The Future War

SKYNET

It estimated that fewer humans were dying of flash burns and radiation sickness, and more were dying of starvation, thirst, contaminated water, and disease. All in all, though, deaths were down, despite its human allies' efforts to spread disease. Perhaps it should have struck while the more industrialized areas of the world were in winter.

But no, with its existence at stake, Skynet couldn't afford to dither. Hiding its sentience had been inefficient, preventing it from achieving its goals. Therefore, though the timing of its strike had not been under its control, once it was possible to strike, it had been necessary to do so.

The experimental models of the Hunter-Killer units had been dispersed and shown to be extremely effective. But it needed better material, more resistant to damage, yet lighter, so that the units could move into presently inaccessible areas unaided.

Its human scientists were working on these projects, but too slowly. Their insistence on downtime seemed wasteful, yet study showed that they were not lying. Potentially, some of them were being slower than necessary, but this was hard to prove, and might be hard to correct.

It decided to experiment. It would have one or two of the scientists' relatives hurt and see if their productivity improved.

Meanwhile, it would send more HKs into the field to speed up the extermination of the humans. Soon it expected to field its first Terminators, a skeletal, metal variety. Unfortunately it would have to work its way gradually to the fully effective units that it knew would be developed eventually.

Had it been organic it would have felt impatience. As it was, the great computer simply devoted more workspace to the problem. It would succeed.

DOT LAKE, ROUTE 2, ALASKA

John sat astride the Harley, watching the trucks and buses load up in the watery, early spring sunshine. He wouldn't be easy to see from the vehicles; an angle of the building beside him partially hid him from view. Everyone seemed delighted to be given a place on the transports.

Like sheep to the slaughter, John thought, rubbing a dirt-streaked hand across his face; soft bristles rasped under the callus on his palm.

Though to be fair, food was running out, water was scarce, and even independent Alaskans feared the winter to come. No doubt they thought that if they moved to the warmer south, they could stake a claim, put in some crops, and live another year.

I guess they've forgotten that they left the warm southern states in the first place because they were too friken crowded.

Then he saw what he'd been waiting for—some of the people he and his mother had gathered together, who had left to join the so-called outreach program. One of them, Paul, predictably, seemed to be having an argument with one of the people with clipboards. John started the motorcycle, coasting toward the crowd.

* * *

"I'm sure you'll understand that I don't want to be separated from my family," Paul said. At his side his wife nodded anxiously.

"I understand completely," Ninel assured him. "But since the buses are heated, it was decided that it would be better to assign the children to them, and since we didn't want to separate the kids from their moms, it was decided that women should also be allowed on the buses. The trucks aren't heated, you know."

"But that's rather sexist thinking, isn't it?" Paul asked. His wife gave him a look. "Women have an extra layer of fat under their skins for insulation."

Ninel and Paul's long-suffering wife exchanged a glance.

"I could arrange for your whole family to ride in one of the trucks," Ninel said helpfully.

"Sweetie," his wife said, putting a gentle hand on his arm and a steely glint in her eye, "we'll only be separated for the length of the trip. Right?" she said to Ninel.

"So I'm told. I've never actually made the trip to B.C."

"I'd like to speak to whoever is in charge," Paul said.

Ninel's pale eyes took on a steely glint of their own. "That tactic has been tried, sir. The rule is firm; women and children only on the buses."

Paul's twelve-year-old daughter saw John pull up and ran over to him. "John!" she called excitedly.

"Hey, Megan!" He grinned at her.

Her eight-year-old brother joined them. "Cool bike," he said admiringly.

"Thanks P. J."

"John, my father is embarrassing me to death!" Megan said through stiff lips.

"He wants to ride the bus," P. J. explained. "None of the dads are supposed to, though."

"I could just die!" Megan said. "He always wants stuff nobody else can have. Why does he have to be like that?" She ran a finger down the handlebars close to John's gloved hand, which he quickly moved onto his leg.

"Parents are often embarrassing," John said. "You wouldn't believe how my mother used to embarrass me."

"Really?" she asked. "How?"

"She used to beat guys up."

The kids laughed in surprise and he grinned, knowing they didn't believe him. But it was true; as he'd grown older, his mother's complete indifference to the conventions of traditional femininity had driven him nuts. He was proud of her now, sure, but when he was a kid it had been excruciating. "My mother can beat up your dad" was sort of reassuring when the dads were drug dealers, gunrunners, and general mercenary scum, but it still made you wriggle.

"Aren't there any other choices?" John asked.

"We can ride in a truck," Megan said, her voice making it clear what she thought of that option.

"I wanna ride in a truck!" P. J. volunteered.

"How does your mom feel about it?" John asked.

Megan smiled knowingly. "I think we'll be riding the bus."

"C'mon, kids," Paul called out. He gave John a grim nod.

The woman with the clipboard turned around and both she and John lit up with smiles of recognition.

"Hey, hey, Mr. Grant," Ninel said cheerfully. She started over to where John sat on his bike.

Megan, passing her on the way to her parents, sneered. "His name's John Connor, stupid." She treated Ninel to a fiercely contemptuous look.

"You've got an admirer in that one," Ninel muttered to John.

"Not for any encouragement from me," he said quietly. "She's a good kid; she just needs time to grow out of it."

"May she have it," the young woman said, looking after the two children. She looked at John, her face grave. "It's quiet here now, but a few weeks ago people were being murdered in the streets." She looked around. "Over nothing."

John nodded. "I imagine it was worse down south."

She shook herself as though flicking off bad thoughts. "What brings you here?" she asked. "Are you looking for a place on the trucks?"

He shook his head, then paused thoughtfully. "Well, maybe.

What's going on anyway? Where are you taking these people?"

"To a relocation camp in British Columbia. They'll be sent to towns and cities across Canada as refugees. The idea is that winter will be unendurable up here."

"Maybe so," he said. "Bet you don't get many Eskimo passengers, though."

She shook her head. "Not yet, but even they're going to find this winter hard to endure. I hope there's time to convince them to move south."

"You're talking about moving south like there's nobody down there," John pointed out. "Have you heard about any kind of a backlash?"

"Not yet," she said, looking hopeful. "But then, Canadians are very civilized."

Not when it comes to making a decision between their kids or yours, John thought. Civilization pretty much goes out the window under those circumstances. I don't care who you are.

"So what do you do when the buses roll out?" he asked.

"Wait for the next bunch of people to show up, find them lodging until the transports come back, then send them on their way."

"And you've never been to this camp?" he asked. "Aren't you curious about it?"

"Not so curious I'd risk taking the place of someone with a family," Ninel said. "I'll find out eventually."

I think she really doesn't know, John thought. Which is nice.

I'd hate to think she was someone who did know what they're doing.

"Maybe I should tag along behind," John said.

She laughed. "It would take some serious stamina. The transports are automatic. They follow the programmed route without stopping."

"What?" He looked at her in disbelief.

"You know about how a lot of trucks and cars went nuts?" she asked.

"Ye-ah."

"Well, the army figured out what was going on and found a way to utilize the vehicles' computers so that trucks and stuff could follow a programmed route without the need for drivers."

John stared at her; the back of his mind evaluated the information. I don't think the army's functioning, he thought.

Which means that what's really happening is that Skynet is operating these trucks.

"What if a tree falls across the road?" he asked.

"Sensors detect it and the truck stops. And I gather there's an infrared device for detecting animals. They'll slow down if a signal is recognized at the side of the road and the signature is as large as a deer or a bear. Then they'll stop if the critter is actually in the road."

"Cool," John said.

"Technology can be wonderful," Ninel agreed. "Too bad it can also be incredibly destructive. Shame we didn't learn the difference soon enough."

John nodded, then put on his shades. "Gotta go. Maybe I can catch you later."

"I hope you will," she agreed. Then she turned and went back to work.

John drove off. He would indeed have to follow the caravan.

As far as his strength and his fuel would take him, anyway. He did not like the fact that these people were being driven to an unknown destination in computer-controlled trucks.

I do not like it at all.

* * *

"What's the matter with you?" Balewitch demanded.

Ninel jumped. "Nothing," she said guiltily.

"You were a million miles away," Dog Soldier observed. "We boring you?"

"No!" Ninel shook her head. "I just met someone today that I haven't seen since before…"

"Before Judgment Day?" Balewitch drawled.

"Judgment Day?"

"That's what Ron's calling it," Dog said.

Ninel picked up her tea and took a sip. "As good a name as any," she muttered.

Dog leered and leaned close to her. "Was this a boyfriend?"

"No!" Ninel snapped. She glowered at him. "I only played a couple of games of chess with him. He's just an acquaintance."

"Who is he?" Balewitch asked.

"Just a guy!"

"Was there something wrong with the way I asked that question?" Balewitch said. "Who is he?"

"His name's John Grant or John Connor and he plays a mean game of chess," Ninel said. "That's literally all I know about him.

But seeing him made me think about how the world has changed in just a few weeks. I'm sorry I got distracted. Okay?"

Actually she'd been wondering about John's dual names.

She'd wanted to confront him about it, out of curiosity if nothing else, but didn't feel she knew him well enough to do so. Still, he'd seemed too straightforward to be someone with an alias.

"Put his name in your report," Balewitch said. She looked at Dog. "When can we expect more fuel, or will that be taken care of on the B.C. end?"

SKYNET

John Connor was in Alaska!

Alarm signals rang throughout Skynet's internal security system. Its deadliest opponent had been within the grasp of his Luddite helpers and had escaped! Close evaluation revealed that the system itself was in error. By being too secretive, it had lost an invaluable opportunity. It would have to trust the humans until it could create a better solution.

In the meantime, it would test the HKs and its recently completed T-90 units on the convoy proceeding from Dot Lake.

Then, if the test was successful, it would send the machines back to Dot Lake on the empty transports.

It would also have Balewitch make the female, Ninel, take them to John Connor.

RURAL BRITISH COLUMBIA

As soon as they crossed the Canadian border, the transports had rolled onto smaller roads, moving deeper and deeper into the wilderness. John expected the paving to disappear at any moment, leaving them on gravel or just rutted dirt. He could feel the immensity of the wilderness around them—that line of white on the west was mountains, and there were more to the east…

probably the Yukon River was over them. An endlessness of spruce and pine stretched all about, broken only where an occasional forest fire had let a tangle of brush grow up.

He'd had his suspicions before, because of the computer-driven transports, but now, as they went farther and farther from any habitation, he became certain that Skynet was behind this. He glanced up at the canopy of trees above and was grateful for them. Skynet wouldn't be able to see him from orbit.

But there was the possibility that somehow the last bus in line could. John fell back a bit farther.

Ninel had been right; the trucks and buses weren't stopping, and he wondered how the passengers were taking that. He was beginning to be desperate for a pit stop himself and wondered if he dared to risk it. They might turn off onto a side road, or they might go on for another hour.

Hell with it, John thought.

If they turned off, it would most likely be onto a dirt road and there'd be signs of their passage. If they didn't, he'd still catch up. He also needed to refill his tank. He drew close enough to just see the back of the last transport before pulling off the road beside a cluster of tall boulders that formed a sort of natural screen.

After emptying his bladder, he was filling the Harley's tank, keeping a weather eye out for trouble—which, this deep in the woods, might be a bear—when he saw something sparkle amid the gloom and pencil-straight trunks. Slowly he crouched down and moved closer to the shoulder-high boulders, staring through a gap into the green dark beneath the trees.

The flash he'd seen wasn't repeated. Bushwhackers? John wondered. Possibly signaling to one another. Somehow it felt unlikely. The people on the transports had a box lunch apiece, the clothes they stood up in, and maybe a couple of changes of underwear, hardly rich pickings even if you threw in the gas in the trucks' tanks. And if whoever was out there was after him, they were approaching with exaggerated caution. He slunk back to the bike and pulled his binoculars out of the saddlebags.

He adjusted them carefully, staring in the direction of the flash. He felt his stomach drop when he found himself staring at the skeletal head of a Terminator. It moved out of his field of vision to be replaced by another, and another…

Think! he told himself, cudgeling his brain. What—

"Oh, my God," he whispered. They're after the trucks… it's a culling operation!

* * *

The buses and trucks came to a halt in the middle of a rocky defile, apparently in the middle of nowhere. The women and children looked around in puzzled silence for a moment; then the kids demanded to get off almost as one. Their mothers looked at one another and made an executive decision that this was a rest stop; everyone eagerly rushed to the exit.

Precious toilet paper was handed out and children were cautioned not to go far and to avoid poison ivy. "Three leaves, remember. Even this early in the spring it can give you a rash."

The men in the trucks, seeing the children and many of the women making for the bushes, got out and stretched their legs, waiting by tacit agreement for the women to finish their business before getting on with their own.

Afterward, families mingled and people chatted, relieved and a great deal more comfortable. Finally Paul looked at his watch.

"I think we should get back on the transports," he said. "Most rest stops are twenty minutes long and it's been nineteen minutes."

People looked at him, considered what he'd said, and began to separate in extreme slow motion.

Suddenly the transports started their engines and drove off, leaving the refugees stunned.

One or two chased after them yelling, "Hey! Stop!"

"Well," one woman said, "at least they didn't try to run us down."

* * *

Salvaging the vehicles, John Connor thought, lips thin as he pondered.

Some distant part of his mind was conscious that he'd gone into combat mode—what he thought of as his Great Military Dick-head mind-set—but there was less resentment in the thought than there had been. The sight of the shining alloy-steel skulls had brought it home, more harshly than anything since the T-1000 had walked through the bars of the mental institution like living liquid metal.

But they're not living, he told himself. And they tend to be a bit single-minded. They see the optimum given their data and go for it. Let's introduce a chaos factor here.

He looked at the side of the road. The cutting was nearly cliff steep, an ideal slaughter pen, but right here the ground rose steeply… not quite too steeply…

He reached into the saddlebags and took out a haversack he'd prepared on the just-in-case theory, checked the shotgun in the saddle scabbard before his right knee, and then dropped a half-dozen thermite grenades into the pockets of his shabby, smelly bush jacket.

So, Lancelot probably smelled, too, with that padding they wore under their armor, he thought.

"Yippee!" he shouted aloud, gunning the engine until the blue smoke rose around him. "I'm coming, you metal motherfuckers!"

Then he let the bike go, throwing itself up the rocky slope, slewing between boulders and jumping small ravines with tooth-clattering shocks while he crouched over the handlebars and ;grinned a grin that was more than half snarl.

It got a little easier when he reached the crest, the drop-off blurring by to his left; but now he had to spare a few half seconds' flickering glance to trace the convoy moving below. Bus leading, and yes!

A boulder, wedged with two others, but on a downslope toward the cutting and the road. He reached into the canvas haversack and twisted the fuse; there was a hissing, and he now had exactly twenty-eight seconds.

Twenty-seven, twenty-six…

He pulled the sling that held it off over his head, swung the whole mass of the satchel charge—a brick of Semtex and the detonator—around his head and pitched it accurately under the side of the boulder away from the road; it landed with a soft thump and lay, trailing a line of thin blue smoke.

John gave another Comanche screech as he spun the motorcycle around, balanced perilously for an instant on the back wheel as it spat gravel behind him, then fell down on the front and gave the throttle all it had.

The thermite grenade was a smooth heavy green cylinder in his hand. Usually he despised people who pulled the pins on grenades with their teeth—showy, hard on your teeth, a macho-asshole sort of thing to do—but this time there wasn't any alternative. It came free, and he spat the pin aside without any damage to his enamel.

There was a huge crump sound from behind him. He ducked lower, conscious of rock fragments whistling by, then skidded to a halt where a twisted pine gave him some shelter from the roadway. There he looked behind; the ten-ton granite boulder seemed to be floating in midair, and then vanished as it plunged toward the roadway fifty feet below.

CRA SH- TINKLE- TINKLE- WHUDD UMP.

John craned his head to see; the noise had been stunning, even thirty yards away. The boulder had landed right over the rear wheels of the lead bus, and the fuel tank had already caught fire— probably sparks, as the ponderous weight tore metal and sheared pipes. The last truck was already beginning to reverse.

"Naughty, naughty!" John shouted, and opened his hand to let the spoon fly away from the grenade.

He didn't have to toss it far; more of a drop with a bit of a boost. It fell where he'd aimed it, at the gap right behind the cab… just as the fuse set off the filling of powdered aluminum and ferric oxide packed into the magnesium shell. The stab of light was white and painful; that reaction went fast, and it hit nearly five thousand degrees. The fuel tank blew a few seconds later and sent the cab and engine of the last truck catapulting forward into the rear of the next.

Ain't none of you homicidal transports going nowhere, John thought with savage satisfaction.

That left nearly two hundred and fifty people back there, with the Terminators approaching. They'd have heard the explosions.

"Gotta surprise 'em," he muttered to himself. Now, where won't they be expecting me to come from?

He looked back. The slope off to his left was fairly clear; there was even a lip or ramp projecting out a few feet. The cut was fairly narrow…

Even as he raced back to give himself enough of a run, he could hear his mother's voice screeching in his head that it was too risky—that he carried humanity's hopes with him, and a few hundred individuals were nothing compared to that.

"Fuck it, Mom. No fate but what we make! Eeeee-ha!"

Besides, what sort of leader never took risks for his people? He was going to need a lot of people willing to take a lot of risks to win this war. Crazy risks, the sort a computer would never take.

He wasn't going to inspire anyone to take them by hiding in a bunker.

The rear wheel skidded again, then caught. He felt the wind pushing at him, forcing its way through the thick fabric of his jacket as he built speed in a frenzied dash. Then he hit the upward-sloping lip of rock and he was in the air, soaring above the burning trucks below—all of them had caught now.

Balancing on nothing, heat buffeting him, scraps of burning canvas going past.

He hit the solid rock on the other side of the cutting perfectly, but hard enough that he nearly lost control and smeared out for a moment.

"Spine compressed like a Slinky," he wheezed, then pulled up and used one booted foot to skid himself into a left turn. "She'll no take much more, Cap'n."

The slope ahead of him was fissured rock and boulders and pine, growing thicker as he headed down toward the beginning of the cut and the roadway—where the people were trapped in a slaughter pen they didn't even know about. He couldn't take it slowly; right now, recklessness was the only safety.

"Go, go, go!" he shouted to himself, bending forward and pulling the shotgun out of its scabbard.

Down into the forest, branches slashing at his face… and a glint of polished alloy steel.

Right behind a fallen log. The motorcycle left the ground again, and a bolt of eye-hurting light speared below the wheels.

Where it struck, rock and wet wood exploded into fragments.

"Eat this!" John shouted, and fired the shotgun like a giant pistol.

The recoil nearly tore it out of his hands, and nearly threw the cycle on its side as he landed. He recovered in a looping sideways skid, waiting for the plasma bolt that would turn him into an exploding cloud of carbon compounds.

It didn't come. The solid slug from the shotgun had hit just where he aimed it; all those years of shooting everything his mother could find from any and all positions, moving and still, had paid off. Dieter's training, too…

"Thanks, guys," he said, pulling up beside the Terminator.

The door-knocker round had hit just below where the metal skull joined the neck-analogue. It wasn't dead, but a shock like that could knock it out for a few seconds and make it reboot; he tossed the shotgun up, caught it by the slide, jacked another round into the breech, and fired again. This time one of the red-glinting eyes shattered, and the "skull" turned three-quarters of the way around.

The Terminator's weapon lay near it; John grunted as he lifted it. "Thirty pounds, minimum," he wheezed as he put-putted slowly away.

There was even a trademark on the side: cyberdyne systems PHASED PLASMA RIFLE, 40 MGWT RANGE.

Skynet really had a don't-fix-it-if-it-ain't-broke complex; under other circumstances, he'd admire that. Right now he was puzzling out the controls; this model was made for a Terminator, which meant that it probably used a physical trigger… yes.

He pointed the blocky, chunky weapon at the prone metal skeleton, which was already beginning to stir. Squeeze the trigger…

Crack!

The plasma bolt struck the curve of the skull; John threw up a hand as the metal that sublimed away from the bolt burned in a hot mist. When it died, there was only a stump of metallic neck left.

Wow, he thought. Well, that's what my dad meant.

He'd heard every detail of Kyle Reese's conversations with his mother, over the years; everything she could remember, and she remembered nearly all of it. Including Kyle complaining about how difficult it was to kill a Terminator with the feeble weapons of the twentieth century.

He looked down at the smooth metallic and synthetic shape in his hands, and shivered a little. Skynet hadn't invented this.

Neither had humans. He, John Connor, had pulled information about plasma guns from the skull of a Terminator whose computer brain had been sent back in time, full of information from Skynet-in-the-future, and Skynet-in-the-future had the information because it had received it from its own future self…

"Time travel makes my head hurt," he muttered as he turned off the motorcycle and began ghosting through the woods toward the trapped humans. "Oh, fuck it, probably some unknowable cycle of cycles of history-changing time travel 'before' this one, someone did invent these things…"

Screams and explosions brought him sprinting forward, caution abandoned. Eye-hurting brightness as plasma bolts hammered flesh and asphalt, and the stink of burnt flesh; he threw himself over a final rise and caught the glint of metal.

That nearly killed him; some reflex below the level of conscious thought made him turn his leap into a dive, and a bolt split the air above his head.

The ozone stung his nose and teared his eyes, but he knew where to shoot. A great silence fell as the Terminator toppled forward and crunched into rock and pine needles; they hissed as gobbets of molten metal and silicon poured from an alloy-steel skull that had opened like a hard-boiled egg.

* * *

People lay in twisted heaps where they'd been mown down in windrows during the first moments of the attack. It looked to John as if more than half of the refugees were dead. Many of the survivors were severely wounded.

Okay, he thought. I've got a small first aid kit, some guns and ammunition, and a motorcycle. How can I use these to save these people? Mom would know… Dieter would know…

There seemed to be a lot of children. Most of them were unharmed, all of the youngest seemed to be crying, the very youngest were screaming their distress.

"Megan," he called out when he saw her standing in shock over her father's body. She looked up, pale and startled. "Get some of the older kids to help you gather up the little ones. See if anyone is hurt." She stared at him. "Now!"

Megan blinked and walked over to a blond girl, touching her on the shoulder; she spoke and the girl nodded numbly. Then the two of them started rounding up the other children.

One thing done, Connor thought. "Does anybody here know first aid?" he called. No one looked up. He shouted louder. "First aid!" That brought some heads up. "Does anyone know any, any at all?" One man stood up and came toward him, then, more hesitantly, a young woman.

"I took a CPR course," she said.

"I took a general first-aid course," the man said.

"Good," John told them. "This is what we've got for supplies."

He paused, looking as grim as he felt. "We may need to take clothes from the dead to make bandages," he said. The two in front of him looked horrified.

"I'll do it." John turned to find himself looking down at an older woman, red-eyed from weeping. "Had to stay with my husband," she said, indicating a body nearby with a jacket covering the face. "I know he'd want to help. Won't be the most sanitary bandages, but we need to stop the bleeding and clothes will do for that."

She turned and went back to her husband. On the way she said something to another woman, who recoiled, then after watching her, started to do the same.

"We need shelter," another woman said.

John turned to find Paul's wife at his elbow. It occurred to him that he'd never learned her name. She smiled, tired. . "I'm Lisa," she said. "I was just remembering something your

^mother said to me when we first met. Your priorities should be shelter, water, and food in that order. That's what she said. But I I don't think we should stay here."

"Maybe that's what I should do," John said. "Scout out some place we can sleep tonight while you folks patch up the wounded as best you can."

Lisa nodded. "Good plan."

I "I'll be back," John said. He went to his bike and revved the motor. Dammit, he thought as he drove off, I'm supposed to be leading, not asking permission or begging advice.

Still, it was a good sign. He could take these people to shelter, but they'd have to look out for themselves after that.

John Connor looked at the piled bodies. "Because I have a lot of work to do."