Terminator 3--Terminator Hunt

by Aaron Allston

  It had to be some leftover part of his Skynet conditioning. It wouldn’t do for someone who thought he was a twentieth-century clerical worker to desire to live in a hole in the ground. “I hope you get to do that,” he said and climbed into his bedroll.

  “Thanks.” Sato crawled into his own tent and disappeared.

  Kyla was one of the last to set up her tent. Paul poked his head out to watch her work. “Cold camps like this,” he said, “I bet you miss your dogs.”

  She nodded. “Yeah. My big, furry space heaters.” She’d left Ripper and Ginger back at Home Plate, which was only sensible for a mission in which the entire team was going to be winched into and out of a blimp, though no one had known at the time why the orders had directed the dogs be left behind.

  “So, what if this warm-blooded mission planner were to look at you and say, ‘Hey, how about crawling into this bedroll with me? I’ll keep you warm.’”

  Mark, standing on the other side of the small encampment, shot him a warning look. Paul ignored it.

  Kyla smiled. “I’d say no, thanks.”

  “Oh, hell.”

  “But I’ll say this, too.” She leaned in close over him and her hair brushed his chin and forehead. “You asked that just like a real boy.” She leaned a bit closer and gave him a quick kiss. “Good night.”

  “Night.”

  * * *

  After a day’s rest, and in the remaining hours before sundown, they got in a little additional training.

  Dr. Bowen raised the Blowfish to an altitude of about thirty feet beneath the gondola. From the gondola’s aftmost compartment, the Hell-Hounds showed Paul the bare basics of rappelling, a task they might be called upon to perform when descending the Bryce Hotel—or even exiting the blimp itself, should something cause a winch to jam. And all members of the operation got some additional training with the devices that, for this mission, replaced Operation Fishhook’s steel net and capacitance charges.

  Conceived of by Paul and built by Lt. Tom Carter’s workshop, the four devices resembled harpoon guns. That was, in fact, what they were, except that they also functioned in a fashion similar to tasers. The harpoon, though it could in no way do real damage to a machine as tough as a Terminator, had a head with reverse barbs that would penetrate skin—or liquid metal configured to function like skin—and be difficult to remove. When fired, it carried with it one end of a heavy-duty electrical cable. The cable led back to a capacitor carried within a backpack. Paul dubbed the weapon the “T-taser.” The weapon’s left trigger would launch the harpoon; the right trigger would fire off the capacitor.

  With three or four successful hits, the T-tasers would, in theory, be able to put the T-X down for enough time to attach the CPU insulator, the device needed to keep the Terminator inert. This was nowhere near as reliable an arrangement as the net in Santa Fe had been, but at least it was mobile.

  Once an earthen rise had taken enough harpoon shots to establish that everyone could reliably hit a human-sized target within the weapons’ limited range, they were ready to go.

  * * *

  Four hours later, they cruised in over the northen end of the darkened city of Pueblo. Dr. Bowen told them over the intercom that they were running parallel and a few hundred yards west of I-25, the main north-south highway. The LCD screen in the main passenger cabin showed an infrared view of streets and houses, long-empty swimming pools, long-abandoned cars, all of it crawling past very slowly. Everyone present had seen this sort of landscape before, except that the altitude and perspective were very different now.

  Paul found it difficult to keep his breathing under control. He’d been on any number of field missions in the past, even if on those occasions he’d merely been a well-protected technician, but this was very different.

  Those had been intelligence-gathering or resource-harvesting operations. This was far more critical. John Connor’s life might depend on it. Which meant the Resistance’s very existence might depend on it.

  If Paul screwed up, he might doom the Resistance.

  That thought settled over him like a wet, cold blanket.

  “You all right?” Kyla asked.

  He gave her a nervous smile. “I always get a little nervous when I visit old girlfriends.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Don’t you ever get the shakes?”

  She thought about it. “The guy who taught me to shoot, Tony Calhoun, once told me, ‘Consign yourself to dying at the start of every mission. That’ll keep you calm enough to shoot. You’ll fight harder, better, and smarter. If you survive to go home, then you’ll get the shakes.’ And he was right. It’s a sad way to live sometimes, kind of hard on the morale, but I think I’ve kept more people alive because of it.”

  Paul fell silent and thought about it.

  That’s what he’d done back on the highway where he’d confronted Eliza. He’d been sure he would die then. And though regretting the likelihood of his imminent demise, he’d never been as sure and focused as in those moments.

  Dr. Bowen’s voice crackled over the intercom. “We’re getting a good correspondence between available maps and what we’re observing on the ground. So I’m pretty sure we’re on course to the Bryce Hotel. Estimated time of arrival: seven minutes.”

  “Final gear check,” Ten said. Half of them stood and the rest remained seated in the already-overcrowded compartment as they performed one last confirmation that every piece of gear they needed was still in their possession, every weapon loaded, every battery charged.

  Paul found that his heart was no longer pounding hard enough to shake him.

  His sniper rifle, tool kit, CPU insulator, IR goggles, handgun, and miscellaneous gear were in order.

  He was ready.

  c.20

  They assembled in the aft compartment and hooked Mark, Kyla, Ten, and Earl up to the nylon webbing arrays that Dr. Bowen had called carry rigs; they were attached by carabiner clips to the metal loops at the end of the cables. Then Ten switched out the compartment’s light. After a minute, their eyes more adjusted to the darkness, Ten flipped the intercom switch. “Ready to go,” he said.

  “Opening in twenty seconds,” Bowen answered. “From the time I open it, I’m leaving this intercom dead. Don’t want any extraneous sounds floating out of the bay.”

  “Roger that,” Ten said.

  Moments later, they felt air movement. In seconds, the hatch covers had withdrawn to their fully open configuration, and the operatives stood on the narrow sections of flooring surrounding the gap. Now they could hear the rush of wind across the blimp’s surfaces, hear the muted whine of the main and secondary engines driving the blimp forward. Though the city beneath them was dark, occasional objects—intact car windshields, pools of standing water—reflected the stars.

  Paul switched on his goggles, watched as the streets below materialized into shades of green. He could now estimate their movement rate. It didn’t seem much faster than a good walking pace. The buildings below seemed to be mostly office structures, shops, restaurants, and hotels, and he decided that the gondola was less than fifty yards above the ground.

  They passed over a sprawling, irregular building, probably a convention center or something similar, with a connecting hotel on one side. Then the engine whine changed. Their forward progress slowed even more and they began to descend. Moments later, a rooftop, closer than the other building summits, perhaps only thirty feet down, moved into view from ahead. Paul could see a dark mottled surface, like a squared-off letter O, with a much brighter square in the center. On one side of the darkened portion was a raised scaffolding, a sign that once had shone with the words BRYCE HOTEL; Paul could see that some of the letters had survived and from the rear he read: B E H TEL.

  There was also a small, boxy construction on the dark portion of the O, something like a windowless, one-room shack. That was their target. As Paul watched, they moved until the edge of the roof was beneath them, then they were directly above the brightest portion
, which had to be the skylights over the atrium.

  Dr. Bowen apparently realized that this was not ideal. The Blowfish shuddered a little as it slowed, then came to a complete halt. One set of engine sounds stopped completely, but the higher pitch of the secondary engines increased. Paul winced as he listened and imagined that every machine everywhere in Colorado could hear the noise.

  Blowfish drifted to port and suddenly the hatch was directly above solid roof again. “Go,” Ten said and stepped down into nothingness.

  The cable he was hooked to kept it from being a long step. Mark, Kyla, and Earl followed suit. Glitch, on the control panel, threw four switches and the four operatives glided, nearly silently, down into the darkness.

  Blowfish continued drifting as they descended, but Bowen kept them above rooftop all the way down. Then, as they landed and strapped themselves from the carry rigs, the blimp began to gain altitude, the ends of the cables snaking up and away from the operatives below. The four hundred or so kilograms they and their gear represented was a significant part of the blimp’s payload. Paul heard the tiny whine of servos as the main engines turned, then the deeper hum as they kicked in again. Now Bowen would be pumping some of the hydrogen out of the ballonets, directing outside air into the main envelope to maintain pressure. Lift would decrease slightly and—

  Blowfish slowly descended again. On the roof below, Mark was at the door of the small boxy construction, performing a security check on it. That door should lead to the stairway into the building proper, and if Resistance intelligence held true to form, there would be little or no security installed. If Skynet didn’t believe the humans could do something, such as land operatives on a ten-story roof, it generally didn’t defend against that possibility.

  The ends of the cables snaked up again and Glitch switched the winches off. Paul struggled into his carry rig and clicked its straps shut.

  “Go,” Sato said.

  And Paul, unconcerned, stepped off. The cable held. He and the others dangled, then began their descent.

  By the time they reached the roof, Mark had the door open. He and Kyla entered. Ten motioned the rest to wait. Paul unclipped himself and stepped out of his rig, watched as two of the three cables snaked up into the sky, watched as Blowfish once again began its altitude-balancing act. The third cable remained at its fully deployed length.

  A minute later, Glitch slid down the last cable, his hands wrapped up in a blanket to protect his artificial skin from the damage the cable would otherwise have done to it. He landed comparatively lightly for something that weighed two hundred kilograms, even discounting the massive pack he wore. When Blowfish rose away this time, it made no effort to maintain altitude. Paul heard its engines hum to life again, and the craft slowly began moving toward the south, toward their eventual rendezvous.

  Now they followed Mark and Kyla into the building.

  The door led into a concrete stairway. There were metal safety rails along the walls, and the forward edge of each step was inset with an abrasive strip to make slipping more difficult. That marked this all as original equipment, as Skynet never built anything with the safety measures that had so concerned humans before J-Day.

  One floor down, they passed through a metal doorway into the top floor’s main corridor. To one side were room doors, all closed; to the other, a solid banister over the building atrium. The banister rail was chest-high, making it harder for some foolish hotel guest to fall over. The corridor made right-angle turns at intervals so that a square bank of rooms surrounded a square corridor, which in turn surrounded the square atrium.

  And light filtered up from the atrium’s lower floors, bright enough that Paul and the others could switch off their infrared goggles and pull them free.

  Below, between them and the lobby floor, hung a large apparatus that looked like it was made of dozens of lengths of shiny brass piping. From a central point directly beneath a three-story-high support cable attached to the corners of the roof, the pipes spread out in several directions, looking like multiple sets of superelongated wind chimes or a set of pipes magically removed from a church organ.

  Paul felt the others looking at him. “What?”

  “What the hell is that?” Ten asked, whispering.

  Paul sighed. “It’s a sculpture. Decoration. I mean, I suppose Skynet could have assigned it some sinister purpose, setting each pipe up to fire a single armor-piercing round or something, but why?” He shook his head. “It’s just leftover twentieth-century decoration.”

  Ten relaxed. Paul returned his attention to the floor below. The hotel lobby was well lit, shiny, and well scrubbed, as if a crew of workers had been at it only that morning. Paul could see black marble gleam from the top of the reception desk.

  “Feel anything?” Ten asked him.

  Paul shook his head. “But something occurs to me.”

  “Shoot.”

  “In the hospital where you found me, they’d restored a nurse’s station, and that’s where Mark was able to get all the information about me.”

  Ten nodded. “Right. So?”

  “So it suggests that, when it sets up these facilities, Skynet preserves the original roles of certain areas. Nurse’s stations were places where computers were set up and where you could get information about patients. So is a hotel’s reception desk.” He pointed downward.

  “That’s a good place to start, then,” Ten said. “Kyla, where do you want to set up?”

  “Fifth-floor balcony,” she said. “It’ll give me a good field of fire, and if I have to get out quick, it’s a height I can rappel down from—inside or outside.”

  “Okay, you’ll peel off there. Everyone back to the stairs.”

  * * *

  At the fifth-floor landing, Kyla did wait until Mark checked out the door and pronounced it free of security measures. Mark pulled it open a bit, looked both ways, and said, “Empty and unlit.”

  “Good luck,” Paul said.

  “You too.” Kyla slipped through and was gone.

  The rest of them reached the first-floor landing moments later. Ten was looking concerned, and as Mark checked out this door, Paul asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s going well,” Ten said. “I hate that.”

  Paul opened his mouth, but it was Glitch who spoke up first, asking, “Why?”

  “Because it usually means that we’ve guessed wrong about the enemy’s setup.”

  “Sometimes,” Sato said, “it just means they’re sloppy.”

  Ten nodded. “But counting on that is a fast way to get dead.”

  “A simple sensor,” Mark said, gesturing to the door lock. “Made to send a signal somewhere anytime the door is opened or closed.”

  “Simple to disable?” Ten asked.

  “Already done.”

  Sato considered. “So it’s not intended for someone like us. Who, then?”

  Something stirred up a bad taste in Paul’s mouth. “Someone like me,” he said.

  Ten looked at him. “Huh?”

  “Think about it. They’ve built a new facility to replace the one you wrecked. What else have they replaced—or are they planning to replace? Me.”

  In his peripheral vision, Paul saw Jenna pale, but she didn’t say anything.

  Ten absorbed the idea with less concern. “Ready to go?”

  “Ready,” Mark said.

  “Go.”

  Mark slid a tactical observation device, a narrow mirror at the end of a several-inches-long metal stem, beneath the door, then leaned down close to look at it as he turned it back and forth. Satisfied, he pulled the door open an inch, peered around, then opened it wide enough to stick his head through. Paul could see potted palms directly ahead. Finally Mark stood and slid through the door, leading the way.

  They were in a lobby-level side corridor, as clean and brightly kept up as the atrium floor had been. Signs on nearby doors indicated the presence of bathrooms, pay phones. Paul wondered what he would get if he picked up a pay phone and diale
d a number. Would he have the opportunity to talk to Skynet for a brief few moments?

  The corridor ended to the left, merged with the atrium to the right. Just to the right of the stairway door—and immediately opposite—were elevator doors, three on each side. The seven operatives moved silently to the atrium end and surveyed what lay beyond.

  The lobby was spacious, its main open area constituting the bottom of the atrium. The front doors, sliding and revolving, were on one wall with nothing but huge plate-glass windows stretching above them for two more stories. Along the lobby’s edges were the registration desk, the bell captain’s desk, doors into offices and into the bar and restaurant, hallways leading to function rooms.

  To the right of the hallway where the Hell-Hounds and Scalpers stood was a fountain, the same one Paul had seen in his brief vision and in the old hotel advertising material. It was a four-foot-high bowl, its internal diameter some twelve feet across, its exterior made of gleaming green marble. Though water was not being piped up through it now, the water in it seemed clear, and Paul could see coins in the bottom.

  Far above the lobby floor, ranging from the fifth to seventh stories, was the esoteric sculpture they had seen from the top floor. Its dangling pipes swayed gently in the air-conditioning, occasionally connecting and making a pretty, metallic tone.

  Motion attracted Paul’s eye to the front doors. Beyond them stood hotel employees: men wearing purple uniforms with gold trim. On the street they faced, cars and taxicabs occasionally passed before them.

  Paul discovered that he was sitting down. Ten leaned in close. “Are you all right?”

  “Tell me what you see through the doors,” Paul managed.

  “Nothing. They’re black, totally black.”

  “Got it.” They were black like the window in Paul’s bogus apartment had been. The blackness was some sort of neutral field or color, like a blue-screen once used in moviemaking, replaced by sensory input broadcast by the facility’s computers—input only someone like him could see. “I’ve interfaced with the computers here,” Paul said. “I didn’t even know when it happened.” He got back to his feet. “Sorry, I was startled.”