Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire

by Timothy Zahn

  But continuing to play Skynet’s game would be to lose by default.

  “On three,” she called. “One, two, three.”

  Slamming the stick forward, she dropped the Blackhawk to the ground. The wheels hit hard, bounced her a meter back up—

  And as Barnes dropped out the starboard side door she angled the helo as far as she could to port and clawed for altitude.

  She nearly made it. But at the last second the H-K managed to sidle back into place above her, once again trapping her between earth and metal. With her last bit of maneuvering room she turned the Blackhawk in a tight circle, bringing the pair of them back toward where she had dropped Barnes.

  She could feel the buffeting as her rotors’ airflow bounced off the ground and up into the Blackhawk’s belly when Barnes finally opened up with his minigun.

  The H-K’s nose took the full brunt of the blast, the smooth metal shattering into scrap. Instantly, it swerved away, abandoning its attack on Blair as it tried to get clear of the deadly stream of lead.

  But Barnes was clearly expecting that. Without letting up on the trigger, he shifted his attack from the H-K’s nose to its starboard turbofan. Blair skidded the Blackhawk sideways as she heard the turbofan disintegrating, managing to get completely out from under the H-K as its starboard wing suddenly drooped nearly to the ground.

  Once again it tried to dodge away.

  Once again Barnes shifted his attack, this time back to the machine’s nose and the Gatling guns nestled there.

  Blair was circling back toward the battle when the H-K was rocked by a massive explosion as the minigun’s rounds ignited the machine’s ammo supply. Floundering like a beached fish, the H-K swiveled around, making one final attempt to escape.

  It had gone fifty meters when Blair brought the Blackhawk’s wheels down on top of its spine, forcing the crippled aircraft into a sand-billowing impact with the ground.

  “See?” she muttered toward it under her breath. “I can do that, too.”

  The H-K was bucking weakly, trying to throw off six thousand kilos of dead weight, as Blair crossed to the portside M240, flipped the selector to full auto, and fired a long burst into the remaining turbofan.

  The bucking had stopped, and Blair was back in her seat, when Barnes reappeared.

  “Dead?” he grunted as he heaved the minigun in through the door and clambered in behind it.

  “Close enough,” Blair said, frowning as she eyed the weapon. Surely Barnes must have emptied the thing in the past two minutes. “Bringing home souvenirs?”

  “‘Course not—this is a new one,” he said, pulling the rest of the new minigun’s ammo belt inside and taking hold of the harness. “We getting out of here, or what?”

  Glowering, Blair turned back and fed power to the engines. Seconds later, they were far above the crawling Terminators and burning their way through the night sky.

  “Any preferences as to where we go?” she asked, squinting through the cold wind hammering against her face as Barnes dropped into the copilot’s seat.

  “Yeah. Somewhere else.”

  Blair nodded, and settled in to the task of flying.

  Ten minutes later, she set the helo back onto the ground.

  “What are we stopping for?” Barnes asked as she ran the engines back down.

  “You wanted to go somewhere else,” she reminded him. “This is it.”

  “Funny,” he muttered, leaning forward and giving the area around them a careful look.

  “More specifically, we’re a long ways from anything that might still be moving back at the lab,” Blair continued. “Too far away for anything to get here before daybreak, but not so far that we waste fuel. We may need that tomorrow.”

  “Or we could just head back to San Francisco right now,” Barnes said.

  “And give up on that cable we saw?” Blair asked. “After all that?”

  “After all what?” he retorted. “So they tried to kill us. They’re Terminators. That’s what they do. Doesn’t mean there’s anything out there worth looking at.”

  “Then why did that H-K try to force me down instead of just destroying us?” Blair demanded. “And why didn’t the T-700s attack until nightfall, which was after we’d talked about following the cable to the other end? If they’d just wanted to kill us, they should have tried it during the afternoon, when we wouldn’t have had a hope of getting back to the Blackhawk.”

  Barnes glared out at the desert landscape.

  “Yeah, I suppose that’s a little strange,” he conceded.

  “More than just a little,” Blair persisted. “Look at the timing. The machines didn’t move until after sundown, which is when shortwave transmissions open up again and they can communicate with the eastern hubs. Skynet finds out we’re interested in the buried cable, and suddenly all the machines have orders to take us out.”

  “Yeah,” Barnes said. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe, like hell,” Blair growled. “Something’s going on here, Barnes. We need to find out what. And it’s going to take both of us to do that.”

  He eyed her suspiciously. “Yeah. Convenient, huh?”

  Blair frowned. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning this looks a lot like one of Connor’s little trial by fire learning experiences,” he said. “You two set this up together?

  Blair shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you don’t,” Barnes said scornfully. “Connor says we need to clear the air between us, and suddenly here we are in the middle of a firefight. Which he also says is the way you forge good combat teams.”

  Blair stared at him. “Are you suggesting Connor knew all those Terminators were going to come back to life and try to kill us?” she asked. “Hoping that if we lived through it we’d be good friends afterward?”

  “Why not?” Barnes asked pointedly. “That’s how it worked with you and Marcus Wright, isn’t it?”

  A jolt of jagged-edge pain stabbed into Blair’s gut.

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Isn’t it?” Barnes countered. “It sure as hell wasn’t the guy’s native charm.”

  “No, it was his humanity and his loyalty,” Blair bit out. “Sorry if those qualities are too old-fashioned for you.”

  “Hey, I’m not the one with the team loyalty problem,” Barnes retorted. “You want to see that, go look in a mirror.”

  Blair stared at him, her anger and pain abruptly vanishing. Suddenly, a crack had opened in the barrier he had kept between them ever since San Francisco.

  “What do you mean?” she asked carefully.

  Apparently not carefully enough. Even as Barnes turned away, she could sense the barrier slamming shut again.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he muttered. “You want to track that cable? Fine. You’re the pilot. But we go home the minute we find the other end.”

  “Sure,” Blair promised. “Barnes, look. We really need to talk about—”

  “Get some sleep,” he cut her off. Standing up, he went to the door and dropped to the ground. “I’ll take watch.”

  “Come on, Barnes, don’t do this,” Blair said, trying one last time. “Barnes, stop.”

  “You want to stop me?” Barnes demanded, throwing his arms out to both sides.

  Blair caught her breath, her pain and anger suddenly flaring up again. Barnes’s pose was an exact, deliberate parody of the way Marcus had been secured above the empty missile silo back at Connor’s base.

  “You want to stop me?” Barnes repeated. “Shoot me.” He held the pose for another second, probably just to make sure she’d gotten the message. Then, dropping his arms again he picked up his rifle and stalked back toward the helo’s rear.

  Blair ground her teeth, forcing her anger back down as unwanted tears suddenly began to flow. The man was, without a doubt and without serious competition, the biggest pain in the butt she’d ever known.

  But he was one of Connor’s people. That meant he was also one of her people. And she
was not going to let him spend the rest of his life brooding and hurting and avoiding her. Or worse, lashing out at her.

  One way or another, she was going to crack that shell and find out what was bothering him. If only to prove to him that she was as loyal to Connor’s people as he was.

  And also because her butt was on the line here too. Brooding, self-absorbed soldiers tended to get themselves and their teams killed.

  Sniffing back the tears, she wiped her sleeve across her wet cheeks. Then, trying to ignore the pains in her injured leg and her aching soul, she folded her arms across her chest and settled down to sleep.

  Kyle was sleeping soundly under the gently rippling barracks canopy when a sudden grip on his wrist snapped him fully awake.

  He opened his eyes, squinting a little in the diffuse glow from the distant searchlights. Nine-year-old Star was sitting up beside him, her hand still gripping his wrist, her back unnaturally straight as she gazed out into the night.

  There was no mistaking that look. Not from someone who’d lived as long with Star as Kyle had.

  The Terminators were coming.

  Quickly but gently twisting his arm free of her grip he half turned and reached for the rifle laying beside his sleeping mat. He got a grip on it—

  “Easy,” a voice murmured in his ear.

  Startled, Kyle craned his neck to look behind him. Joel Vincennes, one of Connor’s original Resistance team members, was crouched at his side, gazing out in the same direction that Star was.

  “Terminators,” Kyle murmured urgently.

  “I know.” Vincennes pointed past Star’s shoulder. “Eight T-700s, with a T-600 armed with a minigun at point.”

  Kyle squinted into the darkness. He could see nothing out there but twisted metal and concrete, all of it covered by a layer of hazy smoke.

  “You can see them?” he asked.

  “No, but I can see that,” Vincennes said, pointing thirty degrees to the side.

  Kyle frowned. Then he spotted it: a faint, hooded light pointed back toward them, flickering rapidly on and off.

  “Morse code,” Vincennes identified it. “One of the things you’ll be learning later. There—between those two broken towers. There they are.”

  Kyle nodded. He could see the line of Terminators now, metal skeletons striding toward the camp, their weapons held ready.

  “Shouldn’t we be doing something?” he whispered, his hand tightening on his rifle.

  “We are,” Vincennes said calmly. “Wait for it...”

  And abruptly, the night erupted with the shattering noise and stuttering light show of the Resistance counterattack. From an arc around the approaching machines a dozen guns opened up, some of the flashes coming from small bunkers, others from behind piles of wreckage, still others from places where Kyle wouldn’t have thought a human being could actually lie concealed from view.

  For perhaps half a second the Terminators staggered in the flood of lead slamming into them. Then they opened up with their own weapons, and the fury of the machineguns was punctuated by the shouts and cries of wounded men and women. From a sagging building fifty meters to the right of the battle another set of heavy machineguns joined in, and between bursts Kyle could hear the sound of engines revving up as one or more of the A-10s and Cobra attack helicopters prepared to take off. The Terminators’ assault was faltering, the machines stumbling and then collapsing as their limbs, torsos, and heads shattered under the withering fire.

  “H-K!” Vincennes snapped, pointing to the left.

  Kyle’s throat tightened as he spotted the two small red lights centered in the black shadow flying low across the night sky. Was Skynet hoping to slip in the H-K under cover of the battle noise?

  If so, it was a futile hope. Even as the H-K snaked back and forth in an attempt to avoid fire, a small missile sputtered up from the ground, matching the incoming aircraft swerve for swerve. The missile’s exhaust trail intersected one end of the black shadow—

  The exploding turbofan lit up the whole area, briefly illuminating the high clouds overhead. As the crippled aircraft slammed into the ground, Kyle saw the skull of the last of the approaching T-700s explode into metal fragments, and the headless Terminator collapse into the rubble around it. The T-600 held out the longest, standing almost defiantly among the shattered bodies of its companions, firing its minigun until it too finally dropped backward onto the ground.

  The gunfire ceased, and the world once again fell silent.

  “And that,” Vincennes said with grim satisfaction, “is that.” He clapped a hand on Kyle’s shoulder. “You and Star need to get back to sleep,” he added. “Morning comes early, and I believe you, Kyle, are scheduled for first-shift clean-up duty.” Straightening up, he headed across the shelter toward his own sleeping pad.

  “Right,” Kyle murmured, frowning across the ground at the remains of the nine Terminators, the wreckage still visible in the light of the burning H-K. He looked at Star, found her gazing back at him with a troubled expression on her small face. “What do you think?” he asked.

  Her hands moved in their private code. Too easy.

  Kyle nodded. He’d been thinking the same thing.

  “Any more of them out there?”

  Star considered, then shook her head. A diversion? she suggested.

  “Maybe,” Kyle said, looking around. “Maybe we nailed them faster than Skynet expected. Maybe before they could bring in the real attack.”

  Star’s lips puckered. Too easy, she signed again.

  “I know.” Kyle touched her shoulder. “But whatever it was about, we’re not going to figure it out tonight. Go back to sleep. If Skynet’s got anything else planned, Connor’s people will handle it.”

  Star still looked troubled. But she nodded and lay back down on her mat.

  Reluctantly, Kyle settled down beside her. Too easy, the words echoed through his mind. Too easy.

  Eventually, he fell asleep.

  Preston was careful to close the door quietly behind him when he got home. After his daughter’s long day hunting in the woods, the last thing he wanted to do was wake her up in the middle of the night.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The caution turned out to be a waste of effort. Hope was already in the living room, wedged into the half-broken recliner that she had always liked, her eyes closed, a blanket wrapped around her and tucked up under her chin.

  For a long moment Preston gazed at his daughter, the usual kaleidoscope of thoughts and memories and regrets flashing through his mind. Hope was a child of the post-Judgment Day world, unschooled, uncivilized in the traditional sense of the word. Her knowledge and training were strictly limited to those skills needed for survival here in the wild.

  And yet, amidst all that, she’d somehow also managed to develop a maturity far beyond her years. She had knowledge, but she also had wisdom. She had physical and mental toughness, but she also had compassion. She knew woodlore, but she also understood people.

  Susan Valentine was a perfect case in point. An older woman, a brainy ex-scientist on top of that—on paper there was no way she and Hope should ever have been more than polite working companions. But Hope hadn’t settled for that. She’d taken Valentine under her wing, helping her work through the bewilderment and fear of her new environment, nurturing her like a mother helping her child through those first confusing and terrifying days at school.

  Even more amazingly, Valentine had responded, not with the pride or resentment someone in her position might have gone with, but with gratitude and a deep respect for her young mentor’s patience. Somewhere along the way, somewhere in the short span of three months, the two of them had become friends.

  Which was going to make it that much harder when Preston was forced to order Valentine to leave Baker’s Hollow.

  He was taking off his gun belt, wondering if Hope might be sleeping deeply enough for him to carry her back to her room, when her eyes fluttered open.

  “Hi,” she murmured sleepily. />
  “Hi,” he said. “Your bed just too warm and cozy tonight?”

  “I heard you go out,” Hope said, pushing down the edge of the blanket and yawning widely. “Right after I heard the H-K pass by to the west. Did you see where it went?”

  “Somewhere southeast, I think,” her father replied, stepping over to the small hurricane lamp on the table and lighting the wick. “I couldn’t tell for sure.” He hesitated, wondering if he should let her have one more night of peaceful sleep before he dropped the bombshell on her along with everyone else. But he needed to work through his options, and Hope was the only person whose advice he genuinely trusted.

  “We did see something else, though,” he continued. “Just across the ford, apparently waiting for someone coming in from the west. Oxley says it’s a T-700 Terminator.”

  In the soft lamplight he saw Hope’s face tense. Then, as he’d known she would, she put the shock behind her and nodded.

  “Are we going to try to destroy it?” she asked.

  Preston snorted. “Do I look crazy?” he countered as he sat down on the lumpy couch across from her. “Or do you know something about T-700s that I don’t?”

  “There’s that weak spot on the base of the skull,” Hope reminded him, touching the spot on the back of her own head. “Connor talked about that in one of his broadcasts.”

  “He was talking about T-600s, not T-700s,” Preston pointed out. “Skynet may have plugged that design loophole by now. Besides, as I recall, all you get by poking something sharp there is some temporary confusion. We need something that’ll actually kill it.”

  “Okay, but if poking the spot causes trouble, maybe digging in deeper will hit something more vulnerable,” Hope suggested. “I was thinking one of Halverson’s carbon shafts with a broadhead at point-blank range.”

  Preston pursed his lips. “No,” he said. “We’d want an aluminum shaft. Better electrical conduction.”

  Hope’s face lit up. “So I can try it?”

  “Whoa, girl,” Preston said, holding up a hand. “That’s not Plan A, B, or anywhere else in the alphabet. That’s an absolute last resort.”