Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes

CHAPTER

NINETEEN

“Well done, everyone,” Connor said into his mike, feeling the first trickle of hope he’d had all night.

“David, set up a defensive line; Tunney, move in to support him. We’ll be heading in immediately as backstop. And remember, even T-600s who are low or out of ammo are nothing to be treated lightly.”

“Don’t worry about us,” David responded, his voice sounding grimly pleased. “I count at least twelve spare miniguns, plus four crates of ammo belts.” He paused. “I mean, damn, there’s a lot of stuff in here. Skynet was definitely planning a big night.”

“It was probably going to hit another neighborhood after it finished with this one,” Barnes said gruffly. “What about us, Connor?”

Connor grimaced. He knew what Kate and Barnes wanted to do. He also knew that it would probably be a heartbreaking waste of their time. The Terminators that had breached the Moldavia had had a lot of time in there. More than enough time to kill everyone in the building.

But the squad had come this far, and they’d put their lives on the line to do it. If there was anything that could be salvaged from the ruins across the street, they deserved the chance to try.

“Go ahead,” he told Barnes. “But tread lightly. Any Terminators still in there will probably be heading straight through you to try to get to the warehouse. Hickabick, do what you can to fly cover for everyone.”

“Check,” Blair’s voice came back. “Nice singing voice, by the way.”

Connor smiled tightly. “Thanks.”

And with that, it suddenly occurred to him that he finally had an answer to the question Kate had asked him in the middle of the night, just two days ago. The question born of fatigue and tension and momentary hopelessness.

Even in this dark and dismal world, there were still reasons for people to sing.

All at once, the firing stopped.

Orozco frowned, his view blocked by the body lying on top of him, trying to listen through his ringing ears. Surely the Terminators hadn’t stopped their attack already. Or had the battering of the gunfire—combined with his slow but steady loss of blood—merely made him deaf?

And then, as the ringing in his ears faded; he heard the thudding of heavy machine feet. He wasn’t deaf, and the Terminators were still here.

Only they seemed to be moving away from him.

Away from him?

It would be a risk, Orozco knew. Movement of any sort was pretty much a guaranteed way of attracting Terminator attention. But he needed to see what was happening out there. Gathering his last reserves of strength, he leaned his shoulder against the body lying on top of him and pushed.

For a moment nothing happened. Orozco kept at it, clenching his teeth against the throbbing pain in his arm, and suddenly the body rolled over onto its back.

He tensed. But no miniguns roared, and no slugs hammered into his body. Blinking the sweat and the other man’s blood from his eyes, he craned his neck and looked around him.

The Terminators were leaving. All of them, lumbering at full speed toward the archway.

They stepped beneath it—

The multiple explosions were actually quieter than Orozco had expected them to be. But the visuals were every bit as spectacular as he’d hoped. Just above the archway, the ten pipe bombs he’d drilled into the decorative facing went off simultaneously, lifting two floors’ worth of stone a foot straight up into the air. The facing reached the top of its rise and fell back down, the impact shattering the archway below it and dumping the entire mass of stone onto the Terminators.

Orozco squinted as a wave of dust blew threw the lobby, tasting the bitterness of this last twist of irony. He’d set up the booby trap to hopefully eliminate some of the attackers before they could get inside the building. Instead, they’d come in through the rear, and had missed the trap entirely.

Now when everyone was already dead and destroying the Terminators gained nothing for anyone, they had finally triggered the damn thing.

Just the same, he was glad he’d lived long enough to see it.

The roar of tumbling rock faded away, and with it the last sound Orozco knew he would ever hear.

Resting among the dead, he closed his eyes and prepared to join them.

* * *

The Terminators were coming.

Blair watched them as she circled as slowly as she could without stalling out. There were sixteen in all, marching in from the west and northwest, probably the last of the T-600s that had been on containment duty at that edge of the neighborhood. With the steadiness and determination of an incoming tide, they were converging on the warehouse.

And unlike the remnants of the earlier attack force, this group almost certainly was still heavily armed.

Blair shifted her attention to the warehouse itself. David and his team had unlimbered two of the spare miniguns, and Tunney’s team was busy uncrating extra ammo belts. It was shaping up to be quite a fight.

Though it could have been a lot worse, she knew. Between her own strafing run on the crowd behind the Moldavia, Connor’s and Barnes’ squads blowing away T-600s in job lots, and the entryway crash that Kate Connor had described—and which Blair again hadn’t seen, damn it—the Terminator count was way down from what Skynet had started with that evening.

The gasoline fire west of the Moldavia might have taken out a couple, too—one of Barnes’ team had reported spotting two T-600s in that area just before that particular balloon went up.

Still, there was no getting around the fact that there were sixteen fresh troops moving in.

So far none of them had tried taking a potshot at Blair’s A-10, but that might just be because Skynet wanted them saving their ammo for the main event.

She grimaced, wishing she had a few rounds left in her GAU-8. Just a few. A strafing run now with 30mm explosive shells would be so soul-satisfying.

“Incoming!” David’s voice snapped.

Blair jerked her head up, swearing at herself under her breath. So intent had she been on the approaching T-600s that she’d neglected her primary duty of watching the skies. She darted her eyes around the horizon.

And felt her blood freeze. Approaching rapidly from the north were no fewer than seven shadowy aircraft.

All of them bearing down on the warehouse.

“Oh, hell,” she murmured, automatically turning her fighter to intercept. Though what she could do against that many HKs, with an unarmed fighter—

“Hickabick, isn’t it?” an unfamiliar voice crackled suddenly in her ear.

Blair frowned. Since when did Skynet program its HKs with folksy voices?

“Hickabick here,” she acknowledged cautiously.

“Snarkster here,” the voice said. “Commander of Squadron Five. No offense, but you might want to pull up just a bit.”

Blair frowned even harder…and then, as she peered out at the approaching shadows, their shapes suddenly clarified. She saw the slender bodies, the side-mounted weapons pods, and the flickering of the rotating blades above them.

They weren’t Skynet’s Hunter-Killers. They were Resistance Apache combat helicopters.

“About time, Snarkster,” she chided, pulling up out of their way. “Got some targets for you about half a klick west.”

“Excellent,” Snarkster said grimly. “You just point ’em out, step aside, and enjoy the show.”

Two minutes later, the sixteen T-600s had been turned into blazing mounds of scrap metal. And Blair had very much enjoyed the show.