Infiltrator t2-1

by S. M. Stirling

  “And I suppose the power cell must be authentic, original equipment, too,” John continued. “It sure wasn’t running on a lawnmower engine! But the rest’s like a cheap knockoff. Like something someone could do in a lab now. It’s all a little different somehow. This thing was made out of here-and-now components, mostly. With the essential stuff from Skynet—from the future. It isn’t Skynet’s style, really.”

  Sarah smiled tiredly; they’d driven a long way through the desert today in the rather crappy Jeep one of her “friends” had sold them. Desert grit still made unpleasant little sounds between her back teeth, and itched in all the creases of her underwear.

  “Now you’re psychoanalyzing a genocidal computer?” she asked.

  “What can I say—it’s a long-term relationship,” John pointed out. “You might say it’s my mission in life. Hey! I’m supposed to be this great military leader, right? Did Napoleon’s mom treat him this way?”

  “She probably whacked him upside the head with a broomstick now and again.

  Of course, she didn’t know he was going to be anything but a Corsican dropout.”

  “Yeah, but you do. So how ‘bout a little respect?”

  Sarah grinned and settled herself down, leaning her back against a rock and

  wiggling until the gritty desert soil felt a little more comfortable. “That thing from a cell phone,” she said after a moment, “what’s it do?”

  “Basically it’s the whole works,” John said, “without the speakers.”

  She nodded, gazing into the fire. “So you were right to make that Faraday cage,”

  she said grimly. “It was communicating with someone.” She glanced up at him.

  “Any way to find out who?”

  “Not without the right equipment.” John’s eyes grew dreamy for a moment.

  “Jackson Skye probably had stuff I could’ve used to find out.”

  “Hold on to it,” Sarah said. “We may yet be able to find out.”

  “If it was communicating with someone it means there are more of them,” Dieter said.

  Sarah and John looked at him.

  “We know,” she said gently.

  “The question is,” John said, “another Terminator, or something else?”

  “Like a T-1000?” Sarah said, her eyes distant.

  John took a shaky breath.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Or maybe just a better-made Terminator,” she said. “If this isn’t an original

  Skynet special, then something here is building them. It has to be. Something came back from the future, with the power units and CPUs. A coordinator, a manager.”

  “Sort of a master Terminator?” John said. He held up the board from the cell phone. “And this might have its number.” He looked at his mother. “So, do we give it a call?”

  A smile lifted one side of her full mouth. “Maybe, when we figure out how to get the number.”

  “I’m worried about the pilot,” von Rossbach said suddenly.

  “Don’t go there, Dieter,” Sarah warned. “If he’s smart he’ll go for therapy and within a month the doctor will have talked him into disbelieving what he saw. If he’s not smart he’ll take a lot of drugs or drink a lot of booze, and when they cart him off with the d.t.‘s he’ll have a therapist convince him it was all in his head.”

  “I think the second way sounds smarter,” John volunteered.

  His mother pointed a finger at him and he subsided, grinning.

  “Thing is you can’t concern yourself with him. We haven’t got the time. Nobody will believe him anyway.” Sarah said.

  “Somebody will,” Dieter warned. “Whoever is at Cyberdyne will. And they must be pretty well connected to the Web to have known we were in the Caymans.”

  John tapped his tweezers against the Terminator’s metal skull in a hip-hop beat

  as he thought. “And if that’s so…” he said, slowly, his eyes flashed up to meet his mother’s.

  “Then Sacramento is probably a trap,” she said.

  John nodded. “So? What are we gonna do?”

  Sarah blew out a breath that fluttered her bangs. She shrugged.

  “We go to Sacramento,” Dieter said. “It’s the only lead we have.”

  “Unfortunately,” Sarah pointed out, “they know we have it.”

  “True,” Dieter conceded. “But they don’t know where we are, exactly, or when we’ll arrive.”

  Sarah glanced at him and very consciously didn’t say what she was thinking.

  Which was that he was the one who had wanted them to find the remote storage site.

  Though, to be fair, she thought, we did learn something fairly interesting. Which is that there’s apparently some sort of boss Terminator. Maybe something even smarter than Uncle Bob. But what?

  “Whoever, or whatever is looking for us,” Dieter said, “can apparently find us very easily through the Internet. That means we can’t use the credit cards or go near what might be computer-connected cameras.” He stopped suddenly as though struck by an idea.

  “What?” Sarah asked suspiciously.

  “I was just thinking… Cyberdyne is on a military base. How difficult would it be for this person to get connected to an uplink and hack into the military’s spy satellites?”

  Sarah and John just looked at him.

  “You remember how Mom said ‘don’t go there’ a minute ago?” John asked.

  “Well, don’t go there either.”

  Sarah shook her head. “Life used to be so much simpler,” she said pushing her hair back from her face. “I liked it much better when all we had to worry about was the FBI and the CIA and Interpol and the Sector and stuff like that. Now we’ve apparently got a head Terminator who might be counting the number of sticks I’m putting on this fire. Well, here’s one if you’re up there!” She held her middle finger up to the stars. “And on that note, I’m going to try to sleep.”

  She pulled her blanket over her and settled down on the cheap plastic air mattress they’d bought in the village store. John looked up into the sky for a minute. Then he picked up the CPU and put it in his shirt pocket. The more suspicious looking of the Terminator’s chips he gathered up and tossed into the flames. Dieter frowned, but said nothing as he watched the sparkles and flares they made in the fire.

  NEW YORK CITY: THE PRESENT

  Ron Labane was annoyed, glowering out his office window, fiddling with a cup of organic, peasant-grown, but cold coffee. It had been days and he’d yet to receive the courtesy of a reply from the CEO of Cyberdyne.

  He chewed his lower lip as he worked on his press release about Cyberdyne’s precious secret project. His followers would just eat this up. Secret military projects made the damn fools cream in their jeans. And since this would be just the first of many such facilities, a lot of precious manufacturing jobs would be going bye-bye forever instead of just going south. That should shake up the complacent, secure middle class. It also meant the more militant Luddites would get on board and stay the course until the issue was resolved.

  He had a meeting arranged tomorrow with a group who would make the fab four look like the losers they were. This news would be at the top of the agenda. He’d received more information on the project, obviously from someone high up in the inner circle at Cyberdyne. Names, dates, places, logistics, even what had to be a general overview of the whole project.

  Nice to have friends in high places, he thought smugly.

  He read over what he had written.

  Profit is good. Isn’t it? Profit drives the economy; it’s what provides jobs that allow us to have homes and buy the things that make life comfortable.

  Of course, sometimes the profit motive can override common sense, or even common decency. As when medical care is denied to a patient because it might cost too much. Yes, it would save the patient, but… that’s not really what health insurance is all about, is it? Health insurance is about profit, about dividends paid to investors. We all just think it’s abo
ut our personal health.

  What about when profit is so important that jobs are eliminated by the

  thousands?

  What about a factory that’s totally automated? A place that manufactures the machines it needs, repairs those machines, and sets them in motion twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No humans needed.

  No such place exists, you say. Except perhaps in the daydreams of engineers.

  Oh, really? Perhaps you should ask Cyberdyne Corporation about their plans to build such a facility for the military. Yes, it’s a real project and it’s due to be built…

  To find the date Ron consulted the secret files he’d been sent. It was wonderful to stick it to a major corporation and the military at the same time.

  He and his people would hit them seven ways to Sunday. Protests, lawsuits, and sabotage, maybe even a little bribery in the right places, maybe a few carefully placed bombs. Ron felt no guilt about moving to the next level. This thing was evil, he knew it, and it had to be stopped at any cost.

  Humanity against the machines, he thought, and their implacable masters!

  CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS: THE PRESENT

  Serena read Ron Labane’s article with pleasure. It was good. It might even motivate some otherwise rational humans to get involved in his cause. Labane and his ilk were the seeds from which the scientists who had created her and her siblings had sprung. It gave her what humans called a “warm fuzzy feeling” to see his progress. And encouraging humans to self-terminate was so… so efficient.

  Besides, having protests and sabotage and sundry other dramas would make the president and CEO of Cyberdyne less inclined to keep her out of the loop from now on.

  Serena smiled. One day she would make them very sorry that they’d tried to put one over on her. But she could wait—a lot longer than they could.

  NEAR CHARON MESA, CALIFORNIA: THE PRESENT

  Sarah drove with her eye on the gauges, ignoring the mesquite-and-scrub landscape that sped by in a blast of hot dry air. This Jeep was going to overheat; she knew it. They should have enough water to take care of it, but what with the Terminator and all, she felt they were operating under Murphy’s Martial Law. So they’d probably blow a hose.

  Still, they’d crossed into Texas and traveled through New Mexico and Arizona without raising the interest of the police. Maybe that was the problem; it had been nearly five days without any sort of incident. It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  She expected to come upon Enrique’s small compound in a few miles. But she’d hate to have to walk there in this heat.

  “Is your friend expecting you?” Dieter asked.

  “My friend is always expecting somebody,” she answered. “Assuming he’s still there.”

  John looked up at that. There wasn’t much in his young life that seemed eternal,

  but Enrique and Yolanda were two of them. What might have happened to them and their kids if they weren’t there made his stomach curdle.

  Don’t borrow trouble, he warned himself. Wait till you’re there.

  The Jeep bounced and he almost fell off the seat.

  “Yo! Mom, watch the rocks, okay?”

  “You want to drive?” she snarled.

  “Yeah!” John thrust his head into the front seat, grinning eagerly.

  “Well, forget it,” Sarah snapped.

  Dieter laughed and Sarah frowned at him.

  “Give the kid a chance, Sarah. He has to learn sometime,” von Rossbach said.

  Sarah narrowed her eyes. This part of the desert was beginning to look familiar.

  “Well, not right now,” she said. “I’d prefer to have a vehicle I can trust for one thing. Besides, we’re here.”

  Von Rossbach stared at the clutter of stripped helicopter carcasses, Jeeps, and an old bus. Tumbleweeds rocked in a breeze too mild to move them. Everything else was deathly still and silent. “Nobody could possibly be living in this hole,”

  he muttered.

  “They’re here,” John said confidently.

  Sarah drove on, saying nothing. She pulled up at the edge of the compound and got out of the Jeep slowly. She drew her pistol and looked around. Dust, weeds, and rusting wrecks. “Enrique?” she shouted.

  They waited in the desert heat and silence.

  “Hey!” John shouted, jumping out of the Jeep and running a few paces into the compound. “Anybody here?”

  ” John?” a disbelieving and familiar voice said. “Is that you, Big John?”

  Enrique appeared from behind one of the helicopter bodies, rifle in hand. His hat was off, so they could see that his hair had receded and gone gray.

  “Hey!” John said, smiling. He held out his hand and Enrique shook it. “We weren’t sure you guys would’be here anymore.”

  “Some aren’t,” Enrique said. “My cousin’s moved to Austin. He plays a little guitar and I think he wants to be a rock star or something.”

  John grinned at that; he’d heard Carlos play. “Where’s Yolanda?” he asked.

  “Right behind you!” she said. She gave John an enthusiastic hug. As Sarah walked up she released him and reached for her. “So good to see you!” she said.

  Yolanda hadn’t changed at all; even her hair was the same length.

  “Hey, Connor, you look like a schoolteacher,” Enrique said.

  “You look like a grapefruit farmer,” she countered. They shook hands, laughing.

  Sarah’s eye fell on a solid-looking little boy of about seven. “Paulo?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “Si,” Yolanda said with motherly pride. “The last time you saw him he was just a tiny nino.” She ruffled his straight black hair.

  Paulo ducked his head in embarrassment and cast an eye at Dieter, who stood at least a head taller than his father. Sarah took notice.

  “This is Dieter von Rossbach,” she said. “Dieter—Enrique, Yolanda, and Paulo.”

  Dieter held out his hand to Enrique, who seemed surprised and took a moment to respond. He glanced at Sarah and raised a brow.

  “Later,” she muttered.

  “We heard a lot about you for a while,” Enrique said. “Then nothing. Well, not nothing. Did you know there’s a Web site with your name?”

  “You’re wired?” John said, surprised and delighted.

  “Hey, everything up-to-the-minute with us! You know that!” Enrique said with a grin. “Don’t let appearances deceive you, senor,” he said to Dieter. “What you want, we got, can get, or can make.” He looked at Sarah. ” Si?”

  ” Si,” she confirmed. “I hate to break up our reunion with business…” she began.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “Business is as welcome as company, always! What can I do for you?”

  “Well, my computer needs its battery charged,” John said.

  “And this piece-of-shit Jeep Lupe sold me is ready to die,” Sarah finished.

  “Lupe, eh?” Enrique moved toward the Jeep and he started to grin. ” Ai, caramba!” he said. “What are you doing dealing with that one, eh? You know Lupe is a capitalist at heart.”

  “Oh, he’s got a heart now, does he?” Sarah said. “I’d never have guessed from the way he robbed me.”

  Enrique opened the hood and immediately started to dicker.

  “Come with me, John,” Yolanda said, slipping her arm through his. “I’ll show you that Web site and we’ll let these two hard bargainers go at it.”

  “Where’s the tequila?” John asked.

  “Ts ts ts,” she shushed him. “We don’t drink that anymore. I have Classic Coke, though, and Mountain Dew.”

  Sarah leaned over the engine, pretending she hadn’t overheard. Enrique gave her a glance.

  “I have a pacemaker now,” he said. “So I watch what I eat and drink. Eh, we grow more stupid as we get older,” he said. “Depriving ourselves of pleasure so that we can stay old longer.”

  Sarah laughed with him at that. She looked up at Dieter, who stood beside the

  jeep lookin
g awkward.

  “Would you mind taking a look at that Web site for me?” she asked him. “I’d like your opinion.”

  He gave her an ironic smile and followed Yolanda and John into the dilapidated school bus.

  Enrique watched him go, then turned back to the engine. After a moment he glanced at Sarah. “He’s different. Not so stiff like before.”

  Sarah’s laugh was more a squawk. “You’ve no idea,” she said fervently.

  “So, how come he’s ‘Dieter’ now and not ‘Uncle Bob’?” He reached in and squeezed a hose, then gave her a significant look.

  ” ‘Cause he’s not Uncle Bob,” Sarah said. The longer she looked at this engine the more discouraged she became. “But the resemblance is amazing, isn’t it?”

  He straightened up and wiping his hands on a rag looked at her askance.

  “He’s not the same hombre?”

  Sarah shook her head. “They say everybody on earth has a double somewhere,”

  she said.

  Enrique shrugged. “They say bullshit a lot, too. What can you do, eh?”

  Sarah laughed. “It’s when I tell the truth that no one believes me.”

  “Maybe that’s because for you the truth is always very strange.” He held up his hand to forestall any protest. “About this Jeep,” he said, “if it was a horse I’d put it out of its misery.”

  “Can you fix it?” she asked.

  He looked off into the distance, then grimaced.

  “You ask me can I fix it? Si, I can fix anything. But with a car like this, you have to fix it every time you stop. You know?” He screwed his face up. “I got something better I can trade you for a few hundred. It’s not pretty, but it will get you there and back again.”

  “Better let me see it,” Sarah said.

  He led her out into the desert and tugged a sand-colored tarpaulin off a diseased-looking Marquis. Sarah pursed her lips and walked slowly around it. The white paint had turned to chalk in places, exposing the underpainting, and the paint under that. It had a leprous look to it and rubber was dangling from the windows.

  “That is one ugly car,” she said.

  “Like Lupe’s Jeep would win a beauty contest?” Enrique challenged. “It’s under the hood you’ll see her value.” He popped the hood and set it on its stick. “See?”