From the Ashes E-Book

Timothy Zahn

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 408

Beschreibung

From the Ashes, written by Hugo Award-winning author Timothy Zahn, is an exciting all-new story set in the universe of Terminator: Salvation. In post-Judgment Day LA, two lost kids named Kyle and Star keep watch for Terminators; a jaded Marine struggles to keep his rag-tag community together in the face of unrelenting danger; and John and Kate Connor assemble their Resistance team for a brutal assault on a deadly enemy.

Leseprobe

TERMINATORSALVATION

FROM THE ASHES

TIMOTHY ZAHN

TITAN BOOKS

Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes

ISBN: 9781848569324

Published by

Titan Books

A division of

Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark St

London

SE1 0UP

First edition March 2009

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Terminator Salvation ™ & © 2009 T Asset Acquisition Company, LLC.

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group UK Ltd.

As always,

For always,

For Anna.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

The last day of his life, he remembered thinking afterward, had been hell on earth.

It wasn’t just the heat of the Baja desert. That was awesomely intense, shimmering across the dirt and scrub, and he knew some of his fellow Marines were suffering in it. But U.S. Marine Sergeant Justo Orozco had grown up in East Los Angeles, and he had no problem with heat.

It wasn’t just the job, either. The Eleventh Marine Expeditionary Unit prided itself on its ability to fight anywhere on the planet, and there wasn’t any particular reason why Orozco’s platoon shouldn’t be here running a drug-interdiction exercise with their Mexican Army counterparts. Never mind that the theory underlying the exercise was bogus. Never mind that the Mexicans probably saw this as a slap at their own capabilities. The logic and politics of the situation weren’t Orozco’s concern, and he wasn’t being paid by the hour.

No, what made this particular mission hell was the way every single damn Mexican insisted on calling all the Americans “gringo.”

Including Orozco.

It irritated the hell out of him, which was probably why they kept doing it. He was an American, yes, but he was also full-blooded Hispanic, and he was damn proud of both. Why some people seemed to think those two identities had to be mutually exclusive was something he had never understood. He’d never put up with that nonsense before, and it galled the grit out of him to have to put up with it now.

But he was under orders to be cooperative. More than that, he was a professional, and he was damned if he would let a few resentful locals get the best of him.

It was getting on toward evening, and the team was just wrapping up a search-and-corral exercise, when out of the corner of his eye Orozco saw the flash.

His first reflexive assumption was that the Mexicans had sneaked an aircraft into the exercise, just to shake things up a little, and that he’d caught a flicker of sunlight off one of its windows. He turned that direction, opening his mouth to warn the rest of the team.

The words died in his throat. In the hazy distance far to the north, right where he’d seen the flash, a tiny, red-edged cloud had appeared.

And as he watched, its top boiled over into the shape of a mushroom.

He was trying to wrap his brain around the sight when there was another small flicker, slightly brighter this time. He waited, still staring at the mushroom cloud, when a second fiery pillar boiled up from the earth a little ways to the east of the first.

“My God,” someone whispered beside him. “Is that...? Oh, God!”

“It’s San Diego,” Orozco said, the sheer unnatural calmness in his voice as frightening as the mushroom clouds themselves. “San Diego.”

“Maybe Mexicali, too,” someone else muttered.

“Or Twentynine Palms,” Orozco said, marveling at the strange disconnect that had severed the link between his intellect and emotions. “Who the hell would want to take out Mexicali?”

“I just thought—”

“Oh, Dios mio!”

With an effort, Orozco tore his eyes away from the twin pillars of death. One of the Mexicans was staring past Orozco’s shoulder, his eyes wide and horrified, his face as pale as any of the gringos he derided. Moving like a man slogging through a nightmare, Orozco turned to look.

In the distance to the southeast, another tiny mushroom had appeared, clawing its way toward the sky.

“What the hell?” someone gasped. “That can’t be—”

“Hermosillo,” one of the other Mexicans said in a quavering voice. The man had tears shimmering in his eyes, and Orozco remembered him talking about his family in Hermosillo.

Orozco stared at the third mushroom cloud, his mind reeling with the utter insanity of it. San Diego, yes. Twentynine Palms, maybe. But Hermosillo? The place didn’t have a single shred of military or political significance that Orozco could think of. Why would anyone waste a nuke taking it out?

Unless someone had decided to take out everything.

Slowly, he turned to look at the rest of his team, their faces etched with varying degrees of terror, anger, or disbelief. They’d figured it out, too. Or they would soon enough.

Their lives were over. Everyone’s life was now over.

Orozco took a deep breath.

“I think,” he said, “we can safely say the exercise is over.”

“What do we do now?” someone asked.

Orozco took another look around the group... and this time, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before. All the Marines were looking at him. Even Lieutenant Raeder, whose face was as frozen as anyone else’s. They were all looking at Orozco.

Waiting for their sergeant to tell them what to do.

He took another deep breath. One of these deep breaths, he thought distantly, would be his last. He wondered if he would even know at the time which breath that would be.

“We’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ll survive, because we’re Marines, and that’s what Marines do. We’ll start by going back to camp and figuring out what we’ve got to work with.”

For a moment no one moved. Then the lieutenant stirred.

“You heard the man,” he called. “Gather up the gear and head back to camp.”

Slowly, the clustered knots broke up as the men finally began to move. Orozco took one last look to the north, noting that the mushroom clouds, too, were starting to break up.

And as he began helping the others collect the gear, he realized he’d been wrong. This day hadn’t been hell on earth. This day had been paradise.

Hell on earth had just begun.

CHAPTER ONE

It was after one in the morning by the time John Connor and his Resistance team made their way back through the rubble of Greater Los Angeles to the half-broken, half-burned-out building they’d called home for the past three months. He supervised the others as they stowed their gear, then sent them stumbling wearily to their bunks.

Then, alone in the small pool of light from his desk lamp, amid the outer darkness that pressed in against it, he sat down to make out his report.

In many ways, he reflected, this was one of the worst parts of the war against Skynet. In the heat of battle, with HK Hunter-Killers swooping past overhead and T-600 Terminators lumbering in from all sides, there was no time for deep thought or grand strategy or clever planning. You played it on the fly, running and shooting and running some more, hoping you could spot the openings and opportunities before Skynet could close them, trying to achieve your mission goal and still get as many of your people out alive as you could.

But sitting here alone, with a piece of crumpled paper laid out on top of a battered file cabinet, things were different. You had the quiet and the time and—worst of all—the hindsight to replay the battle over and over again. You saw all the things you should have done faster, or smarter, or just different. You saw the mistakes, the lapses of judgment, the miscues.

And you relived the deaths. All of them.

But it was part of the job, and it had to be done. Every Resistance contact with the enemy—win, lose, or draw—was data that could be sifted, prodded, evaluated, and tucked away for possible future reference. With enough such data, maybe the strategists at Command would someday finally find a weakness or blind spot that could be used to bring down the whole Skynet system.

Or so the theory went. Connor, at least, didn’t believe it for a minute. This was going to be a long, bloody war, and he had long since stopped hoping for silver bullets.

But you never knew. Besides, Skynet was certainly analyzing its side of each encounter. The Resistance might as well do the same.

It took him half an hour to write up the report and transmit it to Command. After that he spent a few minutes in the bathroom cleaning up as best he could, scrubbing other men’s blood off his hands and clothing. Then, shutting off the last of the bunker’s lights, he cracked the shutters to let in a bit of fresh air, and wearily headed down the darkened corridor to the tiny room he shared with his wife.

Kate was stretched out in bed, the blankets tucked up under her chin, her breathing slow and steady. Hopefully long since asleep, though Connor had no real illusions on that score. As one of their team’s two genuine doctors, the hours she put in were nearly as long as Connor’s own, and in some ways even bloodier.

For a minute he just stood inside the doorway, gazing at her with a mixture of love, pride, and guilt. Once upon a time she’d had the nice, simple job of a veterinarian, where the worst thing that could happen in a given day was a nervous horse or a lap dog with attitude.

Connor had taken her away from all that. Wrenched her out of it, more accurately, snatching her from the path of Skynet’s last attempt to kill him before the devastation of Judgment Day.

Of course, if he hadn’t taken her away, she would be dead now. There were all too many days when he wondered if that would have been a kinder fate than the one he’d bestowed on her.

There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves. The old quote whispered through his mind. Kyle Reese’s old quote, the words Connor himself would one day teach the boy—

“Good morning,” Kate murmured from the bed.

Connor started.

“Sorry—didn’t mean to wake you,” he murmured back.

“You didn’t,” she assured him, pushing back the blankets and propping herself up on one elbow. “I only got to bed an hour or so ago. I heard everyone else come in, and I’ve just been dozing a little while I waited for you. How did it go?”

“About like usual,” Connor said as he crossed to the bed and sat down. “We got the Riverside radar tower— not just taken down, but blown to splinters. If Olsen’s team got the Pasadena tower like they were supposed to, that’ll leave Skynet just the Capistrano one and no triangulation at all. That should take a lot of the pressure off our air support in any future operations. At least until Skynet gets around to rebuilding everything.”

“Good—we can use a breather,” Kate said. “How many did we lose?”

Connor grimaced.

“Three. Garcia, Smitty, and Rondo.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and Connor could see some of his own pain flash across her eyes. “That’s, what, ten including the ones Jericho lost when his team took out the Thousand Oaks tower?”

“Eleven,” Connor corrected. “Those towers come expensive, don’t they?”

“They sure do,” Kate said soberly. Abruptly, she brightened. “By the way, I have a surprise for you.” Reaching to the far side of the bed, she came up with a small bag. “Merry Christmas.”

Connor stared at the bag in her hand, a surge of husbandly panic flashing through him. How could he possibly have forgotten—?

“Wait a minute,” he said, frowning. “This is March.”

“Well, yes, technically,” Kate conceded innocently. “But we were all kind of busy on the official Christmas.”

Connor searched his memory, trying to pick the specifics out of the long, blended-together nightmare that life on earth had become.

“Was that the day we raided the air reserve base for parts?”

“No, that was Christmas Eve,” Kate corrected. “Christmas Day we were mostly playing hide-and-seek with those three T-1s that wanted the stuff back. Anyway, I didn’t have anything for you back then.” She jiggled the bag enticingly. “Now, I do. Go ahead—take it.”

“But I didn’t get anything for you,” Connor protested as he took the bag.

“Sure you did,” Kate said quietly. “You came home alive. That’s all I want.”

Connor braced himself.

“Kate, we’ve been through this,” he reminded her gently. “You’re too valuable as a surgeon to risk having you go out in the field.”

“Yes, I remember all the arguments,” Kate said. “And up to now, I’ve mostly agreed with them.”

“Mostly?”

She sighed.

“You’re the most important thing in my life, John. In fact, you’re the most important thing in everyone’s life, even if they don’t know it yet. Whatever I can do to keep you focused, that’s what I’ll do. Whether I personally like it or not. If having me stay behind helps that focus, well, I’ve been content to do that.”

Connor had to turn away from the intensity in her eyes.

“Until now?”

“Until now.” She reached up and put her hand on his cheek, gently but firmly turning him back to look at her. “People are dying out there. Far too many people, far too quickly. We need every gun and every set of hands in the field that we can get. You know that as well as I do.”

“But you’re more valuable to us right here,” Connor tried again.

“Am I?” Kate asked. “Even if we grant for the sake of argument that I’m any safer hiding in a makeshift bunker than I am out in the field, is this really where I can do the most good? Patching up the wounded after you get them back is all well and good, but I can’t help but think it would be better if you had me right there with you where I could do the preliminary work on the spot.”

“You could teach some of the others.”

“I have taught them,” Kate reminded him. “I’ve taught you and them and everyone everything I can about first aid. But there’s nothing I can do to give you my experience, and that’s what you need out there. You need a field medic, pure and simple. So you’ve got Campollo and me, and Campollo is seventy-one with arthritic knees. This is one of those decisions that really kind of makes itself, don’t you think?”

Connor closed his eyes.

“I don’t want to lose you, Kate.”

“I don’t want to lose you, either,” she said quietly. “That’s why we need to be together. So that neither of us loses the other.”

With her hand still on his cheek, she leaned forward and gave him a lingering kiss. Connor kissed her back, hungrily, craving the love and closeness and peace that had all but died so many years ago, when the missiles began falling to the earth.

They held the kiss for a long minute, and then Kate gently disengaged.

“Meanwhile,” she said, giving him an impish smile, “you still have a Christmas present to open.”

Connor smiled back.

“What in the world would I do without you?”

“Well, for one thing, you could have been asleep fifteen minutes ago,” Kate said dryly. “Come on—open it.”

Connor focused on the bag in his hand. It was one of the drawstring bags Kate packed emergency first-aid supplies in, turned inside out so that the smoother, silkier side was outward.

“I see you’ve been shopping at Macy’s again,” he commented as he carefully pulled it open.

“Actually, I just keep reusing their bags,” Kate said. “Adds class to all my gift-giving. For heaven’s sake— were you this slow on Christmas when you were a boy?”

Connor shrugged.

“Given that my mother’s typical Christmas presents were new Browning semi-autos or C4 detonators, it didn’t pay to open packages too quickly.”

Kate’s eyes widened.

“You are joking, aren’t you?”

“Of course,” Connor said with a straight face. “Christmas was survival gear; Fourth of July was munitions. Okay, here goes.” He reached into the bag.

And to his surprise, pulled out a badly cracked jewel case with a slightly battered compact disc inside.

“What’s this?” he asked, peering at it in the dim light.

“A little memory from your childhood,” Kate said. “Or at least from simpler days. An album called Use Your Illusion II.”

Connor felt his eyes open. A memory from his childhood, indeed. “Thank you,” he said. “Where on earth did you find it?”

“One of Olsen’s men had it with him last month when they came by to swap munitions,” Kate said. “I remembered you talking about listening to it when you were younger, so I traded him a couple of extra bandage packs for it. You know, those packs we dug out of the treatment room at the Orange County Zoo.”

“I just hope Tunney was able to get that CD player working,” Connor commented, cradling the disk carefully in his hands. “I miss music. That and Italian food, I think, are what I miss most.”

“For me, it’s definitely music,” Kate mused. “Vocals, especially—I used to love listening to a live choir in full four-part harmony.” She smiled faintly. “Just a bit different from your taste in music.”

“Differences are the spice of life,” Connor reminded her. “And G’n’R is probably better music to kill machines by.”

“Probably.” Kate’s smile faded. “Besides, nowadays what reason does anyone have to sing?”

“There’s still life,” Connor said, eyeing his wife closely. Kate didn’t get depressed very often, but when she did it could be a deep and terrible pit. “And love, and friends.”

“But mostly just life,” Kate agreed. “I know. Sometimes we forget what’s really important, don’t we?”

“A constant problem throughout history,” Connor said, breathing a quiet sigh of relief. So she wasn’t going there, after all. Good. “Thanks again, Kate. This really makes my day. Probably even my year.”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Oh, and rock on. The man who gave me the disk told me to say that.” She took a deep breath, and Connor could see her chasing the memories back to where they belonged. “Meanwhile, it’s been a late night, and the world starts up again in about five hours. Come on, let’s go to bed.”

“Right.” Standing up, Connor reached for his gunbelt.

And paused. “Did you hear something?” he asked in a low voice.

“I don’t know,” Kate said, her head tilted in concentration.

Connor frowned, straining his ears. A whispery wind was blowing gently across the bunker roof, setting cat-purr vibrations through the piles of loose debris up there. Everything seemed all right.

But something had caught his attention. And something was still screaming wordlessly across his combat senses.

“Stay here,” Connor told his wife, crossing back to the door. He listened at the panel for a moment, then cautiously opened it.

The earlier overcast sky had cleared somewhat, allowing a little starlight to filter in through the cracked shutters. Connor checked both directions down the empty corridor, then headed left toward the rear of the bunker and the sentry post situated between the living quarters and storage room.

Piccerno was on duty, seated on a tall stepladder with everything from his shoulders up snugged up inside the observation dome. Like everything else these days, the dome was a product of simplicity and ingenuity: an old plastic office wastebasket that had been fastened to the top of the bunker, equipped with a set of eye slits that permitted 360-degree surveillance, then covered from above with strategically placed rubble to disguise its true purpose.

“Report,” Connor murmured as he stepped to the foot of the ladder.

There was no answer.

“Piccerno?” Connor murmured, the hair on the back of his neck tingling. “Piccerno?”

Still no answer. Getting a one-handed grip on the ladder, Connor headed up. He reached the top and pushed aside Piccerno’s bunched-up parka collar.

One touch of the warm, sticky liquid that had soaked the upper surface of the collar was all he needed to know what had happened. He spent another precious second anyway, peering up into the narrow space between Piccerno’s face and the rim of the dome, just to make sure there was nothing he could do.

There wasn’t. Piccerno’s eyes were open but unseeing, his forehead leaning against the dome, the blood from the hole in his left temple still trickling down his face.

Skynet had found them.

Quickly, Connor climbed back down the ladder, a kaleidoscope of Piccerno’s life with the team flashing through his mind. Ruthlessly, he forced back the memories.

This was not the time.

Grabbing the Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun that was propped against the wall, he hurried back to the living quarters.

Kate was already dressed, her gun belt in hand. “What is it?” she asked tensely.

“Piccerno’s dead,” Connor told her grimly. “Longrange sniper, or else one hell of a silencer.”

“Terminators?”

“I didn’t check,” Connor said. “Skynet’s obviously trying the sneaky approach, and I didn’t want to do anything that might alert it that we were onto the game. Get back to supply—I’ll go roust everyone and send them back there. Make a quick sort of the equipment and load them with as much as you think they can handle.”

“Right,” Kate said as she finished strapping on her gun belt.

“And keep everyone as quiet as you can,” Connor added. “The longer Skynet thinks we’re all still asleep, the longer we’ll have before the fireworks start.”

Kate nodded.

“Be careful.”

“You, too.”

He continued along the corridor, ducking into each room as he passed and nudging or whispering the occupants awake, giving them a set of terse instructions, then moving on as they grabbed their clothing and weapons.

Finally, he reached the bunker’s main entrance. There, to his complete lack of surprise, he found Barnes waiting, standing beside the bunker door with his eye pressed to one of the eyeslits, a 9mm Steyr in his holster and one of the group’s few remaining grenade launchers clutched to his chest. A few feet away stood the young man who was supposed to be on sentry duty tonight, his throat working as he nervously fingered his rifle.

“We got eight T-600s on the way,” Barnes reported as Connor came up beside him. “What’s goin’ on in back?”

“They took out Piccerno,” Connor told him. “Quietly, and at least several minutes ago. Probably means Skynet’s about to send in the heavy stuff—T1s or maybe a tank or two—and was hoping to sneak up on us.”

Barnes grunted and straightened up from the peepholes. His bald head glistened with a week’s worth of sweat, his clenched teeth glinting through two weeks’ worth of beard stubble.

“So what’s the plan?”

“We run on our timetable, not Skynet’s,” Connor replied. “If we can buy a few minutes, I can—”

Barnes nodded.

“Got just the thing.”

With that he pulled open the door, and fired.

There was a soft chuff as the grenade shot skyward out of its tube. Biting down hard on his tongue—I can get more men here before you engage—Connor stepped quickly to the other side of the doorway and looked out.

In the faint starlight he could see eight towering, human-shaped figures picking their way carefully across the treacherous ground. One of the T-600s looked up at the sounds from the bunker, and Connor caught a glimpse of glowing red eyes.

And then, with a brilliant flash, Barnes’s grenade exploded.

Not in the midst of the approaching Terminators, but in the doorway of the half-collapsed four-story building immediately to their right. There was a stutter as the grenade’s shockwave set off a line of smaller charges embedded in the pockmarked masonry.

And with a horrendous crunch, the entire wall gave way, raining blocks of concrete and rebar and broken glass across the street, toppling and burying all eight of the Terminators.

“That how you wanted it?” Barnes called to Connor over the echoing roar.

“Pretty much,” Connor said. So much for giving the group as much time as possible to make their escape.

On the other hand, if Barnes hadn’t blown the building when he did, the eight Terminators would soon have passed that particular trap, and Connor’s fighters would have had that many more enemies to deal with.

“I’ll send you some backup,” he added, moving away from the doorway. “Hold for ten minutes, or as long as you can, then pull back to the tunnel.”

“I don’t need no one else,” Barnes growled, throwing a contemptuous glance at the shaking sentry. “You just get the people and stuff out.”

“I’ll send you some backup,” Connor repeated, making it clear it was an order, and headed back down the corridor. Barnes was probably one of the best ground fighters in the entire Resistance, but this wasn’t the time for lone-wolf tactics. If indeed there ever was such a time.

If anyone had needed extra incentive to get moving, Barnes’s wake-up explosion had apparently done the trick. The whole bunker was alive with people, many of them still scrambling into their clothing as they ran toward the supply room and the emergency exit beyond.

A few of the faster dressers had taken up positions in doorways along the way, their weapons pointed toward the front of the bunker, ready to sacrifice themselves if necessary to slow down the machines once the outer defenses were breached. Connor grabbed two of them and sent them up to the entrance, gave everyone else the same ten-minute warning he’d given Barnes, then headed back to his room for anything he or Kate might have left behind.

He made especially sure that he grabbed his new G’n’R CD.

Most of the fifty-odd people of the team had made it to the supply room by the time he arrived, with only a few stragglers still coming in. Kate was in the center of the activity, coolly pointing each newcomer to the boxes, bags, and packs she’d selected for the must-save list.

“How are we doing?” Connor asked as he picked up two ammo satchels and slung one over each shoulder.

“Another ninety seconds and we’ll have everything we can carry,” Kate told him, threading a bungee cord between the satchels’ straps and fastening them together across Connor’s chest so that they wouldn’t slip off his shoulders. “They took Piccerno’s body down,” she added more quietly.

Connor nodded. He’d noticed that on his way through.

“Have Blair and Yoshi been through? I didn’t spot either of them, but it was pretty dark and I wasn’t exactly taking roll.”

“Blair’s here,” Kate said, waving to a pair of latecomers and pointing them to a stack of ration boxes. “She said she’ll go out with the rest of us and make her way back to the hangar. Yoshi’s already there, or at least he’s supposed to be.”

“We’ll need to get the ground crew out, too,” Connor said, grimacing as a low vibration tickled at the soles of his feet. “Here comes our company.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when one of the younger women dashed in from the direction of the sentry post, nearly running down an eight-year-old boy in the process.

“T1s,” she announced breathlessly. “Coming in from all directions.”

“Are they heading for the main door?” Connor asked.

“No, toward here. I saw them through the—” she faltered a little “—where Piccerno was. Maybe a hundred meters out.”

Connor nodded. T1s were heavy, splay-armed fighting machines mounted on heavy treads, slower than the humanoid T-600s but more heavily armed and even harder to take down. The plan was probably to roll them up onto the roof near Piccerno’s sentry post in hopes of collapsing it by sheer weight and trapping the group in a pincer.

“Go to the front and tell Barnes and the others I said to pull out now,” Connor told her. “They’re to collect the rest of the backstops along the way.”

The girl nodded and took off down the corridor at a dead run.

“Tunney?” Connor called, looking around at the heavily laden men and women.

“Here, sir,” Tunney called from the side wall. He and the other lieutenant, David, were standing beside the dark opening that led into the bunker’s emergency exit. Like Connor, each man was loaded with two shoulder bags of ammo or grenades, but instead of just a sub-machine gun each of them also carried a grenade launcher and flame thrower. “Time to go?” he asked.

“Almost,” Connor said, squeezing Kate’s shoulder briefly and then crossing to join them. “Now it is,” he said. “I’ll take point; keep a three-meter spacing between us.”

“I believe it’s my turn for point, sir,” Tunney said, his voice low but firm.

Connor shook his head.

“My team; my job. Stay alert—if Skynet’s found the far end, we’ll have some unpleasant surprises waiting.”

He looked back at the group, to find them silently watching him. Watching, and trusting.

“Stay as quiet as you can, and don’t stop moving,” he said, keeping his voice as calm as if this was just another training exercise. “Once you’re through the tunnel, depending on what’s waiting out there, we may decide to split into small groups of two or three. Everyone knows where Fallback One is?”

The room bobbed briefly with nodding heads.

“Then I’ll see you all there,” Connor said. “Good luck.” Nodding for Tunney and David to follow, he headed into the tunnel.

The group referred to the emergency exit as a tunnel, but a real, hand-dug tunnel would have taken far more time and manpower than the group had had to spare over the past few months. The route was instead a mostly natural pathway consisting of half-crushed hallways, basements, and service corridors. Connor’s people had cleared out the blockages, propped up the ceilings, and dug short connecting shafts where necessary until they’d created an exit route that could take them invisibly a good three blocks from the bunker.

But there was always the chance that one of Skynet’s endlessly roving machines had spotted the route, and Connor felt his nerves tightening with each step as he made his way through the darkness.

There were dozens of places where the roof had eroded through to the outside world, allowing in some badly needed starlight but also precluding the use of any lights by the escapees. Worse, the longest straight-line segment anywhere in the tunnel was about six meters, with everything else being a collection of zigzags, right-angle turns, and occasional backtracks. A T-600 waiting in the darkness around any one of those corners could have Connor and his vanguard dead before they even knew what had hit them.

But each corner was clear, the starlight filtering through the fissures never blazed with HK floodlights, and he heard nothing of the telltale growl of T-1 treads. Gradually, Connor’s hopes and pace began to pick up. They might make it. They just might make it.

He was about halfway through the tunnel when the sounds of distant explosions and gunfire began to echo through the passageway from behind him.

He swore feelingly under his breath. The blasts could be nothing more ominous than Barnes setting off the last string of the bunker’s booby traps. But they could also be the rear guard fighting desperately against T1s that had succeeded in crashing through the bunker roof.

And Kate would be one of the last of the group to leave, probably just a couple of steps ahead of Barnes. If the Terminators had cut through...

If they had, there was nothing Connor could do to help. He could only trust to hope, and to the destiny that linked him and Kate to humanity’s ultimate salvation.

He’d gone twenty meters more when a blast rolled through the tunnel, sending a wave of warm air across the back of his neck. The final booby trap had been triggered, bringing down the bunker’s ceiling and burying any Terminators that had made it inside as it sealed off the end of the tunnel. Connor and his people were committed now, with nowhere to go but forward.

Still no sign that Skynet had noticed them. Connor kept going, the drifting air currents from the overhead gaps slowly becoming a single steady breeze in his face. He rounded one final blind corner, and with a suddenness that for some reason never failed to surprise him, he was at the end.

Cautiously, he looked out between the carefully positioned rotting two-by-fours that blocked the exit. The street beyond was cleaner than some he’d seen, with much of the masonry and wood having been scavenged over the years by the handful of civilians who still scratched out a tenuous existence in the ruined city. More importantly, there was no sign of Terminators.

From the direction of the bunker came a short burst of gunfire from one of the remote-activated guns set up there and in nearby buildings. The burst was answered instantly by a longer, staccato roar from the T-600s’ miniguns. Connor gestured Tunney forward, and the two men set to work clearing the exit.

The wooden barrier looked sturdier and more impassible than it actually was, and it took less than half a minute for them to silently move the boards out of the way. Connor started to step out.

And ducked back as an HK swooped past, just half a block away, heading toward the bunker. Connor waited a few seconds, then tried again.

Nothing jumped or swooped out at him, either metal or human. As the sporadic gunfire continued from the vicinity of the bunker, he did a quick three-sixty, then gestured to Tunney and David. The two men slipped past him, moved ten meters in opposite directions down the street, and did three-sixties of their own. They hand-signaled the all-clear, then hunkered down in the rubble with weapons ready.

Connor stepped back into the tunnel, went back around that final blind corner, and gestured to the line of people waiting tensely in the dark.

Blair Williams, her dark hair tied back in a ponytail, was the fifth one out. She spotted Connor and stepped out of line.

“I’m heading for the hangar,” she announced softly. “Any special orders?”

“Yes; that you wait a minute,” Connor told her, grabbing her arm and pulling her down into a crouch as another HK appeared to the west, weaving its way between the skeletal remains of two of the taller buildings.

“Why?” Blair countered.

“Just wait,” Connor repeated.

Blair huffed something under her breath, but obediently moved over to the stubby remains of a fire hydrant and squatted beside it, drawing her big .44 caliber Desert Eagle from its holster.

Two more HKs had swooped in to join the party at the bunker before everyone made it out of the tunnel. But none of the machines came close, and there was no indication that they’d noticed anything amiss, especially with all the gunfire masking any sounds the group might make.

Kate, as Connor had expected, was the last one out before the rear guard. At the very end of the line, also as expected, was Barnes.

“You seen my brother?” he asked Connor, hefting his grenade launcher as he looked around.

“Yes, he’s already out,” Connor assured him. Along with his launcher, Connor noted, Barnes had also picked up a Galil assault rifle somewhere along the way and had the weapon slung over his shoulder along with his gear bags. If all the extra weight was bothering him, it didn’t show.

“Good,” Barnes said. “We’re splitting up, right? I’ll get my squad and take point.”

“David will handle your squad,” Connor told him. “I want you to take Blair to the hangar.”

Blair rose from her crouch, a look of outraged disbelief on her face.

“Is that why you made me wait?” she demanded. “For him?”

“I don’t want you trying to get to the hangar alone,” Connor told her.

“I don’t need him,” Blair insisted.

“Right—she doesn’t need me,” Barnes seconded.

“More importantly, Wince and Inji are still in there,” Connor explained patiently. “Once the planes are out, someone has to get them to safety.”

Barnes bared his teeth, but reluctantly nodded.

“Fine. Come on, flygirl. Try to keep up.”

He set off down the street, his head moving back and forth as he watched for trouble. Blair paused long enough to roll her eyes, then followed.

“I’m sure they’re secretly very fond of each other,” Kate offered dryly.

“As long as they dislike Skynet more, I’m happy,” Connor said. “Come on, let’s get these people out of here.”

CHAPTER TWO

The gunfire back at the abandoned bunker was starting to trail off as Blair flitted down the street like a ghost, her eyes automatically picking out the quietest route through the debris and rusting cars and occasional pieces of shattered human skeletons. She took advantage of every shadow, and since the main source of light was the HKs’ spotlights three blocks away, the shadows were both plentiful and deep. She’d done this sort of thing a thousand times, and was very good at it.

Certainly better at it than Barnes. He wasn’t bad at shadow-hopping, but the sheer bulk of the gear he habitually lugged around automatically made him noisier than she was. In addition, he had a habit of turning his whole upper body back and forth instead of just his head as he scanned the area, which tended to jingle his equipment belts and ammo bandoleer. Blair had pointed it out once or twice in the past, and had gotten a highly ungracious and extremely unoriginal expletive for her trouble.

She didn’t trust Barnes. Not because she thought that he would ever betray them to the Terminators, but because he was a loose cannon who tended to act without thinking. Sometimes in the heat of combat that was what you had to do, and Blair had certainly done her share of such flailing. But Barnes not only did way too much of it, in Blair’s opinion, but he also seemed perversely proud of his refusal to think things all the way through.

Besides that was the man himself. He was good to have on your side once the fighting began, but he had none of the idealistic courage that Blair could sense in both of the Connors, the commitment to the people whose lives had ended up in their hands. Barnes fought because he liked to fight, and because he hated Skynet.

Which wasn’t, for Blair, a particularly durable motivation for this kind of long-term war. As far as she could make out, Barnes didn’t particularly like people, had never gotten along with authority figures of any sort, and probably hadn’t been a particularly outstanding citizen of the pre-Judgment Day world. In fact, she could easily envision him running along these same streets, in this same darkness, carrying a flat-screen TV from a broken store window instead of the grenade launcher he was currently clutching to his chest.

But he was hound-dog loyal to John Connor, and Blair was one of Connor’s people, and for that reason alone she knew Barnes would get her to the hangar safely or die in the attempt. The big man might not be the best argument for saving humanity, but if humanity was to be saved, Barnes would probably be one of those who would make it happen.

Probably dying somewhere before it was all over.

Possibly while saving some flygirl’s butt.

The hangar was just ahead, a broken remnant of an old airspace museum whose roof had caved in so far that it was obviously no longer able to conceal anything bigger than a Piper Cub. Barnes lifted up a closed fist in warning as they approached, trotting to a crouching halt beside a mangled sign just outside the grounds.

Blair crouched down beside him, adjusting her grip on her Desert Eagle as she studied the open space that lay between them and the hangar. A handgun, even one this powerful, wouldn’t do much against T-600s except slow them down, and would be of even less use against a T-1, unless she got in a lucky shot. However, there were also human gangs still roaming the streets, scavenging for buried supplies or stealing from the people who’d gotten there first, and the Eagle’s .44 magnum rounds were more than adequate for opening their guts to the cool night air.

But either it was past the gangs’ bedtimes or else the ruckus a few blocks away had scared them back under their rocks. Nothing was moving out there, human or otherwise.

“Looks clear,” Barnes murmured. “You want me to walk you in?”

“You just stay here,” Blair murmured back. Did the man deliberately go out of his way to tick her off? Probably. “I’ll send the crew out to you.”

Barnes grunted. “Make it snappy.”

Blair took a deep breath, and headed toward the hangar, taking the open ground in as fast a sprint as she could without risking a broken ankle. She spun halfway around as she reached the building, landing her back against the wall beside the door as she gave the area one last quick look.

Still nothing.

Panting a little, she slipped inside and pulled the door closed behind her.

And jerked back as a bright light exploded in her face.

She had just enough time to slam her eyelids shut before the light disappeared.

“Sorry,” Yoshi’s voice came from behind the purple blob floating in front of her eyes. A hand reached out and took her arm. “Come on.”

“Where’s Wince?” Blair asked as she let Yoshi guide her across the broken floor.

“He and Inji are prepping your plane,” Yoshi said. “I’m assuming Connor wants us to blow this popsicle stand?”

“Yeah, that’s kind of a given,” Blair said. “Why, were you thinking of staying?”

“Not if everyone else goes,” Yoshi said, an odd wistfulness in his voice. “I just hate to see the place go, that’s all.”

Blair looked around. Actually, so did she. The purple blob was fading now, and behind it the familiar cramped area beneath the hangar’s crushed roof was coming into view.

Or rather, now that the false floor had been rolled aside, the uncramped area of the basement storage room, a sublevel that Skynet’s initial surveillance had missed. By removing the floor and installing a winch-equipped ramp, Connor’s people had turned an expanse of otherwise useless space into a very cozy spot for stashing the team’s two A-10 “Warthog” attack jets.

Blair ran a quick eye over her plane as she and Yoshi headed down the ramp. It was as banged-up as everything else in Connor’s meager arsenal, though the wild flying-shark paint job she’d adorned it with hid a lot of the damage. But to her, the nicks and bullet holes were nothing to be ashamed of. They were marks of honor, wounds suffered in the cause of humanity’s war for survival.

And scarred or otherwise, the plane was no more ready to give up the fight than Blair herself was. A pair of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles hung from two of the A-10’s four remaining under-wing pylons, while the seven-barrel GAU-8 Avenger Gatling gun nestled beneath its nose promised a hornets’ nest of 30mm explosive and armor-piercing rounds to any HK or T-1 foolish enough to get in her way.

Her remaining two pylons, she noted, were sporting equipment nacelles, undoubtedly loaded with everything Wince and Inji could pry up and pack inside. That was going to play hell with the A-10’s balance and maneuverability, but Blair would just have to deal with it. It wasn’t like the two men could lug everything out on their backs. Not even with Barnes to help.

“Is everyone okay?” Wince’s disembodied voice drifted out from somewhere behind the two planes. “It sounded pretty nasty there for awhile.”

“It was,” Blair said, deciding there was no point in burdening him with the news of Piccerno’s death. He’d find out about that soon enough. “We need to get moving, too. If Skynet follows its usual post-raid pattern, the T-600s could be knocking on the door anytime now. We don’t want to be here when they do.”

“No argument there,” Wince agreed, coming into sight around the rear of the plane, his white hair glistening in the starlight that filtered through the cracks in the roof. “You probably saw the cargo pods we strapped on. You going to be okay with that?”

“I’ll be fine,” Blair assured him. “Barnes is waiting outside by the west sign. You and Inji grab whatever you’re carrying, and get going.”

“We’ll get the door first,” Wince said, looking around. “Inji?”

And then, abruptly, the cracks in the hangar roof blazed with light.

“Cover!” Blair snapped at Wince as she sprinted toward her plane. Damn the HKs, anyway. “And get clear of the door!”

The words were barely out of her mouth when the silence of the night was shattered by the thunder of automatic weapons fire.

But not the drawn-out stutter of an HK’s miniguns. It was the slower, higher-pitched sound of a Galil assault rifle.

Like the one Barnes had been carrying over his shoulder.

Blair swore under her breath. Leave it to him to pick a one-man fight with a flying weapons platform.

“Forget the winch!” she shouted to Yoshi as she bounded up the ladder and dropped into her cockpit. “Blast and burn.”

“Right,” Yoshi called over the gunfire as he headed for his own plane. “You or me?”

“Me,” Blair shouted, punching for engine ignition. “Go as soon as it’s clear.” There was no time for her to do a proper flight checklist. She would just have to hope Wince and Inji had done the prep right.

They had. Even as she pulled the canopy closed she could feel the vibration of the twin GE turbofans behind her coming to life. Flipping up the safety bar on her stick, she raised the muzzle of her GAU-8 to point at the center of the hangar door and squeezed the trigger.

A normal door would have simply disintegrated at the center of fire, leaving the bulk of it still sitting there, blocking the way. But this particular door had been carefully warped most of the way out of its guide rails and fasteners, and its center had been heavily reinforced with large pieces of superhard alloy, scavenged from wrecked HKs and T-4 tanks. The result was exactly as planned: even as the door’s center began to shred in the face of Blair’s onslaught, the sheer impact of two-pound shells striking it at a thousand meters per second blew the whole door out of its housing and hurled it in a twisting arc across the open area outside. Blair caught a glimpse of an HK swooping down toward the spot where she’d left Barnes—

And with a teeth-tingling screech of metal against metal, the flying door slammed into the HK’s tail.

The HK nearly lost it right there and then, as the impact threw it violently to the side. Its left tail fin hit the ground and dug in, spinning the whole aircraft a quarter turn around the pivot point.

But the computer controlling the craft was faster than any human pilot. Before the HK’s nose could slam into the tarmac, it managed to pull up and out of its spin, its engines revving madly as it tried to regain its equilibrium.

It was still trying when Barnes sent a final burst of fire squarely into its nose, igniting its fuel and munitions and blowing the whole thing to scrap metal.