint for a time machine, allowing his friends to re-create it far in the future. Maybe.

June, Present Day

Mojave Desert

The caravan of vans and cars sped northeast along Interstate Highway 15. Danny was in the third seat of one of the middle vans, his boss, Phil Sherman, beside him. On the second seat were General Brewster and an observer from the Department of Defense, Mr. Jackson, a jowly man who seemed faintly ill at ease in his dark civilian suit. The front passenger seat was occupied by Jackson’s aide, a thirtyish brunette woman in a dark business jacket and skirt; Danny hadn’t caught her name. General Brewster’s regular driver, an Air Force sergeant, was behind the wheel.

Danny had his laptop open on his lap. The computer was equipped with a battery of wireless communications options—built-in wireless modem, cell phone card, mil-spec short-range radio transceiver—and on his screen were fairly low-resolution images broadcast from a camera on the front of one of the vehicles in the caravan. The largest image on his screen was the camera view, and a belt of instrument readings—speed, engine RPM, gas gauge, lights on/off, and more—occupied the right quarter of the screen.

“I’ll admit to being a little surprised,” Jackson said, and tugged at his tie, obviously wishing to but not allowing himself to loosen it. “I’d anticipated that we’d be riding in the vehicle with the unit.”

General Brewster offered Jackson a faint smile. Brewster was a compact, handsome man with a face made to fit in anywhere. Give him a twinkle in his eye and a broad smile and he could be selling cars in Los Angeles; give him a long-neck beer, a cowboy hat, and a three-day growth of beard and he could be anyone’s amiable white-trash neighbor. But he was clean-shaven and posture-perfect, his graying hair cut to Air Force officer punctiliousness. To Danny, he always looked a little young to be a three-star general, but his impression of what a general should look like came from the movies and TV, fixed long before real life made him a civilian employee of the Air Force.

Danny thought he saw something in Brewster’s smile, some minor pleasure at having anticipated Jackson’s statement. “Ordinarily we’d have done it that way,” the general said. “But today, well, regulations wouldn’t allow it. Safety regs, that is.”

Jackson lifted an eyebrow above the level of his dark sunglasses. “The machine isn’t safe to transport?”

Brewster glanced at the occupants of the third seat and Phil spoke up. “Of course it is, Mr. Jackson, except that we’re testing a new transportation system for it. If today’s test is a success, which so far it is, we can probably arrange to loosen the restrictions next time.”

“‘So far,’” Jackson repeated. “I thought the test hadn’t begun yet.”

Phil nodded. “The live-fire test hasn’t. But we piggybacked another test onto it, and that’s taking place right now.”

“I still don’t get you.”

Phil looked to Danny, who took up the baton of the conversation. Danny pointed between the general and Jackson at the road ahead. “Sir, you see the vehicle two places ahead of us? The burgundy van with the tinted windows?”

“Of course.”

“Well, it’s actually a commercially available vehicle, a standard van modified by a service that customizes cars and vans for the disabled. That one’s set up as if for a paraplegic driver. It has a lift that can pick up a wheelchair, and the driver can roll the wheelchair behind the steering wheel and operate all the controls, including accelerator and brakes, with his hands.”

Jackson nodded. “So?”

“So, today’s Terminator, the prototype nicknamed Scowl, is driving that van right now.”

Jackson finally turned to look at Danny straight on. “You’re kidding.”

“No, sir. Today’s secondary test was for Scowl to go online, access information sites that provide driving directions, and choose our route from Edwards to the missile range. It had to review traffic laws and symbols. If it gets us all there without incident, we chalk this one up as a success. Would you like to see what it’s seeing?” At Jackson’s nod, Danny turned his laptop around. “This image is actually from a camera mounted in the front grill, and these other blocks are graphic representations of the vehicle’s instruments and diagnostic readouts. I could switch to a feed straight from Scowl’s sensor package, but I don’t want to mess with things midstream, as it were.”

“Nice,” Jackson said. “What sort of incidents do you worry about?”

“Being pulled over by the police would be a big one,” Danny said. “Our security team would have to handle things before the officer got a look through the van’s window. Oh, and we had to make sure Scowl used the blinker instead of hand signals for turning.”

Jackson looked blank. General Brewster offered him another slight smile. “Civilian humor.”

“Ah.”

Phil said, “Later Terminator models will be able to control completely unmodified vehicles, but this still serves as a significant proof of concept.”

“I’d have to say so.” Jackson turned forward again. His features were unreadable, but his voice suggested he was impressed.

*   *   *

Once they were at the closest approach to the missile range, the vehicles took a rutted dirt track that led miles away from the main road into rolling terrain. The sparse vegetation here was burned yellow and brown by the summer sun. Heat hit Danny and the other vehicle occupants like a shock wave, causing them to begin sweating heavily, the instant they slid the van door open.

The long line of vehicles disgorged military officers from Edwards and from the Pentagon, soldiers who would be handling the setup and breakdown of the operation, members of Danny’s team, and CRS employees who set up minicams, camcorders, and boom microphones to record the operation.

They did not unload Scowl immediately. First, they drew a two-and-a-half-ton truck up near Scowl’s van and its crew of Air Force noncommissioned personnel unloaded a large military tent, a huge mass of green cloth. This they erected just beside Scowl’s van.

Then, from the back of the truck, they unloaded a car—or, more precisely, the body of a car, a classic Volkswagen Beetle. There was no frame attached to it. Features such as windshield and window glass had been removed. Interior amenities had been replaced by a series of struts and clamps. There were empty racks along the door interiors. “What’s all this?” Jackson asked.

“Believe it or not, a disguise,” General Brewster said. “Keep watching.”

Scowl, at last, was unloaded. The wheelchair lift on the side of its van brought it down to ground level and the Terminator, obeying commands sent from Danny’s laptop, rolled into the tent. It pulled to a stop in front of General Brewster and those around him.

“How’s it hanging, Scowl?” Danny asked.

There was a faint pop and Scowl’s voice—heavily modulated, generated by a voice synthesizer within the Terminator—emerged from a speaker beneath its head. “All systems green. Power at one hundred percent. Inquiry.”

“Go ahead.”

“Transportation versatility test complete yes no.”

“Yes. Clear it.”

“Inquiry.”

“Go ahead.”

“Question how’s it hanging Scowl constitutes request for diagnostics run yes no.”

“No.”

The Terminator went silent. Brewster gestured to indicate that they should step back from the machine. Danny followed him and Jackson a few paces backward. The work crew approached, lifting the Beetle shell over Scowl’s head, and began attaching the shell’s struts to corresponding bolt-holes on the Terminator’s exterior.

Jackson shook his head. “It understood ‘How’s it hanging’?”

“Sure,” Danny said. “Not much use in giving the Terminators a voice interface if they don’t understand colloquial English. Scowl doesn’t speak colloquially, but we’re in the process of giving it some learning potential that will allow it to add phrases to the vocabulary it uses as well as the vocabulary it understands.”

The work crew had the shell affixed to the robot now. The resulting hybrid looked strange, as though the Terminator had gutted a car and then crawled inside the remains to live. Soldiers began clipping rocket-propelled grenades and squad-level machine guns to the interior door racks.

“We’re performing our exercise in the open to simulate actual field conditions,” Brewster said. “But we can’t afford to have a foreign surveillance satellite swoop by overhead and pick up valuable data about our project. So—”

“So,” Jackson said, “the Chinese or French or whomever, if they see anything, will see a low-cost German car destroying military matériel. I like it.”

*   *   *

The observers took to the summit of a hill overlooking the exercise field. From here, they could see for miles in any direction, though numerous hills and folds in the earth blocked certain viewing angles. They could also hear an ominous rumbling from the north. Danny thought he knew what it was—engine noises from other participants in today’s exercise.

Danny shrugged on a flak jacket and donned the Army-style helmet handed him. He felt as though the door to the oven he had crawled inside had finally slammed shut. Most of the other observers were also donning flak jackets, although a couple of senior officers waved the precautions away.

Danny set up a folding chair beside Mr. Jackson’s. General Brewster had suggested to him that despite Jackson’s apparent lack of rank, he was the individual they most needed to impress today.

He opened his laptop and brought up a topographical map of the area. He angled the computer toward Jackson and said, “I was wondering if you’d like to move Scowl into position and set this operation into motion.”

“How would I do that?”

“This thumb pad controls the mouse cursor.” Danny demonstrated, using his thumb to move the cursor around on the screen. He settled it on a long blob toward the bottom of the screen. “This is where we are.” He moved the cursor to the right edge of the screen, then up and down along that edge. “Beyond this point is where the enemy forces are. Just move the mouse to wherever you want the Terminator to start and double-tap there.”

Jackson grinned. “‘Double-tap’ has different meanings in other parts of the service.”

“I know. I’ve done a fair amount of recreational shooting.”

Jackson reached over and expertly maneuvered the cursor to a point toward the center of the screen, directly between two small blobs that represented rises. Then he tapped the thumb pad twice.

General Brewster, visible over Jackson’s shoulder and watching the man’s actions, beamed at Danny. It had been Danny’s idea to demonstrate the simplicity of this particular navigational tool of the Terminator setup by letting Jackson use it, and the general was obviously pleased.

Danny suppressed a shudder. He was doing good work here, impressing the officer who oversaw his department. And his good work was helping speed human civilization toward a catastrophe. But if he didn’t do his best work, he might come under scrutiny that would limit his ability to change things for the better—to give the people of the future a better fighting chance.

At some point in the future—his friends the voices had never told him exactly when—Skynet would assume control of the military forces of the United States and portions of NATO, raining devastation on the centers of government and military activity around the world. Most of the people on this hilltop would die then or shortly thereafter, he was sure. He took a good look at their faces. It was possible that if he did not remember them, no one else would be alive to do so.

Danny wondered if General Brewster would make it. His memory from the other night of having spoken to his daughter, years in the future, was comforting. When push came to shove, if he had the opportunity, he could tell the man, “Your family will not die. They’ll be a big part of the effort to set things right.”

There were exclamations from others on the hill as the ludicrous Volkswagen rolled out into the field. It expertly maneuvered between obstacles in the broken terrain and took up position between the two rises selected by Jackson.

General Brewster extended a thumbs-up to a group of military men who sat apart. Each man sat on a folding chair like Danny’s but had on his lap something that looked like a mil-spec console game system, complete with screen and joysticks. They all faced away from the field of action, relying solely on the views their console screens gave them.

The engine roar from the north increased and was suddenly accompanied by distant metallic clanking. From that direction rolled tanks, three from behind one hill and three from behind another; they spread out into a ragged, broadening line as they approached the Terminator’s position. Danny didn’t know much about tanks, but to him these looked a little antiquated in design. In addition to the main gun, each had a machine gun attached to its turret; the turrets were oblong, with rounded edges.

General Brewster kept his eye on the field but leaned over. “Mr. Jackson, these are Russian T-54s manufactured in the 1960s and 1970s. We’ve been picking them up for a song—”

“Since the collapse of the Soviet Union,” Jackson said, nodding. “I know. I have one in my garage. The kids love it.”

“Ah.” Brewster kept a stony grin on his face, but Danny knew the general was struggling to decide whether or not to believe Jackson.

Fire gouted from the interior of the Beetle and two needles of smoke lanced from the Terminator’s position to that of the right-most tank. A cloud of fire and smoke erupted from the right side of the tank, the side away from the observers’ hill, and Danny saw the tank rock. It went still and fire continued to rise from its side and underside even after the smoke began to dissipate.

The Terminator went into reverse, spinning back away from its position, retreating behind the farther of the two rises. Two of the tanks fired in almost the same moment, their 100mm main guns shaking the tanks. Explosions erupted, one from the side of the nearer rise, one merely yards away from the spot where the Terminator had stood when it fired its rocket-propelled grenades.

“The tanks,” Jackson said. “They are radio-controlled, I assume.”

“That’s right,” Danny said. He gestured to the line of men with consoles on their laps. “You can see which one is out of the action.” Indeed, the third man in line was standing, placing his console in what looked like a hard-sided black suitcase. He seemed rueful. Danny resisted the temptation to say that they’d switched to radio-controlled tanks after the slot-car versions proved unreliable; he doubted General Brewster would appreciate the joke.

The two tanks nearest the observers’ hill picked up speed. Their controllers’ obvious intent was to make an end run around the near rise and approach the Terminator from the back. Meanwhile, the other three tanks approached the two rises more cautiously. Two had their tank guns swiveling to aim toward the west side of the west rise, anticipating the Volkswagen’s appearance from that side; the third kept its aim resolutely on the gap between the two rises.

But Danny and the observers could see the Terminator now climbing the south side of the west rise. It was hard going, a thirty-degree slope made up of earth and scrub brush, but Scowl made it in good time.

Danny could only imagine what it looked like from the perspective of the Russian tanks. It was something out of a black comedy—tank commanders splitting their attention between two likely points of arrival, when suddenly the comically non-threatening silhouette of a Beetle topped the rise between those two points.

The operators of the two tanks concentrating on the westernmost approach detected Scowl’s arrival. Their 100mm gun barrels began to traverse, but Scowl fired first, two more RPGs.

Scowl didn’t fire at the two tanks nearest it. Instead, it targeted the two farthest, those making the end run toward the eastern side of the eastern rise. The smoke trails from the RPGs drew near-instantaneous lines between Scowl’s position and the sides of the tanks.

When the last echoes of the two booms had died and the smoke cleared away, the first of the tanks was dead and burning; the second was still active, its turret turning, but it had thrown its right-hand track. With only its left track remaining, it could only move in rightward circles.

“You’ll notice,” General Brewster said, “that it’s avoiding shots at the tanks’ forward and upper sloped armor. This is a function of its target recognition software. It has by now identified the make and model of the enemy targets and recognizes their strong and weak points…”

Danny tuned him out. Scowl backed partway down the rise, out of sight of the nearer tanks, even before they got an opportunity to fire. Still they came on toward the west side of the west rise.

But the Terminator didn’t descend to ground level. It maintained its position two-thirds of the way up the rise and turned at ninety degrees. Slowly and with difficulty, it traversed that altitude of the rise, edging toward its western slope.

The two tanks moved behind that rise, out of Danny’s sight … but not out of Scowl’s. Danny saw smoke fill the interior of the Volkswagen shell as Scowl fired again—two more RPGs, and then two more. Smoke rose from the far side of the western rise. In his peripheral vision, Danny saw Jerry Squires jumping up and down in characteristic glee.

“That’s four kills, and one target immobilized,” Brewster said.

“Are you calling the test?” Jackson asked.

Brewster shook his head. “No, as promised, we go until the end—total elimination of one side or the other. I’m just keeping score.”

The last intact tank stayed where it was. It kept its main gun aimed beyond the western rise, anticipating a possible Terminator dash from that point. The tank with the thrown tread aimed between the two rises; from its current position, it could see all the way through the gap.

Danny saw the machine guns on both tanks orient up the slope of the western rise. Should Scowl reappear atop that rise, they wouldn’t have to waste time getting their target into their targeting brackets; a twitch of the wrist and depression of the firing button would send high-caliber machine-gun rounds straight into Scowl, damaging or perhaps destroying him.

“So it’s a waiting game,” Jackson said.

Brewster shook his head. “Not for long. The two tank operators are now coordinating, figuring out how the immobile one can cover the mobile one for an approach.”

“Basically,” Danny said, “it’s just become a game of chess, with the king protecting the queen.”

“So what’s the Terminator going to do?” Jackson asked.

“Scowl’s throwing away the chess manual,” Danny said. “It’s now going through the rules for Go, checkers, Parcheesi, everything in its repertoire, trying to figure something out.”

“It had better figure out something fast,” Jackson said. The mobile tank was maneuvering again, slowly moving around in the wake of the two that had been destroyed on the far side of the rise.

Danny saw Scowl extend a closed hand outside the driver’s-side window. The hand opened and sand fell from it, blowing eastward, toward the observers’ position, in the stiff wind.

Scowl abruptly rolled back down the rise. At its base, near the point that it would become visible to the immobile tank’s cameras, it faced westward. It canted its body forward so that the Beetle shell’s nose touched the earth and the rear was raised.

General Brewster frowned. “What’s it doing, Ávila?”

Danny grinned. “I’m not sure. It figured something out.”

Scowl’s tracks spun but the Terminator, though it lurched forward a hand-span, did not move. It had to be bracing itself on its hands and the front end of the Beetle, Danny realized.

The spinning tracks kicked an amazing amount of sand out from under the rear of the Beetle shell. The sand rose up higher than the height of a man, a thick, obscuring cloud that drifted across the southern side of the gap between the rises.

“A smoke screen,” Brewster said. His tone was admiring.

Danny glanced over at the two remaining tank operators. One was staring fixedly at his screen, his expression one of frustration.

Scowl suddenly reversed direction on its treads. It raced backward, plowing through its own sand-cloud, and was across the gap between rises in a moment. The hillside observers could dimly pick out its position in the cloud of sand, but from the immobile tank’s position, it must have been completely invisible as it crossed.

Scowl spun around and climbed the most forgiving slope of the rise, appearing well above and to the left of the tank’s angles of fire, launching another RPG before the immobilized machine could track.

“Five,” said Brewster.

The fate of the last tank was now a foregone conclusion. Scowl fired at the tank from its current position, the RPG striking the tank just before it disappeared behind the western rise. Scowl raced down this rise and across the open ground, then up the slope of the far rise, firing one last time as it came within view of its target.

“Six,” Brewster said. “Excuse me a moment, Mr. Jackson.” His step jaunty, he moved over to Phil Sherman and clapped the programming director on the back.

Jackson smiled. “The little Beetle that could.”

“Scowl’s hands are modeled after human hands,” Danny said. “It can pick up and use assault rifles, grenade launchers, machine guns, grenades … it has operation specifications for thousands of weapons on its hard drive, and interpretive programming that will allow it to figure out many weapons not in its database. If it has a trigger and a barrel, Scowl can probably figure out how to fire it and reload it.”

“How about swords?” Jackson asked. “Are we going to see a Terminator on the U.S. fencing team in 2008?”

Danny snorted. “Maybe 2012. Right now, I think Scowl’s sword technique would be considered a little crude. Something like a mass murderer with a fire ax.”

Brewster returned and extended a hand to Danny. “I started to congratulate Phil on a tremendous achievement … and he tells me that most of the Terminator’s creative thinking comes from your programming, Ávila. Well done, son.”

Danny shook his hand. “Thank you, sir.”

He felt odd and almost swayed in his seat. For just a moment, Danny was several people all at once: a young programmer struggling not to be flushed with pride as he received the praise of his boss, a man knowing that he was in possession of facts whose revelation would destroy the officer in front of him, and a man looking at the face of someone who’d been dead for more than twenty years.

But the general, oblivious to Danny’s sudden disorientation, had already turned away.

There was a tremendous boom and the turret of the nearest tank went straight up, propelled by a burst of flame from within the wreckage. The turret topped out at about the altitude of the summit of the observers’ hill and came to earth again about halfway between the tank and the observers.

“Tank ammunition cooking off,” Jackson said. His tone was amused.

General Brewster’s wasn’t. “Everyone off the hill!” he shouted. “Muster back at the tent.”