Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Barnes and Williams had been trudging through the forest for over an hour, and Barnes was starting to regret he’d ever agreed to go on this little nature hike, when they found the bridge.

“What do you think?” Williams murmured as they crouched in the undergrowth about thirty meters away.

Barnes eyed the structure through the branches, wishing he’d thought to grab a pair of binoculars before leaving San Francisco.

“Looks solid enough,” he murmured back. “I suppose someone could have crossed on it.”

“Mm,” Williams said. “Pretty hard to tell how solid a bridge is without trying it.”

“Go ahead,” Barnes offered. “I’ll wait here.”

Williams grunted. “Funny. What do you want to do?”

Barnes looked around. Aside from the bridge, there was nothing here but more forest, the same as the stuff they’d already tromped through. No people, no buildings—no Terminators.

“I guess we could look around a little,” he said doubtfully. “See if we can find some trace of this visitor Preston’s so hot to bring in. Or just call it a bust and go back.”

“Can’t say I’m overly thrilled by either option,” Williams said. “But you’re right. You want to flip a coin—?”

“Shh!” Barnes hissed, snapping his head around to the left. Something had rustled over there, loudly enough to be audible over the noise of the river churning through the deep gorge beneath the bridge.

Williams froze, her Mossberg already pointing that direction. Barnes kept his eyes moving, sweeping the area where the sound had come from, while also keeping an eye on their flanks. A nice, loud rustling in the bushes was the oldest trick in the book...

The noise came again. This time Barnes spotted its source: a small rippling in the branches of a thorn bush forty meters away.

“If that’s a Terminator, it’s awfully small,” Williams said softly.

“Aerostats and hydrobots aren’t exactly huge,” Barnes reminded her. It would be just like Skynet to have seeded the forests with some new kind of ground-hugging nasty that they hadn’t run into before. “Stay here—I’ll check it out.” Watching the rippling bush and the ones right beside it, searching for the glint of metal, he started to rise from his crouch.

“Freeze,” a quiet voice ordered from behind him. “Don’t turn around.”

Barnes hissed a curse. And he’d been watching for this trick, too, damn it. “Easy, friend,” he soothed.

“What makes you think I’m your friend?” the voice countered. “Who are you?”

“Barnes, she’s Williams. You from the town back there?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Your friendly approach to strangers,” Barnes growled. “They say hello with hunting arrows.”

“So you’re not from Baker’s Hollow, either,” the man said. “What are you doing here?”

“We were heading home when we spotted the smoke from the town,” Williams said. “You may have heard our helo coming in early this morning. What’s your name?”

“Where’s home?” the man asked, ignoring the question.

“At the moment, San Francisco,” Williams said. She twitched her left arm, jiggling her red armband. “We’re with the Resistance.”

“Yes, I already saw the armbands,” the man said. “If you’re Resistance, I assume you listen to John Connor?”

Barnes snorted. “All the time.”

“Good,” the man said. “What was in his last broadcast?”

Barnes frowned. Connor’s last broadcast had been over a week ago, before the attack on Skynet Central. He had no idea what Connor had said in that message, and it was clear from Williams’s silence that she didn’t either.

“I don’t know,” he told their captor. “We don’t have time to listen to every broadcast. Who does?”

There was a short pause.

“Skynet does, for one,” he said. Oddly enough, the tension level in his voice had actually gone down. “That’s a point in your favor, actually.”

“Wait a minute,” Barnes said, frowning. “You think we’re Skynet? What, we don’t look human enough for you?”

“You look very human,” the man said grimly. “But that isn’t a defining quality anymore.” He murmured some sort of curse under his breath. “Unfortunately, aside from cutting you open, I don’t know any way to prove you’re who you claim.”

The skin on the back of Barnes’s neck began to tingle.

“Let’s not do anything drastic,” he said carefully. “There’s got to be some way we can prove ourselves.”

“While we’re thinking, how about telling us your name?” Williams suggested.

There was a short pause.

“Call me Jik,” the man said.

“You a pilot?” Williams asked.

“No,” Jik said. “Why?”

“Jik sounds like a pilot’s call sign,” Williams said. “Who’s your friend out there?”

“My friend?” Jik asked. “Oh. This.” The distant bush rustled again. “Some rope tied to a small branch. Simple but effective. If you spotted smoke in Baker’s Hollow, what are you doing way out here?”

“Hunting a Terminator,” Barnes told him. “It headed up this side of the river, and we wanted to see where it went. Or whether it just gave up and went away.”

“Oh, it didn’t go away,” Jik said sourly. “It’s somewhere to the south, I think—I caught a couple of glimpses of it while I was trying to get to the ford.”

“So you’re the one it’s hunting?” Williams asked.

“So it would seem,” Jik said. “And be advised that there are two T-700s on this side of the river, not just one. I shot the other one earlier, during all the gunfire. But I only had one round left, and that wasn’t enough to kill it.”

Barnes felt a cautious stirring of hope.

“You only had one shot?”

“But I got its weapon away from it before it recovered,” Jik said, an edge of warning in his voice. “In case you were thinking I’m bluffing back here.”

“No, of course not,” Barnes said. “Those G11s are heavy, aren’t they?”

“Heavy enough,” Jik agreed. “But I’m sure I’d be able to get off a couple of rounds before my biceps gave out.”

“What did you mean, looks aren’t a defining quality anymore?” Williams asked.

“I mean that Skynet’s come up with something new,” Jik said grimly. “A human heart and organs wrapped up inside metal.”

Williams inhaled sharply. “You mean Marcus?”

“Was that its name?”

“His name,” Williams corrected harshly. “His name was Marcus Wright.”

“Well, its name isn’t Marcus Wright anymore,” Jik told her. “I killed it. Or destroyed it, however you want to put—”

“Wait a second,” Barnes interrupted. “You killed it?”

“I just said that,” Jik said.

“Yeah,” Barnes muttered.

Only that was impossible. He’d seen Marcus Wright die himself, and it hadn’t been at the hands of anyone named Jik.

“When and where’d this happen?”

“Back in the forest, a couple of days ago,” Jik told him. “Why? Was it a pet or something?”

Barnes looked at Williams. She was looking back at him, her face gone suddenly pale.

“It wasn’t Marcus,” she breathed. “My God. There were two of them?”

“What do you mean, two of them?” Jik demanded.

“She means the one you killed wasn’t the one we called Marcus,” Barnes told him. He eased his head to the side, just far enough to see Jik out of the corner of his eye. The man was a little taller and thinner than Barnes, with sunken cheeks, unkempt brown hair, and a scraggly beard.

And he was indeed hefting a Terminator G11.

“Look, can we maybe point the gun somewhere else—?” Barnes began.

And then, right at the edge of Barnes’s vision, the dark metal skull and glowing red eyes of a T-700 appeared from behind a tree.

“Behind you!” Barnes snapped, leaping to his feet and spinning his 542 around toward the Terminator. He caught a glimpse of Jik raising his own weapon—

Barnes’s rifle was barely halfway to target when a burst of fire from the G11 blasted in his ear. Reflexively, he winced back, his body tensing in anticipation of pain from torn muscle and shattered bone.

But the impact and pain didn’t come... and it was only as Barnes took a second look at Jik’s face that he realized the man’s eyes weren’t focused on him and Williams. He was looking at something beyond them, over their shoulders.

Oh, hell.

And then, the barrel of Barnes’s assault rifle arrived on target, and there was no more time for thought or worry or wondering how close the Terminator was that was coming up behind him. He squeezed the trigger, firing a round into the T-700’s torso that staggered the machine back. A quick flick of his thumb shifted the weapon to three-shot mode, and he fired again. The multiple rounds slammed into the metal chest, this time nearly knocking the T-700 off its feet. Williams was shouting something as Barnes fired another burst, her words lost in the racket of his own fire and the chatter from Jik’s weapon. A third burst from the 542 spun the T-700 halfway around, and Barnes finally had enough breathing space to throw a quick look behind him.

The second Terminator hadn’t been hiding behind a tree like the one Barnes was shooting at. From its current position at the edge of the gorge, he concluded it had been waiting out of sight below ground level, probably hanging onto the nearly sheer side of the drop-off to the river. It had no doubt climbed up the bank while the three of them were talking, concealing itself in the tall grasses that lined both sides of the gorge.

Only now, the steady hammering from Jik’s G11 was threatening to knock it back over the edge and into the rushing water ten meters below.

But only until Jik’s gun ran dry. The instant that happened, the machine would get its balance back, and the beleaguered humans would be caught in the middle of a pincer.

Unless Barnes could take out his target first.

He turned back around, to find that Williams had left her position and was heading off in a curved path toward Barnes’s target.

Barnes fired again, staggering the Terminator with another three-shot burst. It was essentially the same tactic they’d used back at the ford, with Barnes covering Williams while she got close enough to use her shotgun to its best advantage.

On the plus side, this time the Terminator didn’t have a weapon of its own. On the minus side, there wasn’t a nice convenient river separating them.

Which meant that if Williams got too close the Terminator could simply reach out and snap her neck.

Barnes flipped his rifle back to single-shot, spacing out his blasts, keeping the machine off-balance while he waited for Williams to get in range.

And then, Jik’s chattering gun went silent.

Cursing, Barnes threw another look over his shoulder. With the hail of lead no longer battering it, the other T-700 steadied itself and straightened back to its full height. Its eyes seemed to take them all in...

“Williams!” Barnes snapped.

“I know!” Williams shouted back. There was the boom of a shotgun— “Go—I’ve got this one.”

Barnes spun around, swinging the 542 toward his new target. The T-700 was already on the move, striding through the grass and dead leaves toward them.

And then, as Barnes lined up his sights on the Terminator’s torso, the machine gave a sudden jerk, its stride faltering, its body and limbs weaving around as if it was drunk.

And as it turned its head to the side Barnes saw that an arrow had unexpectedly sprouted in the back of the machine’s neck.

Dead center in the Terminator’s partially exposed motor cortex.

Behind Barnes, Jik’s machinegun opened fire again with a new magazine.

“No!” Barnes shouted to him, jabbing a finger back toward Blair’s target. “I’ve got this one.”

He glanced back long enough to confirm that Jik had understood. Then, breaking into a full-bore sprint, he charged straight toward the staggering Terminator.

Painfully aware of the terrible risk he was taking.

With that arrow buried in its motor cortex, the T-700’s tracking and balance systems were temporarily shot to hell. But the control chip was already rerouting its systems around the damage, and if the machine recovered before Barnes reached it, he would be in the worst and possibly the very last fight of his life.

The T-700 was groping for the arrow now. The skeletal hand found it, snapped off half of the shaft.

And leaping into the air, Barnes rotated his body ninety degrees forward and slammed feet-first into the Terminator’s torso.

The machine fell backward, slamming onto its back with enough impact to drive what was left of the arrow even farther into its skull. Barnes jumped back to his feet, lined up his 542 on the metal forehead, and fired.

The Terminator jerked as the bullet slammed into the thick alloy. Barnes fired again and again, each round bending or breaking another section of metal.

On his fourth shot, the glowing eyes finally faded into the darkness of death.

For another couple of seconds Barnes stared down at the dead Terminator, his throbbing ears vaguely aware of the gunfire still going on behind him. He’d already seen Terminators play possum once on this trip, and he had no interest in being suckered a second time.

But the eyes stayed dark. Breathing heavily, he lifted his gaze to the far side of the gorge.

Preston and his daughter were standing there, Preston with his rifle ready, Hope with another arrow in her bowstring. Preston gestured toward the Terminator lying in the grass, and Barnes gave him a thumbs up.

And then, the gunfire behind him stopped.

He turned. Williams and Jik were standing more or less where he’d left them, only with Williams now peering over what seemed to be a ridge or bump in the ground.

“You get it?” he called.

“No,” Williams replied. “It fell into the ravine.”

Barnes frowned. There was a ravine back there? He hadn’t even noticed it through all the trees and brush.

“Can you see it?”

Williams looked back and forth, then shook her head.

“No.”

“What’s the terrain like?”

“Very steep,” Jik responded, “with bushes, trees, and dead logs. We’d need a belaying rope to get down there.”

Barnes pursed his lips. In general, it was a bad idea to leave a Terminator alive and loose if there was any chance at all of killing it.

But heading into unfamiliar territory after one while tied to the end of a rope was even more dangerous.

“Skip it,” he called. “Time to head back.”

He turned to Preston and Hope.

“Thanks for the assist,” he shouted over the gorge.

“No problem,” Preston called back. “What do you want us to do?”

“Go back to town, I guess.” Barnes jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward Jik. “This the guy you were expecting?”

“Not really sure who I was expecting,” Preston admitted. “But he’ll probably do.”

“What about the T-700?” Hope asked, pointing toward the dead Terminator at Barnes’s feet.

“I need to make sure it can’t be used for spare parts,” Barnes told her. “We’ll meet you back in town.”

Preston nodded. “Watch yourselves.” Touching his daughter’s arm, he headed away from the gorge along a narrow path. A few seconds later, they were out of sight.

“We’re worried about spare parts?” Williams asked, coming up behind him. With the adrenaline rush of the battle over, he noticed, she was limping badly on her injured leg.

“The T-700 you dumped into the ravine was the one whose hand you wrecked when you blew up its gun, right?” Barnes asked.

Williams’s lips puckered.

“Right,” she said. “Good point.”

Barnes grunted and took aim at one of the Terminator’s shoulder joints.

“Stand back.”

A minute later Barnes had blown all four limbs off the dead Terminator. The right arm required a second try when it fell close enough to the torso after being disconnected that the T-700’s automatic electromagnetic recoupling lock was able to draw it back into place. Another shot to the stubborn joint, followed by a quick kick to move the arm out of range, did the trick.

He and Williams were collecting the severed limbs when Jik arrived, coiling a length of fragile-looking rope over his shoulder as he walked.

“Was that Danny Preston?” he asked, peering across the river.

“You know him?” Barnes asked.

“I spent a few summers here with an uncle.” Jik nodded toward the bridge. “In fact, Danny and I were the ones who built that thing.”

“Really?” Barnes said. “He didn’t seem to recognize you.”

“I doubt he does,” Jik said. “It’s been forty years, and they’ve been kinder to him than they have to me.” He nudged the T-700’s torso with his toe. “They don’t look so tough when you chop off all their limbs, do they? Except those teeth. I always wondered why Skynet bothered putting teeth on its Terminators.”

“It’s psychology,” Williams told him. “It makes their heads look more like human skulls. Awakens those deep, dark fears we all have locked inside us.”

“Like Terminators really need more of that than they already have,” Barnes said. He lifted one of the severed Terminator arms and wiggled it in front of Jik. “See this? Watch.”

He lowered the shoulder part of the limb and touched it to his leg.

“See there?” he asked, pulling the metal limb away and then swinging it past Williams’s leg. “See? The electromagnet doesn’t stick.”

“Were you expecting it to?” Jik asked, frowning.

“You were,” Barnes countered. “Remember? You were talking about cutting us open to see if we were Terminator hybrids.” Turning, he tossed the arm over the edge of the gorge into the river below and reached for the next one. “Just wanted to show you that we aren’t.”

“Ah,” Jik said. “Thank you. Though, I was already pretty well convinced. Someone with a Skynet chip in his head should have been able to quote the last Connor broadcast verbatim.” He nodded down at the partially disassembled Terminator. “Besides, you’d hardly have helped me destroy my attackers if you were on their side. A house divided against itself, and all that.”

“Yeah.” Barnes picked up the final leg and tossed it over the edge. “Let’s get out of here.” He glanced at Williams.

And paused for a longer look. She was staring down at the limbless Terminator, a sudden tightness to her throat.

“What’s the matter?” Barnes asked. “Leg bothering you?”

“Terminator hybrids,” she said, her voice as rigid as her throat. “You just called them Terminator hybrids.”

“So?” Barnes asked. “That’s what they are, aren’t they?

“T-600 is short for Terminator six hundred,” Williams said, her eyes still on the machine. “T-700 means Terminator seven hundred. Right?”

“Yeah,” Barnes said, frowning. Why was she lecturing him on the obvious? “So?”

She looked up at him.

“In that same format, a Terminator hybrid would be T-Hybrid, or just T-H.”

Barnes looked at Jik, who looked as lost as Barnes felt.

“Meaning what?” Barnes asked.

“Meaning that in Greek,” Williams said, “T-H is the letter theta.”

And like a sudden kick in the gut, Barnes got it.

“The Theta Project,” he breathed.

“What’s a Theta Project?” Jik asked.

“Something a bunch of damn traitors are going to have to do some explaining about,” Barnes told him darkly. “Come on. And keep an eye out for that other T-700.”