Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

C.27

Connor pulled Kate behind the general's massive desk and shoved her to the floor, shielding her body with his.

The missile exploded like an atomic bomb as it hit the window shards, instantly filling the room with blinding white light, a tremendous crash, and an intense stab of heat that singed the hair on the back of Connor's neck.

It was as if a gigantic vacuum cleaner came right behind the initial explosion, sucking up nearly everything in the room and spewing it out the window that was now a huge, gaping hole in the side of the building.

Glass and debris flew everywhere. Connor kept his head down, his arms wrapped around Kate, his body tight against hers.

But then it was over and he slowly raised himself up off her, his ears ringing from the concussion. It didn't feel as if he were injured, and as far as he could tell Kate wasn't hurt either.

Terminator had taken the brunt of the blast with his torso. He'd been shoved backward off his feet. He picked himself up, his jacket smoking, more of the artificial flesh on his face and neck burned away, exposing even larger sections of his cranial case and optical sensor sockets.

Kate suddenly pushed Connor away and half scrambled, half crawled over to where her father lay tangled in a mass of debris. His eyes were open but sightless.

"No!" Kate cried. It wasn't supposed to end like this for him. Not destroyed by some mindless machine. There had been time. She could have given him CPR. Something. Anything.

She looked up at the hole blasted in the wall. The H-K was gone.

She gathered her father in her arms and held him, her body wracked with sobs. Not like this, she kept repeating to herself.

Connor came over to her. He could see now that she had been hurt in the explosion. Her leg had been cut just above the knee, and she was bleeding. But as far as he could see it was nothing major. Blood was seeping from the wound, not spurting as it would, had an artery or major blood vessel been severed.

He disengaged her grip on her father's body, took her by the shoulders, and tried to pull her away. Gently. The H-Ks would be back. He was sure of it. "There's nothing you can do now," he told her, his tone compassionate. He could write a book on what it felt like to lose someone. "Come on."

"I can't," she said. She looked up at him, pleading, and shook her head. "I can't."

"Yes, you can," Connor insisted.

She tried to turn away, but he pulled her back and looked into her eyes. Willing her to understand what had to be done. She was covered in blood now, her own and her father's. She was on the verge of collapse.

"Kate, listen to me. He wanted you to come with me. To get to Skynet and shut it down."

She kept shaking her head, as if she could blot out the death and destruction around her. But she allowed Connor to help her to her feet.

She almost collapsed, suddenly feeling the sharp pain in her leg. Connor helped her catch her balance.

She nodded after a moment.

Connor pulled his AK-47 and knapsack from the debris behind the desk. "How much time do we have?"

Terminator was at the door, looking toward the corridor. "Fifty-one minutes," he said.

"We better hurry," Connor told him.

He and Kate followed Terminator through the general's outer office and into the broad corridor as the T-X turned the corner and came directly at them.

Terminator stepped between them and the charging T-X. "Run," he said, and he stepped forward into her charge.

Connor grabbed Kate by the arm, hauled her around the opposite corner, and they headed down the corridor in a dead run.

At the last instant T-X leaped into the air and kicked Terminator in his face with the heel of her boot, putting all of her considerable power into the blow.

It was a force even stronger than the H-K's missile, sending Terminator smashing into the wall.

T-X came down light-footed as a cat, and without a glance at Terminator started after Connor and Kate.

Terminator's CPU was unable to register surprise, or at least not the human variety, but he was able to register a reevaluation of new data that his processor instantly used to overwrite an old subroutine. The T-X model was stronger, much stronger and even more agile than he had been programmed to expect.

He would not make the same error twice. Before the T-X managed to take three steps, Terminator came off the wall like a prizefighter off the ropes and went after her.

As she reached the corner he caught up, clamping his arms around her upper body, and swung her to the left She went with the direction of the force, then dug her shoulder into his chest and slammed him completely through a steel-reinforced concrete wall into the executive staff men's room.

Terminator no longer held confidence that he could win this fight. At the beginning he'd evaluated his chances of disabling the T-X at 18.773 percent His estimate based on the new data was now at 4.331 percent, with a 14 percent margin of error.

But his program allowed for no options other than the preservation of John Connor's and Katherine Brewster's lives.

A sink flew off the wall, shattered porcelain peppering the stall doors like machine-gun fire. Water gushed from a broken pipe, and a section of the tile flooring cracked and sagged under the pressure of their combined weights landing with such sudden force.

T-X had broken free, and she turned to step back into the corridor, but Terminator grabbed the broken sink by its drain pipe and swung it with all his strength at her head.

Her cranial case nodded under the force of the blow, otherwise she seemed undamaged.

She turned back to Terminator, grabbed him between the legs, lifted his bulk off the floor, and tossed him like a piece of trash across the men's room into the stalls that crumpled like tissue paper.

Even if he had been human, Terminator would have felt little or no pain. As a human his adrenaline would have been coursing through his body. As a cyborg a series of action circuits were firing, providing the electronic equivalent.

He was pumped, as Connor would say.

T-X turned and headed for the door, her sensors reaching out for indications from the T-ls roaming at will through the complex for signs of her primary targets.

Terminator rose easily from the tangled mass of stall doors and partitions and in three quick strides reached the T-X.

He grabbed her shoulders and working with her forward momentum drove her cranial case, face first, into a mirror above a sink, smashing the glass and cracking the wall.

He pulled her head back and smashed it into the reinforced concrete wall again. And again. And again.

Connor and Kate held up at the ground-floor landing in the executive wing emergency stairwell.

They could still hear gunfire somewhere above, but the screams had diminished, as had most of the returning gunfire from the Air Force security people.

The machines were winning as they had been designed to do. The only two questions in Connor's mind were how Terminator was doing against the T-X, and how they were going to get out of here without him.

He looked through the mesh-reinforced glass window in the door. Offices, workshops, and labs opened off the long corridor. The place was all shot up. The T-ls had already been here.

There were bodies on the floor, and all the rooms, especially the labs and workshops, were in shambles. But there was no sign of the robots. Connor glanced back the way they had come, half wondering if they shouldn't go back to try to help Terminator.

"What?" Kate asked.

"We can't get out of here without him," Connor said. Kate had followed his gaze. She knew what he was thinking. "Yes, we can," she told him. "I have a pilot's license."

Connor's left eyebrow rose. He nodded, impressed. "Good to have you around," he said, and he meant it. He was starting to appreciate her strength and resilience. She was good to have at his side.

"It should be the next wing from here," he told her. They stepped out into the corridor and raced to the end, where they came to another emergency door with a reinforced window.

The situation here was the same as in the wing they'd just come through. Offices and labs opening off the main central corridor were in shambles. Bodies lay everywhere, and small fires burned here and there, the haze of smoke thick in the air.

But there were no warrior robots.

The entrance down to the particle accelerator complex was somewhere off this last corridor. Connor and Kate stepped through the door and pulled up short. The stench of shredded human bodies hit their noses at the same time, and they gagged.

Pictures and diagrams and artists' renderings of T-ls and H-Ks and other futuristic weapons systems were framed and hung on the walls in some of the offices and work areas.

"God, it's actually beginning," Connor said. This was the future his mother had worried about. The future she had fought so hard to prevent.

They started down the corridor, passing a big, smoke-filled work area. There were a lot of bodies here, where the fighting and destruction seemed to have been more intense than in other parts of the building. A pool of some flammable liquid had collected in the center of the room and was burning.

Connor took Kate's arm again and had started around the tire when they heard the distinctive whirr of a T-l moving their way.

Kate pulled back, but Connor bodily hauled her to the floor and scrambled as close to the fire as he could stand without being too badly burned.

The T-l, its hunched back and shoulders nearly reaching the ceiling, came around the corner, its treads crunching over debris and bodies.

It stopped short. A red laser targeting beam swept the room, avoiding the heat source of the fire.

The machine was searching for the heat signatures of still living humans. This unit was evidently part of a mop-up squad. Either that or the T-X had sent it ahead to search for them.

Either way the T-l presented a deadly menace. Connor eased closer to the fire, dragging Kate with him.

"No," she whispered urgently in his ear. "It's too hot!" "The heat will blind it," he explained. "Don't move."