Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt

by Aaron Allston

  He poured out the contents of the backpacks. There were no radios to be had, but he found a web belt with a holstered handgun and an ammunition pouch. He buckled it on.

  c.15

  The T-X dropped into a crouch atop a rock that loomed over the roadway. A massive boulder projection, it had soaked up quite a lot of heat during the day and was still releasing it into the night air. In the infrared range the humans’ goggles afforded them, she would probably be hard to detect if she remained motionless.

  She turned to face the direction from which the next vehicle should come, and she waited.

  There it was, a plume of brightness in the distance. It quickly grew into a recreational four-wheel vehicle, a dune buggy. She recognized it as belonging to the Scalpers; it was the second vehicle belonging to that company, the one that had been occupied by J. L., Nix, and Smart, and as it got near enough for her to make out the three occupants, she recognized them. The vehicle was hauling a small crude trailer upon which, wrapped in a tarpaulin, appeared to be a motorcycle.

  A pity this wasn’t Connor’s vehicle. But it was a stepping-stone on the path toward Connor.

  As it neared her position, she leaped in its direction of travel. She came down feetfirst in the backseat, directly atop the member named Nix, her great weight smashing his leg and pelvis.

  The tremendous impact of her weight bottomed out the shock absorbers. The vehicle veered, sending the T-X momentarily off-balance. She corrected this by seizing one of the roll bars. Nix shrieked, but seemed to have been incapacitated by pain.

  The young one, J. L., stood up in his seat. The T-X swung an arm at him, a backhand blow that should have smashed his head. But he was ducking beneath the blow even as she committed to it, and as her arm passed above his head he reached up with his shoulder belt and wrapped it around her extended arm, then hauled on the lap belt portion of the restraint. The T-X, gripped by a material with far more tensile strength than mere human flesh, was tugged off-balance.

  From his crouch, J. L. kicked up at her, the blow striking her buttock and sending her a few more degrees off-balance.

  The T-X took a few milliseconds to recalculate. J. L. was proving to be an impediment. He could not stop her, hurt her, or kill her, but he could delay her long enough for the vehicle’s driver to perform an action she might consider troublesome.

  From her awkward position, she reached over to seize the back of J. L’s seat and yanked with all the strength she could manage. The seat broke free of its mountings and catapulted J. L. over the side.

  Before he hit the pavement, she issued instructions to the truck, ordering it to run over the human lying in the road. There was a small but measurable possibility that the impact would throw his body off the road and make it difficult for the driver of the next vehicle in line to detect. The main purpose of the instruction was to ensure that J. L. would be dead rather than injured when encountered; if he were still alive, he might gasp out some information that the vehicle’s occupants could transmit, thus costing the T-X several seconds of potential surprise.

  She dimly detected the truck’s transmitted response, accepting its new instructions. The lack of long-distance broadcasting functionality could conceivably impede her ability to control the truck. She also instructed it to close up the distance between it and her position.

  Now the dune buggy’s driver, Charles Smart, was lifting a field radio to his mouth. The T-X lunged forward and grabbed both the device and Smart’s hand, crushing them both instantly.

  The man’s face twisted in pain. Unlike Nix, he did not shout. Instead, he yanked the wheel, sending the dune buggy toward the lip of the road.

  As the dune buggy’s front wheels roared out over empty space, the T-X reflected that she probably encountered more truly obstructive humans than other Skynet units.

  * * *

  Paul’s truck negotiated a hairpin turn. Now the drop-off was on the driver’s side. And Paul could see, far ahead, a bright green shape that had to be the Scalpers’ second dune buggy.

  It was weaving all over the road. As he watched, something bright detached itself from the vehicle and rolled to a stop in the middle of the road.

  Then the dune buggy veered left and sailed off the road.

  The truck picked up speed, and as it neared the object lying in the road, Paul could see that it was a human body. The truck angled itself to put its driver’s-side wheels right across that unmoving form.

  Paul seized the steering wheel and yanked it to the right, away from the drop-off, away from the body. The wheel resisted in his hands but was still connected to the truck’s steering. The truck slewed rightward, missing the body. Then the wheel yanked itself free of his control, correcting the truck’s course so that it was safely in the middle of the road again.

  * * *

  The T-X, undamaged, clambered free of the dune buggy and surveyed the damage.

  Nix and Smart were both dead. Smart still stared at her, an angry expression still on his face, but his neck was at such an angle that he could not have survived. Their possessions had spilled out of the vehicle in a broad debris field, and the rollover had caused the yoke of the trailer the dune buggy had been pulling to snap.

  But the dune buggy itself seemed to be in fair to good condition. If that were the case, it would still travel faster, over a protracted distance, than she could. She pitched the bodies of Nix and Smart out of it, then picked up the buggy’s front end and hauled it quickly up toward the roadway.

  The truck reported that it had missed its target. It supplied no explanation; the components controlling it did not have enough processing power to come to any conclusions.

  She ordered it to turn back and finish the human. As this task would doubtless take it out of her broadcast range, she issued additional orders, instructing it to continue up the road and ram the next vehicle in the convoy. If it succeeded in destroying that vehicle and was still mobile, it was to repeat that action against each successive vehicle in the convoy, until all were destroyed, in which case it could power down, or it was destroyed.

  She reached the roadway, set the dune buggy up on four wheels, and climbed into the driver’s seat. The vehicle started on the second try. She roared off in pursuit of the next vehicle.

  Behind her, she heard gunshots. She assigned that event a high probability that it was J. L., partially recovered, firing on the truck that was about to end his life.

  * * *

  Paul watched as, far ahead, a shades-of-green T-X appeared at the edge of the road, hauling the dune buggy.

  Then the truck began to slow. Wheezing like a runner too old for the race, it maneuvered onto the right shoulder, then commenced a slow, careful turn back the direction it had come.

  It had to back and fill a couple of times to accomplish this task, Paul saw—the road was too narrow for it.

  It had to be turning around to go after whoever was in the road. He couldn’t let it do that. Worse yet, by stopping here, it was letting Eliza get farther and farther away from him.

  He piled as much as he could of the dead soldiers’ gear into one backpack, then, still gripping it, stepped out of the truck in the middle of its maneuvering. He drew out the handgun at his belt. It turned out to be a Colt 9mm, made for the armed forces before J-Day. He switched the safety off and put a couple of rounds into the driver’s-side tires, then fired the rest of its clip into the engine.

  He knew the engines on these trucks. He knew where the fuel lines were, where the drive train emerged, where the carburetor was. He concentrated his fire on these areas.

  The truck continued to pull around until it was facing back the way it had come. Paul put his last rounds into the passenger-side tires. Then the slide of his gun locked back … and the truck’s engine died.

  He swapped out the spent clip for a full one in the belt’s ammunition pouch.

  * * *

  Miles ahead, John Connor, in the driver’s-side backseat of his Humvee, saw the T-850, Glitch, tilt hi
s head. The movement was uncannily like that of a human trying to hear something better, and it was for very similar purposes. The Terminator would be trying to get an optimal orientation to improve his reception of distant audio stimuli.

  “What is it?” John asked.

  “Gunfire,” Glitch said. “Multiple shots. Small arms. Miles away.”

  John considered. That in and of itself was not unusual. There were humans living in the wild spaces all over the world—and not all of them belonged to the Resistance. As many trips as John had been on, it was not unusual for travelers to hear distant gunshots from some solitary homesteader hunting or from some exchange between a Skynet-controlled unit and a band of luckless humans.

  Still, it never paid to ignore signs of trouble. “Stay alert,” he told everyone.

  * * *

  Breathing fast, Paul reached the site of the dune buggy’s crash. In his infrared field of vision, the bodies of Smart and Nix still glowed brightly. Their weapons, camp packs, and field rations were scattered all over the slope, though Paul could see no sign of a radio.

  The trailer he’d so laboriously pieced together had half-folded on impact, and the ropes and tarp wrapped around the Kawasaki were slack. But when Paul pulled them free, the motorcycle itself did not seem to be too badly damaged. The left handlebar was bent, at a lower angle than the right, but the throttle seemed operational.

  Paul hastily cut the ropes away and freed the dirt bike from the wreckage. Then he grabbed up some items from the field of debris. Smart’s sniper rifle, still in its padded cloth case, looked intact; he retrieved it first. He set it aside for the moment, along with Nix’s plasma assault rifle. A few feet from the assault rifle, Paul found its corresponding ammunition bag, filled with battery/ammunition packs and weapon maintenance tools. He poured its contents into his backpack, donned that, then slung the sniper rifle across it. He positioned the sling of the plasma assault rifle across his neck so the weapon could be swung back, out of the way, or forward into firing position. Then he was ready to go.

  The road, which Eliza was now traveling, continued off the right, disappearing in the distance. But there had to be a switchback down in that direction, because the same road continued well down the slope below Paul.

  He twisted the bike’s key in the ignition and the engine caught. He pointed the wheel down the slope and began navigating the rocky, cactus-dotted, slippery route toward the road below. If he reached it quickly enough, he could head off Eliza, perhaps even head off the next vehicle along the convoy.

  * * *

  “Oncoming vehicle,” Glitch said in his flat tones. “From ahead. It is a motorcycle optimized for off-road use. Single operator.” He reached down to the floorboards and picked up a classic Uzi carbine. At some point, it had been reconfigured from single-shot operation to full autofire functionality. He held it out the window with his left hand.

  Tom Carter, in the front passenger seat, gave him a look suggesting that he was insane. The trouble was, the Terminators he programmed, such as Glitch, weren’t insane, and they didn’t lie. Carter put on his IR goggles and thumbed the switch to power them up. He heard John and Kate checking out their plasma rifles.

  The shades-of-green vision the goggles afforded Carter confirmed Glitch’s statement. “Hold your fire,” he said. “That’s Paul Keeley.”

  “How the hell did he get ahead of us?” Kate asked. “Wasn’t he at the back of the caravan?”

  “I suspect we are in real trouble,” John said. “What are our immediate resources?”

  Glitch said, “Scalpers-Two has closed the distance behind us. They are the nearest reserve unit.”

  The motorcycle roared past them, headed back the way they had come.

  c.16

  Had she been capable of excitement, the T-X would certainly be feeling it now. She was only a few hundred yards behind the next vehicle in line, and it was a Humvee, the precise sort of vehicle John Connor was known to favor. Every minute that passed she gained at what she believed to be an inconspicuous rate on her quarry. This vehicle would probably be able to outpace a Humvee if her quarry decided to make a run for it. Things were going well.

  Then her optical sensors picked up a new infrared source. A small flare of heat was now visible on the road ahead of her quarry and was closing range fast.

  Probabilities popped up on her main screen. The probabilities that this was a member of the convoy traversing its length to report on the general condition of all vehicles, or that it was a Skynet unit that had detected the convoy, were approximately equal. The T-X increased her rate of speed. Either way, a conflict would be precipitated within the next few seconds.

  The new heat source resolved itself into the image of a human on a motorcycle, reducing to almost nil the likelihood that this was another Skynet unit.

  The motorcycle passed the Humvee, approaching at a rate of speed inconsistent with a mere patrol or courier mission.

  As the T-X’s optical analysis routines determined that the motorcycle’s operator was a known individual, Paul Keeley, he raised his weapon, a standard Resistance-issue plasma rifle, and opened fire.

  The T-X put the dune buggy into evasive maneuvers, erratic back-and-forth movements designed to throw off the aim of an attacker. Her precise choice of maneuvers was based on firing behavior observed in humans in similar circumstances, on the tactics they would employ to hit a rapidly dodging ground vehicle.

  Her evasions did not work. Plasma blasts struck the windshield in front of her and the roll bar above and behind her, nearly causing her to lose control. Another struck the road immediately in front of the dune buggy, sending up superheated gobbets of pavement into the engine compartment. The engine immediately began whining. The T-X calculated from the noise that a belt had loosened or fallen free. This did not augur well for the continued survival of this machine.

  As her optics cleared, Paul roared past her on the motorcycle. She did not attempt to maneuver into his path. Such a collision would further damage her conveyance.

  Her tactical programming informed her that she had not fared well in terms of combat efficiency. She had probably overestimated his combat skills; the wide, erratic way he sprayed the plasma bursts was not as easy to anticipate as the tighter, more controlled assault from a human veteran, hence the damage her vehicle had sustained. And had she readied one of her internal weapons, she could have eliminated this intruder as he passed. She dismissed the analysis. She could remove Paul from the picture and still retain him as a Skynet asset with almost no effort.

  She wrested the dune buggy back into line, aiming it at the tail end of the Avenger ahead, and accelerated.

  * * *

  As the plasma fire began behind the Avenger, Glitch checked both the side-view and rearview mirrors. “Illumination of the pursuing vehicle’s passenger compartment indicates that it is being operated by a T-X,” he said.

  John swore to himself. The events that had preceded this attack began to click into place in his mind. It was completely unlikely that a second T-X had reached this scene, so somehow the T-X they had captured had escaped her confinement. And somehow Paul had detected the escape and given chase.

  Glitch shoved the driver’s-side door open and braced it with his foot, then reached up to clamp a hand on the vehicle’s roof. “Someone else should drive,” he said. He stood up and heaved himself onto the roof.

  Tom Carter, his face a comic mask of surprise, grabbed the steering wheel. Despite his effort, the Humvee swerved to the left. He was able to yank it back in line along the center stripe of the road, and John could hear Glitch sliding around on the roof.

  Carter swore to himself and slammed the driver’s-side door shut. “Speed and efficiency are one thing. Behavior that gets us killed is another thing entirely.”

  Kate, her head half out through her window, called, “You’re right, it’s complete foul-up. Talk to the programmer.”

  “Oh, ha-ha.”

  John reached up for his lapel mic,
but his radio buzzed before he even touched it. “Command, this is Fishhook-Seven. Emergency.”

  Fishhook-7 was the Avenger. John keyed his microphone. “Seven, this is Command.”

  “We’ve just come across Corporal Larson. He’s badly hurt. He says his vehicle is down and the package is loose.”

  “We just got some of that information ourselves, Seven.” John did some rapid calculations. The truck the T-X was in was Fishhook-6. Its personnel were likely to be dead, but there was some faint chance some of them, and some of the other Scalpers in Fishhook-5, had survived. “Command to convoy, command to convoy. All vehicles numbered five and higher are to turn back and switch to the first alternate route to destination. Personnel who are extravehicular should go to ground and make your way by best means available to the nearest habitat you can reach. Vehicles one through three, be aware, command is being pursued by the package and about to come under fire.”

  Which was a conservative way to express their situation.

  * * *

  Paul downshifted rapidly, got the dirt bike turned around, and accelerated in the dune buggy’s wake.

  Then he heard Eliza’s voice, her tones soft and caressing: Paul, it’s time to go to sleep. Sleep, Paul.

  He closed his eyes.

  He felt the handlebars vibrate in his hand as he hit a patch of rough road. That snapped his eyes back open again. He found himself drifting toward road’s edge. He leaned the other way, straightened out.

  No, Paul. It’s better to sleep now.

  His eyes closed again, but he forced them open. It was like trying to stay awake at the end of a late-night shift when the body knew what was best but the mind was unwilling.

  Well, his mind was in charge. He gritted his teeth and continued accelerating.

  The next time Eliza’s words came, his eyes didn’t even begin to close.

  Finally he knew what was happening. It was his implant. It was indeed an interpreter of sensory stimuli. While he floated in his sensory-deprivation tank, it would tell him what he was feeling, experiencing.