Infiltrator

Outside, a man in sunglasses was clinging to the wing of the plane. His face in profile looked remarkably like Dieter's.

"What is it?" von Rossbach asked. He undid his seat belt and rose to cross over to their side of the aircraft.

"Sit down, please!" the pilot said.

Sarah looked out and down; they were already over the ocean. When she looked

up she was staring into the Terminator's face.

"Shit!" she said, real terror in her voice.

It clung to the wing until they were airborne, then it moved, hand over hand, toward the body of the plane. Once it was close to the fuselage, Three raked its nails down the jet's metal skin. One of the T-950's improvements had been to give the Terminator titanium steel claws, hidden beneath the human-looking fingernails. Its blow to the side of the plane broke away the fragile keratin covering that disguised this asset; the bloody bits fluttered away as steel ripped beneath Three's hands.

It looked up to confront Sarah Connor's white face and considered tearing away the window plastic to get at her. Three rejected the idea. The opening was too small; it could not reach her this way. She would escape, and it would be too vulnerable. Causing a crash at this low altitude and speed also lacked sufficient probability of mission success. It began to work its way down the fuselage, one careful blow at a time.

"What the hell is going on out there?" the pilot asked, his voice sounding desperate.

He was still too close to the heavily trafficked airport to put the plane on autopilot so he could go back and look. The instruments didn't show any reason for those vicious thumping sounds, or that wild dip of the wing while they were taking off.

"This is Owen Roberts Control," the headphones spoke. "There is… there is a man clinging to the exterior of your aircraft."

"Oh, very funny," he snapped. This wasn't a frigging biplane, for God's sake. He was doing better than three hundred mph already.

Then he thought about that dip on the wing, those weird pounding sounds. "Give me clearance for an emergency landing," he said. "I'm turning back," he called to his passengers.

"NO!" his passengers shouted as one.

"John, stop him," Sarah said.

John tightened his lips, but nodded and headed forward. Sarah and Dieter looked out the window, watching the Terminator's progress.

Three clung to the side of the door frame and began to tear away the metal around the handle, careless of its flesh sheath. It would self-destruct soon anyway.

John slipped into the copilot's seat.

"Please return to the passenger cabin," the pilot said sharply. He didn't need this distraction, not with the tower giving him instructions and some maniac outside the plane. How was that even possible?

"You can't turn the plane around," John said.

The pilot looked at him. "Hey, kid, there's somebody in trouble out there. We can't just ignore him!"

"I can fly a plane," John said quietly. He held one hand up, and there was a sudden click. The blade of the knife looked short, but extremely sharp. "If you attempt to turn back we will kill you and I will take over. My advice is to keep to your route and let us take care of this situation. Do you understand?" he asked.

The pilot snapped a look at the kid, ready to face him down. Then something in John's eyes registered. He wasn't looking at some dumb, punk kid who didn't understand the situation. He was looking a man who meant what he said.

"Sure," he said wonderingly. "You got it."

"Good." John said. He smiled and squeezed the pilot's shoulder, then turned back to the passenger compartment.

Somehow the pilot felt better for that brief contact. Damned if he could figure out why. He licked his lips and toggled the com to talk to air traffic control.

"Seems we don't need to turn back after all, Owen Roberts. My passengers have the situation under control."

Which, from the continued pounding, they did not. But he wasn't prepared to die on behalf of someone stupid enough to hitch a ride this way no matter what Owen Roberts had to say.

Three peeled back the metal skin and bared the locking mechanism. Reaching into the hole, he worked it, pushing hard against the pressure of air escaping the cabin with its free hand. Simultaneously it tried to bring its foot forward, ready to step into the hatchway when it slammed open.

Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling and dangled ignored as Dieter flung himself at the door, catching it just as the lock disengaged. He hauled it closed by main strength, bracing one foot against the frame to give himself leverage, and looked around for something to jam the mechanism.

Sarah dragged her bag close and pulled out the lid over the hidden compartment.

Outside, Three patiently worked the mechanism again.

Dieter grabbed it as he saw it begin to move and tried to hold it closed. He held the handles and twisted until lights swam before his eyes, his breath coming in sharp controlled gasps. But they turned inexorably, as though his was the strength of a child. Von Rossbach began to know real terror. This had never happened to him before.

Sarah handed something to John and he came up behind Dieter. "Let it in," John said.

"Let it!" Dieter grunted. "I can't stop it!"

"Don't let it all the way in," Sarah said quickly.

"John, this isn't a good idea," Dieter said from the corner of his mouth. "We don't have any guns."

John gave his head a little shake, frowning. "Guns wouldn't work anyway. We'll use this." He held up the lump of plastique that his mother had given him. In his other hand was the detonator.

"Oh, joy," Dieter said weakly, closing his eyes.

Taking a deep breath and a firmer grip on the hatch's handles, he allowed them to turn. Then held on with all his might as the airstream sought to tear the door from his grip.

Three grasped the inside edge of the door frame with its left hand, pushed its right arm through the opening, and began to pull up its leg.

Dieter pulled the door to, catching the Terminator's forearm in the opening.

Three wasn't worried. It had tested its strength against the humans and it had won. It angled its arm outward and the door began to open again as it pulled its leg up.

John moved forward and wrapped the plastique around the Terminator's arm just below the elbow. He didn't want to permanently damage the door. Then he inserted the detonator and gave the cap a sharp twist.

"Fire in hole!" he shouted, and they dived for their seats and huddled behind them.

The door was flung open, crashing against the fuselage as the airstream took it.

The charge went off with a flash and a sharp bang, filling the thin air of the cabin with the smell of burnt explosive.

"What the hell are you people doing!" the pilot yelled frantically. "What the hell was that?"

"SHUT UP!" Sarah yelled back, her hands working the soft puttylike explosive into a long snake between her palms.

When they looked up over the chair backs the Terminator was still holding on to the door frame despite its shattered upper arm. Slowly it fitted its left leg into the opening and began hoisting itself in, fighting the wind that threatened to rip it from the plane's side.

Sarah handed John another rope of plastique and a detonator and he and Dieter dived toward the door. John distracted the Terminator while von Rossbach slid in behind it and tried to pull the door to. With one big hand grasping the door frame, he reached for the handle.

The Terminator flailed its stub of an arm at John, then suddenly slammed its shoulder into Dieter. Von Rossbach's feet slid out from under him on the carpeted deck; he went down on his hip and looked up at the machine. It reached for him with its broken arm, looked at the ruined stub, then turned once again to John.

Dieter pushed himself to his knees and once again reached for the door, staying low to avoid another body blow. He grasped the door handle just as John got close enough to the Terminator to make Sarah gasp. Bracing his leg against the door frame, Dieter reached out and caught the door with his other hand and heaved, pulling with all his strength against the force of the air, every muscle screaming.

The Terminator gained purchase and began to pull its body forward. It was slower than it should have been, as though the small explosion had thrown it

partially off-line somehow. But it was still stronger than a human.

With a full-throated roar, von Rossbach pulled the door to, slamming it against the body of the Terminator. It turned its head toward the Austrian and continued to thrust its body forward as hard as it could.

John moved forward and wrapped the explosive just above the Terminator's knee and planted the detonator. He looked up at von Rossbach.

"Go!" von Rossbach told him.

Dieter could hardly let go. This monster would burst into the cabin like a shot.

Von Rossbach's mind supplied an unwanted vision of the Terminator coming through the door ripping the plastique off of its leg and planting it on his chest.

He pulled harder, gritting his teeth, until they grated, and stopped the thing's forward motion.

The charge went off after what seemed an eternity and Dieter was flung backward into the bulkhead, hard enough to knock him unconscious for a few seconds. When his blurred vision cleared he was greeted by the sight of the Terminator dangling in the open doorway, trying to angle its big body close enough to the plane to swing in through the door. Dieter found he couldn't move and all he could say was, "Unhnnn!"

"John!" Sarah said, leaping forward. She ignored the pilot's shouts as she worked the last piece of plastique between her hands.

John grabbed the door and tried to drag it away from the fuselage. The hinges grated and moved reluctantly, but it was the massive push of the air that defeated

him. Sarah stopped what she was doing and leant her strength to his, pulling the door toward her with all her might.

Three watched the humans try to close the door. It saw both of its primary targets within its reach, if only it could get to them. Its left arm and leg dangled uselessly and several circuits had been fried. For the moment it had to watch them helplessly as it clung on by one hand and rapidly rerouted power.

At last it could once again move its right leg. It brought it up and hooked the door frame with its remaining foot. Then it thrust its head through the door.

Sarah and John gave a mighty heave and the door slammed onto the Terminator's head. It worked its way forward, scraping its ears off against the unyielding steel of the door and the frame. With the crisp sound of rending metal, it thrust the stump of its left arm into the gap and pulled itself farther in by pressing its chin against the door frame. Its shoulder inched forward.

Dieter staggered erect and swiped at the blood dripping from his nose, then joined them at the door, lending his weight and strength to theirs. The Terminator was stopped. For the moment.

"I want the head," John said.

The head? the pilot thought. He couldn't have heard that right.

Sarah nodded, and leaving her son and Dieter to hold the Terminator, she began to spin a rope of plastique between her hands.

"I never saw anybody work it in quite that way," Dieter said dreamily.

John looked at him, trying to see both his eyes, wondering if their friend was contused.

"It's how she works pastry," he said. "She does that to make these cinnamon thingies for Christmas."

"Cinnamon bows," Sarah said, distractedly.

She moved forward and attempted to wrap the plastique around the Terminator's neck. Three thrust its head forward and bit, its teeth flashing. Sarah jerked back with a gasp and looked into the mutilated face, with its glaring eyes.

You never get used to this, she thought, fighting back tears of frustration, her heart pounding. No one could ever get used to this.

She brought her hands forward and jerked back again while John and Dieter watched her. After a few more attempts Dieter reached forward and pushed up on the Terminator's forehead, lifting it back with some untapped resource of muscle power that vaguely surprised him. He almost let go when the thing's blue eyes shifted to glare at him and something within clenched and closed off his breath in sheer atavistic terror.

Sarah took advantage of the Terminator's momentary distraction to flip the rope of explosive around its throat like a neckerchief. It redoubled its efforts to sink its teeth into her as she tried to push the detonator into the soft substance.

With her lips tightly closed, Sarah took a deep breath, set the timer, and tried again. This time John lifted his hand to aid Dieter and the Terminator snapped its head up, attempting to grab him. Sarah pushed the detonator into place and then

grabbed John, yanking him away.

Startled by her sudden move, Dieter pulled as hard as he could against the door, using his body as a weight. Once again he went flying as though smacked by God's pillow when the plastique blew. This time, in answer to the explosion, the Terminator's head flew into the cabin and bounced off the far wall. Bits of flesh and spatters of blood sprayed out into the cabin; not nearly as much as from a real body, but enough. Its massive body went pinwheeling through space, exploding in a magenta ball of flame just before it hit the azure blue of the water.

Dieter was slumped, once again unconscious, against the bulkhead. The door hung open.

Sarah raised her head and found herself looking into the Terminator's blue eyes.

It snapped its teeth at her and wobbled on the floor, helpless to make itself move toward her.

"John?" she said, not taking her eyes off of it.

"Here, Mom," he said from beside her. He was watching the Terminator, too.

"We'd better get that door," she said.

Taking in her breath in a gasp that was too close to a sob for her liking, Sarah staggered to her feet and grabbed the door. John moved in beside her and pulled.

They found that it moved better this time; at least the hinges weren't fighting them. It just wouldn't stay closed. Sarah tried to work the lock and got nowhere.

Apparently something was jammed inside.

"Shit," she muttered. "I can't shut the door!" she shouted to the pilot.

"Right there," he said, a quaver in his voice. "Okay, got her on autopilot."

He came into the passenger cabin white-faced, a sort of crowbar in his hand.

There was a slot in the floor into which he inserted one end, then pushed the other end into a similar slot on the door. "That's never happened before," he said weakly. "But it's good to be prepared."

He turned around to see John pick up the head. My God, he thought, the kid really did want the head!

"I'll need to make a Faraday cage for this," John said to him. "To cut it off from communicating with any of its friends. Assuming it has any. So I'm going to need some wires. Where can I take them from so I don't do serious damage to the plane?"

The pilot watched the head dangling by its hair from John's bloody hand with fascination. Then the head swung out, face forward, and clicked its teeth at him, its eyes rolling wildly.

From some place deep within, possibly the soles of his feet, the pilot felt a scream building, rushing upward until it blared out of his mouth. He leaped toward the pilot's cabin and slammed the door behind him, locking it and cowering in his seat, screaming.

Sarah tsk'ed and looked around her, then went over to Dieter, kneeling beside him to feel his pulse. She looked up at John and smiled, giving him a reassuring nod. Peeling back one of Dieter's eyelids and then the other, she breathed a sigh

of relief. The pupils were the same size. Pretty much. He should be all right.

"First the Faraday cage," she said briskly to John. "And then the pilot."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

FAMAULIPAS. MEXICO, NEAR THE

TEXAS BORDER: THE PRESENT

Sarah tossed another stick of mesquite onto the fire and glanced over at John, at work on the Terminator's head in the uncertain light of a pair of Coleman lanterns. She watched him pull something out of the thing's skull with a pair of long-nosed electrician's pliers, holding it up in triumph under the brilliant desert stars.

Somewhere a coyote announced its presence to the night.

"This is a Terminator all right!" he said. "But it's primitive. Heck." He held up another bit he'd excavated. "This thing here is from a cell phone! It's nothing like Uncle Bob. Y'know? But the chip seems right."

At least it resembled the stuff he remembered seeing on Miles Dyson's computer printouts. This weird little-connected-boxes design had been all over everything.

He turned it, studying it by the light of the lantern.

He'd been trying to get this thing out for the last forty-five minutes. The CPU

was the first thing he'd wanted to take out. The damned Terminator seemed disinclined to stop trying to bite them all to death until he did so. Unfortunately the CPU had been buried deep underneath a solid steel cage and getting to it had

been a long and nasty process.

Even knowing that the Terminator wasn't a living being, cutting into its head as it snapped its teeth and rolled its eyes at him had been pure nightmare fodder.

"And I suppose the power cell must be authentic, original equipment, too," John continued. "It sure wasn't running on a lawnmower engine! But the rest's like a cheap knockoff. Like something someone could do in a lab now. It's all a little different somehow. This thing was made out of here-and-now components, mostly. With the essential stuff from Skynet—from the future. It isn't Skynet's style, really."

Sarah smiled tiredly; they'd driven a long way through the desert today in the rather crappy Jeep one of her "friends" had sold them. Desert grit still made unpleasant little sounds between her back teeth, and itched in all the creases of her underwear.

"Now you're psychoanalyzing a genocidal computer?" she asked.

"What can I say—it's a long-term relationship," John pointed out. "You might say it's my mission in life. Hey! I'm supposed to be this great military leader, right? Did Napoleon's mom treat him this way?"

"She probably whacked him upside the head with a broomstick now and again.

Of course, she didn't know he was going to be anything but a Corsican dropout."

"Yeah, but you do. So how 'bout a little respect?"

Sarah grinned and settled herself down, leaning her back against a rock and

wiggling until the gritty desert soil felt a little more comfortable. "That thing from a cell phone," she said after a moment, "what's it do?"

"Basically it's the whole works," John said, "without the speakers."

She nodded, gazing into the fire. "So you were right to make that Faraday cage,"

she said grimly. "It was communicating with someone." She glanced up at him.

"Any way to find out who?"

"Not without the right equipment." John's eyes grew dreamy for a moment.

"Jackson Skye probably had stuff I could've used to find out."

"Hold on to it," Sarah said. "We may yet be able to find out."

"If it was communicating with someone it means there are more of them," Dieter said.

Sarah and John looked at him.

"We know," she said gently.

"The question is," John said, "another Terminator, or something else?"

"Like a T-1000?" Sarah said, her eyes distant.

John took a shaky breath.

"Yeah," he said.

"Or maybe just a better-made Terminator," she said. "If this isn't an original

Skynet special, then something here is building them. It has to be. Something came back from the future, with the power units and CPUs. A coordinator, a manager."

"Sort of a master Terminator?" John said. He held up the board from the cell phone. "And this might have its number." He looked at his mother. "So, do we give it a call?"

A smile lifted one side of her full mouth. "Maybe, when we figure out how to get the number."

"I'm worried about the pilot," von Rossbach said suddenly.

"Don't go there, Dieter," Sarah warned. "If he's smart he'll go for therapy and within a month the doctor will have talked him into disbelieving what he saw. If he's not smart he'll take a lot of drugs or drink a lot of booze, and when they cart him off with the d.t.'s he'll have a therapist convince him it was all in his head."

"I think the second way sounds smarter," John volunteered.

His mother pointed a finger at him and he subsided, grinning.

"Thing is you can't concern yourself with him. We haven't got the time. Nobody will believe him anyway." Sarah said.

"Somebody will," Dieter warned. "Whoever is at Cyberdyne will. And they must be pretty well connected to the Web to have known we were in the Caymans."

John tapped his tweezers against the Terminator's metal skull in a hip-hop beat

as he thought. "And if that's so…" he said, slowly, his eyes flashed up to meet his mother's.

"Then Sacramento is probably a trap," she said.

John nodded. "So? What are we gonna do?"

Sarah blew out a breath that fluttered her bangs. She shrugged.

"We go to Sacramento," Dieter said. "It's the only lead we have."

"Unfortunately," Sarah pointed out, "they know we have it."

"True," Dieter conceded. "But they don't know where we are, exactly, or when we'll arrive."

Sarah glanced at him and very consciously didn't say what she was thinking.

Which was that he was the one who had wanted them to find the remote storage site.

Though, to be fair, she thought, we did learn something fairly interesting. Which is that there's apparently some sort of boss Terminator. Maybe something even smarter than Uncle Bob. But what?

"Whoever, or whatever is looking for us," Dieter said, "can apparently find us very easily through the Internet. That means we can't use the credit cards or go near what might be computer-connected cameras." He stopped suddenly as though struck by an idea.

"What?" Sarah asked suspiciously.

"I was just thinking… Cyberdyne is on a military base. How difficult would it be for this person to get connected to an uplink and hack into the military's spy satellites?"

Sarah and John just looked at him.

"You remember how Mom said 'don't go there' a minute ago?" John asked.

"Well, don't go there either."

Sarah shook her head. "Life used to be so much simpler," she said pushing her hair back from her face. "I liked it much better when all we had to worry about was the FBI and the CIA and Interpol and the Sector and stuff like that. Now we've apparently got a head Terminator who might be counting the number of sticks I'm putting on this fire. Well, here's one if you're up there!" She held her middle finger up to the stars. "And on that note, I'm going to try to sleep."

She pulled her blanket over her and settled down on the cheap plastic air mattress they'd bought in the village store. John looked up into the sky for a minute. Then he picked up the CPU and put it in his shirt pocket. The more suspicious looking of the Terminator's chips he gathered up and tossed into the flames. Dieter frowned, but said nothing as he watched the sparkles and flares they made in the fire.

NEW YORK CITY: THE PRESENT

Ron Labane was annoyed, glowering out his office window, fiddling with a cup of organic, peasant-grown, but cold coffee. It had been days and he'd yet to receive the courtesy of a reply from the CEO of Cyberdyne.

He chewed his lower lip as he worked on his press release about Cyberdyne's precious secret project. His followers would just eat this up. Secret military projects made the damn fools cream in their jeans. And since this would be just the first of many such facilities, a lot of precious manufacturing jobs would be going bye-bye forever instead of just going south. That should shake up the complacent, secure middle class. It also meant the more militant Luddites would get on board and stay the course until the issue was resolved.

He had a meeting arranged tomorrow with a group who would make the fab four look like the losers they were. This news would be at the top of the agenda. He'd received more information on the project, obviously from someone high up in the inner circle at Cyberdyne. Names, dates, places, logistics, even what had to be a general overview of the whole project.

Nice to have friends in high places, he thought smugly.

He read over what he had written.

Profit is good. Isn't it? Profit drives the economy; it's what provides jobs that allow us to have homes and buy the things that make life comfortable.

Of course, sometimes the profit motive can override common sense, or even common decency. As when medical care is denied to a patient because it might cost too much. Yes, it would save the patient, but… that's not really what health insurance is all about, is it? Health insurance is about profit, about dividends paid to investors. We all just think it's about our personal health.

What about when profit is so important that jobs are eliminated by the

thousands?

What about a factory that's totally automated? A place that manufactures the machines it needs, repairs those machines, and sets them in motion twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No humans needed.

No such place exists, you say. Except perhaps in the daydreams of engineers.

Oh, really? Perhaps you should ask Cyberdyne Corporation about their plans to build such a facility for the military. Yes, it's a real project and it's due to be built…

To find the date Ron consulted the secret files he'd been sent. It was wonderful to stick it to a major corporation and the military at the same time.

He and his people would hit them seven ways to Sunday. Protests, lawsuits, and sabotage, maybe even a little bribery in the right places, maybe a few carefully placed bombs. Ron felt no guilt about moving to the next level. This thing was evil, he knew it, and it had to be stopped at any cost.

Humanity against the machines, he thought, and their implacable masters!

CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS: THE PRESENT

Serena read Ron Labane's article with pleasure. It was good. It might even motivate some otherwise rational humans to get involved in his cause. Labane and his ilk were the seeds from which the scientists who had created her and her siblings had sprung. It gave her what humans called a "warm fuzzy feeling" to see his progress. And encouraging humans to self-terminate was so… so efficient.

Besides, having protests and sabotage and sundry other dramas would make the president and CEO of Cyberdyne less inclined to keep her out of the loop from now on.

Serena smiled. One day she would make them very sorry that they'd tried to put one over on her. But she could wait—a lot longer than they could.

NEAR CHARON MESA, CALIFORNIA: THE PRESENT

Sarah drove with her eye on the gauges, ignoring the mesquite-and-scrub landscape that sped by in a blast of hot dry air. This Jeep was going to overheat; she knew it. They should have enough water to take care of it, but what with the Terminator and all, she felt they were operating under Murphy's Martial Law. So they'd probably blow a hose.

Still, they'd crossed into Texas and traveled through New Mexico and Arizona without raising the interest of the police. Maybe that was the problem; it had been nearly five days without any sort of incident. It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

She expected to come upon Enrique's small compound in a few miles. But she'd hate to have to walk there in this heat.

"Is your friend expecting you?" Dieter asked.

"My friend is always expecting somebody," she answered. "Assuming he's still there."

John looked up at that. There wasn't much in his young life that seemed eternal,

but Enrique and Yolanda were two of them. What might have happened to them and their kids if they weren't there made his stomach curdle.

Don't borrow trouble, he warned himself. Wait till you're there.

The Jeep bounced and he almost fell off the seat.

"Yo! Mom, watch the rocks, okay?"

"You want to drive?" she snarled.

"Yeah!" John thrust his head into the front seat, grinning eagerly.

"Well, forget it," Sarah snapped.

Dieter laughed and Sarah frowned at him.

"Give the kid a chance, Sarah. He has to learn sometime," von Rossbach said.

Sarah narrowed her eyes. This part of the desert was beginning to look familiar.

"Well, not right now," she said. "I'd prefer to have a vehicle I can trust for one thing. Besides, we're here."

Von Rossbach stared at the clutter of stripped helicopter carcasses, Jeeps, and an old bus. Tumbleweeds rocked in a breeze too mild to move them. Everything else was deathly still and silent. "Nobody could possibly be living in this hole,"

he muttered.

"They're here," John said confidently.

Sarah drove on, saying nothing. She pulled up at the edge of the compound and got out of the Jeep slowly. She drew her pistol and looked around. Dust, weeds, and rusting wrecks. "Enrique?" she shouted.

They waited in the desert heat and silence.

"Hey!" John shouted, jumping out of the Jeep and running a few paces into the compound. "Anybody here?"

" John?" a disbelieving and familiar voice said. "Is that you, Big John?"

Enrique appeared from behind one of the helicopter bodies, rifle in hand. His hat was off, so they could see that his hair had receded and gone gray.

"Hey!" John said, smiling. He held out his hand and Enrique shook it. "We weren't sure you guys would'be here anymore."

"Some aren't," Enrique said. "My cousin's moved to Austin. He plays a little guitar and I think he wants to be a rock star or something."

John grinned at that; he'd heard Carlos play. "Where's Yolanda?" he asked.

"Right behind you!" she said. She gave John an enthusiastic hug. As Sarah walked up she released him and reached for her. "So good to see you!" she said.

Yolanda hadn't changed at all; even her hair was the same length.

"Hey, Connor, you look like a schoolteacher," Enrique said.

"You look like a grapefruit farmer," she countered. They shook hands, laughing.

Sarah's eye fell on a solid-looking little boy of about seven. "Paulo?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.

"Si," Yolanda said with motherly pride. "The last time you saw him he was just a tiny nino." She ruffled his straight black hair.

Paulo ducked his head in embarrassment and cast an eye at Dieter, who stood at least a head taller than his father. Sarah took notice.

"This is Dieter von Rossbach," she said. "Dieter—Enrique, Yolanda, and Paulo."

Dieter held out his hand to Enrique, who seemed surprised and took a moment to respond. He glanced at Sarah and raised a brow.

"Later," she muttered.

"We heard a lot about you for a while," Enrique said. "Then nothing. Well, not nothing. Did you know there's a Web site with your name?"

"You're wired?" John said, surprised and delighted.

"Hey, everything up-to-the-minute with us! You know that!" Enrique said with a grin. "Don't let appearances deceive you, senor," he said to Dieter. "What you want, we got, can get, or can make." He looked at Sarah. " Si?"

" Si," she confirmed. "I hate to break up our reunion with business…" she began.

"Oh, don't worry," he said. "Business is as welcome as company, always! What can I do for you?"

"Well, my computer needs its battery charged," John said.

"And this piece-of-shit Jeep Lupe sold me is ready to die," Sarah finished.

"Lupe, eh?" Enrique moved toward the Jeep and he started to grin. " Ai, caramba!" he said. "What are you doing dealing with that one, eh? You know Lupe is a capitalist at heart."

"Oh, he's got a heart now, does he?" Sarah said. "I'd never have guessed from the way he robbed me."

Enrique opened the hood and immediately started to dicker.

"Come with me, John," Yolanda said, slipping her arm through his. "I'll show you that Web site and we'll let these two hard bargainers go at it."

"Where's the tequila?" John asked.

"Ts ts ts," she shushed him. "We don't drink that anymore. I have Classic Coke, though, and Mountain Dew."

Sarah leaned over the engine, pretending she hadn't overheard. Enrique gave her a glance.

"I have a pacemaker now," he said. "So I watch what I eat and drink. Eh, we grow more stupid as we get older," he said. "Depriving ourselves of pleasure so that we can stay old longer."

Sarah laughed with him at that. She looked up at Dieter, who stood beside the

jeep looking awkward.

"Would you mind taking a look at that Web site for me?" she asked him. "I'd like your opinion."

He gave her an ironic smile and followed Yolanda and John into the dilapidated school bus.

Enrique watched him go, then turned back to the engine. After a moment he glanced at Sarah. "He's different. Not so stiff like before."

Sarah's laugh was more a squawk. "You've no idea," she said fervently.

"So, how come he's 'Dieter' now and not 'Uncle Bob'?" He reached in and squeezed a hose, then gave her a significant look.

" 'Cause he's not Uncle Bob," Sarah said. The longer she looked at this engine the more discouraged she became. "But the resemblance is amazing, isn't it?"

He straightened up and wiping his hands on a rag looked at her askance.

"He's not the same hombre?"

Sarah shook her head. "They say everybody on earth has a double somewhere,"

she said.

Enrique shrugged. "They say bullshit a lot, too. What can you do, eh?"

Sarah laughed. "It's when I tell the truth that no one believes me."

"Maybe that's because for you the truth is always very strange." He held up his hand to forestall any protest. "About this Jeep," he said, "if it was a horse I'd put it out of its misery."

"Can you fix it?" she asked.

He looked off into the distance, then grimaced.

"You ask me can I fix it? Si, I can fix anything. But with a car like this, you have to fix it every time you stop. You know?" He screwed his face up. "I got something better I can trade you for a few hundred. It's not pretty, but it will get you there and back again."

"Better let me see it," Sarah said.

He led her out into the desert and tugged a sand-colored tarpaulin off a diseased-looking Marquis. Sarah pursed her lips and walked slowly around it. The white paint had turned to chalk in places, exposing the underpainting, and the paint under that. It had a leprous look to it and rubber was dangling from the windows.

"That is one ugly car," she said.

"Like Lupe's Jeep would win a beauty contest?" Enrique challenged. "It's under the hood you'll see her value." He popped the hood and set it on its stick. "See?"

Sarah leaned in. She had to admit it looked a hell of a lot better than the Jeep.

The hoses didn't look like they were going to melt, for one thing. And the interior looked pretty good for all its age.

"Air-conditioning?" she asked.

Enrique nodded proudly. "Works great." He held up the keys. "Want to try her?"

She snatched them out of his hand and opened the door. "Coming?" she asked.

* * *

Sarah leaned her elbows on the old picnic table, gazing out over the desert, watching the sun go down in opalescent fire. She let her eyes wander around the compound, resting briefly on the incongruous chain-link fence. Almost every open diamond formed by the crossing of the wires was filled with the head of a rattlesnake, jaws open as if screaming, fangs out in ferocious display.

She sighed, remembering when she'd first met Enrique and Yolanda. They were a young couple then, with only the trailer to live in. She'd been lost and thirsty and frightened, as well as big as a house with John.

They'd taken her in, fed and watered her and calmed her down, letting her stay as long as she wanted. They'd introduced her around and, in a sense, had gotten her started. Who knows how long it would have taken her to make the contacts she needed without them.

Sarah thought about the girl she'd been then. She'd led a sheltered life, protected, well fed, well cared for. Better than her son's actually. Until the night that changed her life the worst thing that had ever happened to her was her father's death from a heart attack when she was seventeen.

When she met Enrique in the desert she was still soft as a kitten, despite the loss of Kyle and the terror of being pursued by a Terminator.

Kyle, she thought wistfully, seeing his beautiful face in her mind's eye. What a life he must have had. And yet he'd remained a decent and gentle man. He'd touched her as though she were spun glass, impossibly delicate.

One night, she thought, not bitterly, but with an aching longing. Just one night to learn to love one another, to express that love, to conceive their son. Her throat tightened. She loved him still, and he deserved her love. I wonder if he would love me if he could see the woman I've become.

With an effort she pulled her mind from such maudlin thoughts. She was certainly a different woman than she'd been when she last sat here. Then she'd just met the T-1000, been saved by a Terminator, and was coming down from the drugs Silberman had pumped into her. Desperate to do something to stop Judgment Day. She looked at the words in the table before her, carved into the wood with a K-bar bayonet.

NO FATE.

"There's no fate but what we make for ourselves," she murmured, completing the thought. Kyle had told her that. John made him memorize it as a message to her from the future.

"That Web site is very strange," Dieter said, coming up behind her.

Sarah shifted, making a place for him on the bench.

"Why?" she asked. Sarah put her elbows on the picnic table and rested her chin on her fist, her eyes on the first faint evening stars. "What's strange about it?"

She looked at him, and rubbed a finger over the time-smoothed words.

Dieter glanced at the graffiti, then swung one long leg over the bench. "Well, for one thing, whoever put it up thinks you're the victim of a government conspiracy."

Sarah laughed; it was so stupid she couldn't help it. "No kidding?" she said. "Are there UFOs?"

"How did you know?" he asked. "There seems to be a sizable group of people who imagine that the government is working with aliens to make your life difficult." Dieter hunched his shoulders, leaning his big arms on the table. "I find it disturbing that people that dumb can afford a computer."

"And they can vote!" She grinned at his expression. "Don't let it get to you. If they're busy on-line they aren't out making trouble."

"Not necessarily, Sarah. The ones that worry me are the ones who call themselves Luddites; they seem very serious. They had a private chat room, but I couldn't get into it. It seems to be by-invitation-only."

"So what are you saying? That I've got a following?"

"Just a feeling," he said. "I think somebody's manipulating these people. They attract them by using certain key words—'conspiracy,' 'aliens'—like ringing a supper bell for a dog—then direct the discussion. Whoever set up the site also set up the invitation-only chat room. It feels like they're picking and choosing individuals." He shrugged. "Big things have started from such small beginnings."

Sarah picked at a splinter on the table and thought about it. A Web site suggesting a government conspiracy would pull in a lot of discontented people no matter what the conspiracy was supposed to be about. But my name on it…

Could that be a coincidence?

She sighed heavily. "It could be that 'master Terminator' we were talking about,"

she said, making air quotes. "If it exists it might just be smart enough to know that under the right circumstances humans could help it." She grimaced.

"Interesting, but I don't see what we can do about it."

Sarah looked at him sidelong and watched him shrug again. She punched his arm gently and he looked at her.

"If it's some long term plan then the only thing we can hope to do is disrupt it by destroying said 'master Terminator'."

"What if there's more than one?" he asked.

Sarah rolled her eyes. "If you want a headache that badly! Dieter, just hit yourself in the head with a hammer." She stood up. "I'm going to check on John."

"Hey, sweetie," she said, coming up the steps of the bus.

He looked up from the keyboard and grinned. Sarah glanced at the arrangement he'd made on the tabletop. He'd stripped the Terminator's skull off the interior matrix, which he put in a smaller version of the Faraday cage he'd made for the whole head. The CPU was connected to Dieter's laptop by yet another jury-rigged contraption.

"How's it going?" she asked uneasily. "There's no modem…"

"Not as well as I'd hoped," he admitted. "In the movies they always break a code like this in a couple of hours."

"Ah, but this isn't the movies," Sarah said wisely. "Maybe you should take a break."

He shook his head. "Nah. I've got to keep banging away at this. I couldn't sleep anyway."

Wanna bet, Sarah thought. She seemed to remember sleep coming easily at sixteen, no matter what the circumstances.

"So what's the problem?" she asked.

John shrugged, drawing one corner of his mouth up sardonically.

"I dunno; maybe I'm just not cut out to be a hacker."

"My advice is to go for the simple solution," she said. "The machines probably aren't that big on innovation. Anything they used was undoubtedly based on human work. It might even be less complicated than something used for humans."

John frowned and nodded, his eyes on the screen.

"Let Dieter help you," she ordered. "He's been trained in cryptography."

John raised his head at the change in her tone.

"I'd like to see some progress on this by tomorrow morning," she said. Then she got up and walked away.

John blinked. He'd just been given a lesson, he realized. Okay, he thought, so I'M

get the big kraut.

"First of all, I think we should disconnect this," Von Rossbach said. He pulled the clips off of the CPU and drew it out of its slot. "If it's functioning it might be altering any information remaining, or erasing it."

John slapped his forehead.

"Don't be hard on yourself," Dieter said. "Nobody can think of everything."

"Now here's what we're going to do." He began typing rapidly. The screen lit up and columns of numbers and symbols flowed past.

John leaned close. "What's it doing?"

"It's the latest decryption software from the Sector," Dieter said. "I've been told this is the best in the world." He gave John a look. "But then, they always say that."

The computer beeped and information began scrolling up in standard English.

Dieter's face lit with surprise.

"Hey, maybe they were right!"

John leaned out the door of the bus. "Mom! Hey, Mom!"

Both Yolanda and his mother came running, both of them shushing him and making violent waving motions with their hands.

"For God's sake, John! The kids are asleep!" Sarah hissed.

"Sorry; sorry, Yolanda," he said, reducing his voice to a near whisper.

Yolanda ruffled his hair and rolled her eyes. "There's no point in whispering now, hombre," she said. "I'll go check on them." She cast Sarah one of those shared-between-mothers glances women do so well.

Sarah smiled and shook her head, then she approached the little table. "So what's all the excitement?"

"We cracked the code!" John said. "Well, Dieter did."

Sarah looked at him.

"The Sector did," von Rossbach said modestly. "We've got entry codes, a map of the facility—"

"Anything on this master Terminator we've been supposing," she asked.

"Uh, no. At least, not so far," Dieter said.

"There's a chance that the Terminator may have altered its memory, or erased stuff," John admitted reluctantly.

Sarah tightened her lips and put her hands on her hips. She stood in thought for a

moment, then she shook her head. "We can't use this," she said bitterly. "And this… possible misinformation, coupled with the fact that they know we're coming, only makes me even more certain that we should go for the main facility first."

"No, Sarah. We need to know more before we can attack there." Dieter's voice held absolute conviction. "Nothing has really changed here," he insisted. "I still believe our best chance of succeeding with Cyberdyne lies in the Sacramento facility."

"And I still believe that going there would be a mistake," she said. "My gut tells me it would be a wrong choice."

"Sarah, we're not ready," Dieter said quietly. "We need the information that the Sacramento facility holds."

"Need I remind you that they are ready," she said through clenched teeth.

"But we know that!" John said.

Sarah rubbed her face, then slowly pulled her hands down and away. "So what you're saying is that we know that they know that we know, and that's supposed to make some kind of a difference?"

"Yeah, 'cause they don't know that we know," John said. "We only think that they know that we know. But do they?"

Sarah glared at Dieter.

"Don't look at me," he said. "I lost you the first time around. My argument is that Sacramento is the only place where we might be able to obtain entry codes and a map of the main facility. You know we'll need that. And we don't dare go on-line looking again.

"Besides, their main facility is on a military base. At the very least we need to know which one! Or were you planning to just hit them at random, hoping you'd get the right one the first time out."

Sarah blew out her breath and paced two steps one way, two the other, then stopped, her lips pressed into a thin line. "All right," she said reluctantly. Her eyes snapped toward John. "But you are staying here."

"Mom!"

Dieter nodded. "Fine by me."

"Well, it's not fine by me!" John protested.

"My mind is made up, John," his mother said.

"Mom, if you keep me from taking risks I'm never going to learn anything and I'm never going to lead anyone! This is my fight, too." He drew himself up.

"And I am going."

"It's too big a risk!" Sarah insisted.

They looked at each other and said a great deal with their eyes.

"I think it's a bigger risk to leave me here." John shook his head. "You can't

protect me forever, Mom. Skynet has to be stopped, and even if I am a kid, I have to try to stop it, too."

He startled her by pulling her into a hug and by doing so once again reminded her of how tall he'd grown. Sarah leaned her head against his shoulder and hugged him back. She could put her arms around him twice, he was so adolescent thin. Sarah let out her breath, and the last precious thread of her dream of a peaceful life for him slipped away in a long sigh. She pushed back and looked him in the eye, then she nodded once and released him.

"I want to go on record as saying I don't like this." Sarah muttered.

"We'd better get some sleep, then," Dieter interrupted, rising. "We leave at dawn."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SERENA'S LAB: THE PRESENT

Serena frowned at the newly decanted pair of Terminators standing dripping on her improvised laboratory floor, amid the musky smells of the nutrient bath and the scent of damp concrete. Because she had needed them so quickly she'd put some of the tissue accelerant into their nutrient baths. Perhaps a little too much.

They looked like weather-beaten men in their mid to late thirties. But they'd come out with full heads of hair and beards and a full crop of body hair, which was a convenience.

She walked around the two. No gaps, no flaws. But something niggled at her.

I've forgotten something, the T-950 thought. As she came around to the front

again Serena saw it immediately. They were identical. She gave an exasperated hiss. ,

This is what comes from having too many balls in the air, she thought. It was necessary to assign them both to the Sacramento facility and they were going to draw attention with their looks. I suppose they could be twins. No. Maybe brothers or cousins, but twins would cause too much comment.

Immediately she began planning what to do to differentiate them from one another. One would shave his head, the other his beard, and she'd apply a different hair color' to the bald one's mustache. A Fu Manchu, she thought. She'd trim and color the eyebrows, too. Some sort of stain to the skin to mimic a darker coloration should also help.

The T-950 viewed the mock-up the computer part of her brain supplied with satisfaction. Then she applied dark glasses to one and half tints to the other. It would do. Especially if they weren't constantly lined up beside each other.

The next pair will look different from the get-go, she wowed. It wouldn't be hard, a few minor adjustments to the cartilage matrixes and different hair colors. She was pretty much stuck with the same bone structure. But there's a lot you can do with that. If you were smart enough to think of it first.

She relayed instructions to the two. After they were finished, she'd set them to watching several talk and game shows that she'd recorded; then they would listen to a half-dozen radio shows of the same type. That should give them some idea of how ordinary people spoke and their body language. She'd already downloaded maps of California and information about the Sacramento target facility as well as a driving program.

Before doing their homework, however, Six and Seven started on the cosmetic adjustments she'd designed. Pity there wasn't time enough for corrective surgery.

Four she was sending to Two in the outback cabin where her own replacement was breeding. It would be taking the rest of the CPU and energy-cell packets with it. With the way I'm going through Terminators, it might be best to leave a few in reserve for Serena Two, she thought.

If it all worked out, the Connors and their allies destroyed and Cyberdyne safe, then she would probably keep the second fetus and abort the first as potentially unstable. If things went horribly wrong, she'd done her best to cover any potential outcome.

Five was young looking enough that it wasn't absolutely identical to the other Terminators; it just looked amazingly like them. Instinct prompted her to send it to Sacramento as well. There were probably cosmetic things she could do to it to further differentiate it from its cohorts.

The T-950 frowned. She could be giving the Connors more credit than they deserved here. Sending three Terminators, even this homegrown variety, after two humans was… embarrassing. Yes, perhaps she'd keep it with her at Cyberdyne.

Satisfied with her decisions, Serena closed her eyes and sat back in her chair. As the two Terminators worked on their hair and eyebrows, she sorted through the day's downloaded data. Still nothing from the Connors or their ally. They were definitely avoiding the Internet. Well, if they weren't updating her on their whereabouts and interests at least she'd deprived them of an important tool.

The last report she'd received from Three indicated that it had been captured.

Serena had come as close as she ever had in her life to genuine rage. How had humans captured her Terminator? Destroyed, she could understand, all they'd have to do was knock it off the plane somehow. But captured?

True, Three wasn't one of Skynet's best. But it was a damn sight better than any three humans, especially when one was a smallish woman and another barely more than a child. Or it should have been.

Making the best of the situation, the T-950 had ordered it to erase certain portions of memory while she planted other information. Whether or not the Connors would fall for the false information remained to be seen. But they'd seemed dead set on attacking the Sacramento facility. One can only hope that they'll remain stubborn about it.

She wanted to go there herself. Very, very much. It would be exciting to pit herself against Skynet's two greatest enemies face to face. Serena imagined herself crushing John Connor's skull between her hands. Then realized she was smiling and smoothed her face to blankness.

Daydreaming. That was the sort of thing a human would do. She ardently wished for the stabilizing influence of Skynet, instead of the silence in her mind.

Another human response, she thought disparagingly.

With an effort she pulled her thoughts away from that realization and the feelings that accompanied it. It was irrelevant. What was important was killing or capturing the Connors. Even more vital was defending Skynet from them.

Which she would do to the last drop of blood in her body. She would not fail.

Serena opened her eyes and watched the two Terminators work. We will not fail.

In the end, a day later, she decided to include the younger-looking Five. Serena gave him a haircut so distracting she was certain no adult human would be able to take their eyes off of it long enough to notice its resemblance to the others. It was an upright Mohawk roach dyed brilliant scarlet with green bars, and tattoos on the shaved sides of his head. A pair of tiny round sunglasses that made its face look wider completed the illusion.

The humans in the Sacramento facility might not like its looks, but since she'd sent it, they'd just have to rise above their feelings. One corner of her mouth lifted in satisfaction at the thought.

She ordered it to slouch and it looked like it was melting, its shoulders collapsing onto its pelvis in a move that even a human contortionist couldn't manage.

"Like this," the T-950 said, throwing out a hip and dropping one shoulder.

It imitated her perfectly.

"Now walk like this." Serena moved her shoulders as she walked, pushing her pelvis just slightly forward of them in a sort of James Dean dawdle. She looked astonishingly masculine. The Terminator duplicated her swagger.

She had him walk for her, adding little bits of business and then subtracting most of them. The others she left to themselves. "All right," the 1-950 said, not satisfied, but resigned. She'd done all she could for now. "Get dressed. We leave in ten minutes."

CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS: THE PRESENT

"Jordan?" Serena's voice came smooth as ice cream from his intercom.

"Yes, Serena," he answered, laying down the report he'd been reading.

"Could you come to my office, please? I think I have something for you."

"On my way," he answered.

Jordan stood and slipped his arms into his suit jacket. When his boss said she thought she had something, she probably did.

He still couldn't get over how incredibly good her sources were. He'd taken a sneak peek at her personnel records and her work experience sure didn't explain it. If it was life experience that gave her the edge, she must have been one wild kid; because she was a lot younger than he was and his own sources were fewer and far less trustworthy.

Of course she was also damned smart. You could almost feel her mind going in a dozen different directions when you were with her. It was disconcerting. And she had a knowing air about her, as though she found the scientists she was guarding rather quaint as they groped their way toward things she already knew.

He nodded to Mrs. Duprey, whom he had discovered was yet another of Burns's infallible sources. She smiled at him as he tapped the door and entered to Serena's "Come in."

"Hello, Jordan," she said, smiling.

Three men seated on the couch rose as one. He glanced at them, then Serena called his attention back to herself.

"I need you to take a short trip for us," she said, her eyes bright with excitement.

"There have been indications that the Connors are planning an attack on the Sacramento facility."

Jordan went still.

"Sacramento," he said after a moment. "Why Sacramento?"

Burns shrugged one shoulder.

"Apparently someone told them about it." She smiled. "Or maybe because Sacramento's a civilian facility. Who knows?"

Jordan's mind flew to Tarissa. Had she been in touch with the Connors? Could it have been her? It could well have been if she'd had the information. And it was perfectly possible that she did.

"When do I leave?" he asked.

"Now," Serena said with a smile. "I've arranged for accommodation for you in the Holiday Inn there." Her lips quirked and she said, "It's not luxury, but then, it is Sacramento."

He grinned in response.

"I'm also lending you some manpower." Serena gestured toward the three tall

men standing in front of her couch. "Tom Gallagher, Dick Lewis, and Bob Harris."

The men nodded together, so Jordan couldn't tell who belonged to which name.

He guessed they probably went left to right. As he looked at them he couldn't help but think of the ancient clay warriors who guarded the tomb of China's first emperor. The same bodies, lined up in the same postures, with different heads attached.

"Do you need to go home and pack a bag?" Serena asked.

"No," Jordan said. "I've got some things in my office."

It was an old habit he'd developed in the Bureau and it had saved him a lot of time and trouble over the years. He'd decided to continue it here until he knew just what this job entailed.

"Good," she said.

She handed him a folder, which on examination proved to contain addresses and phone numbers for the hotel and storage site as well as directions to both places.

"Let me know when you arrive," she said. She touched him lightly on the arm. "I wish I could tell you more than 'I think they're coming,' but right now that's all I've got. If anything else comes down the pipe I'll call you immediately."

"Okay," he said. He looked at the three men. "I guess you guys ride with me."

They nodded in unison. He smiled, a little nervously. These guys are weird, he

thought. Formidable enough, certainly—they bulged with muscle, and they moved well despite their massive size—but weird. And they were all ironed, with shoulder holsters under a baggy sweatsuit jacket, a suit, and a leather affair with chains.

Stop echoing each other's movements, Serena sent. Remember you're supposed to be individuals. She almost sighed in exasperation as their heads turned toward her as one.

"Okay, guys, good luck," she said aloud.

The T-950 shut the door behind her minions with something like resignation. It was pretty much out of her hands now; what would be, would be. I guess I'll have to be grateful that Dyson can't suspect them of being Terminators—

because Terminators don't exist.

She smiled. Being a figment of a deranged imagination made it so much easier to hide. Humans censored their own perceptions for you.

They didn't talk. Jordan had tried a few questions to loosen things up and they had answered, but as tersely as possible. They weren't even personal questions for cryin' out loud.

They were so quiet that he could almost forget they were there. Except for the way they moved their heads in constant overlapping arcs. They looked like a trio of lighthouses inexplicably built on the same promontory. Their bodies were so still that they might have been paralyzed from the neck down; no scratches, no twitches, no shifting. After a short while their constant head motion combined with their dead silence began to wear on him.

"Are you even breathing?" he said to the one beside him. Bob, he thought.

Seven consulted a subroutine in charge of imitating respiratory function. It appeared to be working at optimum; visual observation confirmed the monitor data.

"Yes," it said.

Jordan glanced at him. fuck yes? he thought. What was their damn problem?

Were they having a fight or something? Was this some sort of group sulk he'd walked into? Okay, that's about enough of this shit!

"Look," he said aloud, and three heads turned, three pairs of eyes aimed at him like howitzers. Jordan's mouth twitched and he frowned. Man! These boys have some attitude! "I don't know if Ms. Burns briefed you on Sarah Connor, so I don't know if you're aware of what a tough, well-trained customer she is."

"We know about Sarah Connor," Bob said.

"Good!" Jordan said. Cause I sure as hell wouldn't want to bore you gentlemen by repeating anything you've already heard! "But you see, the problem is, I don't know what you know and I don't know anything about you three guys. And since we might be facing some pretty dicey situations together, I'd like to know a little bit about you. Okay?"

Bob looked at him. Jordan glanced in the rearview mirror. Tom and Dick looked at him. Nobody spoke.

"Don't all jump in at once," he said sarcastically. "Would anybody like to tell me how long you've been with Cyberdyne, or what your training is, or why I should have you as my backup team?"

"I have a headache," they all said at once. Then they returned to their lighthouse imitation. As one.

Then it hit him. Burns had introduced them as Tom, Dick, and… Harris. Was that some sort of joke? Had she hired some kind of freelance hit squad to take out the Connors? Could she be a sociopath? he wondered.

Not good, he thought. Not good at all. He could be wrong, he could be making mountains out of molehills, but these men were not normal. He knew nothing about them except their names and the fact that they were carrying Cyberdyne rent-a-cop ID and had licenses for the guns—Israeli Desert Eagle .50-calibers, at that, hand cannon. Usually he despised anyone who carried the things; the engineering was excellent—the Israelis were the world's best practical weaponeers—but the caliber was to big for accuracy, the sort of gun macho blowhards with little tiny dicks bought because they thought it made them bad.

These gorillas looked as if they could actually shoot the damned things.

ROY'S DINER, JUST OUTSIDE SACRAMENTO: THE PRESENT

"Hey, something occurred to me," John said, pushing aside the second-rate huevos rancheros.

Dieter and his mother had been ignoring each other studiously; John hid his smile at the obvious electricity between them. About time Mom found someone, he thought. I've got a good feeling about this guy. If a human could be Uncle

Bob, Dieter would be it. They probably thought it was a Big Secret, even from each other. From the smile on her tired face, even the waitress here was picking it up.

Now they looked at him. He unfolded his laptop, fingers flicking over the keyboard and trackpad, then swiveled it around.

"You know, one thing always bothered me. About this time-travel shit, the war against the machines, all that stuff."

" One thing?" Dieter said, raising an eyebrow.

"Well, a lot of stuff. But one thing that my… dad… told Mom. You know, those plasma weapons he wished he had? The ones that fried Terminators good?"

Sarah nodded, a brief flicker of sadness moving like a wave across the tight-held tension of her face at the mention of Kyle. "Yes?" she said.

"Well, when did they get invented? Like, originally Judgment Day was supposed to have happened by now."

Dieter frowned. "I hadn't thought," he said. "I just assumed that the future would have more formidable weaponry."

"Maybe Skynet invented them?" Sarah said, stirring the remains of her limp bacon around the plate with her fork.

"Maybe," John said. "But it's awfully advanced stuff, even so. Look at what I downloaded from the Terminator's memory—here's a schematic for a…" he

pointed to the text below the diagram: " 'Phased plasma rifle in the forty-kilowatt range.' Energy storage cell, perfect dielectric—this is a Buck Rogers in the 25th century ain't-no-doubt-'bout-it blaster, man."

"Yes?" Dieter said.

"Well, it occurs to me—this information traveled back from the future, right?

And we figure some sort of super-Terminator is watching over the… heck, the birth of Skynet at Cyberdyne, right?"

The older heads nodded. "So," John went on triumphantly, taking a bite out of a piece of leathery toast spread with pseudo butter. "I figure the information came back with the Terminators. Like, nobody invented it; it's in Skynet's memory because Skynet-in-the-future sent it back, and Skynet-in-the-future has it 'cause it was there because—"

"My head hurts," Sarah said plaintively. "I need more coffee."

They fell silent as the waitress came over with a pot in each hand, regular and decaf.

"Time to go," John said at last. "Let's get radical."

SACRAMENTO: THE PRESENT

"Advanced Technology Systems," John said. "Or butt-ugly Bauhaus Office Building."

Dieter snorted. "Would you prefer fake gingerbread?" he asked softly. Then, his

voice all business: "Go."

Sarah Connor crossed the street, looking as casual as a woman carrying a raincoat in a California summer could look. The bored rent-a-cop sitting at the semicircular security desk in the faux-marble lobby looked up politely as she approached.

The smile turned gelid as her combat shotgun came out from under the coat.

"Hands where I can see them. Scoot back—yeah, right back from the alarm pedal you were about to step on, asshole. Do it now!"

She sat on the curved surface of the desktop and swung her legs to the other side, then held the shotgun one-handed as she pulled a roll of heavy duct tape out of the pocket of her khaki hiking pants.

"Lie down," she said as she stripped a length off with her teeth. "Time for a nap."

"Convenient," Dieter von Rossbach said as he put the bolt cutters against the pipe-enclosed conduit that ran down the aluminum siding of the building facing the alleyway.

"Welcome to California, where everything's aboveboard," John said. He turned his head as a shower of sparks spat out of the severed cables. Inside, the building would be dark except for a few emergency lights… and the phones would be cut off, and the datalink to the computers that handled Cyberdyne's storage. Not that it would matter much. There wasn't supposed to be anybody in the building this early except for the security staff.

"Go," he said, clipping the leads from his laptop's (highly modified) modem onto

the bare wires of the exposed telephone line.

His fingers danced over the keyboard, dumping Cyberdyne's security codes and a set of very pointed commands into the machine's idiot-savant brain.

Dieter picked up the heavy duffel bag and slung it over his back, reached up, and began to haul his massive body up the pipe conduit hand over hand. At the second floor he swung out and kicked at a window. It was tough glass, and not meant to be opened; the impact thudded back into his torso, with a twinge that reminded him he'd never see forty again. A second kick, and the window frame and the shattered glass it had held punched into the corridor. Dieter swung through, the Heckler & Koch submachine gun in his massive fist probing about as if it were a toy pistol.

"Clear," he said, looking down at John.

The boy—young man, he reminded himself, remembering the Terminator on the plane—grinned up and gave him a thumbs-up.

"We've got to get into the office," John said. "There's a physical barrier, like I thought. But it should be pretty straightforward from there."

"All right," Dieter said, lowering a rope.

It's a good thing the Connor's aren't really terrorists. They'd have given the Sector a run for its money.

John swarmed up with a loose-limbed gracefulness. He handed Dieter the laptop, which he shoved into the knapsack slung across his shoulder and chest, and they

moved down the corridor cautiously.

"Front's secured," Sarah Connor called from the stairwell. "We'll cover John from both ends of the corridor while he works on the lock."

John grinned again as he worked on the e-lock of a steel-slab door labeled ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS.

"Insert stolen identity card here, trigger subroutine… there we go!"

Dieter had never seen a man move as fast as John did, when the door swung open and a massive figure who might have been Dieter—Dieter with a bald head and a Fu Manchu mustache—stepped through.

The younger Connor dove aside, his hand coming up with a weapon like a stubby shotgun; the Austrian knew it was a grenade launcher. It flashed with a hollow tchooonk!, but not before the big automatic in the Terminator's hand barked. The leopard grace of John's leap turned into a crumpled fall, one hand going to his side.

Things happened very rapidly after that. Dieter flung himself backward, emptying the full thirty-five-round clip of his machine pistol into the Terminator's chest and stomach. It staggered, turned, fired. The bullet struck close enough to Dieter's head to send chips of wallboard flying into his eyes; he rolled backward, blinking and shaking his head frantically as he slapped another magazine into the weapon, Sarah's shotgun boomed behind him…

And two more Terminators came out of the office, guns extended, taking the heavy recoil of the .50-caliber automatics as if they were children's water pistols.

All three turned toward John. Dieter braced himself to hurl his own body between the young man and death, to give him a few seconds' armor. Behind him he heard Sarah's incredulous scream.

Another man came out of the office, a tall slim black man with a Clock in his hand. "Are you insane?" he shouted at the Terminator in the lead, forcing himself between the killer machine and the wounded human. "Get them!" he snapped. "I'll look after the prisoner. Now!"

He bent over John. The Terminators… froze. Motionless, their eyes on the black man, their guns halted in mid-arc.

A lifetime of confronting merciless necessity—and making the decisions he had to, had trained Dieter as much as the academies and courses. He dove from the concealing shelter of the office doorway and into the stairwell, scooping Sarah up as he passed and plunged downward to the lobby.

Dieter dragged her to the car and pushed her into the passenger seat. He pulled the seat belt across her body and strapped her in, then slammed the door and ran around to the driver's side.

Sarah closed her eyes and clung to the armrests, breathing through her teeth in harsh, tearing gasps as she tried to get her sobbing under control. Her throat felt as though she'd swallowed a sharp stone and after a moment she could neither indulge in the relief of weeping nor stop the pain.

When she opened her eyes she could see clearly, no tears obscured the road from view. Sarah concentrated on her breathing, on calming herself, on tearing her

mind away from the awful repeated image of her son falling and the blood… On to the next thing, she ordered herself. What comes next?

"We have to destroy Cyberdyne's main facility, now!'" she said to Dieter. Her voice was thick, and tense, but under the circumstances it sounded amazingly calm.

Von Rossbach's jaw worked. It would almost have felt better to have her throwing accusations at him. He glanced at her, then looked back at the road.

"I have no desire to commit suicide, Sarah," he said firmly. "If we're going for Cyberdyne I'll need a day, at least, to set it up. We still need to find out exactly where it is."

What do I need him for? Sarah wondered numbly, staring straight ahead.

Listening to him has screwed this up from the get-go. If she was genuinely paranoid, as she'd been diagnosed, she'd suspect von Rossbach of being sent by Skynet.

But she couldn't blame him for this mess. She'd gone along with every suggestion, allowing herself to be persuaded against her better judgment. There's nobody to blame for that except myself, she thought.

Her eyes slid sideways, regarding the man beside her. He might yet be useful.

She could scarcely walk onto Cyberdyne property all by herself.

Slowly she dragged herself back up onto her metaphorical feet. The wound might feel mortal, but she wasn't close to dead yet. Something those bastards at Cyberdyne were going to learn to their sorrow. Sarah Connor was a long way

from defeated.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS,

SACRAMENTO: THE PRESENT

As the lights went out Jordan knew that—once again— Serena's info had been good. His mouth began to go dry and his hand automatically went to the Clock bolstered under his armpit, excitement pumping into his blood, and driving out the drowsy boredom of the stuffy, silent suite of offices.

Ideally he wouldn't have to use the gun; so far he never had. But things are rarely ideal for the good guys when they're dealing with Sarah Connor.

The Three Stooges stood around like furniture. They didn't move, they didn't talk. They watched the door. Occasionally, as if making a concession, they blinked.

Never thought I'd miss their scanning the horizon, Jordan thought. They were downright lively then.

The office had only one unblocked window, which was in the president's office at the back of the building. Feeling a need to get away from the creeps, Jordan decided to check it out.

They're just as likely to come down from the roof as up the stairs, he reasoned. In fact that's what he would probably do. Not that he'd ever gone in for that rah-rah commando stuff that some agents loved. He suspected that Sarah Connor did.

They'd sent the few employees there home and the dark office was full of suspicious shadows cast by the emergency lights and eerily quiet as he moved through it. Already the air seemed to be going stale. A rectangle of gray light shone through the frosted glass in the president's door and brightened the area around it slightly.

Jordan listened, then quickly opened the door and stood back, heart pounding, even though he'd really expected the room to be empty.

It was. He moved to the window, and standing back out of sight, studied the parking lot below. It, too, was empty.

C'mon, c'mon, he thought. Where the hell are you? He moved to the other side of the window and checked out the lot from that angle. Still nothing. With a sigh he started back toward the front office.

A flash and the percussive burst of a grenade followed by the sudden sharp pops of gunfire brought him up to a run. The front office had been miraculously spared

—except for the receptionist's heavy desk, which was scrap. But there was no fire and his backup were all on their feet and heading through the door.

A sensation like a bolt of electricity shot through him when he saw a piece of shrapnel sticking out of the back of Lewis's naked head. Jordan fumbled a step at the sight. The three moved out into the corridor single file, then, as one, they each brought up their guns and fired. More gunfire met theirs in the hall. There was the sound of a machine pistol and a shotgun's heavy thudding boom, and the slight sharp nose-crinkling smell of burnt nitro powder.

Jordan sped up. He reached the door just in time to see the three of them aim at a boy collapsed on the floor.

"Are you insane?" Jordan shouted. He pushed his way between Lewis and the kid on the floor. "Get them," he ordered, pointing toward the stairway. "I'll take care of the prisoner."

Jordan felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck as the three froze. One he could take, but not three. If they decided to take him out—and it sure looked like they were thinking about it—there wasn't a damn thing he could do to stop them.

Then they turned and jogged down the hallway without a backward glance. The piece of shrapnel in Lewis's scalp came loose and hit the floor with a tiny ping!

It wasn't until then that Jordan realized that Lewis's whole front had been a mass of blood, his shirt hanging in patches where it hadn't been pounded into the raw meat of his chest. Which meant that Lewis ought to be screaming, or possibly dying of shock and blood-loss…

Jordan put the sight firmly from his mind and knelt beside the boy; Lewis couldn't be that badly hurt, or he wouldn't be moving so well. This had to be John Connor—her son. The boy who was supposed to save humankind from the machines.

The kid had crashed headfirst into the wall; the plasterboard was dented and there was blood in his hair and on the floor when Jordan turned him over. There was a wound in his shoulder, too.

No time for that, Jordan told himself. He hoisted the boy up and pulled him onto his shoulders in a fireman's carry. Then he headed for the back stairway. He

didn't know just what was going on with those three, but he had no intention of letting them near John Connor if he could help it. He was—had been—FBI, not part of some cowboy kill-for-hire outfit.

As he came out into the parking lot he fumbled one-handed for his keys and hit the button on the key ring that unlocked the doors. He opened the back door and awkwardly laid the boy down on the backseat. He was pushing the kid's legs inside when Bob Harris came around the corner and froze.

Jordan jumped into the car and rolled himself over the seat into the driver's side.

With a shaking hand he jammed the key into the ignition, thrilled that it was the right key, started the car, and backed up. Then he peeled rubber as he sped into the street, leaving skid marks and a low plume of black smoke behind him. The back door slammed shut and the kid half fell off the seat behind him. Shit!

Jordan thought. I should have just put him on the floor in the first place.

He pressed his foot onto the accelerator and ignored everything he knew about responsible driving. Bob's big hand hit the fender with an audible thump. Dyson jumped and looked in the rearview mirror. His erstwhile backup's face was as calm as if he were having a cup of coffee with friends. His arms pumped and he came even with the car once again and reached toward the door handle.

Jordan checked the speed. Thirty-five. Jesus, God! he thought, and pressed down on the accelerator. Bob seemed to be keeping up with ease. Once more Jordan pushed the gas and they finally sped away from the big man. Forty miles an hour. Dyson's breath was hissing between his teeth and he felt light-headed, almost faint. What the hell was that? he wondered. What in the hell was that?

People could do insane things when hopped up on adrenaline, he reminded

himself. But why? What could the Connors possibly have done to them that's worse than what they did to me? What would drive a man to run forty miles an hour to commit murder? Because they were going to kill John Connor, of that Jordan had no doubt.

And in spite of everything, I don't want to kill him, or his mother. See them in jail until they rotted, sure. He'd gladly see that day come. But he wasn't about to murder a kid! Not even Sarah Connor's son.

So where had Burns found these maniacs? They were stone killers if he'd ever seen any, which he had. Was she aware of what they were? Given her track record so far he had to believe that very little happened around Serena Burns that she wasn't fully aware of.

He plucked the cell phone from his pocket and dialed.

The phone rang once and was answered. "Burns."

"Would you like to tell me just what the hell is going on, Serena?" Jordan demanded, his voice carefully cold.

There was a pause.

"Isn't that what I should be asking you?" she said. "Did they show up? Or… they didn't and you're mad at me because of it."

In fact, she knew exactly what had happened: Six had given her a full report.

Dyson had the boy, and if she wanted him—and she did— then this conversation needed to be handled very carefully. Jordan, she realized, would have to be

eliminated as soon and as discreetly as possible.

"Oh, they showed up all right. And one of your boys almost blew the kid away."

" What? What are you talking about?" Serena put as much exasperation and confusion as she dared into the questions. "Could you please just tell me what happened? Because so far you haven't been very coherent."

Jordan drew a deep breath. Maybe that was true.

"Those three men you sent with me," he said slowly, "did their utmost to kill the Connors and their friend. They were so set on it that I can't help but believe that they were ordered to do so."

Maybe that's saying too much, he thought. If Serena had issued orders to kill, then he wasn't going to prolong his own life by making statements like that one.

I guess maybe I'm a little more panicked than I want to admit. The image of a bland-faced Bob Harris reaching out and almost touching the car while the speedometer registered forty mph kept coming back to him.

"Whoa! Jordan," she said, sounding very indignant. "Slow down here! I did not give anybody orders to kill! Okay?" The T-950 paused for a count often.

" Why would I do that?" she said reasonably. "In what way would that make anything better? Huh?" Another pause. "Can you imagine what the papers would make of it? Can you 'tmagine the questions we'd get asked?

"And why, Jordan? Why? I'm just as happy to have them in prison as dead! All I want is for Cyberdyne to be safe. But it's a company, Jordan. It's not my family,

it's not anybody's family. There's no question of anyone having to die to protect it. Get real!"

He felt almost embarrassed. Serena was making sense here. But what about what I saw?

"Look, Serena, all I know is how they were acting. I mean, I never saw these guys before—"

"Well, neither have I. I sent down to the security shack for three guys who would be willing to travel overnight and those were the guys they sent up. I will check into it as soon as I hang up. Obviously we have a hiring problem."

She waited a moment then let out an exasperated breath.

"Jordan! What the hell happened? Did you arrest the Connors? Are they dead?

Oh, God, please tell me they're not!"

"Nobody's dead," Jordan assured her. "Sarah and their friend, a big guy, got away. But I've got the kid in the backseat, bleeding all over the cushions."

"Oh, God," she repeated. It sounded right. "How badly is he hurt?"

"To be honest, I don't know," Jordan confessed. "I just got him into the car and ran."

"I suggest you pull over, now, and take a look," she said firmly. "I'll wait."

Jordan frowned. He didn't want to stop driving; he fully expected to see Bob come running up the road, even though he knew that was ridiculous.

"Yes, ma'am," he muttered, and pulled off the shoulder. Then he got out, opened the back door, and climbed in. The boy was unconscious, or mostly so; a bright, white line showed between his lashes. Dyson pulled him back up onto the seat and the kid moaned.

Jordan lifted the boy's eyelids. One pupil was noticeably larger than the other: concussion for certain. But his color was good and he didn't seem to be going into shock.

Dyson ripped the neck of John's T-shirt and looked at the gunshot wound: the bullet had gone straight through without breaking the bone or cutting major arteries. It was still bleeding pretty freely, though. Dyson tore John's shirt off completely and then ripped it in half, making two pads of the soft material. Then he stripped off his tie and bound the pads in place as best he could.

The head wound worried him. It was bloody, all head wounds were, but the cut was basically superficial. It was the evidence of concussion that bothered him.

Anything might be going on inside the kid's head, there was no way to tell. He gently probed the area around the wound and sighed with relief when he felt solid bone.

Jordan shook his head. He needed expert help on this. Climbing into the front seat again, he picked up the phone. "Serena?"

"I thought you weren't coming back," she said, sounding relieved. "Well?"

Jordan hesitated. "He seems stable right now. But he has a concussion and that's not something to take lightly. I'm going to take him to the hospital."

"No!" Serena said, letting her voice shrill with alarm. "Jordan, you can't. You have to bring him here. We have a top-notch medical facility right here. We'll give him the best care available. Bring him here!"

"Serena," Jordan said slowly, "what are you thinking of? This kid is hurt, dammit! He has a head wound. Maybe you're prepared to take the blame if he dies or suffers brain damage, but I don't want that on my conscience."

"Jordan, his crazy mother is still out there somewhere. And right now she's probably very, very angry. Given her record, she's heading for Cyberdyne with blood in her eye.

"If we can show her that her son is alive and that we're taking good care of him, right here at what she might well consider ground zero, then maybe she won't hurt anyone. Do you want the deaths of who knows how many scientists and secretaries and who knows who else on your conscience?"

Jordan compressed his lips and thought. She was probably right.

Connor was probably headed toward Cyberdyne. And he personally knew what kind of mayhem she was capable of causing. But the one thing in her life that Sarah Connor had always been careful of was her son.

"Okay, look," he said. "I'll just get him looked over and I'll send him on to you by ambulance."

"Jordan! He's been shot! That means that any doctor or clinic or hospital you take him to has to report it to the police. Then the police have to come and

question everybody, then everybody has to wait for somebody, somewhere to give you permission to send him down here. By then we could be a smoking hole in the ground."

"It's three hours to Cyberdyne," he snapped.

"If the kid is stable that won't matter. You said he was stable," Serena insisted.

Jordan rubbed his face with his hands. "All right, you mentioned the police," he said. "What are they going to say when they find out that I've dragged this boy down there and didn't report the shooting, and didn't take him to the hospital, and didn't stay here in Sacramento to be questioned, and didn't report his fugitive, cop-killer mother's presence in their town. You do realize that you're asking me to break the law, don't you?"

"I do," she said solemnly. "And I'll take the responsibility. Since we'll undoubtedly be shooting it out with Connor and her allies before the day is out, I think we can plead mitigating circumstances. Make him as comfortable as you can and bring him here. His presence in this facility is the only thing that will stop that maniac."

Serena stopped herself. It was time to stand back and see if she'd convinced him.

Jordan was silent, thinking about what she'd said, thinking about how Connor had killed his brother and destroyed his work. Tried to destroy it, he amended.

Burns was right; Cyberdyne would draw Connor like a magnet. And this time she might very well not wait until the place was empty to strike. Not if she's looking for revenge as well as serving whatever crazy cause she's into. And the truth was, he wanted to be there when she arrived, not sitting in the police station

answering questions.

"All right," he agreed. "I'm on my way."

It was wrong, and he knew it, but this was something he'd worked toward for six long years, it was easier to get forgiveness than permission.

Jordan stopped at the first store he saw and bought bandages, alcohol, a blanket and pillow, and some aspirin and bottled water. Then he rushed back to the car parked at the deserted far end of the parking lot and opened the back door.

Connor was conscious, but just barely.

The scalp wound was still bleeding, but sluggishly and it wasn't as deep as he'd feared. He poured some water on a sterile pad and wiped the blood away, then poured alcohol onto another and wiped the wound. Connor hissed through his teeth and his eyes flared open at the pain.

"Sony," Dyson muttered. "At least you know you're alive."

"M'mother'd say "at," the boy mumbled.

Jordan smiled grimly.

"From what I've read about her, I believe you," he said.

The shoulder wound was another matter, a far deeper wound.

Jordan wiped away the blood, then flushed it with alcohol.

"Ssssshitt!" John shrieked, jerking upright, teeth clenched, muscles straining, then he flopped back onto the seat panting like a steam engine.

"Easy," Jordan said.

"Easy?" John rasped. "Easy… for you… to say."

Jordan gave him a quick look, he heard the boy's voice shaking and it worried him. But he wasn't looking any worse. If anything, he was looking more alert. Of course, so would I if some bastard did that to me.

"Why don't you just take me to a hospital?" John asked.

His eyes tried to catch Jordan's. This was a human. That was unmistakable, but from what he'd heard a few moments ago he was the super-Terminator's cat'spaw.

"I'm going to," Jordan said tersely. "You'll get the best care available. I just wanted to get you stabilized."

He pulled the bandage tight and John gasped.

"Easy! Easy," John said. "You're going to cut off the circulation to my heart!

Loosen it up, let the blood flow."

"That's what I'm trying to prevent," Jordan muttered between his teeth.

"I know what I'm talking about. I've had some training in battlefield first aid."

"I'll bet you have," Dyson snarled.

John looked up and suddenly saw the resemblance.

"Miles?" he said, feeling weak. Weaker. He looked closer and realized the face was far too young. "No," he said sadly. "But you look just like him."

Jordan looked up from his work, his eyes blazing.

"Yeah, I do. I'm his brother. Correction, was his brother. Miles is dead."

John closed his eyes and nodded. "I know," he said.

Dyson frowned. There was a quiet dignity to this kid that moved him, completely against his will. He realized that he'd wanted the boy to be a jerk, a punk he could despise.

"Good field dressing," John said, his eyes closed.

"Glad you like it," Jordan said. "It's my first."

John smiled.

"What?" Dyson asked suspiciously.

"Nothing," John said. He opened his eyes. "Why aren't you taking me to a hospital?" He thought he knew the answer from what he'd overheard, but he wanted Dyson to tell him.

"I am taking you to a hospital," he said, looking down. He picked up the various medical paraphernalia and began putting it back in the shopping bag. "Just not in

Sacramento."

"Who's Serena?" John asked. He kept his eyes on Jordan's face, willing the older man to look up.

"My, what big ears you have," Jordan snapped. He kept working for a moment, painfully aware of the boy's accusing eyes. "She's my boss," he finally said.

"Chief of security at Cyberdyne."

That would fit, John thought. Better than a scientist, even. So this Serena had to be the super-Terminator. Interesting that it was a female. He wondered if his mother's reputation had inspired that choice. John tried to imagine a female Terminator and couldn't get beyond the massive chassis.

"What's she like?" he finally asked.

Jordan had watched the boy thinking things over and was waiting for his next question. This wasn't the one he was expecting.

"Younger than me, blond, very pretty, about average height… slender. Not what you expected, I guess," he said as John looked at him perplexed.

John shook his head. "No," he said. "I thought she'd be bigger."

Now it was Jordan's turn to be perplexed. What the hell does that mean? he wondered. He picked up the bag and began to back out of the car.

John grabbed his jacket with his good hand.

"Don't take me to her," he said. He tried to make Dyson meet his eyes. "She'll

kill me."

"No, she won't," Jordan said disgustedly, pulling the boy's hand off his jacket.

"There is absolutely no reason for her to kill you."

"Yes, there is," John said earnestly. "If I die, then Skynet wins."

"Who? Oh, wait a minute, that must be the monster computer that's going to take over the world, right?"

John nodded, then wished he hadn't as his vision doubled. He dropped his head back down on the cheap pillow. "She's here to protect Cyberdyne so that Skynet can be born."

"Of course she is!" Dyson sneered. "Why didn't I see that myself? What else could she be doing?"

"If she's really on the level, then why isn't she letting you take me to a hospital instead of dragging me to Cyberdyne?"

Jordan leaned closer to him. "Because she thinks—and I agree with her—that your dear old mom is heading for Cyberdyne with lots of explosives and no brakes. She's trying to keep her from killing anybody as much as she's trying to preserve Cyberdyne."

John licked dry lips. "Can I have a drink of that water?" he asked.

Jordan, looking disgusted, pulled it out and uncapped it for him.

"Thanks." John took a long pull, then plopped his head back down on the pillow, his eyes closed. He kept hold on the bottle when Jordan would have taken it away. "What's your name?" he asked.

"Dyson," Jordan said precisely.

John smiled slightly. "I admired your brother," he said. "He was a good man."

"And thanks to your mother, now he's a dead man."

John shook his head, then frowned at the pain.

"No. The SWAT team shot him. Mom never intended for anybody to die. He was too badly wounded to get out. Mom says he took the detonator and gave her a nod to go. Then he held on as long as he could before he let the place blow."

John swallowed some more water. "He was a brave man."

Jordan felt the strength run out of him, as if someone had pulled a plug at the bottom of his spine. The SWAT team shot him. It was exactly what Tarissa had told him. Exactly. Except that she had gotten that information from the squad leader, while Connor here had gotten it from his mother. Two independent sources, he thought. It could well be… must be true. The thing about the detonator, though, that was new.

"You're telling me my brother committed suicide," he said aloud. He shook his head with a knowing smile. "That's not my brother. Miles wouldn't do that."

John looked at him. "It wasn't suicide. He was too badly wounded to make it; I told you that. He didn't kill himself, he sacrificed himself for his family and his

friends. He died trying to save the world."

"That is insane," Jordan said straightening. "You are insane. You and your mother and her boyfriend kidnapped my brother and forced him to—"

"We didn't kidnap him—he led us to Cyberdyne. He willingly came with us, willingly showed us where things were, and he helped us set up the bomb." John closed his eyes again. He seemed to be less nauseated with his eyes closed.

"Why?" Jordan asked simply. He raised one hand and let it drop. "Why would he do that?"

"Because we had a Terminator with us who showed him some of its inner workings and he couldn't deny that proof," John said wearily. "Look, I know it sounds insane. Before I met a Terminator I thought my mother was crazy. But she's not. It's all true." He opened his eyes and looked at Jordan. "Call Tarissa,"

he said. "Tell her you have John Connor in custody and he's asking her to tell you the truth."

Jordan was silent for a moment, his mouth open.

"You want me to ask my brother's widow to back you up?" he said slowly.

"She'll confirm what I've told you," John said with perfect confidence. "She will."

Jordan tightened his lips and looked away. She would, he well knew it. He thought of Tarissa's message: Remember what I told you. And here it was again.

"Shit!" he said. "Shit!"

John shut his eyes against the pounding in his head.

"Believe it or not," he said, "I know how you feel."

Dyson tightened his lips and glared at the kid. Then he dug into the bag and opening the aspirin bottle tapped out three tablets.

"Here," he said. "Knock yourself out."

Then he got out and slammed the door behind him.

He walked back and forth for a while, calming himself and trying to decide what to do. The kid thought Serena meant him no good. Given the behavior of the three "backups" that she'd sent with him, maybe he had a point.

But Serena denied it, seemed stunned when he told her about it, and there was nothing in her previous behavior to cause him to doubt her. Serena said she only wanted the boy at Cyberdyne to protect the people there. That seemed extremely believable to him. She said the three goons were strangers to her.

He stopped pacing. Getting beyond that was hard, maybe impossible. And in all fairness he had to give some credence now to the story that Tarissa had told him.

Shrapnel dropping out of skulls, men running forty miles an hour. Unbelievable as it was, here it was again from a different source. And what a different source, he thought. The maniac's own son.

He wondered briefly if Tarissa might have been hypnotized into believing this insanity. No. Even if she had, it wouldn't have lasted six years, he thought. Not the way he'd kept her picking at it. And Danny wasn't even supposed to have

known a lot of stuff that he… claimed to know.

Jordan ran his hand over his short-cropped hair. The more he tried to sort it out, the more tangled it became. He put his hands on his hips and considered his options.

Ralph, he thought. Ralph Ferri.

Ferri was a major in charge of base security. Serena had introduced them, very much as a matter of form, on his second day at Cyberdyne, and they had hit it off. Since there was something in Serena's manner that indicated she didn't want to encourage Ferri to take an interest in the complex under her care, Jordan had kept their friendship to himself.

Ralph's secretary patched him through with no difficulty.

"Hi Jordan," the Major said. "Wassup?"

Now that it was time to ask, Jordan choked. How the hell do I put this?

"Jordan?"

Oh, God. He rubbed his forehead. This was a mistake.

"Hello? Anybody there?"

"Hi, Ralph, sorry I, uh, dropped the phone." Jordan rolled his eyes.

There was a minute pause before the Major said, "Sooo, what's new?"

"I need a favor," Jordan said. "Uuuhhh. This is really awkward."

"Is it going to cost me my career?" Ralph joked.

"I honestly don't know," Dyson admitted. "Let me outline my problem for you."

He went on to describe the situation, the three goons, the wounded kid, his notorious mother, and Serena's plea to bring the boy to Cyberdyne. "But I just…

can't trust her," he admitted. "I just can't do it."

There was silence.

Then, his voice cautious, Ralph asked, "So, what do you want from me?"

"I want to put him in the base hospital under military guard," Jordan said.

"Aaawww, man!" Ferri was silent for a moment. Jordan could hear the rapid tapping of a pencil. "Let me get this straight," the Major said. "You want me to put a wounded sixteen-year-old fugitive, that your boss has ordered you to bring directly to her, into the base hospital."

"That's about the size of it," Jordan confirmed.

"I can't do that! Ask me for something I can do, man, and it's yours. But not this!"

"I'm willing to bet that Tricker would clear it." Actually, Jordan had no idea what Tricker would clear. He'd only met him once and hadn't seen him since.

But instinct told him that mentioning Tricker's name in connection with something this hinky might work. The man was the personification of powerful, well-connected hinkiness.

"I'm willing to bet Tricker would put my ass in a sling for doing it," Ferri protested.

"No, he won't. Look, trust me on this man, it will be all right. I'm assistant head of security at Cyberdyne. Your department has been ordered to cooperate with Cyberdyne, right?"

"Right."

"So just do what I'm asking—cooperate with me. Okay?" Jordan waited.

"Yeah, but, Jordan, you just told me that your boss ordered you to bring this kid directly to Cyberdyne. To their med facility. Isn't that right?"

"Yeah. But you don't know that." Jordan waited a beat. "Do you?"

Ferri gave a long sigh, then he chuckled.

"No, I don't, do I?" he said. "Okay, bring him in. When can we expect you?"

"If I leave now I should be there in three hours. Depending on traffic."

"I'll stick around," the Major promised. "I'll leave word to expect you at the hospital. I'll have them call me when you get in. I'll expect a complete, if off-the-record, rundown on this thing."

"You got it," Jordan assured him. "Thanks."

"Hey, what are friends for?"

They hung up. Jordan grinned. Then he looked at the car. The kid was looking back at him.

This is going to be a loooong drive, he thought.

SAN JOAUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA: THE PRESENT

"Left here," Sarah snapped.

Dieter looked at her from the corner of his eye. That was about all she'd said since the fiasco in Sacramento. "Turn right here, left, right, get on highway five."

Her calm was beginning to get on his nerves. As was the way she was snapping out directions.

"Where are we going?" he asked as they climbed out of the heat and rectilinear farmlands of the valley and into high, dry hills.

"Friends," she said.

Five miles down the road he began to see things that looked familiar. When he signaled to turn just before she gave him directions, he knew he was right. It was a tremendous relief.

Ike and Donna Chamberlain would help settle her down. Her very stillness indicated that she needed to be doing something. They'd find something to keep her busy.

Sarah cast him a quick glance the second time he began a turn just before she told him to. Then she settled into silence. It didn't come as a surprise to her that

they had some acquaintances in common.

Dieter honked three times, then twice, then once, then once again as he drove down a narrow dirt track that led to the Chamberlains' cabin in the woods.

Ike was a former Navy SEAL, and Donna was a former MR Not surprisingly they had met in the Philippines one wild night when she'd had to arrest him. And tamed him in a heartbeat, so Ike claimed. They were survivalists first and foremost, making, growing, or hunting most of what they needed to live. For cash and anything else they had a sideline.

Ike was a gunsmith. More of a gun artist, really. He could re-create any gun ever made for a rich man's toy. Or he sometimes worked with the government, or an organization like the Sector, to produce high-tech models that would always be too specialized and too damned expensive for mass production.

The sideline was so lucrative that they could easily have retired to some tropical paradise to be waited on hand and foot for the rest of their lives. Such a suggestion, if one had the temerity to make it, was always greeted by a blank expression and the response, "Why, I'd just roll up and die if I didn't have nothing to do!"

Dieter pulled into the deserted clearing before the cabin. It was a large place; the Chamberlains had raised two kids in this out-of-the-way spot. Two kids who couldn't wait to get as far from the purity of the woods as their legs and the bus would carry them.

They both worked in computers now and were doing very well. They called often, via cell phone, and never visited. It was almost as if they suspected their

parents would keep them there by force. Which they were perfectly capable of doing if they thought it was the right thing to do.

Sarah looked around like someone coming out of a deep sleep, narrowing her eyes as she examined the two-story notched-log cabin. Dieter sat with both hands on the wheel and waited. Eventually a tall figure in a hip-length suede coat and broad-brimmed hat stepped from the woods, a rifle held under one arm, pointing downward. From the slenderness, Dieter thought it must be Donna.

"Never thought I'd see the two of you sharing the front seat of a car unless one of you was in handcuffs," Donna drawled. She grinned, her weather-beaten face breaking into a thousand lines, each one a welcome.

"Hello, Donna," Dieter said.

Sarah got out of the car and came around; opening her arms, she hugged the older woman, who returned the hug one armed. Donna's eyes dropped questioningly to von Rossbach, who tightened his lips and frowned in answer.

She gave Sarah's back a pat.

"C'mon in, why don't you?" she said. "I'll put on some coffee and roust Ike outta the workroom. Then you people can tell us what's on your mind."

Ike and Donna blinked as they stared at Dieter and Sarah, then shifted nervously in their chairs and met each other's eyes in sidelong glances. They'd always worried about Sarah. Her strange crusade against Skynet, which Sarah herself said didn't exist—yet—was blatantly insane even by their relaxed standards. It made her a stand out even among the bizarre folk they tended to meet.

Visiting with them had always seemed to center her, though, to bring her back down to earth and the time and place everybody else was living in. She was actually very likable when she was calm and not talking about Judgment Day.

It was with regret that they'd watched her grow harder over the years. They tolerated her wrangy attitude mainly for John's sake. They saw how well she treated her son, even though they thought her discipline was a bit too strong.

And they found John to be a delightful boy, they'd have done anything for him.

Dieter, on the other hand, they'd always liked, and by comparison to Sarah, he was very uncomplicated. Von Rossbach was unequivocally one of the good guys and that appealed to them. The few times they'd met had been fun and he was always welcome. If anyone had asked they'd have said he was one of the sanest, steadiest men they knew.

Now he was telling them that Sarah's wild stories were gospel truth. It was a hard mouthful to swallow. But the look Ike and Donna were giving one another now said as plain as words:

Shucks, the girl can't be that good in bed!

"So where's John now?" Ike asked.

"Probably on his way to the main Cyberdyne facility under a military base somewhere in California," Sarah said bitterly.

She put her face in her hands and breathed deeply for a moment. The other's around the table glanced at one another in embarrassment, not quite knowing what to do.

"Who'd be dumb enough to build a military base underground in California?"

Ike asked.

"The army?" Donna answered, raising her eyebrows.

"Going to Sacramento was a complete waste of time," Sarah said bitterly, dropping her hands. "And way too expensive."

"Not entirely wasted, Sarah," Dieter said. He reached down and pulled up his backpack. Reaching in he extracted the portable computer. "John downloaded a lot of stuff into this."

"It never occurred to you to tell me about that?" Sarah snapped.

"I thought I'd give you some privacy," von Rossbach said calmly. He turned the computer on. "Now we can see what he got for us. Then we can go and rescue him."

"You're assuming he's alive," she said.

He stopped and looked at her, his gaze level.

"And what do you assume, Sarah?"

"I assume that if he was brought directly to the boss Terminator that he—" She stopped herself.

Letting her anger take over wouldn't help, and if she gave up hope there was no point in going on. Closing her eyes she took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and

started over.

"I think we'd better find John before we blow the place up," she said grimly.

"This whole rigmarole is pointless if we kill him ourselves." She looked at von Rossbach. "What did he get for us?"

One corner of Dieter's mouth curved up at that. He'd been worried. But this woman was, if anything, resilient.

"It's encoded," he said, and tapped a few keys. "In a few minutes the decoding program should bare all of Cyberdyne's secrets." Dieter shrugged. "Unless they've got something this program can't work its way around."

Sarah nodded. Ike and Donna looked at one another.

"Um," Ike said. Sarah and Dieter looked at him and he cleared his throat. "I don't like to sound inhospitable," he began awkwardly, "but was there a reason you came to us, specifically."

"Yes," Sarah said. "John indicated that he had plans for a… what was it?" she asked Dieter.

"A phased plasma rifle in the forty-watt range," he quoted.

"Yowza," Ike said softly, his eyes very interested.

"Not that I expect you'll be able to just whip one up, even with the plans," Sarah said. "But I had an idea and I think you might be able to help me with that."

"What is it?" Donna said. "You know we don't hold with killing soldiers just

doing their duty, Sarah."

"I don't want to kill anybody," Sarah answered calmly. "I never have, and I see no reason to start now. But Terminators aren't people and weapons that would tear a human apart wouldn't stop one for more than a few seconds."

Ike and Donna both slid their eyes toward von Rossbach, who nodded grimly, his arms crossed over his chest. "The lady speaks from experience. Shared experience. I've seen it with my own eyes."

Sarah tightened her lips at their obvious doubt, then continued, "But they're robots. And robots have to have a power source. If we could interrupt that power, permanently, if possible, then they won't be as big a problem."

Dieter nodded, frowning thoughtfully.

"Yes, that would be good." He looked at her and shrugged. "Did you have something in mind?"

"I don't know if this is possible," she said to Ike. "But I was thinking, maybe, some sort of souped-up taser?"

Ike looked between them both, then at his wife, who shrugged.

"Sure, I could soup up a taser for you," he said. "But how souped up are we talking here?"

"At least three or four times what you'd need to drop a man my size," Dieter said. "Maybe more."

Ike blew out his breath. "The problem there would be battery power." he explained. "I guess I could work out some sort of back- or fanny-pack arrangement." He wasn't talking to them now, but to himself. He looked up suddenly. "When do you need this?"

"Tomorrow morning," Sarah said definitely. "I'd say tonight but that's just the mother in me talking."

Ike gave her a long look, then nodded. "I can have one, definitely. I'll try for two, but I make no guarantees."

"I'll accept that." Sarah smiled wearily. "It's more than I have any right to expect.

And I thank you."

The computer beeped, and von Rossbach drew it toward him. He tapped keys and read, then tapped some more.

"There is no Skynet project," he said after a careful search.

"There's probably an artificial-intelligence project, though," Sarah said. She came to stand by his shoulder and read the text he was looking at. "Right now the things that will go into making Skynet might just be starting up."

Dieter started broadening his search, using "AI" and "artificial intelligence" as search parameters. Within seconds he had several projects listed. The first one he pulled up had a familiar name. "I know about this guy," he said. "He's a genius, but he's also a lunatic."

Sarah shrugged slightly. "In what way?"

"He's a Nazi for one thing; genuine article, no Haider pussyfooting. We watched him carefully in the Sector. We thought that he had terrorist leanings and that he could do a lot of damage if he put his mind to it. A very powerful mind."

"Maybe he's the one that taught Skynet to hate," Sarah said. Maybe we should kill him, she thought. Stop the hate, stop the problem? After all, there was no guarantee that destroying Cyberdyne again would stop the project. Unless we get all the stored information this time.

John's face was suddenly in her mind's eye, smiling, obviously about to crack a joke; she pushed it aside. She wouldn't allow herself to think about him until after they'd gotten him free. If I think about him now I'll break down. And then she might never get up again. So feelings and memories she didn't need. What she needed was something constructive to do.

"This is all great stuff," she said, "but not pertinent to our mission. We need to know how Cyberdyne is laid out, and if there are security codes needed to work the elevators, things like that."

"Yes," Dieter said. He tapped keys. A menu came up and he made a selection. A map of the complex came up on the screen.

Donna leaned in. "We've got a printer in the office that you can use," she offered. "In fact, why don't you go set up in there while Sarah and I get dinner ready."

Sarah's eyes widened and her nostrils flared. She was about to say something obnoxious like My son could be dead and you want me to peel potatoes? when