T2, p.24
T2, page 24
Alissa regretted that the Terminator didn’t have a rocket launcher; one shell and problem solved. One of those approaching did have one. But they’d slowed yet again in the interests of silence, so she’d have to wait for the satisfaction of seeing her enemy blown to pieces. She wanted to tell them to get it over with, but held back. She’d already been too impulsive tonight; there was no sense in giving herself more cause for dissatisfaction.
And on the other hand, despite her suspicions, there had been no sign of the Connors. Perhaps she should amend her orders. Well, she’d consider it.
The Sector commandos had counted four men approaching and reported their positions to their fellows. All remained silent in the gully and John surmised that someone had jumped the gun and now was holding back, waiting for reinforcements. That wasn’t like a Terminator. Their method was to go for their target. Undirected, the shooter would have been down in that gully exchanging fire ten minutes ago.
Which means, he thought, that we’ve got another . . . Serena Burns on our hands, for want of a better name. Another of Skynet’s little surprises. Maybe she’s less experienced. Then he thought irreverently, There are always two, a master and an apprentice . . .
He watched the gully for movement, trusting the commandos to watch the approaching Terminators. He wanted badly to warn them what to expect, but knew better; he’d been here before. They’d find out soon enough; let them keep their innocence awhile longer. Perhaps, though . . .
“These guys are going to be very hard to stop,” John said. “Real hard. Sort of like armored-car hard. You won’t believe me now, but keep it in mind.”
The black-clad gunmen gave skeptical grunts; John shrugged and looked back to the gully. He wondered why the five men huddled behind the dubious protection of the car didn’t retreat to the rocks? At least rocks didn’t explode when a rocket hit them.
Dieter van Rossbach had seen a lot of wounds. Sully didn’t have a sucking chest puncture, but it was bad, bleeding freely, and might be worse inside. He packed it with bandages from the pouches on the Sector agent’s harness, tightened the straps to hold pressure on it, and stabbed a hypo of painkiller from the field medical kit through the cloth of his uniform and into his arm.
All that I can do, he thought, and looked at the two arms dealers. “You’re going to contribute some equipment to this, ratfuck,” he said, keeping the explanation on a level he estimated their shock-numbed brains could handle. “Do you have any night-sight gear?”
Waylon swallowed as Dieter slipped the trunk open. “Yeah,” he said. “In the red plastic box by the spare.”
Dieter grunted satisfaction as he slipped the goggles over his head and switched them on. The world sprang back into clear vision, in shades of green and silver; not as good as full light, but fighting Terminators when they could see and you couldn’t wasn’t his idea of fun. The two arms dealers watched with awe as he loaded up from the rest of their samples; four LAWs across his back—those were collapsible one-shot rockets—a heavy Barrett .50 rifle in his arms, and a slung grenade launcher with a bandolier of 40mm shells. He picked out a few extras—thermite grenades, explosives . . .
“I suggest you arm yourselves,” he said to the two gaping would-be merchants of death. “Things are going to get a bit excessive.”
“Use your shotgun, use your shotgun!” John yelled, fighting back a surge of panic.
One of the Sector agents was staring incredulously as a Terminator sat up, its belly chewed to fragments of flesh held together by blood-sodden cloth. The pistol in its hand came around again, and John winced as the back of the agent’s head blew out in a shower of bone fragments and brains. The other black-clad man obeyed, unlimbering the longer weapon from his back and firing as fast as he could rack the slide of the battle shotgun. The dull massive thudump-thudump-thudump split a night full of screams and shots, a huge bottle-shaped flare of gases lancing out with every round. The gun was loaded with rifled slugs—heavy grooved cylinders of lead, meant for smashing open locks or other demolition work. The massive frame of the Terminator lurched back as each round struck its torso; with the last it toppled backward like a cut-down tree, striking the ground hard enough that John could feel the earth shake beneath him.
“Grenade!” he yelled.
The Sector agent reacted with automatic obedience to something in John’s voice, something that struck too deep to remember that he was a teenager or had been a prisoner less than a minute before. John leapt to his feet with a scrambling gracefulness, snatched the smooth egg-shaped mass out of the man’s hand.
“Illuminating!” the agent warned.
“All the better,” John called back, pulling the pin as he ran and letting the spoon clatter off into the night.
Ought to take him at least fifteen seconds to reboot, he thought—he’d listened carefully as “Uncle Bob” explained the weaknesses of the T-101 class. Sure enough, the massive limbs were just starting to stir as John reached the recumbent form, jammed the grenade into a hole blasted by one of the rifled slugs, jumped, and slammed his heel down on it to drive it deep into the Terminator’s bulky form.
That gave him footing for a backward leap. He blessed the endless hours of practice Sarah had put him through, practice in every form of martial art she could find and gymnastics as well. That let him backflip back to where the surviving Sector agent waited, staring incredulously as his hands automatically reloaded the shotgun.
“You stuffed a grenade into his—”
Several things happened simultaneously then. The Terminator came to one knee, arm extended to aim its pistol. The thermite grenade exploded in the same instant, a brilliant flash of fire and white light; John squinted as he forced himself to feel across the head of the dead man an arm’s length away. The head shot hadn’t wrecked the man’s goggles, and John slipped them over his head after wiping off the worst of the clotted matter on a clump of grass.
“Thank God,” he muttered—there was part of the enemy’s advantage gone.
He scooped up his rifle; it was an ordinary hunting model, bolt action, but the rounds inside were hard-points with much more penetrating power.
“You stuffed a grenade right into that guy’s chest,” the Sector agent said.
“Yeah, except it isn’t a guy. You know any guys who can take fifty rounds of 5.45 and then six rifled slugs and get up again?” John asked.
He was impressed at the speed with which the Sector agent rallied. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “Either I’m crazy—”
“Or I’m right,” John said. “C’mon.”
The night-sight goggles didn’t show contrast very well; when they leopard-crawled to where the Terminator lay smoking, the vision was more than enough to show the warped metal “bones” protruding through the false flesh. The Sector agent gave a grunt of horrified nausea as the head turned and a face half stripped of skin snapped at him. John pulled another grenade—one of the dead agent’s—and judged his time carefully. The next snap closed on the butt of his rifle, and he jammed the grenade in after it. Terminators didn’t spit very well . . .
“Fire in the hole!” he barked, and rolled away.
This time the Terminator didn’t get up. The problem was that it was only one of them, and—
John threw himself convulsively backward. A hand like an ax slashed into the hard clay where he’d just been lying, burying itself wrist-deep. That gave him just enough time to bring his rifle up and fire as the T-101 wrenched itself free and turned toward him. The round struck with unintentional precision in the right knee joint, and the machine fell. When it tried to rise again the limb was locked; it lurched forward more slowly, eyes riveted on the priority target.
Terminators were like that; one-track metal minds. The Sector agent rose to his knees behind it and fired his shotgun again and again, a rippling blast of fire that outlined the hulking figure of the murder machine against the night like a strobing flashbulb. It toppled forward again, landing with an earthquake clamor. John scooted backward on his rear, firing as fast as he could work the bolt of his rifle. Rounds punched into the thing’s arms and shoulders, but its eyes flickered and began to focus again . . .
The Sector agent was a man of resources. He came running up behind the prone machine and imitated John’s tactic, buried the grenade with a stamping kick and then hurtled across the reviving killer. He grabbed the younger man by the collar of his jacket, half dragging them back to the lip of the gully.
“Down!” he shouted. “Whatever it is, it’s got a thermite grenade up its—”
Badoom!
Another sheet of white flame, and the forward half of the Terminator’s torso shot by them, tumbling down into the gully and grabbing at loose rocks and shallow-rooted bushes in an attempt to stop the slide. A huge slab of rock came free under its impact, followed it down, bounced, and landed atop it with a precision no intelligence could have produced. Sparks sizzled out from beneath it, and the outstretched hands clenched, quivered, went limp.
“This isn’t happening,” the Sector agent repeated to himself as he reloaded. “This isn’t happening.”
“Unfortunately it is,” John whispered—and then cursed himself. Terminators had very sensitive auditory pickups, and they’d be looking for his voiceprint.
Dieter laid Sully down behind a boulder, one of many dotting the sandy floor of the arroyo, then continued crawling. The Sector agents seemed to be fully engaged now; there were firefights going on around half the rim of the gully, the muzzle flashes giving the hole cut in the desert floor a weird flickering illumination, like an old-time silent movie. And if his hunch was right . . .
The distance was a good twenty yards, but he could see the resemblance between the hulking figure that strode down the slope toward the arms dealers’ car. It even moved a little like him, if you imagined Dieter von Rossbach as one of Romero’s living dead. He got a whiff as it passed; if Romero had had scent sprays for one of his brain-eater flics, that was the perfume they’d have used. Uncertain voices cried out from behind the car, then screams of terror and the flicker of two assault rifles being fired on full rock-and-roll auto. That made Waylon and Luke worse shots than they’d have been naturally, and only half a dozen rounds struck the machine. It lurched, staggered, came on inexorably, pistol extended and cracking out one shot after another. Someone else—Luis, probably—was firing more steadily, and making better practice, until he stopped a round.
Definitely Luis, Dieter thought; the voice screaming for its mother was in Spanish. The Terminator walked slowly forward, and its gun cracked three more times—making sure of the targets and making sure of its identification.
That gave Dieter time enough to extend the fiberglass casing of a LAW and flip up the simple post-and-ring sight. “Big mistake,” he muttered, and squeezed the trigger.
There was little recoil. The blare of the rocket motor lancing out behind him was a different matter, igniting weeds and sagebrush and pointing to him with a finger of fire. He threw the empty launcher aside and dove for cover, with rounds chewing up the dirt at his feet.
Another finger of fire drove toward the Terminator. It had just enough time to turn and meet the 66mm shaped-charge warhead with its face. The cone-shaped tube of explosive within detonated, turning its copper liner into a pencil of white-hot metal traveling at thousands of feet per second. The finger of incandescence was designed to punch through a tank’s armor; the tungsten-titanium-steel alloy of the Terminator’s skull was tough, but not that tough. The flame lance pierced it the long way, scrambling the delicate components of its CPU and memory systems into molten silicon as it went. The machine fell backward across the bodies of its victims.
Dieter broke open the action of his grenade launcher, slipping in one of the fat shells and scanning around the edges of the gully. John should be—
He blinked behind the night-sight goggles as the front half of a Terminator shot over the lip of the arroyo, trailing fire. It tumbled down the steep slope, bringing down a minor avalanche of stones with it—including a boulder the size of a small car that fell free of the clay and landed on the machine’s torso and skull with a clang audible even through the sounds of combat.
“That’s my boy,” he muttered, and went up the near-vertical slope with a scrambling ease that belied the hundred-odd pounds of munitions draped about his body.
Behind him a streak of flame reached down toward the car. Someone else had a rocket launcher, and when it struck the car the explosion was movie-violent. Billy-Bob and Good Ol’ Boy must have had some serious explosives in that vehicle, Dieter thought as a huge pillow of hot air slapped him against the wall of the gully. When he looked back, only a crater remained of car, Terminator, and human bodies . . .
With the destruction of the third Terminator, Alissa panicked and contacted Clea.
*What is it?* Clea asked. She’d been working on a prospectus for Roger Colvin, the CEO of Cyberdyne, and wasn’t happy to be interrupted.
Alissa paused before answering, put off by the impatient tone of her older sister’s answer. But things at the gully had reached a point where she knew she was out of her depth. *Please access the team I’ve sent after von Rossbach,* she said.
Clea did so and was horrified by what she saw. *You sent four?* she asked, trying to keep the message emotionally flat.
Alissa bit her lip in consternation. *No,* she said. *I also sent the uncle we buried.*
Clea didn’t respond to her sister but ordered the remaining Terminators to disengage. She watched through their eyes as they fought their way clear and ran. It seemed to her that the humans didn’t try too hard to stop them. Both bore considerable damage; their skin hung in ribbons and shattered electronics sparked as they ran, causing one to limp occasionally.
Computer-controlled emotions notwithstanding, it was extremely vexing. She was very vexed.
*We’ll discuss this later, once I’ve had an opportunity to study the recordings of this incident,* she said to Alissa.
The younger I-950 frowned. Withdrawal hadn’t been on her mind. The Terminators were definitely making progress in their attack; she’d only wanted advice on how to press their advantage without losing any more of them. She now regretted contacting her elder about this. If they’d kept up the attack they’d be walking away from it with something to show for it besides the loss of valuable resources.
*Alissa?* Clea said.
*Of course,* her sister answered. *At your convenience,* she said coldly.
Sully was alive and conscious; conscious enough to watch as the living half of his team rolled the boulder off the remains of the . . . machine, he decided.
It had definitely been a machine; the fall and the rock had stripped most of the flesh off, leaving the gleaming metal bones bare. Enigmatic shapes lurked within the “rib cage,” and a few sparks still sputtered around the severed spine. A man came half falling down the slope of the arroyo wall and gasped.
“Other one’s gone,” he said. “His buddies must have taken it. Bottom half of this one, too.”
“And not enough of this one to prove anything to anyone who wasn’t here,” Dieter von Rossbach said, after bending close. “It landed with its head on a rock, and then this boulder came right down on top. No ting inside the skull except what was pounded back into sand.”
Sully could tell the big man was upset; his Tyrolean accent was a little more noticeable. He almost laughed, but with the hole in him that wasn’t advisable. “Now I believe you,” he said. “But who’s going to believe me?”
Well, my men, he thought. Although Rogers was lying on the ground with his face in his hands, crying like a kid.
“Doc Holmes,” Dieter said. “Contact him. Blame everything on me when you debrief. We’ll be in contact through him.”
Sully nodded slowly. “And I suppose for the details, I can look up Sarah Connor’s transcripts?” he said weakly.
“Ja,” Dieter said. “Speaking of which, do you know where she is?”
“Flew the coop,” Sully replied. “Vanished from the halfway house with Dr. Silberman, after some weird shit with a janitor. Last seen crossing the border to Mexico—the all-points just missed ’em.”
He noticed Dieter exchanging a glance with John Connor . . . who is now my ally, Sully thought despairingly. It was so tempting to imagine he was in a hospital having delusions, but he knew better.
“In that case,” Dieter said, “We could use some transportation.”
“Hey, it’s my nickel,” Sully said. “Now I get a chance to let you go.”
PORTO VELHO, RONDONIA, BRAZIL,
DECEMBER
* * *
I don’t see why we can’t just sail down the river to Paraguay,” John complained, looking out over the slow, green expanse of what would eventually become the Río Paraguay.
“We took the river down from Colombia,” Dieter replied, “and we still ended up walking half the way.”
“The falls and rapids were not my idea, buddy. Anyway, your friend Sully gave us a plane,” John pointed out. “We could have flown all the way to São Paulo, or even Asunción if we wanted to. But noooo, that wasn’t covert enough.”
“Well, it wasn’t,” Dieter replied with strained patience. “Leaving the plane in Colombia was more convenient for them and now they won’t know which direction we’ve gone in. I’m surprised that after all these years you don’t think that’s a worthwhile objective.”
Von Rossbach manifested his annoyance by stomping down the street. Locals moved out of his way, giving him uneasy glances.
John frowned thoughtfully as he sped up to keep pace. “Well, yeah, it is,” he conceded. “But I really don’t think being here is a good idea. And I’d like to go on record as saying that seeing Garmendia is a stupid one.”
