Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire

CHAPTER TEN

Jik woke to the sound of gunfire.

For a moment he lay still, his hand groping for the Smith & Wesson lying beside his cot, his eyes and brain fogged by too little sleep. The gunfire was distant, probably a mile or two away. Normally, having some distance between you and gunfire was a good thing, and the more distance the better.

Only in this case, it wasn’t. A mile away meant it was coming from the ford over the Slate River.

The Terminators he’d seen heading that direction last night had launched their attack.

And here, a mile away, Jik was completely out of the fight.

He sat up on the cot, wiggling his toes a couple of times inside his boots to get his circulation going, listening closely to the distant cracks. So far all the gunfire seemed to be of the single-shot variety instead of coming in machinegun bursts. That implied that the townspeople were doing most of the shooting, which in turn implied that the machines were low on ammo and had to be careful how they spent it.

It could also mean that the town’s opposition was so weak that the Terminators weren’t even bothering to shoot back. That they were simply killing the people with their bare hands.

Swearing under his breath, Jik squeezed himself through the door. There was no way he could get to the ford in time to help. But maybe there was something he could do from right here.

The Terminators were trying to find him. It was time they succeeded.

The distant gunfire was still going on as he slipped around the final tree and came into sight of the bridge. He’d wondered if the T-700 he’d seen there earlier might have been called to the ford, but Skynet apparently hadn’t seen any need for reinforcements down there. The Terminator was still standing its silent guard, right where Jik had left it.

And then, as Jik hesitated, wondering if this was really the best plan he could come up with, the distant sounds from the ford changed as a new weapon joined in the battle.

Only this one wasn’t any single-shot hunting rifle. It was the terrifying, lethal stutter of a T-600 minigun.

And Jik no longer had a choice. If the Terminators were bringing that kind of firepower to bear, the people standing against them had literally only minutes left to live. Their only chance was for Jik to give the machines a better, more important target.

The secret of man’s being, the old quote ran through his mind, is not only to live but to have something to live for.

Gripping his Smith & Wesson in both hands, he stepped into the T-700’s view.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Over here!”

The machine turned its glowing red eyes toward him.

“Yes, here,” Jik called. “Here I am. Take a good look.”

He raised his gun.

“And get terminated.”

Aiming between the machine’s eyes, he squeezed the trigger.

* * *

They had just passed through the town, which as far as Barnes could tell consisted entirely of a bunch of ramshackle houses and a couple of larger buildings, when the sound of gunfire erupted from somewhere dead ahead.

Their leader, Hope’s father, was off in an instant, breaking into a sprint with his rifle held high in front of him. Grunting, swearing under his breath, Barnes followed. His legs were already feeling leaden from all the weight he was carrying, and the soft, draggy ground beneath him wasn’t making things any easier. But he’d told Preston he could keep up and he was damned if he would fall behind now.

Three minutes later, they burst through one final barrier of low-hanging branches onto the scene of battle.

Barnes had seen Terminators picking their way through city rubble, striding across empty fields, even climbing up the outsides of shattered walls. But up to now he’d never seen one standing shin-deep in the middle of a narrow river, plumes of whitewater churning around its legs, trying to push forward against the current and the relentless impact of heavy rifle rounds.

Heavy, but not heavy enough. The T-700’s approach was being slowed by the gunfire, but it wasn’t taking much damage. There were some dents in its torso and skull, and its gun arm had been dislocated at the shoulder, but that was about it.

Well, Barnes could do something about that. Braking to a halt, he slid his right foot behind him for stability and dropped the muzzle of his minigun into firing position. Lining up the weapon on the Terminator’s torso, he squeezed the trigger.

The gun thundered to life, pouring out its stream of destruction. Barnes leaned into the recoil, fighting to keep the hail of lead centered on its target.

He probably wasn’t as accurate with the minigun as an actual T-600 would have been. But at this range he was accurate enough. The T-700 staggered back, its arms and legs snapping free of its torso and flying into the churning water, the torso itself denting and then shredding and finally disintegrating under the assault.

And as the machine collapsed into a heap in the roiling water Barnes let up on the trigger.

“Anyone else?” he challenged.

He hadn’t expected a response. He got one anyway. On the far side of the river, thirty meters to the north, a pair of bushes were shoved violently apart to reveal a second T-700. It strode to the riverbank and then turned to its right and started downstream toward the ford.

“Look out—there’s another one!” someone shouted.

Barnes glanced down at the minigun’s ammo belt. There were only about thirty rounds remaining, about half a second at full auto. Best to save those until the machine was closer. He dropped into a crouch and lowered the big gun to the ground.

And as he did so, a burst of gunfire from his left burned through the air above him.

He twisted his head to look in that direction, swinging his shoulder-slung SIG 542 into firing position. A third T-700 had appeared from the trees, this one fifty meters south, also moving along the riverbank toward the ford.

But unlike the one coming down from the north, this Terminator was ready for battle. Its G11 submachinegun was pointed and ready, its metal skull swinging back and forth as its glowing eyes tracked the human defenders scrambling madly for cover.

Sinking a little deeper into his crouch, Barnes swiveled as far around as he could at hips and waist and fired off a three-round burst from the 542. At this range the shots did little but stagger the Terminator back, but it was enough to give the rest of the men time to get to cover.

“Never mind the one to the north,” someone shouted over the renewed gunfire. “The south one. Focus your fire on the south one.”

As if to underline the urgency of the order, the southernmost of the two T-700s fired again, this burst digging gouges into the side of a wide tree two of the riflemen were huddled behind. Barnes sent another burst bouncing off the Terminator’s torso, then checked the T-700 coming from the north. Its gun hand was still hanging at its side as it strode toward the ford, with no indication that it was preparing to open fire.

That would change soon enough, Barnes knew. But for the moment, whoever had called out that order had the situation properly nailed. The second Terminator was the one doing all the shooting, so that was the one they needed to deal with.

From Barnes’s left came a familiar thunderclap as Williams opened fire with her Desert Eagle.

“I need to get closer,” she shouted to Barnes as her shot staggered the Terminator back. “Cover me?”

Barnes gave a curt nod.

“Go.”

He flicked his rifle’s selector to single-shot as Williams ducked around behind Preston and his men and sprinted in a broken-field charge for the river. Deliberately, methodically, he pumped slug after slug into the T-700, spacing his shots so as to conserve ammo while still keeping the Terminator off balance and unable to get a clear shoot at the woman running toward it. A few of the other men, Preston among them, caught onto the plan and added their fire to Barnes’s, their shots alternating with his.

Ten seconds later, Williams reached the river, her Desert Eagle now holstered and the Mossberg shotgun unslung and clutched in front of her. She was just closing the weapon’s action, which told Barnes that she’d exchanged the shotgun round that had already been in place for one of the solid slugs from her ammo pack. The machine turned its G11 toward her, its burst going over her head as she threw herself into a feet-first baserunner slide that carried her to the very edge of the riverbank. The Terminator fired again, this burst also going wide as Barnes and Preston simultaneously hammered it.

And as the machine once again staggered back, Williams’s slug blasted at point-blank range into its gun.

Terminators were made of incredibly strong, incredibly hard alloy. The G11s, on the other hand, were not only not as strong, but also had a couple of critical weak points. The gun’s receiver was one such weakness, a spot where a heavy rifle or shotgun slug could jam the action and possibly ignite the chambered round. The magazine with the exposed explosive of its caseless rounds was another.

And if you were really, really lucky, those two weaknesses intersected. Williams’s round slammed into the gun—

And suddenly the entire magazine went up in a sputtering, multiple flash as the close-packed ammo blew up, each round triggering the one next to it. The T-700 staggered back as the exploding rounds lit up its torso.

“Look out—here it comes!” someone shouted.

Barnes looked away from the sputtering fireworks display. The northern T-700, the one that the earlier voice had ordered everyone to ignore, had reached the ford and started across the river. Cursing, Barnes swung his rifle around toward it.

“Don’t shoot!” the same voice called again. “It’s not after us. Don’t shoot!”

Barnes frowned. Ridiculous. The thing wading through the whitewater toward them was a Terminator. Terminators were always after humans. That was what they did. That was what they were.

But the machine’s gun hand was still at its side, its head and eyes angled to the north instead of toward the small group of humans standing against it. From all appearances, it really did look like it was ignoring them.

“Don’t shoot!” the voice called again.

Barnes swore again, shifting his grip on his rifle. Appearances or not, he didn’t trust the damn machine farther than he could spit at it. He would hold onto his ammo for now, but the instant the T-700 stopped pretending and launched its attack he would make damn sure he was ready to blow its head off.

He was still crouching in the grass and dead leaves, waiting for that moment, when the Terminator finished crossing the river, turned north, and headed off again along the riverbank.

Barnes watched its back as it strode stolidly along, an eerie sense of unreality creeping across his skin, until it disappeared among the trees.

A movement caught the corner of his eye, and he looked across the river to see the other T-700 stride past the ford and continue north on the opposite bank. Its gun, he noted, was lying in a tangle of twisted metal on the ground behind it. Its right hand, which had taken the brunt of the multiple explosions, was in impressively bad shape, too.

The Terminator disappeared into the trees and bushes. Slowly, Barnes got to his feet, his 542 still pointed at the spot where the machine had vanished.

“What the hell?” he muttered under his breath.

“Agreed,” Preston said as he came up beside Barnes, sounding as disbelieving as Barnes felt. “I thought Terminators killed everyone they met.”

“That’s because you don’t understand Terminators.”

Barnes turned around. Shouting and speaking voices were sometimes very different, but he knew instantly that the man emerging cautiously from behind a tree was the one who’d been directing their fire. Or rather, their lack of fire.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“Remy Lajard,” the man replied, eyeing Barnes warily. “The question is, who are you?”

“His name’s Barnes,” Preston said. “The woman over there is Blair. They say they’re with the Resistance. What exactly is it I don’t understand about Terminators?”

“The fact that most of them are programmed for specific jobs,” Lajard said. His face and clothes were as rough and rustic as everyone else’s, but something about his tone reminded Barnes of a couple of his more annoying teachers back in pre-Judgment Day school. “It was clear that these two—these three, actually, counting the one Barnes destroyed—have a more important assignment than shooting back at people who are attacking them.”

“Maybe it’s clear now,” another man put in. This one seemed even scruffier than the rest of the group, as if looking like a mountain hermit was a badge of pride for him. “It sure as hell wasn’t clear when we first started shooting.”

“And as I tried to tell you at the time, Halverson, it wasn’t coming for us,” Lajard said. “It was clearly just trying to get across the river.”

“Clear to whom?” Williams asked as she came up to the rest of the group.

“Clear to anyone who was paying attention,” Lajard said, starting to sound annoyed. “You saw it yourself in that second T-700. Its gun hand was down, and it was looking at the riverbank, not us, as it crossed. It was obviously evaluating footing and route.”

“So what happened with the other one?” Barnes asked, jerking his head toward the spot where Williams had blown away the T-700’s gun. “Didn’t it get the message? It sure as hell was shooting at us.”

“It was just giving the other one cover fire,” Lajard retorted. “After you destroyed the first one, it needed to draw your attention long enough for its companion to get across.” He snorted. “You really think it would have missed everyone if it had actually been trying to kill us? You may not have seen what a G11’s caseless ammo can do—”

“Yeah, we’ve seen it plenty,” Barnes cut him off. “Fine, so it missed everyone. Why?”

“I just told you—”

“I think he means that if it was going to shoot to distract us anyway, why not shoot to kill?” Williams put in.

“And while you’re at it, why were you so hot on us not destroying them before they got away?” Barnes added.

Lajard took a deep breath.

“For the first,” he ground out, “I already said they’re obviously on some important mission, and Skynet is smart enough not to simply waste ammunition. As for the second, see part two of my answer to question one.”

“Oh, I see,” Williams said, an edge to her voice. “You just didn’t want us wasting ammo. Even though they were right there, in the open, where we could get them.”

“You shoot every bear you run across, whether it’s attacking you or not?” Lajard countered. “You’ll probably never even see those particular Terminators again.”

“Or we might,” Barnes said.

Lajard rolled his eyes. “If that happens, and if they shoot at you, you have my permission to blow them to scrap,” he said condescendingly. “Happy now?”

Barnes looked at Williams, caught the sour twist of her lip. Unfortunately, the man had a point. Several points, actually.

“So what kind of special mission could they be on?”

Lajard shook his head. “Haven’t a clue,” he conceded. “I don’t even know what a group of Terminators would want out here in the middle of nowhere.”

“Actually, Oxley and I were talking about that last night,” Preston said. “We were wondering if they might be after someone.”

“You mean someone like them?” Lajard asked, pointing at Barnes.

Barnes tightened his grip on his rifle. But Preston shook his head.

“Seems unlikely,” he said. “At least one of the T-700s was already in position by the ford last night, long before Barnes and Blair showed up.” He frowned suddenly at Barnes. “Unless there’s some reason Skynet might have known you were coming?”

“Not really,” Barnes said, throwing a quick warning glance at Williams. His original plan, once the Terminators had been dealt with, had been to ask Preston if he knew about any underground cables passing through or near the town.

Now, though, he was starting to think that might not be such a good idea. Hopefully, Williams would take the hint and keep her own mouth shut.

She did. Her forehead wrinkled briefly, but she kept quiet.

“Besides, their positioning clearly shows they were expecting their quarry to come from that side of the river,” Preston continued. “No idea who it might be, though.”

Halverson grunted. “Maybe they’ve taken over Buzby Jenkins’s old property,” he muttered. “Probably just don’t want us hunting on that side of the river.”

“Then why did they head upriver away from the ford just now?” Lajard asked. “Come on, Halverson—if you can’t be logical, at least try to be consistent.”

Halverson’s face darkened. “Look, professor—”

“I have a question,” Williams spoke up quickly. “Do you get a lot of Terminators out here?”

“I just said we didn’t,” Lajard said testily.

“Then how come you know so much about them?”

Barnes looked back at Lajard. That was a damn good question.

“Well?” he prompted.

Lajard’s lip twitched, some of his arrogance melting away.

“I have a certain familiarity with them,” he said evasively. “It comes of having—”

“It comes of him having worked for Skynet since Judgment Day,” Halverson said. “Just say it, Lajard.”

Barnes felt his face go rigid.

“You what?”

“It wasn’t all the time since Judgment Day,” Lajard said hastily, flinching back from Barnes’s glare. “And it wasn’t like I had a choice, either. None of us did.”

“None of us?” Barnes echoed. “How the hell many of you were there?”

Lajard sighed. “About a hundred in all,” he said. “If it makes you feel any better, I think the three of us were the only ones who made it out before the attack.”

“Out of where?” Barnes persisted. “Where were you? San Francisco?”

Lajard shook his head. “No, we were in the big research center in the desert southeast of here.”

Barnes felt his eyes narrow.

“Not a chance,” he said flatly. “No one made it out of there alive. Connor said so.”

It was Preston’s turn for widened eyes.

“That was Connor’s group that blew up the lab?”

“Connor’s group attacked it,” Barnes said. “Skynet blew it up.” His eyes flicked across the other men and women grouped silently around them. “You said there were three of you. Who are the other two?”

There was a brief pause.

“I’m one of them,” a woman’s voice came from behind him.

Barnes turned. It was Susan Valentine, the woman who’d been on backstop duty when Preston’s kid had tried to get the drop on him and Williams.

“Who else?”

“Nate Oxley’s the third,” Preston said. “And Lajard’s right. The people who were working there didn’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” Barnes growled.

“Right—we could have let the Terminators kill us,” Lajard retorted.

Barnes shrugged. “Like I said. There’s always a choice.”

“Look—”

“How about we hear the whole story?” Williams suggested. Her voice was carefully neutral, Barnes noted, but he could see his same suspicions lurking behind her eyes.

Because people under Skynet’s control didn’t walk away from that. They just didn’t.

“Certainly,” Preston agreed. “But we’ll have to go back to town if you want all three of them—Oxley’s helping Doc Meade set up an emergency trauma center.” He looked at the pile of broken Terminator pieces still visible above the river water. “In case we needed it.”

“Yeah, well, we still might,” Halverson growled. “Somebody needs to stay here and guard the ford. And we ought to track those Terminators, too, and figure out where they’re going.” He looked pointedly at Lajard. “You know. In case they decide to come back.”

“I was just going to suggest that,” Preston agreed. “Chris, Pepper, you two stay here. Trounce—”

“Trounce, you stay here with Chris and Pepper,” Halverson interrupted. “Ned, Singer—you two are on chaser duty. Find the machine that’s on this side of the river and keep it in sight.”

“But don’t get too close,” Lajard added. “And don’t shoot at it.”

“Not unless it shoots first,” one of the men said grimly. Hefting his rifle, he headed off along the riverbank, another man following close behind.

Barnes looked back at Preston. There was a fresh tightness at the edges of the man’s mouth as he watched the two men disappear into the woods. But he merely turned back to Barnes and gestured.

“Shall we?” he invited. Without waiting for a reply, he started back down the trail toward town, his daughter Hope beside him.

Picking up his minigun, Barnes dropped into step behind them. The rest of the crowd shambled their way into the procession behind him.

He’d made it out of sight of the river when Williams wandered casually up alongside him.

“What do you think?” she murmured.

“I don’t know,” Barnes muttered back. “But I don’t like it.”

“Me, neither,” Williams agreed. “I’ve never seen a machine deliberately shoot to miss.”

“Or just walk off when one of its buddies gets its gun and half its hand blown off.”

“Or leave any wreckage behind,” Williams added. “Especially with so many of them lying around in pieces in San Francisco.” She hissed between her teeth. “What the hell have we gotten ourselves into here?”

“Damn good question,” Barnes agreed. “Let’s see if Preston can give us a damn good answer to go with it.”