“Would you let them take me away?” John asked. He had no idea how young he looked to Jordan at that moment, lying pale and weak in the bed, dark circles under his eyes, his hair tousled on the pillow.
Jordan thought of what Tarissa had told him. He thought of Danny and the look on his nephew’s face before he slammed the door on him. They believed in this kid, and his mother. From what they’d told him, they had good reason to believe him. More important, Miles had believed in them. Could he do less?
“No,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t.”
John almost wept with relief; his eyes filled and his throat tightened. He took a
deep breath and forced himself to relax. Nobody pays attention to a crying kid.
Certainty. If you act certain, people pick it up. After a minute he spoke.
“Then you have got to get me out of here, man.”
Jordan looked at the door as though he expected someone to come bursting through it at those words. He leaned close. “Where do you want me to take you,”
he said quietly.
John thought for a moment. “How long have I been here?” he asked.
“All last night and all day today.” Jordan frowned; he’d already told him that.
Maybe the head wound was making him forgetful.
John blew out his breath.
“Then this is the day we were going to attack Cyberdyne,” he said. He looked over at Jordan. “You have to take me there.”
“To Cyberdyne” Jordan asked. “Are you crazy? What about all those Terminators over there who want you dead?”
“My mother’s going to be there,” John said.
“Oh!” Jordan straightened up and rolled his eyes. “Why didn’t you say so? I guess I’d better go find you some clothes. You can hide out in my office. No, wait; that won’t work, because as soon as I show up, I’m going to get fired and I won’t have an office.”
John smiled. “Seriously,” he said. “It’s the last place the Terminators will be
looking for me. They know I’m wounded; they’ll expect me to be lying low.
They might even be counting on my mother nursing me back to health in some remote location. But she’ll be there. I swear she will.”
Jordan tightened his lips. But he could see that the kid was serious.
“Like I said, I’d better go get you some clothes,” he muttered.
*
Ralph’s Kung Pao chicken was as good as it smelled. Dieter felt like a heel rewarding such a good dinner with what was going to be the mother of all headaches, but there was no help for it. While Ferri’s back was turned he put the drops in his friend’s beer.
Ralph turned back and put a brimming plate in front of Dieter, then set down his own.
He licked his thumb and said, “I think I made just enough. Which is to say enough for six.” Ferri grinned, hoisted his bottle in a toast to von Rossbach and took a long swig. ” Where did you find this?” he asked. “I’ve looked everywhere.
I asked them to order it for me at the PX, but I knew when I did it they’d never be able to score the stuff.”
“I have my ways,” Dieter said mysteriously. He took a sip from his own bottle.
Ferri snorted and drank from his own.
“Actually, there’s this place in L.A. that stocks it. It’s called Ron’s Imported Beers on East Alameda. They’re in the book. Unfortunately they don’t deliver.”
Ralph grinned, already looking a little bleary.
“Even if they did I’m probably outside their delivery zone,” he said.
They talked and ate for a minute more, then, without warning, Ferri’s head hit the table. Dieter wince’d, then moved the dish of chicken out from under his friend’s face. He leaned over to make sure the Major could still breathe, then headed for Ferri’s bedroom.
In a minute he was dressed in the Major’s fatigues and was headed out the door in the direction of Cyberdyne. I wonder how far Sarah got, he thought. He shouldn’t be worried, he knew. Sarah Connor was very professional. But he was emotionally involved, whether he liked it or not. So he worried.
What if they have John there? he wondered. He knew Sarah thought that if her son wasn’t dead he was a prisoner of Cyberdyne. So, did she get right to work, or did she search for him? Most mothers you wouldn’t even have to ask that question, but Sarah Connor wasn’t most mothers.
He couldn’t help but be concerned. She had been absolutely cold since they’d taken John. So withdrawn she might have been living in another time and place—
visible, able to interact, yet untouchable.
Dieter didn’t think John was dead, because the man who had ordered the Terminators to chase them hadn’t come after them. If the boy had been dead, he would have followed them and tried to help with the capture.
Sarah didn’t buy it. She resisted the urge to hope, believing it a fool’s game. You
could almost see John falling—the blood, the boneless landing—in her eyes.
She’d told him that if the first shot didn’t kill him, then they would do it at their leisure, but that they would kill him. If they have him, he’s dead, she’d said to him in a voice and manner that brooked no argument.
And so he approached Cyberdyne looking determined but feeling discouraged.
From what Sarah had told him, if John was dead, then humanity’s only hope was the total destruction of Cyberdyne. And that looks damn near hopeless. The place was like a Hydra; cut off one head and two more pop out.
FT. LAUREL BASE HOSPITAL: THE PRESENT
“No. I’ll go out first, then you. I can steady you, and catch you if you fall. You don’t want to risk that shoulder.”
John frowned at Jordan’s suggestion. Not because it was a bad idea, but because it was so obviously a good one. He felt strange, distant and distracted, which he supposed was due to drugs and loss of blood. But this was a bad time to be slow as an ox.
“Good thinking,” he said aloud. “You go first.”
Jordan slipped over the narrow metal windowsill without comment. The drop from the boy’s room was about four feet. Not bad, but still enough to be bothersome if one arm was out of action. John followed him immediately, barely giving Jordan a chance to step back. Dyson put his hands on the boy’s slim waist and eased him down. Then he looked around. The coast was still clear.
John was wearing his own jeans and sneakers, but Jordan had found a green
surgical shirt to replace the bloodied and torn T-shirt he’d been wearing. Dyson looked down at his own rumpled and bloodstained suit.
We couldn’t be more obvious on an army base if we were wearing rubber noses and orange wigs, he thought. Dyson looked around. It was just getting dark, things were getting hard to see, and the camp lights wouldn’t be going on for a couple of minutes yet. There was no “good” time to do this, but right now was better than some. They started off.
By the time they reached Cyberdyne, it was full dark. There were pockets of shadow here and there around the building, looking all the darker for the arc lights surrounding them. They headed for a well of shadow at the back of the building.
John stumbled and nearly went down, but Jordan caught him—awkwardly because he was trying to avoid the wounded shoulder. To a passerby it would have looked like they were struggling.
In fact, to Dieter it did. He moved up silently behind Jordan, and clasping his big hands together, brought them down on the back of Dyson’s neck. Jordan moved slightly at the last minute, reducing some of the force of the blow, but he went down in a heap, and John dropped with him.
“Ow!” John said, looking up into Dieter’s grave face.
Jordan rolled over onto his back, his eyes wandered for a moment, then focused.
“What the hell did you do that for?” he whispered.
“Dieter, NO!” John barked as Dieter brought his arm back for the coup de grace.
“He’s on our side!”
Dieter relaxed, looking down at Dyson.
&nb
sp; Looking up, Jordan could discern no expression in his attacker’s face or eyes and he was ready to believe that this man was even more dangerous than the resume Serena had given him said he was. Assuming this was von Rossbach.
Then Dieter looked at John and smiled.
“Your mother is going to be relieved to see you,” he said fervently. He offered his hand to help John up. “Let’s roll.”
John’s eyes widened. “Terminal Mission Override XY74!” he snapped.
Dieter spun around and gasped in surprise. He was face-to-face with a Terminator, a thing with his face. He fumbled at his belt for the taser.
The Terminator was frozen by the dissonance of an imperative command phrase uttered at the wrong time, by the wrong person, for the wrong purpose. Its processor worked furiously to reroute its command tree. For a second or two it stood helpless, so much inanimate metal and plastic.
Triggering the taser, von Rossbach stepped to the side, placing himself in front of the boy. Then they all scrambled back as sparks burst from the Terminator’s eyes and mouth, its arms flopping wildly and legs stamping in place. Finally it stopped—frozen—with one foot in the air; then slowly, with the majesty of a sequoia, it fell, face forward, at their feet.
John looked around, then picked up a white-painted rock, and moving over to the Terminator, began calmly slamming it 6n the thing’s head.
“Thanks,” Dieter gasped.
” De nada,” Connor responded, never letting up the rhythm of his pounding. “I got the phrase out of the CPU of that Terminator we decapitated. I wasn’t sure it was genuine, but looks like.”
Shaken, but not to be outdone in cool, Jordan said, “We’d better get moving.
Those fireworks might have attracted unwelcome attention.”
Christ, it’s real! He felt himself going into shock, and hauled back from the precipice with a gasping effort of sheer willpower. I’ll have the nervous breakdown later.
“Can you really kill one of those things with a rock?” Dieter asked.
“No, but you can expose the access plate… here we go.” John peeled back an arc of scalp, opened the plate, poised the pointed end of the rock, and struck twice.
“Sort of ironic—man’s earliest tool killing his last.” The big man looked at him, and John went on with a grin: “So I’m old beyond my years; so sue me.”
John watched the red light of one eye flicker and fade, then dropped the rock.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “We’d better get Bolts, here, out of sight before we go, though.”
Dieter clipped the taser back onto his belt and leaned down. Grabbing one of the
Terminator’s arms, he tugged and grunted.
“He’s heavy,” he said in surprise, his voice showing the strain of dragging roughly three hundred pounds of inert mass.
Jordan took the other arm and they finally got it moving. They dragged, then pushed it into the shadows.
“Mom’s already here?” John asked as they started off.
“She should be,” Dieter said. “What do you Americans say? One big happy family.”
“Christ,” Jordan muttered.
CYBERDYNE: THE PRESENT
Sarah rolled the last barrel into the fourth elevator and took it to the lowest level, four. She’d already filled all the other elevators with the makings she’d flung together and sent them to the other floors.
Cyberdyne’s equivalent of a quartermaster seemed to love ordering in bulk and she’d taken full advantage of his/her thriftiness. I could come up with the makings for a bomb in a public rest room, she thought; fruits of a not-so-misspent life, one the waitress-student she’d once been would have found incomprehensible and terrifying in equal measure. This abundance of stuff was pure luxury.
The one thing they didn’t seem to have an ample supply of was dollies. She’d
been able to find only one. When the door opened on four she tipped the barrel she’d loaded and raced for the far end of the complex. Only fifteen more to go, she thought.
Dieter tapped in the test code and the door lock disconnected with a harsh buzzing sound. The three of them pushed through the doors and rushed toward the desk. John slapped von Rossbach on the arm and pointed to the elevator indicator lights. One car was stopped on each floor.
“Hey, if a guy can’t depend on his mother, who can he rely on? This is her most excellent MO, believe me.” He went over to the elevators and pushed the button for the one stopped on four. Nothing happened. “She’s got the door propped open,” he said. Excitement seemed to be lending him energy. “I’m going down to three to help her spread the bombs,” he said and headed for the emergency stairs.
“John, wait!” Dieter called out, but the boy was already through the door. He turned to Jordan. “Is there anybody else here?”
“Usually on a Sunday there are six security people and a few scientists working and maybe one or two eager-beaver executives,” he said. He thought a moment.
“If I know Serena Burns she’s probably arranged for the place to be empty.”
Dyson turned to the security desk and blinked at the sight of the guard, now slowly returning to consciousness, stuffed under the desk. Jordan shook his head and blew out his breath. Get on with it, he ordered himself. Don’t ask questions, don’t think, just do it. He set the monitors to show what was happening on each floor.
Most of the scenes shown were devoid of human presence. On four, something
flashed by too fast to register.
“Sarah!” von Rossbach said, pointing a thick finger at the monitor.
“And John,” Dyson said, indicating a monitor that showed the boy creeping through a door marked with a big “3.”
The rest of the security cameras flashed views of the areas covered, showing two security guards and no one else.
“Those are the ones Serena sent with me to Sacramento,” Jordan said.
“Terminators,” Dieter growled, looking grim.
“We’d better tell John and… his mother,” Jordan said.
“I’ll take care of John,” von Rossbach said. “Sarah has a laser with her that will take down a Terminator. The boy has nothing.”
first teenage hubris, Jordan thought.
“Is this Serena person likely to be here?” Dieter asked.
Jordan nodded solemnly. “The kid thought she might be the one in charge of all the Terminators we’ve been running into.”
Dieter froze in thought, looking for all the world like the Terminator he’d disabled outside. “Can you distract her?” he asked.
Jordan rubbed his jaw, then shrugged. “I can try,” he said. “I’ll come up with
some story about what happened. That might keep her occupied for a little while.
I don’t think she’ll buy anything I come up with, though. That woman is smart.”
“If John is right, that woman isn’t a woman,” Dieter said. “Go ahead, do what you can. I’ll go help John.”
Jordan glanced at the elevators, then followed Dieter to the stairs. He wasn’t sure what was up with that, but it wasn’t an arrangement he wanted to mess with.
“Wait! “he said.
He went back to the guards’ desk and shut each camera down individually. Then he fixed it so that they could only be turned on again using a new password:
“fear.” Which I expect to experience more of tonight. He stood up and blew out his breath. I guess that means I’ve crossed the Rubicon for certain, he thought.
“Okay,” he said aloud. “Let’s go.”
Von Rossbach nodded and they headed out.
Serena sat behind her desk, hands primly folded before her, and worked the last conversation she’d collected between John Connor and Dyson through a series of filters. For some reason, once he’d entered the base hospital, reception had been extremely poor. The 1-950 had been working on it for a half an hour now, using a reconstruction algorithm, and still couldn’t make out what they were saying through the static.
Once Jordan
had begun speaking again, shortly before he returned to the base, she’d been relieved. Knowing that the boy was at hand, if not actually in her
hands, was satisfactory. She knew where he was and from what she’d heard he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry. At least not pumped up with Demerol, he isn’t, she thought.
For now, she was content to ignore him. Serena had bigger fish to fry. Sarah Connor to be exact. She’ll be here soon. Everything currently known about the woman promised it.
Five was patrolling outside, as were two of the human security guards. One of those she’d put near the gate with orders to report anything strange. The other she’d assigned to the hospital, where he was watching Connor’s room. Six and Seven were on independent patrol of the complex. Now it was just a matter of waiting.
The T-950 looked up in surprise at the tapping on her door.
“Come in,” she said.
Serena came as close as she ever had in her life to dropping her jaw in astonishment. She leaned back in her chair and crossed her long legs.
“Well,” she said slowly. “This is a surprise.”
He came in and slumped toward her desk, head down, looking tired, rumpled, and sheepish.
“So, what happened?” she demanded. “Speak to me, Jordan.”
He leaned both hands on the back of the chair across the desk from her, pressed
his lips together, and looked off to the side.
“Jordan?” she said, looking at him from under her brows. “Have you lost your voice?”
She upped her hearing level and found that his heart was beating rather rapidly.
Meaning? she wondered. It could simply mean that he expected to be fired, or that he had hard questions for her, or it could mean something much more dangerous.
“No,” he said, raising his hand. He looked her in the eye. “Let me tell you what he told me,” Jordan suggested.
She raised her brows. “If you think it will help,” she said laconically.
He blew out his breath and began to speak, his eyes keeping contact with hers.
He told her about the Terminators and how they had ruthlessly pursued the Connors. Of how Connor was convinced that the three men she’d sent with him were nothing less than contemporary versions of the enemy they’d met before.
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