“Paul Keeley. That’s right.”
“I don’t think I should—”
He sat on the wooden chair beside her. “Look, the first thing they do when they convict you of treason is take your ID away, making it more difficult for you to visit secure areas. The second thing they do is shoot you.” He indicated his face and chest, so far unviolated by bullets, and offered her an “Any questions?” expression. “What’s your name?”
“Technician First Class Andrea Berm.”
“Hi. Paul.” He shook her hand. “The place I’m looking for is in the Rockies. A city or town with a hotel with an atrium. The atrium goes from ground floor to the top of the top floor, and the roof above it is all skylights. I can visualize it and some of the surroundings very clearly. And I desperately need to find out exactly where it is.”
“All right.” She cleared a game screen from her monitor and brought up the search function of her system’s database. “We’ll start with everything you know about the place, we’ll weight those criteria, we’ll come up with a preliminary list of possibles, and we’ll begin clearing them.”
* * *
There were no tidy, clean offices in Home Plate, not even that of John Connor and Kate Brewster. Though larger and better appointed than most other rooms set aside for administrative work, theirs was still lined with tables and shelves, all of them piled high with computer gear, boxes of files, souvenirs from countless military operations, and photographs.
John held up a handwritten piece of paper to show Kate, who sat on the opposite side of the desk. “Final report on the Clover Compound evacuation.”
She didn’t reach for it. “Everything went well?”
“Everyone’s out of there. A third of the population is occupying evacuation caves not far away and setting one of them up as the start of a new compound; a third is headed to Denver to be dispersed from there; and a third is heading for Yucca Compound to be the core of its new population. Spotters saw portions of Clover’s exterior collapse, indicating that some of the internal explosives went off after evacuation. Maybe they took out some assault robots with them.”
“Let’s hope.”
There was a knock at the door and Lt. Lott, their secretarial aide, stuck her head in the door. Fiftyish and German-born, she’d been on a tourist trip to the United States when Judgment Day came and had never seen her native country again. She probably wouldn’t see it before she died. Her urban-camo uniform always looked newer, crisper than that of anyone on John’s senior staff. “Tree juice?” she asked.
Kate smiled. Though trade sometimes allowed them the luxury of experiencing real coffee, what the Resistance normally drank was usually percolated from one of several varieties of tree bark. Lott could never bring herself to refer to it as coffee. “Please.”
John nodded. “Me too.”
“There’s someone in the waiting area hoping you’ll have some time for him. I told him probably not today.”
“Who is it?” Kate asked.
“Paul Keeley.”
John frowned. “What does he want?”
Lott sighed, clearly not pleased with the answer she had. “He says he has a master plan to get lots of good people killed.”
John and Kate looked at one another. “What do you think?” he asked.
She shrugged. “We’d better see him now. Otherwise, we’re going to be dying of curiosity all day.”
“True.” John glanced over at Lott. “Show him in.”
She gave him a disappointed look and withdrew.
Moments later Paul entered, accompanied by Earl Duncan. Standard operating procedure demanded that at least one bodyguard be present when John or Kate had visitors who were not on the council of advisers or on a very short list of friends. Earl took up position in the corner nearest John; the position would afford him the clearest field of fire if trouble erupted.
Paul saluted, then took the chair Kate indicated. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” Kate said. “It looks like it’s the end of a long day for you.” In fact, Paul had rings under his eyes and gave the impression of someone who’d been up for far too many hours.
“I’ve been doing research. About this.” He held up a few pages of paper, some of them printed, some of them written on by hand. “Thanks for seeing me.”
John nodded and gave him a “Get on with it” gesture.
“I know where the T-X is continuing her training,” Paul said. “I’m here to propose an operation to go there and get her.”
“How would you know where she is?” Kate asked. “Did she tell you?”
“In a manner of speaking.” Paul tapped the side of his skull. “When she was communicating with me via this, she communicated more than I suspect she intended to. I saw some images of where she was set up. I spent last night working with members of your geographical data staff to determine where it is.”
“Which is where?” John asked.
“Bryce Hotel, Pueblo, Colorado.” Paul shuffled through his papers and put down two of them. They were black-and-white printouts of photographs showing hotel room interiors, happy diners in a restaurant, a round fountain with streams of water dancing atop it.
“Where’d you get this?” Kate asked.
Paul shrugged. “It was in BAWA. This is a page advertising the hotel’s features.”
Kate grinned. BAWA was an acronym used by Resistance computer historians. In the time before Judgment Day, some ambitious institutions had made a habit of sampling the entire contents of the old World Wide Web, making what constituted periodic “snapshots” of the contents of the Web in its entirety. The Resistance had been fortunate enough to find a couple of these archives intact on university computers, and the term Big-Ass Web Archive had entered the lexicon of the Resistance.
“So,” John said, “you’re here to recommend that we mount a mission to a site an hour’s drive from Navajo Mountain, a site where we assume the T-X will be because she told you so, and attempt to recapture her. And this despite the fact that, unlike last time, she’ll be surrounded by Skynet forces and probably smarter than last time. Yes?”
“Yes and no.” Paul sat back in his chair. He was oddly unconcerned in the face of John’s scrutiny. “We have a couple of things going for us. First, I’ll be on the mission, and I think that I can distract the T-X, perhaps persuade her that I’m there to surrender, perhaps even figure out where she is at any given time.”
“And second?”
“Second, this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever run across, so there’s no way Skynet could anticipate we’d do it.”
Despite himself, John snorted. “Okay, I’ll grant that. But let’s look at it from another angle. A mission like this would require an elite unit. A 1st Security Regiment squadron, probably. And everyone in the 1st hates your guts because you got two of its members killed and another badly injured. If Skynet’s forces don’t get you, you might die from friendly fire. Correct?”
“Correct.” Paul nodded. The idea had obviously already occurred to him.
“Plus, there’s your implant,” Kate said. “You’ve already said you don’t think the T-X can influence you through it anymore. But what if you’re wrong? What if Skynet comes up with some new set of commands that incapacitates you, or, worse, turns you into a Skynet asset? Even briefly, like last time.”
Paul smiled. “I have a solution for both problems. The same solution. Assign someone to kill me.”
John and Kate exchanged a look. John said, “Paul, you were supposed to say, ‘I hadn’t thought about that.’ Then retreat in confusion.”
“But I have thought about it. The solution’s simple. Assign one member of the team to stay with me. If I show any signs of helping Skynet, he puts a round between my eyes. Problem solved. Having an assassin on standby actually makes things safer for me, because there’s someone designated to kill me. It means no one else on the team is as likely to say, ‘He’s gone over to the other side’ and shoot me out of spite. It’s the specific assigne
d task of one of their own members to decide that.”
“Interesting,” John said. “Have you given any thought to necessary personnel, resources, timing, staging, transportation, and, most important, extraction?”
“That’s a little outside my field of competence. So I just did some thinking about those factors as they applied to Operation Fishhook and made some recommendations based on that.” Paul set the rest of his papers down atop the Bryce Hotel printouts.
Kate gathered them all up. “We’ll think about it.”
Paul stood. “Thanks again for seeing me.”
John gave him a curt nod. Paul left, admitting Lott, who entered with two steaming cups of tree juice.
“That was … interesting,” Kate said.
“Yeah, it was. Now let’s figure out if what he suggests could work.”
* * *
It took Paul a few minutes to track down Kyla. He found her emerging from the gunsmith’s workshop with a small cloth bag in her hand. Ripper and Ginger, accompanying her as always, moved up close to smell Paul, and Ginger offered her seal of approval, wagging her tail and angling to have her head scratched.
Paul leaned over to pat the dog. He straightened and indicated the bag. “Your lunch?”
“Ammunition,” she said. “Shells for my Barrett are pretty hard to come by. At the end of every operation, I turn in all my brass. They just finished putting me together some new rounds.”
“Ah. Well, in fact, I wanted to ask you about sniper stuff.”
She walked with him out into the main corridor in this supplies and workshops sector of Home Plate. The corridor was thick with pedestrian traffic, dim because of a lack of lighting fixtures, noisy. “Go ahead.”
“I had a talk a few minutes ago with your Colonel Walker.” Sidney Walker was the officer in charge of the 1st Security Regiment, the unit to which all three squadrons entrusted with John Connor’s security belonged. “I asked him what he wanted me to do with Charles Smart’s sniper rifle. He said Smart had no living family, so I could either learn to use it like a professional or turn it in to him for assignment to someone who would.” Paul shrugged. “I decided to learn how to use it.”
“So you’re asking me for training.”
“That’s right.”
“In spite of the fact that the main topic of discussion around Home Plate right now is how you screwed up and got Smart and Nix killed.”
“Correct. Don’t try to snow me, Kyla. You’ve already decided how guilty you think I am for that. There’s too much of your parents in you to let mess hall gossip make up your mind for you.”
“Ooh, nicely done. That was almost flattery. So what was I doing by saying that?”
“Testing my responses, I guess. Trying to figure out if I’d get mad and go away in a huff, or get defensive, or answer before thinking and say, ‘That wasn’t a mistake, I meant to get them killed,’ and therefore reveal that I really am a Skynet agent.”
She snorted. “Close enough. All right, I’ll find somebody to keep the dogs occupied for a few hours. Bring your rifle to the Southpoint exit station at two and we’ll go up to my shooting range.”
“Your own private rifle range?”
“Hey, I’m the boss’s daughter.” She turned away at the next corridor intersection and left him behind.
* * *
Kyla’s rifle range was a straight section of the old storm drains, hundreds of yards long and well away from any of the tunnels used for Resistance movement or habitation. Over a span of weeks or months, pouring concrete and then layering artfully strewn rubbish over the plugs, she had carefully blocked off most of the accesses into the section, leaving only two small, well-hidden entryways and a number of ventilation shafts open. She had also built an earthen wall at one end and strung lights powered by car batteries she hauled in for that purpose.
It was here that she showed Paul the workings of his new rifle. He’d had basic military training, of course. Though a civilian worker in the Resistance, he, like every other human, was expected to fight when fighting had to be done—and to do so competently and ferociously. He knew how to handle the many standard-issue Resistance firearms and explosives packages, but a specialized weapon such as this was a different matter altogether.
Kyla held the rifle and explained its functions for him. “Smart’s rifle is really the polar opposite of mine, so it tends to play a different role in field operations.” She hefted the night-black firearm. In the glow from the overhead bulbs, Paul could make out places where the matte coating had been scuffed or abraded, then repaired with a careful application of paint. Kyla continued, “This is a variation on the standard plasma rifle you’re already familiar with. Unlike mine, which fires physical bullets, yours superheats a small quantity of matter to a plasma state, then launches it against a target. When the matter hits the target, it imparts a significant portion of its energy, resulting in a small explosion.”
“So how’s it different from the standard plasma assault rifle?”
“Basically, three ways. First, range.” She indicated the weapon’s extended barrel and its removable scope, the fold-up iron sights that would be locked in the up position whenever the scope was removed. “Second, rate of fire.” She turned the weapon over and indicated the spot where a standard plasma rifle’s selector switch would be. This weapon had no such switch, no way to change it from single-shot to autofire. “You get one shot per squeeze of the trigger, period, so you have to learn to make it count. Third, there’s energy. The plasma package this weapon delivers is bigger than those from the assault rifles, even though the battery and mass packs are interchangeable. So it just hits harder.”
“Hard enough to put down a Terminator?”
She shrugged and handed the weapon back to him. “On a really lucky shot, on the kind of day when the weather’s just right and you just won the whole pot at cards … yeah.
“Otherwise, it can be reliably counted on to put damage onto a Terminator or assault robot, but it usually takes several shots to put one down. And that’s just not something you can count on. Hit one of the machine’s hardpoints, like its torso armor, over and over, and you’re just not going to inconvenience it much.
“Other differences.” She hefted her own Barrett. “Range. Plasma packages, because they don’t have much mass, slow down and are deflected by air friction even faster than physical rounds. In spite of the fact that this weapon is optimized for range, you’re just not going to get much accuracy beyond, oh, three hundred yards. Good hunting-rifle range. We’ve got two hundred yards to work with in this shooting range, and that’s a good maximum for you to work toward.”
“How far is yours accurate?”
“I get pretty good groupings out to a thousand yards. And I can damage a Terminator at that range.”
Paul whistled.
“I hope it doesn’t puncture your male ego that mine’s bigger.”
“I’ll cope.”
Over the next couple of hours, Kyla gave him the beginner’s course in sniper-style shooting. He learned techniques of breathing, of meditation, of concentration. He learned patience—Kyla had designed herself an apparatus, a target on the end of a moving pole, that would swing up into position after a programmed delay that could be anywhere from a minute to ten minutes after the device was activated.
He learned the care and feeding of the rifle, how to swap out the daytime optical scope currently installed atop the weapon for the bulkier, heavier starlight scope in a padded pocket of the rifle case.
And he shot. He fired at stationary targets, at targets swinging atop Kyla’s apparatus, at designated portions of the earthen wall. Sometimes Kyla told him to shoot when it felt right; sometimes she told him to shoot on her command.
And he did a fair job. The patience and meticulousness that were part of his work habit in other duties helped him here. Kyla looked over his groupings, over the charred craters his plasma fire had left in her earthworks, and pronounced him a promising beginner.
As they were packing up their gear for the return to Home Plate, she said, “Now, you just practice for another thousand hours or two, here and on field missions, and you might get pretty good.”
He laughed. “You are the boss’s daughter.”
She gave him a close look. She looked defensive for the first time, and he realized that she was ready to defend her father, rather than herself, from criticism. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you have a knack for explaining to people how bad things are—such as the fact that I’m hopelessly incompetent at this task—and yet make them feel like it’s just what’s to be expected and some hard work will straighten everything out.”
“Oh.” She relaxed. “Well, that’s usually the case, isn’t it?”
“Maybe when there are Connors around.”
She smiled and closed her rifle case. “Now you’re back to flattery.”
“Not really. The difference between flattery and honesty is that with flattery, you’d never say those things if you didn’t want something from the person you’re talking to. Even if it’s just a little feeling of gratitude or friendliness. With honesty, you’d say them anyway.”
She looked at him, and the guarded expression she so often wore was gone. “So you don’t want anything from me.”
“I didn’t say that. I just said that my comment would be the same whether or not I wanted anything from you.”
“Oh. Well, what do you want from me?”
“Other than what any straight male with any sense might want?”
“Yeah.”
“I want you to let me know when you think I’m a real boy.”
She struggled not to grin, but lost. “All right.”
c.18
October 2029
Home Plate
The powers that be still chose not to assign Paul to a specific work group. He interpreted that as meaning they were holding him in reserve for the mission he’d proposed.
Over the next several days, he spent his time preparing for that mission. It wasn’t training, exactly; the role he imagined for himself didn’t call for training. Instead, he imagined himself in conversation with Eliza, how he’d respond to her questions, how he might persuade her to do as the Resistance needed her to.
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