Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire

CHAPTER SEVEN

The caution turned out to be a waste of effort. Hope was already in the living room, wedged into the half-broken recliner that she had always liked, her eyes closed, a blanket wrapped around her and tucked up under her chin.

For a long moment Preston gazed at his daughter, the usual kaleidoscope of thoughts and memories and regrets flashing through his mind. Hope was a child of the post-Judgment Day world, unschooled, uncivilized in the traditional sense of the word. Her knowledge and training were strictly limited to those skills needed for survival here in the wild.

And yet, amidst all that, she’d somehow also managed to develop a maturity far beyond her years. She had knowledge, but she also had wisdom. She had physical and mental toughness, but she also had compassion. She knew woodlore, but she also understood people.

Susan Valentine was a perfect case in point. An older woman, a brainy ex-scientist on top of that—on paper there was no way she and Hope should ever have been more than polite working companions. But Hope hadn’t settled for that. She’d taken Valentine under her wing, helping her work through the bewilderment and fear of her new environment, nurturing her like a mother helping her child through those first confusing and terrifying days at school.

Even more amazingly, Valentine had responded, not with the pride or resentment someone in her position might have gone with, but with gratitude and a deep respect for her young mentor’s patience. Somewhere along the way, somewhere in the short span of three months, the two of them had become friends.

Which was going to make it that much harder when Preston was forced to order Valentine to leave Baker’s Hollow.

He was taking off his gun belt, wondering if Hope might be sleeping deeply enough for him to carry her back to her room, when her eyes fluttered open.

“Hi,” she murmured sleepily.

“Hi,” he said. “Your bed just too warm and cozy tonight?”

“I heard you go out,” Hope said, pushing down the edge of the blanket and yawning widely. “Right after I heard the H-K pass by to the west. Did you see where it went?”

“Somewhere southeast, I think,” her father replied, stepping over to the small hurricane lamp on the table and lighting the wick. “I couldn’t tell for sure.” He hesitated, wondering if he should let her have one more night of peaceful sleep before he dropped the bombshell on her along with everyone else. But he needed to work through his options, and Hope was the only person whose advice he genuinely trusted.

“We did see something else, though,” he continued. “Just across the ford, apparently waiting for someone coming in from the west. Oxley says it’s a T-700 Terminator.”

In the soft lamplight he saw Hope’s face tense. Then, as he’d known she would, she put the shock behind her and nodded.

“Are we going to try to destroy it?” she asked.

Preston snorted. “Do I look crazy?” he countered as he sat down on the lumpy couch across from her. “Or do you know something about T-700s that I don’t?”

“There’s that weak spot on the base of the skull,” Hope reminded him, touching the spot on the back of her own head. “Connor talked about that in one of his broadcasts.”

“He was talking about T-600s, not T-700s,” Preston pointed out. “Skynet may have plugged that design loophole by now. Besides, as I recall, all you get by poking something sharp there is some temporary confusion. We need something that’ll actually kill it.”

“Okay, but if poking the spot causes trouble, maybe digging in deeper will hit something more vulnerable,” Hope suggested. “I was thinking one of Halverson’s carbon shafts with a broadhead at point-blank range.”

Preston pursed his lips. “No,” he said. “We’d want an aluminum shaft. Better electrical conduction.”

Hope’s face lit up. “So I can try it?”

“Whoa, girl,” Preston said, holding up a hand. “That’s not Plan A, B, or anywhere else in the alphabet. That’s an absolute last resort.”

Her face fell. “Oh.”

“What I want from you,” Preston continued, “is your thoughts of where you’d move everyone if we had to abandon the town.”

Her eyes were steady on his.

“You think we’re going to have to?”

“I don’t know,” Preston said, his eyes flicking around the room. It was an old house, the house he’d grown up in, and the hard years since Judgment Day hadn’t been very kind to it. But it was still weather-tight, and more comfortable than a lot of the other houses in town.

More than that, the house was his. His and Hope’s. It was their home, their sanctuary, and one of the few things left in their lives that still resonated with the memories of Hope’s mother. The thought of abandoning it, even in the face of a Terminator attack, grated more bitterly than anything else that had happened since her death.

“I’d rather not,” he said. “But if that Terminator decides to cross the river, we may have to.”

“Boy, that’s a tough one,” Hope murmured, her eyes taking on the faraway look that meant she was thinking hard. “We’d want to settle near one of the old upslope hunting cabins. That would at least give us a place to store whatever supplies we were able to bring.”

“But there wouldn’t be enough room for anything except supplies in any of the cabins,” Preston pointed out. “Especially since the biggest is the Glaumann place, which is a little too close to the river for comfort. At least, for now.”

“So we’d need tents,” Hope continued, still gazing into space. “Lots of them. And pallets and blankets.” Her eyes came back. “We haven’t got them,” she concluded quietly. “Not for eighty-seven people.”

Her father nodded. He’d already run through the same logic on the trip back from the river. “Which means we’d either have to split up the town among the various cabins, putting everyone inside that we could, or else throw together some kind of big group shelter.”

“If we’d have time for that,” Hope said doubtfully. “And any kind of building project would take people off hunting duty. We can’t afford to do that for more than a couple of days.”

“Agreed,” Preston said. Her conclusions were a vindication of his own thought processes, but that was pretty cold comfort. He would rather that she’d spotted something he’d missed. “Well, at least we know what we’re up against,” he said, forcing himself out of the couch. “You’d better get back to bed. It’s been a long day, and tomorrow will probably be worse.”

“Unless the Terminator attacks tonight,” Hope said soberly as she gathered her blanket together and levered herself out of the broken chair.

“In which case, we won’t have to do any planning at all tomorrow,” Preston said grimly. “And pleasant dreams to you, too.”

“All part of my daughterly duty,” Hope said, forcing a smile she clearly didn’t feel. “Don’t worry, Dad. We’ll get through this.”

“I know.” He wrapped his arms around her in a tight hug. She hugged him back, and for a moment hunger, cold, and even Terminators could almost be forgotten. Then, reluctantly, he let go and kissed her on the cheek. “Now off with you,” he said, patting her shoulder.

“Right.” She gave him a wry look. “Like I’m going to be able to sleep now.”

Back outside the demolished lab, Williams had set herself a thirty-meter perimeter while she was on watch. Out in the middle of nowhere, Barnes made his perimeter a full sixty meters. Just to prove he could do it. Also so he wouldn’t have to look at her slouched there asleep in the pilot’s seat while he plodded through the desert sand.

Because he knew full well what this was all about. She could deny it all she liked, but he knew better. This trip was Connor’s way of trying to nudge the two of them into making up.

Right. When hell froze over.

He glowered toward the Blackhawk. Unfortunately, much as he would like to think of Williams as stupid, he knew better. The girl was smart. Sometimes too smart for her own good, but still smart. Even if you had to hold your nose while you did it, she was usually worth listening to.

Especially since in this particular case Barnes knew down deep that she was right. Back at the lab, in the middle of the Terminator attack, it had taken him longer than he’d expected to locate and grab the minigun he’d spotted earlier that afternoon. The H-K had had plenty to time to get the range, and by all rights it should have blown the chopper into scrap.

Only it hadn’t. Dodging away from Barnes’s firing cone had been a reasonable thing for it to do. Trying to force the chopper down without destroying it hadn’t.

He scowled up at the night sky, sending a flood of cold air down the neck of his jacket. Could the H-K have been out of ammo? That might explain it. Maybe Skynet had decided that dropping the big machine on top of the Blackhawk would be the fastest and simplest way to destroy it.

But that didn’t make any sense. For one thing, all the H-K would have had to do was nudge its armored nose or flank into the Blackhawk’s main rotor hard enough to shatter it. A chopper without a rotor wasn’t going anywhere. Alternatively, it could have just dropped straight down on top of the Blackhawk instead of wasting time dancing with it.

And finally, the damn thing hadn’t been out of ammo. Barnes had proved that himself by blowing up the Gatling guns’ ammo canisters.

Had Skynet been trying to take him and Williams alive, then? That idea sent a shiver up Barnes’s back that had nothing to do with the night air. Especially after that glimpse of hell he’d had in San Francisco when they were busting Connor out.

But wanting to capture the chopper’s crew still didn’t explain not wrecking the chopper itself.

Unless it was the chopper that Skynet actually wanted.

Barnes chewed at his lip. Even before San Francisco had gone up in Connor’s massive explosion Skynet had been running low on resources. Their own experience with the L.A. supply depot had proved that.

But could it really be hurting so badly for aircraft that it would stoop to stealing Blackhawks?

Especially this particular Blackhawk. It was typical of what the Resistance had to work with these days: old, tired, and patched in a dozen places, with engines that had been revamped, rebuilt, and were held together with spit and curses. It was purely through the minor miracles of people like their genius mechanic Wince that aircraft like this were even still flying. The H-K itself had been in far better shape.

Not now, of course. But it had been when it started out. Yet Skynet had apparently been willing to gamble it for the Blackhawk.

And then, abruptly, he got it.

Skynet didn’t want just a Blackhawk. It wanted a Resistance Blackhawk, with all the flaws and patchwork that any genuine Resistance fighter would automatically know to look for.

Skynet was looking for an infiltration vehicle.

Cyberdyne Systems Model 101. Connor had muttered that over and over as Barnes and Wright carried him out of the San Francisco hellhole. When Barnes had asked Kate about it later, she’d told him the 101 was part of a new Terminator series, the T-800s. She’d described them as Skynet’s first attempt at a serious infiltrator model, with human flesh covering an updated version of the T-700 endoskeleton.

How she could possibly know things like that Barnes couldn’t guess. She’d been pretty vague when he’d asked her about it. Probably something Connor had learned from Command, before Command had gotten itself killed.

Kate had also expressed hope that all the T-800s been destroyed in the explosion. That was one of the reasons, Barnes gathered, why Connor was spending the time and resources to sift through the wreckage. Not just to eliminate any remaining T-600s and T-700s, but also to look for any of the newer models that might have survived.

Maybe one of them had. At least one. And Skynet wanted a genuine Resistance chopper to take it to whatever Resistance group it was planning to infiltrate.

Maybe even Connor’s group.

Barnes bared his teeth. Well, the damn computer wasn’t going to get this chopper, anyway. Not if he had anything to say about it.

Williams didn’t even twitch as Barnes climbed carefully back up into the chopper’s cockpit. Either the woman was a lot more tired than he was, or else she simply felt safer with Barnes on watch than he did when she was pulling that duty.

Or else the injury to her leg had driven her into a deeper sleep than usual. He glanced at the limb, feeling a brief flicker of guilt. He’d run her harder that afternoon than he’d probably needed to.

The guilt vanished. She still owed him for that crack about his brother. Lying on his back, he hunched up beneath one of the equipment access covers that Wince had put in and popped it open.

Ten minutes later, he closed it again. He didn’t know anything about chopper electronics, but he knew a jury-rigged circuit when he saw one, and the power wires to the auxiliary fan Wince had installed in the cockpit to help airflow was easy to spot among the mass of other wires.

And as it so often had, Barnes’s pre-Judgment Day expertise in hot-wiring cars had come in handy.

Getting back to his feet, he took one final look at the sleeping Williams. Connor wanted him to forgive her, he knew. Williams probably wanted him to, as well.

But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Not after what she’d done to him.

Not ever.

He climbed back out onto the ground, his boots making little squeaking sounds on the cold sand. He took a moment to give the area around them a careful scan, then headed back out to continue walking his perimeter.

They would follow that cable, just like Williams wanted. Not because she was the pilot and had the final say, but because Skynet was up to something, and there was at least a chance it had to do with the cable.

And when the trail ended, whatever they found at the end of it, he was going to head back to San Francisco to alert Connor about this new T-800 threat. Even if he had to walk.

Even if he had to drag Williams by her sore leg the whole way.

It was a couple of hours before dawn when Jik finally reached the old bridge.

To discover that he was too late. Standing rigidly a meter from the foot of the rickety crossing, its eyes a pair of glowing red embers in the night, was the dark metallic form of a T-700.

For a long minute Jik gazed through the trees at the machine, his mind and heart sinking beneath a bitter wave of defeat. All his hopes and stamina had been focused on this bridge, this frail interweaving of rope and wood. For it to have been so casually snatched away from him was a crushing blow.

Sternly, Jik forced away the emotion. Self-pity was a trap, and he knew better than to let it get hold of him. He’d had more than his share of disappointments and reversals throughout his lifetime, and he’d managed to get over, around, or through every one of them. He’d get around this one, too. All he needed was a little thought, a little planning, and a little ingenuity.

None of which he had at the moment, and none of which he was likely to get until he’d burned some of the fatigue from his mind and body. Taking a final look at the Terminator’s positioning, and the big Heckler & Koch G11 submachinegun gripped in its skeletal hand, he carefully backed away from the river gorge and headed into the deep woods.

A quarter mile away, right where he remembered it, he found the old cabin, looking even more dilapidated than it had forty years ago. The door opened about half a foot and then jammed, and it took some serious sweat and leverage to get it open far enough for him to slip through.

The interior was every bit as dreary as the exterior. To one side was an old cot with deep tears in the canvas, partially covered by a thin mattress that smelled heavily of mold and mildew. Hanging over the cot on a set of hooks was an old rifle of a make and model he didn’t recognize and a thick coil of weathered and fragile-looking rope. To the other side was the cabin’s lone window, broken of course. In the corner between the window and the door was a rusty pot-bellied stove, with a few chunks of firewood lying on the floor nearby.

For a moment Jik looked longingly at the stove and the wood, then turned resolutely away. A roaring fire would go a long way toward banishing the cabin’s damp and chill.

But from the looks of the stove and kinked chimney, it would be a tossup as to whether he would asphyxiate himself or simply burn the whole place down. Worse, the smoke might attract the attention of the Terminator by the river. If that happened, smoke inhalation and third-degree burns would be the least of his problems.

Unless, of course, Jik wasn’t actually here at the time...

He felt a tight grin crease his cheeks. The obvious solution to his problem, and he felt like an idiot for not spotting it sooner.

His first impulse was to grab a couple of chunks of wood and get to work. His second, wiser thought was the reminder that racing through an unfamiliar forest after a tiring hike would be a dangerous and stupid thing to do. Particularly given that he might well end up with the Terminator on his tail. The smoke trick would work just as well in the daylight, after he’d gotten a few hours of sleep.

His first task was to get the sodden mattress off the cot and lug it outside. After that came a quick examination of the rifle on the wall. It seemed to be in decent enough shape, though it was impossible to tell what kind of damage might be lurking in its inner workings. It was a moot point, though, since the weapon wasn’t loaded and there was no place in the cabin where a cache of shells might be stored. If push came to shove, he would just have to hope he could make do with the single remaining round in his Smith & Wesson.

Ten minutes later, he was stretched out on the cot, which with all its rips and sags and odors was still the best bed he’d had in a long, long time. He would sleep as long as he could, he decided, then see if a fire in the stove might lure the Terminator away from his post. If it did, he was home free.

If it didn’t... well, he would deal with that when the time came.