Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire

CHAPTER SIX

Blair filled her lungs.

“Barnes!” she yelled.

His response was exactly what she expected: no startled words, no useless questions, just a pair of bursts from one of the Blackhawk’s two door-mounted M240 machine guns. The two Terminator segments nearest the helo blew into shards that went flying across the sand.

“Move it, Williams!” he shouted.

Another broken T-700 had crawled nearly to grabbing range. Blair considered shooting it, decided she had better things to do with her time and ammo, and took off instead in a dead run toward Barnes and the Blackhawk.

She damn near didn’t make it. There were a half dozen more Terminators between her and the helo, none of which had betrayed its functionality by moving, all of which now lunged up and tried to grab her as she raced past. One of them had managed to collect a pair of broken leg segments along with an arm and was able to rise to something resembling a kneeling position and actually throw itself toward her.

A shot from Blair’s gun staggered it back. Before it could regain its balance another burst from Barnes’s M240 blew it to pieces.

Ten seconds later, Blair was inside the Blackhawk.

“Strap in!” she snapped, ignoring her throbbing leg as she dropped into the pilot’s seat and keyed for quick-start.

“Just get us in the air,” Barnes snapped back, firing two more bursts. “I think I heard an H-K before all this hell broke loose.”

“You did, and it’s headed this way,” Blair confirmed, running her eyes over the gauges. To her left, a misshapen Terminator hand suddenly appeared, clawing for a grip on the edge of the door opening as a pair of glowing eyes lifted into sight. Snatching out her gun, Blair gave a quick cross-body shot that knocked the machine back into the sand. “Here we go,” she said, dropping the gun onto her lap and grabbing the stick and throttle as the rotors began to turn. “Strap in—I don’t want you falling out.”

“Forget that!” Barnes shouted. He fired another burst, then leaned in toward Blair and pointed out the windshield’s right-hand section. “That way—a hundred fifty meters. Go!”

“What?” Blair asked, frowning as she peered out the windshield. There was nothing anywhere in that direction but more desert and more crawling Terminator segments. “Why?”

But Barnes was already back at the door, firing more bursts at the metallic bodies still trying to overrun them.

“Barnes, we have to run,” Blair shouted over the noise. “I’m not sure we can get away as it is.”

“A hundred fifty meters,” Barnes insisted. “Do it.”

Swearing under her breath, Blair fed power to the engines and leaped the helo into the air. Swiveling its nose, she headed in the direction Barnes had indicated.

“Behind you!”

Blair spun around. Another T-700 segment was hanging off the helo’s portside door-jamb with one hand while it other clawed for purchase on the deck itself with the other. Blair snatched up her gun, but before she could bring it to bear Barnes took a couple of rapid steps across the cabin and kicked hard at the arm gripping the door. The impact dislodged its grip, and the Terminator disappeared into the night.

“There,” Barnes called over the engine noise, pointing out the windshield. “Another twenty meters, then put ‘er down.”

Blair nodded and threw a quick look to her left. She could see a faint red glow in the distance now, the telltale lights of a rapidly approaching H-K.

“Barnes—”

“That little mound,” he cut her off, pointing again. “Put us down next to it.”

Blair grimaced. The H-K was coming in fast, and even in the air the Blackhawk would be a painfully easy target. On the ground, it would be a sitting duck.

But it was already too late for them to get a real head start. Whatever Barnes had up his sleeve, Blair could only hope it was good. Braking beside the mound, she dropped the helo onto the ground.

It hit with a crunch of metal from beneath the wheels that made her wince. Barnes was already moving, dropping out the side door and disappearing to the helo’s rear. A few seconds later he reappeared and climbed back inside.

With a Terminator minigun cradled in his arms, the ammo belt triple looped over his arm and disappearing out the door behind him.

“Go!” he ordered, dumping the gun onto the deck and yanking hard on the ammo belt’s trailing end. It came free, and Barnes grabbed for the safety harness by the M240. “Go!”

Blair pulled on the throttle and once again took the Blackhawk into the air. She should have known Barnes would have taken note of where all the abandoned miniguns and other weapons were while the two of them were out searching for his brother.

But even with their newly acquired firepower, this was going to be seriously problematic. Fleetingly, Blair wished she was back in her preferred A-10 fighter, or that the Blackhawk at least had a couple of pylon-mounted Hydra 70 missile clusters.

But she wasn’t, and it didn’t, and they would have to make do with what they had. Climbing as fast as the Blackhawk could manage, she looked back toward the incoming H-K.

Only to find that it wasn’t there.

“Where’d it go?” she shouted, looking frantically around. It couldn’t have overflown them already—it hadn’t been that close. “Barnes?”

“There—left,” he shouted back.

Blair looked out the portside door. There it was, all right, speeding toward them with its searchlights off and its turbofans angled for maximum forward velocity. It must have swung around to that side while the helo was on the ground and she was distracted by Barnes’s weapons hunt.

Only that didn’t make any tactical sense. Why waste time circling around to a new vector when it could have maintained its course and charged straight down the Blackhawk’s throat?

Unless one of the broken Terminators down there had spotted Barnes loading his new minigun into the helo’s starboard door and Skynet had brought the H-K around to keep it away from that side.

If so, the time the H-K had lost in that maneuver might just be the breathing space they needed. Blair twisted the stick around, sending the Blackhawk into a tight turn. If she could get Barnes and his minigun into range before the H-K could line up a clear shot...

The helo had barely started into its turn when a burst from the H-K’s Gatling guns disintegrated the windshield in front of her.

She twisted her face away from the flurry of flying glass, reflexively twisting the stick to spin the cockpit away from the incoming fire. She heard a shout from beside her, but with the wind suddenly roaring in her ears she couldn’t tell whether it was a shout of pain, anger, or encouragement. She blinked something out of her eyes— sweat or blood, she wasn’t sure which—and kicked the engines to full speed.

The enemy had gotten in the first punch, and her job now was to get away, get out of its crosshairs, and buy herself enough time to regroup. At least this was one of the older H-K models, still packing Gatling guns instead of the new plasma weapons some of the Skynet Central defenders had been armed with. Small favors.

Abruptly, the Blackhawk bucked, dropping like a rock, as if Blair had suddenly flown it into a downdraft. She fought the controls, trying to get the aircraft back in hand.

It was only then that she noticed that the wind was not only blowing in at her through the disintegrated windshield but was blowing down on her as well.

She looked up, squinting against the blast. The H-K had taken position directly above them, flying with its underside bare meters from the Blackhawk’s main rotor.

Instead of simply blasting them out of the air, like H-Ks usually did, the damn thing was trying to force them down.

Twisting the stick, Blair tried jinking to the left. But at these speeds the Blackhawk wasn’t nearly as responsive as an A-10 would have been, and the H-K easily matched the maneuver. She jinked the other direction, dropping her nose a few degrees to give herself some extra speed. Once again, the H-K stayed right there with her.

“Barnes!” she shouted.

“I see it,” he called back, and out of the corner of her eye Blair saw him pop his restraint harness. “Drop and dust.”

Blair made a face. Drop and dust—put the Blackhawk on the ground, or close to it, and immediately head up again. A standard enough tactic, but in this case it might prove fatal. If the H-K matched the move, she would end up virtually pinned to the ground, with nowhere to go and no maneuvering room at all.

But continuing to play Skynet’s game would be to lose by default.

“On three,” she called. “One, two, three.”

Slamming the stick forward, she dropped the Blackhawk to the ground. The wheels hit hard, bounced her a meter back up—

And as Barnes dropped out the starboard side door she angled the helo as far as she could to port and clawed for altitude.

She nearly made it. But at the last second the H-K managed to sidle back into place above her, once again trapping her between earth and metal. With her last bit of maneuvering room she turned the Blackhawk in a tight circle, bringing the pair of them back toward where she had dropped Barnes.

She could feel the buffeting as her rotors’ airflow bounced off the ground and up into the Blackhawk’s belly when Barnes finally opened up with his minigun.

The H-K’s nose took the full brunt of the blast, the smooth metal shattering into scrap. Instantly, it swerved away, abandoning its attack on Blair as it tried to get clear of the deadly stream of lead.

But Barnes was clearly expecting that. Without letting up on the trigger, he shifted his attack from the H-K’s nose to its starboard turbofan. Blair skidded the Blackhawk sideways as she heard the turbofan disintegrating, managing to get completely out from under the H-K as its starboard wing suddenly drooped nearly to the ground.

Once again it tried to dodge away.

Once again Barnes shifted his attack, this time back to the machine’s nose and the Gatling guns nestled there.

Blair was circling back toward the battle when the H-K was rocked by a massive explosion as the minigun’s rounds ignited the machine’s ammo supply. Floundering like a beached fish, the H-K swiveled around, making one final attempt to escape.

It had gone fifty meters when Blair brought the Blackhawk’s wheels down on top of its spine, forcing the crippled aircraft into a sand-billowing impact with the ground.

“See?” she muttered toward it under her breath. “I can do that, too.”

The H-K was bucking weakly, trying to throw off six thousand kilos of dead weight, as Blair crossed to the portside M240, flipped the selector to full auto, and fired a long burst into the remaining turbofan.

The bucking had stopped, and Blair was back in her seat, when Barnes reappeared.

“Dead?” he grunted as he heaved the minigun in through the door and clambered in behind it.

“Close enough,” Blair said, frowning as she eyed the weapon. Surely Barnes must have emptied the thing in the past two minutes. “Bringing home souvenirs?”

“‘Course not—this is a new one,” he said, pulling the rest of the new minigun’s ammo belt inside and taking hold of the harness. “We getting out of here, or what?”

Glowering, Blair turned back and fed power to the engines. Seconds later, they were far above the crawling Terminators and burning their way through the night sky.

“Any preferences as to where we go?” she asked, squinting through the cold wind hammering against her face as Barnes dropped into the copilot’s seat.

“Yeah. Somewhere else.”

Blair nodded, and settled in to the task of flying.

Ten minutes later, she set the helo back onto the ground.

“What are we stopping for?” Barnes asked as she ran the engines back down.

“You wanted to go somewhere else,” she reminded him. “This is it.”

“Funny,” he muttered, leaning forward and giving the area around them a careful look.

“More specifically, we’re a long ways from anything that might still be moving back at the lab,” Blair continued. “Too far away for anything to get here before daybreak, but not so far that we waste fuel. We may need that tomorrow.”

“Or we could just head back to San Francisco right now,” Barnes said.

“And give up on that cable we saw?” Blair asked. “After all that?”

“After all what?” he retorted. “So they tried to kill us. They’re Terminators. That’s what they do. Doesn’t mean there’s anything out there worth looking at.”

“Then why did that H-K try to force me down instead of just destroying us?” Blair demanded. “And why didn’t the T-700s attack until nightfall, which was after we’d talked about following the cable to the other end? If they’d just wanted to kill us, they should have tried it during the afternoon, when we wouldn’t have had a hope of getting back to the Blackhawk.”

Barnes glared out at the desert landscape.

“Yeah, I suppose that’s a little strange,” he conceded.

“More than just a little,” Blair persisted. “Look at the timing. The machines didn’t move until after sundown, which is when shortwave transmissions open up again and they can communicate with the eastern hubs. Skynet finds out we’re interested in the buried cable, and suddenly all the machines have orders to take us out.”

“Yeah,” Barnes said. “Maybe.”

“Maybe, like hell,” Blair growled. “Something’s going on here, Barnes. We need to find out what. And it’s going to take both of us to do that.”

He eyed her suspiciously. “Yeah. Convenient, huh?”

Blair frowned. “Meaning?”

“Meaning this looks a lot like one of Connor’s little trial by fire learning experiences,” he said. “You two set this up together?

Blair shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Sure you don’t,” Barnes said scornfully. “Connor says we need to clear the air between us, and suddenly here we are in the middle of a firefight. Which he also says is the way you forge good combat teams.”

Blair stared at him. “Are you suggesting Connor knew all those Terminators were going to come back to life and try to kill us?” she asked. “Hoping that if we lived through it we’d be good friends afterward?”

“Why not?” Barnes asked pointedly. “That’s how it worked with you and Marcus Wright, isn’t it?”

A jolt of jagged-edge pain stabbed into Blair’s gut.

“That’s not fair.”

“Isn’t it?” Barnes countered. “It sure as hell wasn’t the guy’s native charm.”

“No, it was his humanity and his loyalty,” Blair bit out. “Sorry if those qualities are too old-fashioned for you.”

“Hey, I’m not the one with the team loyalty problem,” Barnes retorted. “You want to see that, go look in a mirror.”

Blair stared at him, her anger and pain abruptly vanishing. Suddenly, a crack had opened in the barrier he had kept between them ever since San Francisco.

“What do you mean?” she asked carefully.

Apparently not carefully enough. Even as Barnes turned away, she could sense the barrier slamming shut again.

“Doesn’t matter,” he muttered. “You want to track that cable? Fine. You’re the pilot. But we go home the minute we find the other end.”

“Sure,” Blair promised. “Barnes, look. We really need to talk about—”

“Get some sleep,” he cut her off. Standing up, he went to the door and dropped to the ground. “I’ll take watch.”

“Come on, Barnes, don’t do this,” Blair said, trying one last time. “Barnes, stop.”

“You want to stop me?” Barnes demanded, throwing his arms out to both sides.

Blair caught her breath, her pain and anger suddenly flaring up again. Barnes’s pose was an exact, deliberate parody of the way Marcus had been secured above the empty missile silo back at Connor’s base.

“You want to stop me?” Barnes repeated. “Shoot me.” He held the pose for another second, probably just to make sure she’d gotten the message. Then, dropping his arms again he picked up his rifle and stalked back toward the helo’s rear.

Blair ground her teeth, forcing her anger back down as unwanted tears suddenly began to flow. The man was, without a doubt and without serious competition, the biggest pain in the butt she’d ever known.

But he was one of Connor’s people. That meant he was also one of her people. And she was not going to let him spend the rest of his life brooding and hurting and avoiding her. Or worse, lashing out at her.

One way or another, she was going to crack that shell and find out what was bothering him. If only to prove to him that she was as loyal to Connor’s people as he was.

And also because her butt was on the line here too. Brooding, self-absorbed soldiers tended to get themselves and their teams killed.

Sniffing back the tears, she wiped her sleeve across her wet cheeks. Then, trying to ignore the pains in her injured leg and her aching soul, she folded her arms across her chest and settled down to sleep.

Kyle was sleeping soundly under the gently rippling barracks canopy when a sudden grip on his wrist snapped him fully awake.

He opened his eyes, squinting a little in the diffuse glow from the distant searchlights. Nine-year-old Star was sitting up beside him, her hand still gripping his wrist, her back unnaturally straight as she gazed out into the night.

There was no mistaking that look. Not from someone who’d lived as long with Star as Kyle had.

The Terminators were coming.

Quickly but gently twisting his arm free of her grip he half turned and reached for the rifle laying beside his sleeping mat. He got a grip on it—

“Easy,” a voice murmured in his ear.

Startled, Kyle craned his neck to look behind him. Joel Vincennes, one of Connor’s original Resistance team members, was crouched at his side, gazing out in the same direction that Star was.

“Terminators,” Kyle murmured urgently.

“I know.” Vincennes pointed past Star’s shoulder. “Eight T-700s, with a T-600 armed with a minigun at point.”

Kyle squinted into the darkness. He could see nothing out there but twisted metal and concrete, all of it covered by a layer of hazy smoke.

“You can see them?” he asked.

“No, but I can see that,” Vincennes said, pointing thirty degrees to the side.

Kyle frowned. Then he spotted it: a faint, hooded light pointed back toward them, flickering rapidly on and off.

“Morse code,” Vincennes identified it. “One of the things you’ll be learning later. There—between those two broken towers. There they are.”

Kyle nodded. He could see the line of Terminators now, metal skeletons striding toward the camp, their weapons held ready.

“Shouldn’t we be doing something?” he whispered, his hand tightening on his rifle.

“We are,” Vincennes said calmly. “Wait for it...”

And abruptly, the night erupted with the shattering noise and stuttering light show of the Resistance counterattack. From an arc around the approaching machines a dozen guns opened up, some of the flashes coming from small bunkers, others from behind piles of wreckage, still others from places where Kyle wouldn’t have thought a human being could actually lie concealed from view.

For perhaps half a second the Terminators staggered in the flood of lead slamming into them. Then they opened up with their own weapons, and the fury of the machineguns was punctuated by the shouts and cries of wounded men and women. From a sagging building fifty meters to the right of the battle another set of heavy machineguns joined in, and between bursts Kyle could hear the sound of engines revving up as one or more of the A-10s and Cobra attack helicopters prepared to take off. The Terminators’ assault was faltering, the machines stumbling and then collapsing as their limbs, torsos, and heads shattered under the withering fire.

“H-K!” Vincennes snapped, pointing to the left.

Kyle’s throat tightened as he spotted the two small red lights centered in the black shadow flying low across the night sky. Was Skynet hoping to slip in the H-K under cover of the battle noise?

If so, it was a futile hope. Even as the H-K snaked back and forth in an attempt to avoid fire, a small missile sputtered up from the ground, matching the incoming aircraft swerve for swerve. The missile’s exhaust trail intersected one end of the black shadow—

The exploding turbofan lit up the whole area, briefly illuminating the high clouds overhead. As the crippled aircraft slammed into the ground, Kyle saw the skull of the last of the approaching T-700s explode into metal fragments, and the headless Terminator collapse into the rubble around it. The T-600 held out the longest, standing almost defiantly among the shattered bodies of its companions, firing its minigun until it too finally dropped backward onto the ground.

The gunfire ceased, and the world once again fell silent.

“And that,” Vincennes said with grim satisfaction, “is that.” He clapped a hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “You and Star need to get back to sleep,” he added. “Morning comes early, and I believe you, Kyle, are scheduled for first-shift clean-up duty.” Straightening up, he headed across the shelter toward his own sleeping pad.

“Right,” Kyle murmured, frowning across the ground at the remains of the nine Terminators, the wreckage still visible in the light of the burning H-K. He looked at Star, found her gazing back at him with a troubled expression on her small face. “What do you think?” he asked.

Her hands moved in their private code. Too easy.

Kyle nodded. He’d been thinking the same thing.

“Any more of them out there?”

Star considered, then shook her head. A diversion? she suggested.

“Maybe,” Kyle said, looking around. “Maybe we nailed them faster than Skynet expected. Maybe before they could bring in the real attack.”

Star’s lips puckered. Too easy, she signed again.

“I know.” Kyle touched her shoulder. “But whatever it was about, we’re not going to figure it out tonight. Go back to sleep. If Skynet’s got anything else planned, Connor’s people will handle it.”

Star still looked troubled. But she nodded and lay back down on her mat.

Reluctantly, Kyle settled down beside her. Too easy, the words echoed through his mind. Too easy.

Eventually, he fell asleep.

Preston was careful to close the door quietly behind him when he got home. After his daughter’s long day hunting in the woods, the last thing he wanted to do was wake her up in the middle of the night.