That plan lasted almost six months. No nightmares, not this time. Their dreams came in all varieties, some peaceful, some eerie, a few frightening. But not like before. Not the kind that had driven them to join battle again and again with the future. No, this time it was only the nagging doubt that they had really won. Too many ambiguities about time and the multiplicity of worlds they now knew existed.
Skynet had found ways to dance from dimension to dimension in order to preserve itself—copies of itself, to be sure, but for a machine that existed mainly in copies, continuity meant something different than it did for humans.
And although they had seen nothing to indicate that Cyberdyne had regained its government contracts and resumed its program to build Skynet—even though Cyberdyne personnel they knew to be complicit in Skynet’s future 121
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program remained in penitentiaries, scattered and isolated—they could not be sure. They began to talk about returning to the United States and finding some way to get close to what they considered Ground Zero. Talk. Nothing more.
Then Jack Reed found them.
They had never really been sure what position Reed and his assistant, Samantha Jones, held in the government, only that they were high up in the intelligence sectors and vital in some way to the Pentagon, the Secretary of State, the President. Reed had been the one to pull the plug on Cyberdyne. Through him, the corporation lost all its government contracts. He had taken over the Colorado Springs site, the military installation near Thunder Mountain where Cyberdyne had built Skynet, and where Skynet—a central machine designed to run all of America’s defensive network, from satellites to the missile arsenal—had somehow come alive one night and discovered consciousness and the impossibility of coexisting with humanity. Where it conceived a terrible plan to start the much-rumored and long-dismissed third world war. A war that had led to Sarah’s pursuit by Skynet’s machine agents from the future, the conception and birth of John, and the ongoing guerilla action they had fought against Armageddon. An action, with the help of specialists from yet another world, a different future, John and Sarah felt they had finally won. At least, for a little while.
Jack Reed had had the power of the purse, the final say in how far Cyberdyne went. When he finally understood what was happening—what Skynet was going to do—he stopped it. They had come terribly close to failing.
Now, years after their departure from the Colorado Springs site in company with the last pair of those Specialists-—ade and Anton—and the barely sane scientist whose work had nearly completed Skynet, Rosanna Monk, Reed came looking for them.
Combined with their own growing ill ease, what Reed told them brought them back to North America.
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Cyberdyne was trying to regain its government contracts.
The company had survived somehow. Worse, most of the people being held in prison—those still alive—from the Skynet program were being released.
“What can I tell you,” Reed had asked rhetorically.
“Administrations change, people fall out of favor.”
“You haven’t lost your position, have you?” Sarah had asked.
“No, just some of my perks. I have to be more circum-spect. The abuse of authority rampant under the previous administration has led to a lot of…difficulties, shall we say.
I can’t do things as arbitrarily as I used to.”
“So what do you want with us?” John had asked.
“You think it’s over with Skynet?”
“No,” both Sarah and John said simultaneously.
“Neither do Sam and I. Others who knew about it, too.
We’re not convinced. Even if we can keep Cyberdyne from getting a free rein like it had before, we’re not sure it’s a safe assumption to think we beat it. But I can’t go digging and watching all on my own. I need someone outside the Beltway, someone not part of the program, to watch.”
“You’re recruiting us as spies?” John asked.
“Not exactly.”
Reed got them back into the country with new identities, a clean slate, and resources. He help them set up their own business—security specialists and investigations—and then let them have access to his agency’s resources. Limited access, to be sure, but to date they had seen no real limits—except when it came to asking directly for his help.
So PPS Security Investigations had been born. He had enjoyed playing games with his name—“Wolf Lover”—to arrive at the new one. The same, only different. The idea of becoming wolves appealed to him—becoming the hunter instead of the hunted.
John found Juanita Salceda, in school, pursuing a computer science degree, and a few other people from their days on the fringe, living the outlaw life in Mexico. People who knew about Sarah’s predictions, who had seen a Terminator, 123
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who believed. Other staff came on board slowly. Few of them knew the core mission. They had opened a small office in Albuquerque, then opened a new one in Santa Fe.
Another in Colorado Springs, a fourth in Denver. Now they were back where they started, in Los Angeles, and after nearly three years it looked at if they had struck pay dirt.
From his appearance, though, these past few years had been hard on Reed.
He listened while Sarah recounted her discovery of the deceased Jeremiah Porters and what she had found today.
When she explained her anger with Lash, Reed scowled.
“That’s not his job, Sarah,” Reed said. “He was right to refuse. I can get you people who do that, people in the area.”
“Doesn’t make any difference now,” Sarah said. “The residence in question was vacant.”
“Yeah…” Reed mused. “And you say the body you found had been killed with drugs?”
“That’s what it looked like. I wasn’t going to stick around to make sure.”
“Of course. But…that doesn’t make sense. I mean, why would a Terminator give a damn how the corpse looked?”
Sarah frowned thoughtfully.
“Anyway,” Reed continued, “give me that address again—the vacant one.”
Sarah recited the number. Reed looked off-screen for a few seconds, then appeared to be reading something.
“I’m forwarding this,” he said. “Odd. Six months ago there was a family of five living there. Two-and-a-half years ago…a family of six and one of them was reported missing.”
“Missing how?” John asked.
Reed frowned, impatient. “This is either damned sloppy police work or…the report was withdrawn. No one followed up to confirm. Robert L. Porter, age eighteen, went missing.
The family filed a missing person’s report. A detective interviewed them, then…Robert Porter turned up, registered as a student at Caltech. Scholarship student. Full scholar-124
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ship. The investigating detective did not follow up on the reappearance…and the family has subsequently moved to Minnesota. But there’s nothing more in the database. Weird.
Right up your alley. Like I said, I’m forwarding you the file.
Now, John, what about this Destry-McMillin thing?”
“Well…”
“I know Dennis McMillin,” Reed said when John finished.
“He’s solid. I was sorry to hear about Ian’s death. If he’s right and this has something to do with Cyberdyne…”
“Then your assumptions have paid off,” John said. “We do still have a problem.”
Reed grunted. “Maybe I should come out there.”
“And do what?”
Reed’s eyebrows went up. “Don’t hold back, John. Tell me what you really think.”
“You’re known to them. You show up, you put them on alert. Wait till we have something that rates your presence.”
“Something’s already put them on alert. Eisner’s dead.”
“Eisner,” Sarah said. “Wasn’t he—?”
“One of the personne
l from Cyberdyne’s Colorado Springs site,” Reed said. “We had them all in jail, but…well, along with Oscar Cruz, we were unable to hold them all. Eisner was in IT. I’ve had him and the others under surveillance since. Someone killed Eisner.”
“Where was he?” John asked.
“Clovis, New Mexico. He’d been working as a night watchman. Nothing out of the ordinary. Someone started paying him a visit a week ago. Every night for four nights.
We checked up on Eisner the fifth night, hoping to catch his visitor, but all we found was the corpse. A mess. Terminator-quality mess.”
“You naturally had cause of death listed as a heart attack and had him cremated, right?” John asked.
Reed chuckled. “You should think about a career in politics. Absolutely, we did. As for your oh-so-discreet observation about my liability, all right, I’ll stay put. Do you want me to send Samantha out?”
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“Maybe after we have the new office complete,” Sarah said.
“I’ll run down the files on these other people. I never dealt with Pioneer directly. You say this Gant looked familiar?”
“A familiar type,” John said. “As in model number.”
“Be interesting to find out what’s going on there. All right. I’ll get this material to you ASAP, okay?”
“Great. We’ll start with this Porter thing.”
Reed faded back to the seal, then the screen went blank.
John stared at the slate gray rectangle, going over the exchange. He worried about Jack Reed. Political fortunes seldom impacted people in his position, but when they did the toll seemed excessive.
He swiveled the chair around. Sarah sat at another desk, studying text on a screen.
“What’s that?” John asked.
“Hm? What Jack just sent us about that Porter family.”
John noticed Ken Lash still standing by the door. “Ken?”
“Mind if I get back to work?” Lash asked.
“Do you ever sleep, Ken?”
“When the job is done. Sure.”
John laughed. “Sure, go on,” John said. “We need this place up and running.”
Lash left the room, closing the door behind him.
“Mom,” John said.
“If you’re going to chew my butt out for doing something dangerous, forget it. I’m the mom, remember.”
“You shouldn’t have gone out by yourself.”
“True. But I did. So let’s move on.”
The trouble was, John reflected, that she had trained him better than she had trained herself. He had grown up studying to be a guerilla tactician, team leader, warri-or—among other less honorable things, like thief, liar, spy, con artist. All the necessary tools to fight an unbeatable enemy no one else believed in.
“Something puzzles me about the body you found,” John said.
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“What?”
“If a Terminator did that, how come the setup? Like Jack said, why should a Terminator give a damn about disguising its actions? The others just barged in and killed. This sounds like an attempt to make it appear like something we’d expect to find in the news. Ugly but ordinary. How come?”
“There’ve been so many…”
“And a lot of them look like accidents, illnesses, perfectly normal human deaths. I don’t see the blunt slaughter a Terminator leaves behind.”
“I’m not sure it makes that much difference.”
“Maybe not,” John agreed. “But it suggests a change in tactics. Like maybe Skynet is using human agents.”
“Programmed? Like Layton and Cruz were?”
“Oh, that might not be necessary. I’m sure you could hire plenty of professional killers if you know where to go.”
“Cruz might know,” Sarah suggested.
“After his prison time?”
“A veritable mall of malcontents and murderers.”
John laughed. “Bit melodramatic, but yeah, why not?”
“That means it would be harder to find the source. Harder to get to the real Terminator.”
“A TX-A maybe.”
“You know,” Sarah said, “something else always bothered me. How come Skynet didn’t just saturate the planet with Terminators? I mean, before the final assault, Skynet had its own private doorway to the past.”
“We couldn’t move more than one or two at a time with the same equipment.”
“But that’s what I mean. Over days, how many could we have sent back? Skynet didn’t give a damn about power requirements. And Eve—our Eve—had been sent back as an observer by you as insurance…” She shook her head. “It still gives me a headache trying to sort this all out.”
John thought about the T-790 called Eve, a female Terminator John’s future self had sent back programmed to watch. When circumstances seemed appropriate, she had revealed herself to them and helped them, much as the 127
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earlier “Uncle Bob” Terminator sent back to protect John’s younger self. How many more might there have been?
“But the question is a good one,” he said. “Why not just send back an army? I mean, a few hundred T-800s could do a lot of damage.” He considered for a few moments.
“Unless that much brute force would upset the actual manifestation of Skynet itself.”
“So somewhere, at some time, Skynet may have tried it and found it counterproductive.”
“Probably. But there would be no reason not to send back sleepers. Agents in place to be activated in case of this scenario or that. That’s what our Eve was.”
“Which might lead to one of them setting up a network of completely human agents.” Sarah rolled her eyes. “Great.”
“Not only human.”
“You think this guy Gant is a Terminator? A T-800
model?”
“Our T-800—Uncle Bob—acquired more and more human traits the longer he was with us. There’s no reason to assume he was the only one with that ability.”
“So one who’s been working among humans for a few years would be able to imitate enough human characteristics to pass.”
“Especially if part of its job description is to be an asshole.”
Sarah grinned. “He made an impression on you.”
“I think he’s McMillin’s leak. In place at Pioneer, he has access to all their records and probably any ongoing communications links with other vendors.”
“How are you going to prove it?”
“I could get him fired,” John suggested, “see if anything changes.”
“He might not agree. Violently.”
“Which leads me to plan B. Prove what he is and take him out.”
“Take the big gun, son.”
John grunted. “What are you going to do?”
Sarah turned back to the screen. “I’m going to try to find 128
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this Robert Porter, college student. If he’s still alive, maybe I can get some answers.”
“Just take a pocket knife, then. He’s only a student.”
“I’m going to take whatever I need.”
129
TWELVE
Lee Portis entered the duplex by the back door. The stench caused him to flinch until he filtered it out. He stepped from the tiny utility room at the rear of the apartment into the kitchen.
Eisner still sat at the table, a position from which he had not moved. His hair matted against his head. For four days, he had remained in place, the ’coders Portis put into him worming out all the information in his brain. Portis retrieved the nanoware each time he left, but Eisner had found it impossible to move. Portis had rigged a water bottle next to Eisner’s chair with a tube taped against his face so he could sip at it. When Portis returned at night to resume the probe, he fed Eisner first. But Eisner lost weight. Portis was surprised how quickly he decayed. But when he examined it more closely he realized that Eisner now suffered a condition v
ery like cancer, the ’coders wrestling with the embedded matter from the TX-A and wreaking profound cellular damage.
The smell this evening was different. Portis hesitated, examining the room. Eisner’s head lolled to one side. Portis came around the table.
Eisner’s face, from scalp line to chin, lay in separate halves against his skull. The eyes stared in different directions. The skull itself had been cracked open. Portis saw 130
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brain amid the muck of cloven tissue. Portis went through the apartment, gathering up his various bugs and guaranteeing that no new ones had been installed. He found one, but his defensive ‘coders had attacked and rendered it useless. He took that one, too. Then he returned to Eisner’s body.
He allowed a thin film of ‘coders to sheath his index finger, which he inserted into the visible remnant of Eisner’s brain. Within seconds, the implanted ’coders he had left in place responded to a command to join the ones on Portis’s finger. Few remained. Upon death, most would have self-destructed, but Portis had to assume a small number had been salvaged by the killer. He cleaned out the rest of the system and withdrew his finger.
Pain lanced up his arm. Portis staggered back, coming up against the sink. Gasping, he held onto consciousness.
A trap, he realized, a trojan planted inside Eisner that Portis had taken inside along with his recovered ‘coders. Portis’s own defenses met the invaders, waging war with them. The battle lasted seconds—an eternity in the grip of the agony Portis suffered—but the outcome was never in question. The Terminator nanobits succumbed to his own. The pain eased, gradually subsided into nothing more than a tingly memory.
He opened his eyes. He was on the floor now. Sweat covered his entire body. He focused on the scuffed and grime-covered floral patterned tile, waiting for the process to finish.
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