Paul lay there gasping for long moments, willing his heart and breathing to slow, forcing himself to remain under control. Then he opened his eyes to look around.
His second set of surroundings was very different from the bar. This was a brightly lit room, smaller than the bar, with off-white linoleum floor and walls painted in a soothing pastel yellow. There were chairs, rolling racks with what looked like complicated electronic equipment, and the centerpiece of the room, a massive black thing that looked like an egg-shaped coffin atop a rectangular black pedestal.
Something dug at his memory. I know what that is. I’ve seen them in books.
That’s a sen-dep tank. Sensory deprivation. A late-twentieth-century technique used in various sorts of esoteric research and medical treatment. The subject floats in a liquid environment, in total darkness. Cut off from most sensory input, he becomes more receptive to internal stimuli such as hallucinations, the effects of drugs …
Paul sat up. He seemed to be covered, head to foot, in the dark skintight material. He touched it. It was soft to the touch, giving way under the slightest pressure, and was wet.
Only his hands and feet were free. He raised his hands to his face. His head, too, was uncovered.
In his other vision, he remained slumped at the bar table, while the other occupants of the bar, endlessly patient in their paralysis, waited.
He stood, slow and awkward, and finally his other vision changed. In the bar, his other body straightened and stood as well. Now, when he raised his arms before his face, he could see them twice, once in his long-sleeved work shirt, once in the skintight garment.
But now that both views of himself were consistent in orientation and pose, if not in content, the nausea he’d felt was fading. He felt better. Just not good.
Now that he was upright, it was time to find out just what the hell was going on.
September 2029
San Diego, California
Glitch moved at a rapid pace down the access stairwell, his footsteps echoing on the concrete steps. His posture was perfect, his face devoid of any expression that might indicate he was aware that he could be confronting the end of his own existence.
That was the way it should be. Glitch was a T-850, a Terminator. Captured—assembled, rather, in pieces from Terminators destroyed at a raid on a Resistance habitation compound—and then repaired, reprogrammed, and upgraded from his T-801 roots, Glitch had no concern for his own safety beyond what was required to best achieve his mission parameters.
His short-term parameters were simple. Mark had explained them to him quickly, but meticulously, without recourse to emotional considerations that were irrelevant to Glitch. The activities of Ten and Earl were observable on this compound’s security cameras. The activities of Mark, Kyla, Glitch, and the dogs were not. Therefore the greater danger accrued to Ten and Earl. Glitch was to travel to their location and defend them against all attacks, pending further orders and further recalculations of mission parameters.
At the ground-floor landing, one heavy door—a metal fire door, painted in a red-orange that had faded and peeled with the years—led rightward, an unlit EXIT sign above it. Another, identical but for its darker paint job, led leftward. Glitch’s internal map, a wire-frame diagram of the portions of the building he had seen so far, coordinated with his internal compass and indicated that the right-hand door led to the main lobby. The left-hand door, logically, would lead to additional stairs downward.
He tried it. It was secure. He slung his chain gun on its strap back across his shoulder, then leaned into the door, felt its metal construction buckle under the pressure he exerted. He struck it, once, twice, three times, felt and saw it deform with each blow, and finally it was warped enough that the final blow slammed it open. The crash it made echoed up the stairwell he’d descended and down the one the ruined door revealed.
That was good. The noise might attract Skynet forces away from the humans and to Glitch.
* * *
The noises were almost simultaneous—a muffled clank from beyond the stairwell door by which Ten and Earl had entered the basement and a distant crash from the hallway that seemed to serve the basement level as its main entranceway.
Ten took a couple of paces back to keep ahead of the advancing tide of fuel oil. The air was thick with the smell, though it had been only a few moments since they’d severed the fuel lines. “We’re in for it,” he told Earl. “Both exits are covered.”
Earl turned to stare back into the dimly lit recesses of the basement. “Let’s make a new one.”
“I’m with you.” Ten followed the older man back past banks of locked storage areas with wire-mesh walls. From his backpack, he dug two of his three remaining shaped charges—blocks of plastic explosive with detonators imbedded in one side.
Not far ahead, the storage areas came to an end. There was concrete wall at the end of the aisle; it looked as though the last storage areas were not quite flush with the wall, that a gap, perhaps a service corridor, a mere yard wide separated the last storage areas from the wall itself.
Ten stopped a dozen steps from the wall. “Here,” he said, and slapped one of the shaped charges into Earl’s hand. “Set for radio detonation.” He marched on another six paces, concentrating on the apparatus in his hand, carefully flipping a rocker switch under a protective case from TIMER to RADIO and then closing the case again. From the back of the charge, he peeled a black plastic film; beneath it was a layer of yellowish adhesive, far more sticky than the plastic explosive it coated.
In the distance, footsteps—heavy, ringing, metal footsteps—approached from the direction of the main hall.
“Ten—”
“Yeah, I hear it.” Ten eyed the ceiling above. It was a full yard above his reach. He crouched and leaped upward, slapping the reverse side of the charge against the ceiling. He landed, knees bent, and kept his attention on the charge.
It held to the ceiling, the red gleam of an LED indicating that it was ready to receive transmission.
He glanced over at Earl. The older man had clambered up one of the wire-mesh storage area walls and was carefully fitting his own charge to the ceiling above it. Earl grinned down at Ten, the smile of an older and wiser man who knew how to achieve the same results without as much physical stress.
Beyond Earl, across the basement, a figure emerged from the main hallway at a trot, moving toward Ten and Earl.
She was not what Ten expected to see. She was a human female—blonde, youthful, vital. She was dressed as a nurse. Her expression was serene, unworried.
And she was not the source of the ringing, metallic footsteps. They were still coming up loud behind her.
Ten swung his weapon, the archaic Colt M16-A4 that served as his chief battle piece in those times when plasma rifle batteries were in short supply, around from his back and brought the barrel up. He aimed at the nurse, spraying fire across her head. The assault rifle kicked in his grip, its aim threatening to rise; he struggled to hold it in place.
Bullets struck the woman, deforming her forehead—momentarily. Then her skin smoothed. She continued forward, her pace unchanged.
“Fall back, fall back!” Ten suited action to words, trotting backward as he maintained his fire against the woman, squeezing off short bursts.
Earl dropped from his perch and raced past Ten, out of his sight.
The woman’s right arm changed, the flesh flowing from it like water, revealing shining metal apparatus beneath. The machinery itself altered, reconfigured, with a blue glow dancing across protruding elements.
Ten’s back hit the concrete wall. He moved right, positioning himself at the corner of the last storage area, and continued to fire.
Earl pulled at his sleeve, trying to draw him farther around the corner, out of the nurse’s sight. Ten shook him off. “Detonator!”
Earl shouted, “You crazy bastard!” Then he drew a device, the general size and shape of one of the late-pre–Judgment Day cell phones, from a jac
ket pocket. He used his teeth to pull its short antenna out to its full extent.
The nurse aimed her malformed arm. Ten shoved himself toward Earl, bearing his companion to the concrete floor, just as the air above them ignited with a brilliant electric-blue glow.
Heat washed across them. The contents of the storage area, metal desks and chairs and miniature refrigerators, wooden and plastic crates filled with paperwork and ancient medical samples, exploded or melted, plastic components screaming with animal-like voices. Ten looked up, saw the metal portions of the storage area glowing orange, yellow, and white, deforming as they melted. Heat beat down at them from the destroyed goods.
He scrambled back to the corner. The nurse was still coming. Five more steps and she’d be directly beneath Earl’s shaped charge.
“Ready!” Ten shouted.
Four steps, three, two—her arm came up again, aiming in toward Ten’s unprotective face—one—
“Now!”
The ceiling directly above and a half-dozen steps in front of the nurse rocked, spraying flame and chunks of concrete down upon the nurse. She looked up just in time to see a tremendous mass of concrete, rebar, and plaster crash down upon her. More rained down upon the pile of debris that covered her.
Ten felt hands on his shoulders as Earl hauled him to his feet. The older man wasted no time waiting for orders; he dashed forward to the mound atop the nurse, stepped up on it, and began climbing the adjacent chain mesh up toward the ceiling and the floor above.
Ten slung his M16 and followed. When he was halfway up, his eye was drawn by movement from the direction by which the nurse had entered.
Coming toward him was something the size of Glitch, but gleaming, silvery—an assault robot. Built like a Terminator, but without the false skin to conceal its true nature and lacking all the sophisticated programming needed by Terminators to pass themselves off as humans, it moved with a mechanical precision and efficiency that was distinctly inhuman. In its hands it carried a plasma rifle, as shiny and smoothly contoured as the assault robot itself.
And the robot was already aiming the weapon.
* * *
Once he was in the hallway, Paul found that his understanding of what he was seeing continued to improve. The vision of the bar and its paralyzed patrons faded to nothingness, leaving him in a hallway with scuffed off-white linoleum flooring and industrial-green walls. The air was cool and somehow sterile. The hallway stretched for what seemed like a half a mile ahead of him, but he knew that his perceptions still had to be distorted, that the corridor could not be as long as that.
All the doors along it were closed. He wondered whether opening any of them would give him answers to the questions clogging his mind. Where is this? How did I get here? Where’s Eliza? What’s happened to me?
But he didn’t dare look. Something told him that he was surrounded by wrongness and needed to get clear of it as fast as possible.
That meant finding an exterior exit. Was he on ground level now? Above it? Below it? The silence, broken only by the faint hissing of air-conditioning, suggested that he could be belowground.
First things first. Assess condition and resources. Someone had told him that. Who was it? A man with graying sandy hair, a fleeting, wispy memory. Thinking of him, Paul felt a sense of loss.
Condition: Physically weak, uncoordinated, brain not working right. Memory fouled up. Resources: a set of insulating garments from a sensory-deprivation tank.
If he could only get his hands on a firearm—
Did he know how to use one?
Yes.
How did he know how to use one?
He couldn’t remember.
He growled to himself, slapped his palm against his forehead as if to jar sticky gears and pistons into movement.
Paul came to a slightly open door. He peered in, then, half-recognizing the shapes he could dimly see, reached in to snap on the light.
Inside was furniture—a single twin-sized bed, the bedclothes disarrayed, a cheap-looking wooden desk, a straight-back wooden chair, a weight bench.
He felt dizzy again. This was his efficiency apartment, home sweet hovel, but beyond the door he was peering in should have been a set of three steps down to the sidewalk.
He stepped in and looked around. To the left should have been his kitchenette with the exterior window beyond. The refrigerator, stove, and miniature dishwashing machine were in place, but the window was black. Wondering, he moved over to it. Beyond should have been a busy city street, day or night, but there was nothing but darkness.
The sliding door into his closet was open, revealing his clothes on their hangers: plain white T-shirts, short-sleeved and long-sleeved button-down shirts in a variety of colors, blue jeans, slacks. He hastily grabbed several shirts and two pairs of pants. From the bottom of the closet he took his cross-training sneakers. He slid the closet door closed, revealing a mirror affixed to one of the panels. He dropped all his items onto the bed, rolled them into a bundle.
From the chest of drawers he took underwear and pairs of socks. Atop the chest of drawers was a belt pouch, the pouch he always wore. He’d been wearing it back in the bar. He unzipped it, looked at his contents. A multitool that would fold out into pliers and wire cutters, with smaller tools, ten of them, that would fold out from the handles, five to a side. His wallet. His keys—apartment, mailbox, the gated swimming pool of his apartment complex.
He pulled the belt around him and clicked the plastic buckle into place. There. Now I’m armed. It seemed laughable, but he felt better knowing his precious multitool was in his possession again. Thing’s older than I am— He frowned. He couldn’t remember where he’d gotten it, yet he knew that it was older than he.
How old was he? A year out of college, so twenty-three, he thought. But he couldn’t remember college.
What was this place? It looked like a hospital. Had he been institutionalized, for his own good, by friends or family?
No. There were no institutions. He had no family. He had no friends.
The truth of that, unaccompanied by memories to give it context, hit him so hard that he bent over, nauseated.
The wave of sickness diminished and passed, but not the conviction that his realization was the truth.
He could see himself in the closet mirror, and that view, at least, afforded him some relief. He was not unusually good-looking—tall, lean, with some breadth of shoulder, with brown eyes and ordinary features that would never land him a job in Hollywood—
If Hollywood was gone, why did he know so much about it?
—but the features were those he recognized, the only difference being the three-or-four-day growth of beard. He hadn’t worn any facial hair minutes ago, when he was talking to Eliza.
He gathered his bundle and left.
The next door down the hallway was ajar as well. It was the living room he’d known as a child, the muted orange of the rounded sofa as garish now as it had been when he was little, the turntable of the stereo system on a wall shelf that had been intended to bear books. It was all so fresh in his memory that he expected to see his mother, returning from her shift at the all-night restaurant, step in the front door to greet him, though she’d been dead since—how long?
Half-formed memories were slugging it out with one another in his head. He backed out of the room and decided to let them finish annihilating one another. Then he could ask the winners what reality was. He continued down the hall.
The floor trembled beneath his feet.
c.3
“Commencing download,” Mark said.
Kyla offered a faint snort of amusement. “That sounds so technical. Much better than: ‘At last I’ve figured out what I was doing wrong, so I finally have to get to work.’”
“Wiseass.” Mark turned his attention to the secondary monitors of the nurse’s station and began dialing between them, looking for his companions.
The floor shook. In rooms not far away, glass objects smashed on the hard floor
s. Ginger offered one bark, an alert for her mistress.
Kyla and Mark looked at one another. Kyla said, “That wasn’t the big one—”
“If it was, they really screwed up,” Mark said. “The big one should blow the whole building.”
Kyla offered him an insincere smile. “Let’s hope they give us a little advance warning.”
* * *
Glitch hit the basement-level door for the second time and it crashed open, falling off its hinges to the concrete floor.
Ten yards ahead stood an assault robot, aiming its plasma rifle at a target to Glitch’s left, out of Glitch’s line of sight.
Combat-oriented menu selections and situation analyses popped up into Glitch’s visual display far faster than either Glitch or the assault robot he faced could move.
The analysis program was clear: Anything the assault robot was likely to be targeting was probably either an ally, a potential ally, or something that the Resistance would want to inspect in intact form. The fact that this location corresponded roughly to the last known location of Ten and Earl made the probability that they were the object of the robot’s attention extremely high.
The amount of time it would take to bring Glitch’s chain gun back off its sling, ready it, aim it, and fire it, and for its rounds of ammunition to reach the assault robot in sufficient quantity to do it harm, was in excess of a second, far longer than it would take for the assault robot to evaluate its own situation and determine that it could eliminate its targets and then turn its weapon on Glitch.
Glitch rejected that option. He kicked the metal door lying at his feet.
The warped slab of metal skidded across the floor in substantially less than a second. More than a hundred kilograms in mass, it crashed into the assault robot’s ankles. The robot, its legs knocked out from beneath it, fell forward onto the door, shooting as it fell. The eruption of superheated plasma splashed out across the wall and ceiling, an erratic, badly aimed spray.
Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt Page 3