Infiltrator t2-1

by S. M. Stirling

  She listened quietly, taking note of the micro-tremors in his voice more than of what he was saying. He’s scared, she thought. Because he believes them or because he expects to be humiliated for that belief? For a human, one could be as disturbing at the other. She had time; let him grab enough rope to hang himself.

  It wasn’t as though he was going to survive this no matter what he said.

  When he was finished Serena pursed her lips and steepled her fingers before her.

  “It’s a remarkably self-consistent set of delusions.” She looked him in the eye.

  “Isn’t it?”

  He nodded and slapped the edge of the seat in front of him.

  “Yes, it is. So, am I fired, or what?”

  She laughed outright at that and spread her hands.

  “You still haven’t told me what happened, Jordan. Give me something to base a judgment on, why don’t you?”

  He straightened, then looked to the side again as though gathering his thoughts.

  Now was the moment of truth: was he on her side or the Connors’? Did he believe Tarissa or Serena? Suddenly he thought of John telling him that Serena must be very, very smart, and it shook him. Yeah, she is smart, he thought. And if Connor is right, then she might have resources that we don’t.

  “He’s a very persuasive boy,” Jordan began. “And those guys you sent with me were insanely out of line.” He rested his hands on the chair back. “Maybe I bought into it a little.” He met her eyes. “So I brought him to the base hospital instead of here. I stayed with him last night and thought about it.”

  Serena looked at him, swinging her chair slightly from side to side.

  “And what did you conclude?” she asked.

  He shrugged, looking down. “To be honest, maybe I’m too tired to think straight, but the jury is still out.”

  She laughed again. “Yes, I’m afraid you are too tired to think straight. I suggest you not try to buy a used car today if you’re capable of buying the crap that poor

  kid took in with his pablum.” Serena uncrossed her legs and scooted her chair under her desk, folding her hands before her. “What did you tell them at the hospital?” she asked, all business now.

  “That I didn’t think our clinic could handle the kid’s wounds. And that his life depended on his presence being kept secret.” He shrugged. “I told Ferri that Tricker would want him to cooperate with us on this.”

  The T-950 looked thoughtful. He was telling the truth, at least for the most part, judging from the micro-tremors in his voice.

  “Good!” she said with satisfaction. “You’re probably right about the hospital having a better chance of treating him, too. We do have just a small clinic. So I’m not totally dissatisfied with your performance on this. I should have expected it, given your concern over the boy’s wounds. And he is at hand if needed.”

  She looked at him, her head tipped to one side, then she lowered her eyes.

  “I guess the jury is still out for both of us. How this all works out will determine your future with Cyberdyne,” she said. “Now, why don’t you go home and get a few hours’ rest. I’d like you to come back in tonight; that’s when I think she’ll strike, sometime between midnight and dawn.”

  “Tonight?” he said.

  Something in his voice alerted her. She extended her hearing and caught the sound of an elevator. Not her Terminators; they’d been instructed to use the stairs at all times in order to avoid human contact. The only human in the building besides Jordan was the guard on the desk. Who hadn’t let her know she had a

  visitor. She checked the security cams and found them off-line. Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t turn them on again.

  She had gone so still that she might as well have been a mannequin. Jordan knew instinctively that something had gone very wrong. He took a giant step toward the door. His hand was on the knob when she flew over her desk toward him.

  How he did it he never knew, but he was through the door and slamming it behind him before she could get her hands on him. He ran flat out for the elevators. Serena was through in a split second, her beautiful face completely expressionless, almost serene, as the door flew back hard enough to shatter the knob and tear the lock out of the plywood frame.

  At first he flung things in her path, a chair, someone’s computer, anything he could get his hands on. But he saw when he looked over his shoulder that she leaped over everything like a gazelle, her hair almost brushing the ceiling. After that he just ran, arms pumping, legs flying. It seemed miles.

  There was one last door ahead, the glass barrier between the scientists and executive territory. He swished his card through the reader and a green dot lit, the door clicked, and he was through. The door slid shut behind him. He picked up a potted palm and threw it at the lock mechanism outside the door, which broke with a shower of sparks. Serena was nearly to the door.

  He turned, crossed the corridor, and hit the elevator button; the doors opened and he flew inside. Jordan turned and pressed a button, any button, then watched helplessly as the demon approached.

  Serena slammed into the door and bounced off, looking faintly surprised. Then,

  knowing she had him trapped, a slow, satisfied grin animated her face. She drew back her fist and punched forward, safety glass shattered into a thousand pieces, and she leaped through. As the elevator doors closed he saw her expression change to chagrin and the last he saw of her was her fingertips reaching for the door.

  Then she was gone and the elevator was on the move. Jordan plastered himself against the side of car and gasped for breath, then he slid down the wall and sat for a moment, gathering his strength. Opening his eyes, he smiled, then looked to the side and froze. The elevator was full of bomb.

  Serena hit the elevator door hard enough to dent it. She let loose a strangled cry of frustration, then quickly stifled it. Where are you? she sent to the Terminators.

  Two, one of them answered.

  One, the other replied.

  The third didn’t answer.

  Serena watched the elevator indicator: Dyson was going down; he was already past two.

  There’s at least one human invader in the building, she told them. Jordan Dyson.

  Terminate him on sight.

  Five came toward her from the far end of the corridor. A pity it hadn’t been closer when Dyson ran; they could have cornered him between them.

  “Go to the ground floor,” she said. “Guard the elevators and the door to the stairs. Terminate any human who comes through them.”

  She looked up. Dyson had gone all the way down to four. There was a panel on the wall that controlled the elevators; she ripped off the cover and grabbed a handful of wires, then pulled them from their moorings. That ought to keep him where she wanted him for a while. She signaled Six to meet her there.

  The T-950 turned and headed for the stairs. She had a small but powerful gun bolstered at the small of her back under her suit jacket—a snub-barreled magnum that a human her size couldn’t have controlled. Pulling it out, she clicked off the safety and made sure she had a round in the chamber.

  Hunting humans, she thought. How nice. Seems an age since I did this.

  EMITTER E8 CYBERDYNE: THE PRESENT

  At the sound of the approaching elevator Sarah stopped what she was doing and ducked behind the receptionist’s island. Who (he hell is that? she wondered.

  Surely Dieter would know better than to use the elevator. She pulled her Clock from its holster and rested her gun hand on the desk, eyes on the elevator door.

  The doors opened and Jordan braced his leg against one side to keep them there as he peeked out into the corridor. So should I take the elevator back up, or use the stairs? he wondered. Maybe he ought to check the indicators, see if Serena was following him. He edged out of the elevator slightly.

  Sarah fired, aiming for the thigh of the leg inching its way into view.

  Jordan went down screaming. He thrashed on the floor cursing and trying v
ainly to keep quiet. It hurt so damn much!

  “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” he hissed, half cursing, half praying.

  Sarah recognized him from Sacramento: the man who had said he would take care of John. She rushed from behind the desk to stand over him, her gun aimed at his head.

  “Don’t move!” she ordered.

  Jordan opened his eyes to find himself staring into a small black hole. His breath stopped; it took five long seconds for him to make his lungs work again and he took his breath with a long, tearing gasp.

  “Where’s my son?” Connor said. Her voice and face were as cold as the moon and as distant. ,

  “He… he’s okay,” Jordan stammered. He couldn’t stop shaking and his leg burned. “He’s on three, setting up bombs.”

  She appeared to think about that; after a moment she took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. Then she almost smiled, looking younger in an instant.

  “That’s my boy!” she said proudly. “He can talk anyone around— even me.”

  Sarah bolstered her gun and squatted down to offer help to her victim. “The bullet went clean through, doesn’t look like I nicked any veins or arteries from the way it’s bleeding. Can I have your tie?” she asked.

  “No!” Jordan snapped. “I already used it to bandage your son.” I will never again question why I have to wear that stupid strip of cloth to work, he thought. He wished now that the unofficial dress code required him to wear two.

  “Well, you’d better give me something to use unless you want to bleed to death,”

  she said briskly.

  Jordan shrugged out of his jacket and took off his shirt, with her help. Sarah used her knife to tear it into strips.

  “First you shoot my brother, now you shoot me. What the hell have you got against my family, lady?”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, frowning.

  “My brother was Miles Dyson,” he said. He sucked in his breath through his teeth as a sharp pain shot through his leg.

  “Miles,” she said thoughtfully as she sliced away his pants leg. “He was a good man.” Sarah smiled, her eyes on her work. “I guess next time I’d better ask questions first and shoot later,” she said.

  “Duh! Yuh!” he agreed. “OW!”

  “Has to be tight,” she explained.

  “What about circulation?” he asked, glaring.

  Sarah stood up and looked down at him.

  “I guess that’s your responsibility. Look, I’ve got things to do. Stay cool, I’ll be right back.”

  “Stay cool? Hey!” he said as she walked away. “I’m being chased; that mommy Terminator you’ve been worried about is after me!”

  She looked over her shoulder at him.

  “Then I’d better work fast.”

  Dyson let his head fall back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  “Yeah, I guess you better,” he said softly. He swallowed and tried to fight down a sudden nausea. Maybe it’s time I tried to make a deal with God, he thought irreverently.

  Every agent does, sooner or later, Paulson had once told him. So you should work out your terms in advance.

  Jordan lightly placed his hands on either side of the wound, just above the bandage, and wished he could ignore the pain. He felt a falling sensation within, and when he opened his eyes again he thought some time might have passed.

  Off to his right, the door to the stairs began to open.

  “Connor!” he shouted. He tried frantically to move, to back into the elevator, and couldn’t seem to make his body work as a coordinated whole. “SARAH!”

  Sarah dropped her screwdriver and ran toward his voice. She arrived in time to see a Terminator raise its gun, aiming at Dyson. Response was automatic: she plucked the laser from her belt, ran toward it, aimed, and fired even as it began to wheel toward her.

  The results were dramatic: sparks shot from the Terminator’s head and it flailed its arms and legs like a marionette gone mad. Its trigger finger convulsed again and again, firing the gun in uncontrolled bursts. Sarah threw herself to the floor and wished she could get lower. The machine kept firing until all that could be heard was the impotent clicking of an empty magazine.

  Then, without warning, it was over. The Terminator crashed to the ground, frozen

  —sprawled like a giant doll, broken and abandoned.

  After a moment’s silence she crawled to the edge of the desk and peered around it. The Terminator lay inert. She moved over to it and tugged at the gun; it wouldn’t let go, not without tools. She rifled its pockets for spare magazines and took those.

  Dyson was flat on his back, most of his body in the elevator, so she couldn’t tell if he was alive or dead. Sarah moved cautiously over to him, her eyes on the Terminator.

  As she moved she snapped out the used taser cartridge, its wires still attached to the Terminator’s torso, and replaced it. It was more powerful than the standard model, but it would be useless until it recharged. She quickly checked her watch; twenty minutes or so until it could be used again. She hung the unit on her belt and withdrew her pistol from its holster just in case. It wouldn’t kill a Terminator, but it might slow one down—and it made her feel better.

  She wished there was some way to be sure the Terminator was down for good, but the damn things didn’t have a pulse she could check.

  She glanced in at Dyson; he was looking back, seeming no worse for wear.

  “You okay?” she asked, moving her eyes back to the quiescent Terminator.

  “Just ducky!” he said sarcastically. “Incidentally, if you see a blond ho’ with a very bad attitude who can walk through walls, kill her. That’s Serena Burns, inhuman genius from the future. Sorry, I’m babbling.”

  “Shock,” said the woman he’d hated for six years, and smiled.

  He struggled to a sitting position and Sarah was reaching down to help him when the door to the stairs was thrown open, hitting the wall like a gunshot. Sarah straightened, saw a woman with a gun, and without hesitation raised her gun and shot.

  Serena’s head snapped back from the force of the blow and her vision went white, then black. She felt herself falling and had time to comprehend one word and to feel all the dread that accompanied it.

  Failure.

  Then she was gone.

  Jordan leaned forward and watched with his mouth open in horror as Serena slowly crumpled, then fell to her knees, then forward onto her face. The right

  side of her head was a mass of blood, the pink gray pulp of her brain was visible, and the gold-blond hair was matted into spikes with it.

  “My God,” he said. He looked at Sarah, who was frowning at the fallen woman.

  “I thought you were going to ask first.”

  Sarah looked down at him.

  “Everybody’s a critic,” she growled. She indicated Serena with her chin. “That the one you were talking about?”

  “Yeah,” Jordan said. “That’s her. She dead?”

  Sarah shrugged and put away her gun.

  “Time will tell.”

  She glanced at Jordan, then went over and pried the gun from the woman’s stiff ringers. Sarah touched her neck, feeling for a pulse. If she has a brain, which she visibly did, then she must be human, she thought. So if there’s no pulse she should be out of the game. There was a lot of blood, too. Terminators didn’t have this much in their whole massive bodies. Sarah frowned. The idea of a human running Terminators was mind-boggling. No time, she reminded herself. Get going. Returning to Jordan, she offered him the gun butt first.

  “So you won’t feel so defenseless,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said, accepting it. He looked up at her.

  Sarah felt as though he wanted her to say something, but she had no idea what.

  “I have to finish some things,” she said. “Hold the fort and don’t shoot my kid, okay?”

  He raised the gun in salute. “You got it,” he said.

  He watched her go back into the office she’d come out of, then
he looked around.

  His hands were shaking, so he dropped the gun to the floor beside him and clasped them, hard. Jordan grimaced at the bodies on the floor and let out his breath in a little huff. They looked so human.

  What if they are human? he thought. What if the Connors are delusional and I’ve somehow become infected? Then an image of Serena making those fantastic leaps came into his mind’s eye. He’d actually seen that with his own eyes. This might be the craziest thing that would ever happen to him, but he, at least, was not insane.

  Jordan shook his head and slowly dragged his wounded leg into the elevator. He pushed himself back until he was leaning against the wall. Next time something came through that door he was not going to be a sitting target. He reached up; yes, he could touch the elevator’s control panel; he could shut the door at need.

  He let his head lean against the wall and once again allowed himself to relax.

  *

  reroute, reroute.

  Electronic components no human could have designed struggled to throw off their passionless equivalent of shock. They had been integrated with the

  biological half of their personality for a very long time. Autonomous reintegration took a long time; several complete seconds.

  checksum, response: negative, damage—

  neurological: central brain stem: no responsive. function terminated, terminated, terminated.

  decision tree: restart autonomous functions from backup.

  The corpse’s lungs heaved, once, twice. The heart began to beat with an artificial steadiness. The computer analyzed how much function remained in muscle and organ; enough for a few minutes, if it controlled fluid loss from the ruined brain.

  But it had never been designed to move the organism in this manner. Complex calculation would be required.

  Fingers quivered, clenched. A heel softly tapped the ground. An eye opened, and the pupil cycled from pin-sized to a black disk that swallowed the blue of the iris.

  Serena Burns was dead. But her body began to move…