Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

C.30

Until this moment Connor never believed that Terminator could hurt him. It was like a child's faith in its father.

He raised a hand to ward off the blow.

At the last moment Terminator diverted his fist to smash the Humvee's hood inches from Connor's head.

"I… I cannot," Terminator struggled with the words.

"You know what you have to do," Connor told him. "You know my destiny."

Terminator's entire body shuddered again. His optical sensors glowed with an incredible brightness, blood red, as if they were heading for overload.

It was clear that he was no longer in control of his functions. He was fighting some colossal internal battle. Something had to give way in his system.

"I have to live," Connor said.

Terminator seemed to focus on Connor for a moment, then grabbed him by the jacket and tossed him aside.

Terminator brought his fist down on the hood of the Humvee, caving in the heavy gauge metal like tinfoil.

He threw his head back and uttered a guttural, plaintive otherworldly scream, then stopped, jerked upright, looked at something in the distance, and shut down.

The light in his optical sensors winked out, and Terminator remained frozen in place, unmoving, unblinking, apparently unaware of his surroundings.

Connor got to his feet, a great sadness and weariness coming over him as he stared at the closest thing to a father he had ever known.

Terminator was dead.

There was nothing Connor could do except make sure that he and Kate lived into the future. They owed him and the human resistance that much.

He turned on his heel and sprinted back into the hangar where Kate was struggling to her feet She was dazed from hitting her head on the tool cart.

"Are you okay?"

Kate looked at him, and then out at the flight line at the motionless Terminator. "What happened?"

"He couldn't do it," Connor told her. "He shut himself down." He gave Kate a critical look. "Can you fly?"

She nodded, and he helped her back to the plane where he handed her up into the pilot's seat, then hurried around to the passenger side and climbed in.

They buckled their seat belts, and Kate checked to make sure that the controls moved freely, that no locks were in place. She eased the big throttle knob forward, the engine responded, and they taxied out onto the ramp.

She had to maneuver around Terminator and the destroyed Humvee as well as burning vehicles and the bodies. Everywhere there seemed to be bodies, civilians as well as Air Force officers and security troops.

The humans hadn't had a chance. LAW rockets might have helped, and perhaps if there'd been time to get the Army National Guard out with a couple of tanks, the fight might have been less one-sided.

But even then Connor doubted if the outcome would have been much different.

Kate turned onto the taxiway that led to the main east-west runway. She automatically dialed up the tower frequency that was posted on the control panel, and reached for the microphone when she realized that there would be no response.

In the distance they could see the control tower was badly damaged, all its observation windows shot out, smoke curling from inside, and no signs of life.

The fight would already be spreading out now in preparation for the nuclear war. A war that no one in their right mind wanted, and a war no one ever expected would be fought this way.

"Are we okay on gas?" Connor asked, to distract her. She was starting to drift because of the unreality of what was happening around them.

She gave a start and glanced at him, and then at the fuel gauge that showed more than three-quarters full. She nodded. "Plenty."

"Then let's get out of here before another one of those flying robots shows up," Connor said.

Kate pulled up at the intersection with the runway, and turned toward the east, into the wind. She checked her controls again, and then holding the brakes ran the engine up to 1850 rpm, held it there for a few moments, then switched to magneto one. The engine dropped about 25 rpm, and came back up when she switched to both. It dropped again, this time almost 50 rpm when she switched to magneto two, and came back when she returned to both.

"Ready?" she asked.

"Anytime," Connor answered.

Kate firewalled the throttle, released the brakes, and the Cessna gathered speed down the runway. At sixty miles per hour, Kate pulled off the carburetor heat and the engine picked up another 150 rpm. At seventy-five she eased back the wheel and they lifted off, building speed for the best rate of climb and then accelerating as she slowly bled off the flaps.

T-X emerged from the particle accelerator emergency shaft and went around to the front of the hangar. In the distance to the east she spotted what looked like a small plane gathering speed and altitude off the end of the runway.

She enhanced her optical circuits, focusing on the light plane. It showed up in her database as a Cessna 180, registration N3035C belonging to Brewster, Robert.

She watched for a full minute longer while the Cessna turned and apparently settled on a heading just east of north.

Her processors brought several options to her head-up display, but Crystal Peak indicated the highest confidence at about ninety-five percent.

If they had acquired the necessary data from General Brewster, there was a chance that the humans, John Connor and Katherine Brewster, could have a major negative impact on Skynet if they were allowed to reach the control center core. This could not be allowed to happen.

T-X strode purposefully into the hangar, passing the inert Terminator without so much as a glance, and headed directly for a Bell Iroquois helicopter parked by itself in the open.

It was not quite as fast as the Cessna 180, but it could take off and land anywhere. It did not have to taxi out to the runway and the time saved would be enough.

From the air, Connor could see fierce fighting going on over at the main side of Edwards. The carnage was spreading even faster than he had feared it would.

They were running out of time to stop Skynet. Any delay, no matter how slight, would put them over the limit. They would be late, the war would begin, and there would be no turning back from the fight to the death between the machines and the human race.

The future, as Terminator had painted it for them, was a bleak one.

"Okay," Kate said. "Zero-one-five degrees. Fifty-two miles, our maximum airspeed is about one-sixty."

Connor glanced at his watch. They would touch down at Crystal Peak, if they didn't get lost, in about twenty minutes. Just time enough. "Thirty-two minutes left," he said. He looked at Kate. "It's just you and me now."

She nodded but didn't say anything. After losing her fiance and her rather within the space of one day it was a miracle she wasn't a complete basket case.

Connor got the knapsack from the back, and started arming the one-kilo bricks of C-4 with fuses.

Kate watched him work. "John, what if we can't…"

"There's enough C-4 here to take out ten supercomputers," he told her. "We're going to make it, Kate." He looked up into her eyes. She was frightened. He offered her a small smile. "The future is up to us."

She nodded and turned away to watch out the windshield. The Sierra Nevada Mountains rose in front of them, even more bleak and forbidding than the desert beneath them.

"I saw the future," she said.

Connor looked up, startled. "What?"

"I had a vision. A waking nightmare," she said. "There were robots, and explosions and fires." She shivered, and then looked at Connor, wanting him to believe her. "Bodies too. Hundreds, maybe thousands of human bodies, and skeletons and skulls in big piles."

Connor nodded. "I've had the same dream for the last twelve years. Welcome to the club."

"It's true?"

"Not if we can stop it," Connor said. "The future is up to us."

She nodded with a new determination, her lips compressed. "Then let's do it right," she said.