Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt

by Aaron Allston

  “Everyone goes home happy,” she finished.

  J. L. reached over and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. Sato didn’t know whether it was just an act to comfort her or whether J. L. recognized that the action would be seen, would inevitably be reported to Mears. Probably both. Sato decided that the boy was proving to have good people instincts, to have wisdom beyond his years.

  That wasn’t as rare as it had been before Judgment Day. People needed to get wise fast. Someone who, even as an adolescent, couldn’t behave beyond the urges of his hormonal storms was much more likely to make a fatal error than one who could.

  Nix, opposite Sato, spoke up, his voice oddly melodramatic: “It begins.”

  Sato followed the man’s gaze. Just entering the mess chamber from one of the main tunnels were Mears and Murphy. The compound leaders nodded and chatted to people as they moved among the tables, but there was little doubt that their eventual destination was the Scalpers’ table.

  Sato caught Smart’s eye. “We could use a couple of extra chairs.”

  Smart nodded and rose. Moving quickly but unobtrusively, he approached two tables with unoccupied seats, spoke a few words to the people there, and absconded with two chairs. He placed one at either end of the Scalpers’ table and was seated again before Mears and Murphy reached them.

  “Good evening,” Mears said. He spoke to Sato, but his glance flicked momentarily to Lana, who sat between Sato and J. L. Lana didn’t look up at him.

  Sato kept his tone cordial. “Good evening. I hope you’ll forgive us from stealing your attendant this morning. We had some questions, and she’s been most helpful with the answers.”

  “Not a problem,” Mears said. “I didn’t realize you were breakfasting out here, though, Lana. You might have let me know.”

  Before she could answer, Sato gestured at the two empty chairs. “Please. Join us.”

  Murphy moved around to the far end of the table. He hadn’t said anything, and there was a faint tinge of curiosity to his expression. He obviously knew something was up, knew that whenever someone in Sato’s position defied custom there had to be a reason.

  Mears settled in at the end next to Sato and Nix. “What sort of questions?”

  “Well, pertaining to security issues.” Sato gave Mears his serious “Be prepared for bad news” face and lowered his voice. “There’s a serious security problem, a leak, here at Clover, and it’s getting people killed.”

  Mears leaned in close and put his elbows down on the table end. His tone was low, too, and Murphy had to lean in closer to hear him at all. “What problem?”

  “Well, it starts with Steve Earle and Joel Benson.”

  More than three months ago, the most aggressive Resistance cell in this region, headed by former Air Force colonel Steve Earle, had found what promised to be an unguarded back door access into Navajo Mountain. With his mobile special forces cell, carrying a briefcase nuke provided by the Resistance through Clover Compound, Earle had traveled a second time to the vicinity of that back door … and disappeared.

  A month later, Lt. Joel Benson, leader of the 1st Resistance Rangers, Special Incursion Unit Red 1, and four operatives had tried to replicate the mission. They, too, had failed. Their deaths had been heard by John Connor and his chief advisers; Benson’s team had been in direct radio contact with Home Plate when they’d been assaulted and destroyed by Skynet forces.

  And they, too, had naturally staged through Clover Compound.

  Mears nodded. “A damned shame. Not just because a successful mission would have destroyed Skynet. Those were good men and women. Are you saying that a security breach here had something to do with their deaths?”

  “Yes.”

  “Odds are long, Sato. They walked right up to Skynet’s back door. There can’t be any more sophisticated a security setup anywhere in the world, except maybe at Home Plate. They were caught because they were detected.”

  “They were caught because someone here told Skynet they were coming.”

  Mears’s eyes widened. He turned to look around the mess hall. His movement was slow and smooth, an attempt to be surreptitious, but many people still noted the compound leader’s attention and offered him respectful nods.

  He returned his attention to Sato. “Who?”

  “The same person who informed Skynet of the location of Clover Compound in the first place.”

  Now Mears, already pallid from his years belowground, paled to an even whiter shade, making the liver spots on his face stand out in greater relief. “We’d all be dead.”

  “Eventually, you will be. The instant Skynet realizes that information from Clover Compound has dried up. At that point, the robots will come in and everybody in this compound will be slaughtered.”

  Murphy finally broke in. “You’re saying Clover is doomed. We’ll have to evacuate.” There was disbelief in his voice, disbelief and pain.

  Sato nodded. “That’s right.”

  “No, no, no.” Mears shook his head. “This is a theory on your part, nothing but a theory, and it’s contradicted by all available facts. I am not going to lead all these people, who rely on me, in some terrified, half-assed exodus just because you theorize that we have an information leak.”

  Sato kept his full attention on Mears. He didn’t let himself blink. Under the table, he slowly, silently snapped open the holster flap that kept his Glock handgun secure. “You’re right … in that you’re not going to lead. Colonel Mears, tonight you’re stepping down as leader of Clover Compound.”

  Mears leaned back as if Sato had just transformed into a poisonous reptile. “Now I know you’re crazy.”

  “Whether I’m crazy or not, at this moment I have a nine-millimeter semiauto pointed at your gut, and if you do anything to interrupt what I have to tell you, I’m going to put about six rounds into you and keep the rest in reserve to keep this crowd under control. You have my word on it.”

  At the other end of the table, Murphy started to rise, but Jenna the Greek caught his eye and gave him a slow shake of the head. Her right hand, too, was out of sight beneath the table. Pointedly, her spoon in her left hand, she scooped some oatmeal into her mouth and gestured for Murphy to retake his seat. He did, his expression neutral.

  “In direct contravention of Resistance security protocols, you’ve been maintaining and regularly visiting an insecure aboveground site,” Sato said. “Your old home. Specifically, the library of your old home.”

  Mears shot Lana a betrayed look. “It is not insecure.”

  “It has five intact windows facing territory controlled by Skynet.”

  Mears looked at Sato as though the man were an idiot. “Five intact windows. Nothing comes in. Nothing goes out. No security breach.”

  “Even assuming that a sufficiently sophisticated Terminator couldn’t get close enough to plant a microphone on the exterior of one of those windows—”

  “I have passive sensors all along the outside of the house. Standard pressure sensors. Nothing could get up to those windows.”

  “What do you bet, Mears?”

  “How about your life, Lieutenant?”

  “Against your job? I’ll take that bet. Have you ever heard of a technique by which a laser can be directed against a glass surface to measure infinitesimal vibrations in the glass? And those measurements processed to re-create the sounds, including human voices, that caused them?”

  Mears was silent. But his eyes, widening slightly, told the entire story to Sato. No, I hadn’t.

  “Several times a week, you’ve taken Lana up to your hideaway, read your books, spent time with her, talked to her. You talked to her about Earle’s expedition—and Benson’s. About the back door and the briefcase nukes. The day before yesterday you told her about Gwendolyn Drew, the woman we’re looking for. And you told Skynet. All without meaning to.”

  Mears shook his head. “I don’t believe you.”

  Sato continued as if the old man hadn’t spoken. “Yesterday I had Lana speak, as i
f she were talking to you, and indicate that you’d left something behind in your library—a clue Skynet can’t afford not to have. Then we left. If I’m right, and I am, Skynet will have dispatched a mechanism to take a direct look at that clue, since it’s not something Skynet could acquire by bouncing a laser off a window. Just how good are your passive sensors upstairs?”

  “Very, very good.”

  “And very well hidden, too, I take it.”

  “Yes.”

  “While you were up there, have you ever discussed the locations of those sensors with Lana? Or any of your other attendants over the years? Offered any information that would allow Skynet units to bypass them?”

  Mears thought about it for several long moments. Finally he shook his head. The gesture lacked energy; it was obvious that the old man was seriously considering the possibility that he had betrayed everything he had built over the years. “No. Only in my office. That’s where I keep the plans and diagrams.”

  “Then let’s go look at whatever you use to record the sensor output.”

  * * *

  In the high airflow chamber, Mears looked at all the faces gathered around him: the Scalpers, Murphy, Lana. Then he pulled open the circuit box that provided access to the house far above.

  Instead of throwing the three false breakers in the pattern that unlocked the box, he threw them in a different order. There was the faint whine of a servo and from behind a mass of wiring and circuitry descended an ancient liquid crystal display screen.

  It came to life, displaying the word TEST in the upper left-hand corner. Then that word faded and characters Sato couldn’t interpret came up:

  Mears seemed to deflate. He leaned against the circuit box and held on to it as though if he let go he would fall.

  “What’s it mean?” Murphy asked.

  “Sensors nine, fourteen, fifteen, and eighteen were tripped last night, each one twice, going in and going out,” Mears said. His voice was hoarse. “Side walkway, side service door, front servants’ stairwell, hallway leading south from the library. And the X designation is a rough indication of the weight of whatever tripped the sensors. It was something in excess of two hundred kilograms.”

  Nix whispered, “The boss goes on a shooting spree.”

  “Okay, you’ve seen the bad news,” Sato said. “And the last of the bad news is that you’re retiring, as of this morning, and appointing Murphy your successor. Here’s the good news. The Resistance needs your skills. You can’t be in charge here, but you can come back to Home Plate and teach engineers from all over the continent to do some of the things you do. You can save lives and more than make up for the lives this screwup has cost. Or you can relocate with your compound and live the life of a retiree. As little as any compound can afford to support someone who isn’t working, John Connor is pushing to have it happen here and there … so that people understand that if they live long enough, they can live out the rest of their lives without working themselves to death. But you have to decide what it’s going to be.”

  “I’m not giving up my house.”

  “Understand me, those were the only two choices where you get to live.” Sato’s tone was hard. “Any choice where you try to keep charge of things, even what’s about to be an empty shell of a compound, is a choice where the Resistance can’t afford for you to survive. You would be captured and you might be induced to talk. Not just little bits and pieces, but years’ worth of information might fall to Skynet that way. So, again, you have to decide between the choices I just gave you.”

  Mears finally turned his attention to Lana. “Where do you want to go?”

  She kept her eyes down. “I think … I think…”

  “Speak up, girl.”

  “Home Plate, I think.”

  Mears looked back to Sato. Putting on an expression of false cheer, he said, “I guess we’re going to Home Plate.”

  “Then I’ll stay with Clover,” Lana said.

  Mears stared at her. “Now you’re being insolent.”

  “She’s not going with you,” J. L. said. He didn’t put an arm around her, didn’t make any sort of “She’s with me” gesture. Another point in his favor, Sato thought. “You’re going to have to do without her.”

  “Did I ask you to speak?” Mears’s words came out in a bellow, the loudest Sato had ever heard him speak, and Lana flinched away from the fury in his tone. “You little grabby handed, greasy-haired piece of crap, did I appoint you to speak for this girl?”

  J. L. didn’t lean away, didn’t respond with a punch, didn’t react at all. He crossed his arms and stood there.

  “I quit,” Lana said.

  “What?” Mears’s tone returned to its normal volume.

  Finally Lana met his eyes. “Raymond, I’m not mad at you. You’ve been very nice to me and I’ve been very nice to you, and I don’t blame you for anything. But I quit.”

  “I won’t let you.”

  An expression crossed Lana’s features, a realization that she was trying to impart knowledge to someone incapable of accepting it. “I’m sorry. You’re not in charge anymore.”

  c.10

  They reentered the mess hall, where the crowd of breakfasters had only just begun to thin. Mears, moving at last like an elderly man, walked to the center of the hall, the Scalpers, Murphy, and Lana gathered behind him, and raised his hands for attention. The noise of conversation abated almost instantly.

  “I have an announcement to make,” Mears said. “After many years of serving you as leader … I’m being betrayed by members of my own staff. These people are kidnapping me and plan to destroy the compound—”

  His words were choked off by Jenna the Greek, who got an arm around his throat and squeezed.

  Sato saw the situation begin to play out as though it were in slow motion. Men and women all over the mess began to stand, some of them, a handful, pulling out firearms and readying them, looking from one to the other as if to sort out the confusion. The Scalpers brought out their own guns; Sato had his own in hand before he realized it. In a matter of moments, the Scalpers stood in a circle, facing out, guns ready, against a superior and ever-growing number of people pointing guns straight at them.

  “You dumb bastard,” Sato hissed. Then he raised his voice to be heard above the rising roar from the crowd. “Everyone, stay calm. Colonel Mears is not telling the truth—and I’ll tell you facts you can confirm.”

  From the back of the crowd rose something glittering. Before Sato could quite recognize it as a bottle, one of the numberless old glass containers the Clover Compound residents used as drinking vessels, it crashed into the side of Jenna the Greek’s head.

  It didn’t break. It made an unhealthy ponk noise, then fell to the floor and smashed. Jenna the Greek staggered, but kept her grip on Mears and her handgun.

  Murphy raised his hands, trying to bring order. “Sato’s telling the truth—”

  Mears got his hands under Jenna’s forearms and pushed, giving him a little room to breathe. “Murphy’s the traitor! He’s sold you all out! He just wants my job—”

  Jenna tightened her grip, but with Mears’s hands in place resisting her, she couldn’t quite choke off his words.

  Tactics flashed through Sato’s mind, instantly evaluated, instantly rejected as each one seemed likely to get everyone killed.

  “Bubba’s real name is Eugene!” It was a female voice, and it was high and loud enough to cut through clamor filling the air.

  Sato turned to look at the woman who had shrieked those unlikely words. It was Lana, standing on the bench of the nearest table, towering over those who surrounded her. She looked, her expression sorrowful, at a large white man whose hair and beard were a thick, consistent gray. “Isn’t it, Bubba?”

  The clamor quieted a little, and Sato saw confusion on other people’s faces, confusion matching his own.

  “How did you know?” Bubba asked. He sounded more surprised than pained by the sudden revelation.

  “Raymond told me
. In the library of his house, topside, where we go for privacy.” Before anyone could cut into her words, Lana spun, located another face, and said, “Maria, you got convicted for embezzling from Mears Enterprises. That’s how he knew you were good with inventories. Right?”

  The woman she spoke to, a middle-aged Latina, looked stricken. “He said he would never say anything.”

  “Well, he did, to me. He told me about everything. About all the private things you admitted to him.” Lana turned again, looking from face to face. “He told me about the compound’s secret operations, stuff you never knew about. And I told him I’d stay quiet, too. But I can’t, not if people are going to get killed for it.” Lana was crying now, her face seeking forgiveness from the people she addressed even as she spilled their secrets.

  In Jenna’s grip, Mears was still struggling, but no longer talking.

  Lana raised her voice once more: “And every time we talked up there, Skynet was listening. Lieutenant Sato showed us how. Skynet knows all about Clover Compound and is just going to use us until it stops getting information. Then we all get to die. Raymond just won’t admit that it’s true.”

  Sato began to breathe a little easier. The faces of those in the crowd, hostile and deadly in their attention to the Scalpers a moment ago, were now turning to suspicion and bewilderment … directed against Mears, not them. Sato saw several of the handguns angle away from the Scalpers.

  Mears uttered a final moan and his eyes rolled up in his head. He slumped in Jenna’s grasp. She lowered him to the hard floor—

  Then he was up on his feet, pushing Jenna to send her staggering away. Sato and Nix lunged forward to grab him, but Mears was already among the crowd. A large man ducking out of Nix’s way stepped right into Sato’s path; Sato caromed off him and staggered back into a table, while Nix found himself jammed into the panicky crowd.

  And then Mears was through the crowd, ducking down one of the numerous tunnels that entered the mess hall.

  “Crap,” Sato said. He shoved himself to his feet and took a quick look around, evaluating the crowd.