The future war, p.17
The Future War, page 17
“My son, Ray,” Brock said. He nodded at the boy and the door behind the desk clicked open. Brock led them through.
This time the room was long, narrow, and low ceilinged. The walls seemed to be plastic, as did the ceiling, the whole braced with metal. There were computers and what looked like communications equipment everywhere. About twenty people looked up at their entrance, men and women both, with men in the majority. Nobody seemed to be over forty; that may have been because everyone looked very fit.
“As you were,” Brock said, and the small crowd went back to work. He turned to Mary and Reese. “What you’ve stumbled into is the resistance. Most people don’t realize yet that we need one. But after what you’ve seen, after the way you were handed over to that HK, you have to know that your place is with us, fighting against Skynet.”
Montana
The landscape rolled around her, huge beyond imagining. Sarah Connor felt like a bug on a plate as she roared south along I-3; sometimes it seemed like the gray-green immensity of grass around her was moving while she stayed motionless. She was glad to be away from the towns—away from the stink of death, too, except for the odd victim of the first wave of the machine uprising, and the coyotes had cleared most of that away. Mostly the air was clean, dry, a little chilly for this time of year, but otherwise normal.
But things aren’t normal at all, she thought grimly.
Cattle in a nearby field looked up and started to lumber away as she passed; she felt an obscure sadness at realizing that they’d become wary of humans and human sounds so quickly.
Sarah had decided to use main routes as much as possible since the quality of the roads made up in speed what they lacked in safety; she’d come south along the country roads that flanked the Judith River, and then back onto I-3 near Hobson. Detouring around population centers and the little oblongs marked on her map as fallout footprints kept her out of radiation danger; at least, the counter said she hadn’t picked up enough to worry about—enough by post–Judgment Day standards. The number of roentgens would have put any safety officer before that into screaming fits, and made a lawyer slaver.
There was little traffic, and what there was usually was official—which meant Skynet and its allies and/or dupes. So far she’d had no problem avoiding them; it helped that she was avoiding towns when she could.
Still worse here in the lower forty-eight than it was in Canada, she thought, pausing by the side of the road to take a drink from her canteen; the water had a nasty mineral aftertaste from the pills she’d had to add to it. Ears, stunned by days of the Harley’s motor, almost ached with the quietness at first; after a minute or two she could hear the wind singing in the roadside wire.
She’d run across tons of abandoned cars and trucks and far too many unburied bodies. Canada had been in better shape, but only marginally, and it, too, was under martial law. Another reason to avoid towns.
She and John had organized resistance centers here, but Sarah didn’t seek them out. Her task now was to get to Central and South America as quickly as possible and start up the food deliveries. This was no time for a grand tour.
But she was mightily tempted. She felt out of touch, and it was irksome, like losing one of your senses—one you didn’t know you were counting on until it went missing. What was John doing? Where was Dieter? How was the resistance holding up? And most important of all, what was Skynet doing?
Maybe I can pick up some information at the next town, she thought.
She was running low on alcohol and would have to stop soon to fuel up; during daylight, in this rural area, that shouldn’t cause problems. She had four IDs, all extremely good. She also had beef jerky and small parcels of spices to trade for what she needed, and she expected to get a good rate of exchange. By now people were probably hungry for a taste of beef. She knew they were hungry for what was in her little packets.
Sarah pulled to a stop to check her map. With the engine quietly muttering, she suddenly heard another motorcycle revving, loudly, to the south.
No, more than one. In fact, there were quite a lot of them, if she wasn’t mistaken. Just over that rise, and coming this way.
She decided to go back to the last exit and go around whatever was happening ahead of her.
It was unlikely to be a bunch of lawyers and CPAs out for a picnic with their families. John had asked her once about recruiting motorcycle gangs on the grounds that they were tough, somewhat organized, and seemed to be natural survivors, but she’d discouraged him.
“We’re trying to save the world,” she’d said. “They’re trying to eat it.”
As Sarah meandered back down the road, she wondered how big the rally was. And what does the army think of it? Would it bring the authorities running to break it up, or would they stay away, with the not unreasonable excuse that their plates were already full to overflowing? Skynet wouldn’t care—in fact, it would feel a sort of cold mechanical glee at humans doing its work for it, unprompted.
And how were the bikers managing to gather without wholesale intergang slaughter taking place? Though they might have worked that out weeks ago after the bombs fell. Whatever. As John had said, they were natural survivors, but then, so were cockroaches and lice, and she didn’t want closer contact with them, either.
Sarah was going down the exit ramp slowly as she thought about the rally up ahead. Should she try and get a look at it from a distance, or should she just ignore it and carry on with her mission?
WWSD? she wondered idly. What Would Skynet Do?
She managed to pull the bike into a turn just before she ran into a rope snapped up to neck height. Sarah continued the turn, meaning to run, but three bikes rolled onto the ramp behind her. Their filthy riders grinned evilly and chuckled at her near escape.
Shit, she thought. I don’t have time for this. She heard bikes moving in behind her. Your move, she thought at them.
They hadn’t gone for their guns, so she didn’t reach for the Bushmaster in its scabbard by her right leg. She had some grenades on a belt under her jacket; that might be a better technique, but the sound of the explosion might bring half that rally running.
She moved her bike so that she could see the ones behind her as well. The sides of the off ramp were too steep for them to make an effective circle, which was lucky, because it offered an out—not a good one, but still, beggars couldn’t be choosers.
“Yer supposed to say, ‘What do you want?’ Don’cha know that?”
Sarah looked toward the voice. Nobody here looked like a leader, but there was one guy a little beefier than the others. These followers of macho legend probably looked up to that, so he might be the one to watch. As for what they wanted, she already knew that. They wanted to stomp her flat and take her stuff.
“It’d be polite to show us your face,” a woman said. She was a well-built amazon, probably topped out at six feet, and her arms rippled with muscle. It had been so long since she’d bathed that her skin glistened with her own natural grease; her hair was a matted rat’s nest that might once have been blond. It was fortunate that the weather was cold; otherwise the smell would be…
Unimaginable. Dear, God, Sarah thought, discouraged. Help! I’ve fallen into a bad biker movie and I can’t get out. Mel Gibson, where are you when we need you?
Sarah always wore a helmet. For one reason, it made it less likely she’d be recognized by especially vigilant cops. For another, she’d long since outgrown the fantasy that the wind in your hair was the feeling of ultimate freedom. The wind in your hair twisted it into impenetrable thickets and filled it with road dirt. And if you spun out without a helmet, you could say good-bye to your face.
She figured she’d have to talk to them; hell, maybe she could actually talk her way out of this. “I don’t want any trouble,” she said.
The big guy laughed. “Hell, we figured that. If you wanted trouble, you would’ve just kept goin’ straight.”
His crew all laughed.
Sarah figured they were here for one of two reasons; either they couldn’t hack it with the main group and so were looking for easy pickings on the outskirts, or they’d been assigned here by whoever was in charge to pick up any strays. Either way it meant that they weren’t as tough as they were pretending to be. On the one hand, that meant that she could probably take most of them; on the other, it meant that the group ego was bruised and they’d feel they had something to prove.
She’d better try talking first.
Sarah raised her visor. “So what’s going on down there anyway?” She indicated the rally with a tip of her head.
As soon as she’d lifted the opaque visor, she sensed the disappointment in the males. Sarah knew she was way too long in the tooth for their taste. Sometimes she thought it a miracle that Dieter didn’t find her so. But then Dieter didn’t spend every day of his life getting a prostate massage from a motorcycle.
The group looked at one another and apparently decided they were bored enough to answer a few questions before the fun began.
“The supreme leader has decided that we should take over this part of the country,” the big, muscular one said, leaning on his handlebars. “Get all the little farmers growing food for us in exchange for protection.”
Again Sarah knew the answer but decided to be a good sport. “Protection from what?”
“From us!” the smallest of them shouted gleefully, and they all laughed uproariously.
Sarah didn’t roll her eyes, but the urge was almost irresistible.
Then the amazon started her bike forward and began to slowly circle Sarah.
“Y’know what might be fun?” she asked, never taking her eyes off their captive. She licked her lips. “Let’s you and me fight.” The boys went wild, whoo-whooing fit to burst their own eardrums. The amazon grinned, holding her clenched fists up like a victorious boxer. “If you win, then you get to go, tax free. If I win…well, you won’t need to worry about anything anymore if I win.” Howls of laughter greeted this sally.
Jeez! Is there a camera around here someplace? Sarah wondered. Or have I stumbled onto the Tribe of the Cliché Speakers?
The girl wasn’t a problem; Sarah knew she could mop the floor with her, big as she was. The problem was that fighting her meant getting off the motorcycle, leaving her vulnerable when she finally stopped kicking the crap out of the…
Brainless slut-bitch? Sarah thought. Yeah, that has a satisfying sound.
However, before she’d left home, she and Dieter had come up with something that should intimidate the small and the stupid, and this was an excellent time to deploy it. She dug her hands into her pockets and flung the contents in either direction. Packets of gray putty with a short length of cord sticking out of them went skittering across the ground, and in Sarah’s upraised hand was a black plastic sunglasses case with a big red button on top.
“That’s C-4,” she announced. “It probably won’t hurt you too badly unless you’re right on top of one. But it’ll tear the hell out of your tires. And asphalt makes pretty good shrapnel.” She let them think about that for a few seconds. “Like I said, I don’t want any trouble. In fact, I mean not to have any trouble. But I’m perfectly happy to make trouble for you.” She looked them all in the face. “So just stay right where you are and maybe I won’t push this button.”
Sarah turned her bike and glared at the men in front of her. One of them moved aside, slowly, resentfully, and she drove through the gap and gunned it. She was almost 100 percent sure that they wouldn’t come after her. And if they did, well, she could always use the thermite grenades.
On to Mexico, she thought, hoping she wouldn’t run into any more world-conquering biker heroes. Because too many and I might just start agreeing with Skynet.
Alaska
John flopped down into the battered desk chair and put his dirty, booted feet up on the gray metal desk. He whipped off his hat and sunglasses with a sigh and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Since that cyber-controlled seal had scarred it, his nose sometimes ached when he wore sunglasses for any length of time. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes.
It had been his first real command, he now realized.
One hundred and seventy-one people, slaughtered in the first moments of the Terminators’ attack. And of the seventy-nine left, more than half were wounded, twenty of them severely. Nothing like being thrown in at the deep end.
His throat tightened painfully as he thought of the smallest victims. The sight of those tiny, broken bodies kept flashing before his inner eye. Don’t let it go, his mother had advised him about things like this. Keep it inside, channel it into anger. Controlling your anger, using it, will make you strong. Mom would know. He swallowed painfully and gathered up a sheaf of reports from the resistance cells across the continent.
One bit of luck was that one of the women was a nurse practitioner, who had greeted his gift of a liter of alcohol as though it was worth its weight in diamonds. There had been seven men who’d been in the military who seemed to be shaking down to a decent working team by the time he’d left them. And the moms that were left had taken the children in hand in an almost magical way.
“We can’t stay here,” John had said to the nurse when they’d patched up the worst of the wounds. “I’m going to take the bike and search for a likely place.”
She’d nodded and waved him off as though said likely place would certainly be found. Though he’d thought at the time that a more unlikely place for a likely place would be hard to find.
Yet two miles down the road he’d found an almost invisible track leading to an abandoned lumber camp. The buildings had been log-built and so some of the walls were pretty sturdy. The roofs hadn’t fared as well and only two buildings still had any. They would probably leak like sieves, but they’d do for temporary shelter. There were even a couple of rusty woodstoves still in place. It was things like that that made John think God just might be on their side.
It would have to be temporary, though. Even two miles away from the slaughter site was much too close. Soon, if there was a relocation camp, Skynet would have them send out searchers. And when the number of bodies didn’t match their manifest, they’d go looking for survivors.
It was too close to danger, but it had still been a long haul for the kids and the wounded. Two miles is a long way to carry the deadweight of a wounded man or woman, especially on cobbled together stretchers. But Alaskans were a hardy bunch and they’d managed it with a minimum of fuss.
Though it had left him feeling naked, John had given his shotgun to a man who claimed to be a champion shot and a “damn good hunter.” He handed out a brace of hand grenades to the military types. It probably wouldn’t do them much actual good, but it was better than nothing and therefore good for moral.
Then he’d left them, promising to send help. Which he’d done as soon as he could get to one of their encrypted satellite relays. It might be a full day before that help arrived, but trucks and medical help were on the way.
John hoped someone would be there for his friends to find. They were good people. Wearily he brought his feet down from the desk. Time to go to work, he thought. He glanced at the phased plasma rifle he’d taken from a Terminator. Time to get the resistance and himself rolling. These rifles, so handily provided by Skynet, would kill Terminators. Although he was certain that these easily destroyed first attempts would quickly be replaced by vastly more formidable models, thousands of them.
He picked up the plasma rifle. Ike’s gonna love this, he thought. Until I tell him he has to relocate to manufacture ’em.
Chapter 12
ALASKA
“I love this thing!” Ike Chamberlain said with the enthusiasm of a six-year-old on Christmas morning. “This plasma rifle is so cool!”
The sound came clearly through the speaker in the communications bunker, albeit it had a slightly flat tone—the machine was taking the compressed digital packets and reconstructing them, which inevitably meant a slight loss of tone. It was more easily understandable than ordinary speech, though, if anything.
Love this gear, John thought, giving it an affectionate pat; the operator matched his grin. Thank you, Dieter.
Round-log walls and the smell of damp earth did make a bit of a contrast with the smooth surfaces and digital readouts. So did the kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling, adding its scents of burning fuel and hot metal. Efficient though, he thought; besides saving power, it helped keep the temperature comfortable, and it could burn wood alcohol at a pinch.
Now, this is going to require careful manipulation, John Connor thought, and went on aloud: “That’s great, Ike. But can you make it?”
“Oh, I can make it all right. I can even improve on it, elegant as it is. The design’s optimized for Terminators—I can cut the weight by a kilo, kilo and a half, without losing significant function. What I can’t do is manufacture it.”
Dismayed, John sat up straight. “What?”
“I lack the machinery and the raw materials, not to mention the personnel to mass-produce ’em. Donna and I will bang out as many of these as we can. But until you can get me those three things, well, we’ve got a bottleneck.”
No kidding, John thought.
He’d sent the captured plasma rifles down to the gunsmith’s home in California with a trusted courier three days ago and had been anxious to see what Ike would make of them. Chamberlain’s enthusiasm was no surprise. He’d been working on this project, off and on, for about three years now, using information John had culled from a Terminator’s scavenged head. But the machine had somehow compromised the information, leaving them hopelessly stymied. Now, at last, here was real progress.
“I don’t suppose I could finagle you and Donna into coming up here to set it up?” John said.
