by Timothy Zahn
Which meant the oblique reference hadn’t been oblique enough. Skynet had figured it out, and wasn’t going to waste its resources on an enemy who couldn’t fight back. At least, not until it had dealt with the one who could.
“Better idea,” Blair told Yoshi. “Break off and get back to the coop. I can handle them.”
Yoshi muttered something Blair didn’t quite get. But he was smart enough to realize that, with the jig up, it was the only reasonable course. The Resistance didn’t have nearly enough planes and pilots to let any of them get wasted without a good reason.
“Check, Hickabick,” he said with a sigh. “I’m gone.”
“Just watch for unfriendly eyes,” Blair warned. “And don’t forget to go in from the north.”
“Check,” Yoshi said again. “Good luck.”
“You, too.”
The two HKs, which had worked so hard to get into a single formation, now split apart again at Blair’s approach, one swinging right as the other went left. Blair flipped a mental coin and turned to follow the one to the left. Her turn caught up with it before it could sidle out of range, and a single long burst from her GAU-8 took it out.
Unfortunately, that left the other machine sitting squarely on her tail. Even as she started to turn back to face it, the HK opened fire, sending a burst of lead across the A-10’s belly.
There was only one thing Blair could do.
Throwing full power to her engines, she hauled back on the stick, turning the A-10’s nose toward the sky in a power loop. She kept going, ignoring the enemy fire that was tracking up toward her, curving ever more skyward until the A-10 was nearly to stall configuration.
Then, twisting the plane around into half a barrel roll, she turned it right-side up again as she finished her half loop.
And with that single smooth maneuver, she was heading along an opposite vector, and had gained herself a good stretch of altitude along with it.
She cut back a little on her throttle, breathing out a sigh of relief as she scanned the sky around her. The Immelmann turn was a standard fighter maneuver, one that had probably been taught to every military pilot since World War One. But that didn’t mean anyone especially liked doing them.
Still, when the trick worked, it worked well, particularly against aircraft like HKs that had been designed more for hunting ground targets than for real aerial combat. And indeed, the sky around her seemed to finally be clear of enemies.
Though just because the current generation of HKs weren’t particularly good at this kind of warfare; it didn’t mean Skynet didn’t have something more maneuverable already in the works.
There were also rumors of some kind of plasma gun that would replace the HKs’ Gatlings. Given time, she suspected, every advantage the Resistance had been able to find or carve out would be blocked.
It was her job, and the job of people like John Connor, to make sure Skynet was taken down before that happened.
She checked her mirrors. The HK she’d thought she’d left far behind was still in pursuit, moving as fast as its little midships turbofans could take it.
Skynet wasn’t yet ready to call it a day.
Fine. If the massive computer system wanted to lose another HK, Blair would be happy to oblige.
In fact, there was a little maneuver she’d been saving for just such an occasion, and with three of Skynet’s four radar towers currently down, it was the perfect time to try it. Watching the blip behind her, adjusting her speed just enough to let the HK start closing the gap, she headed due west, toward the edge of the city and the dark ocean beyond.
The HK had closed about half the gap between them by the time Blair came in sight of her objective: a pair of twenty-story buildings about fifteen meters apart, probably once the towers of a hotel, with a fair amount of wall and ceiling still clinging to their skeletons.
She didn’t know why so much of their structure had survived, especially that high off the ground, unless there had been something even bigger and taller to the south that had shielded them from the worst of the nuclear blast. However it had happened, though, the buildings presented her with a golden opportunity.
Smiling tightly to herself, she reached over and shut down her starboard engine.
It was like throwing fresh meat into a shark tank. The HK behind her abruptly leaped forward, drawing on a reserve of extra speed that Blair had never realized the damn things had. As it closed the gap, it began firing, sending quick bursts across her wingtips and tail, clearly targeting her remaining engine.
Blair swore under her breath as she checked the distance back to the HK, then ahead to the two buildings, then back again to the HK. It was going to be tight, and with the enemy firing at her the whole way. Briefly, she considered restarting the starboard engine and getting back her speed advantage.
But the minute she did that, Skynet would know she wasn’t as vulnerable as she was pretending and realize it was a trap. At that point, it would either break off the attack entirely or else send the HK in with more caution than Blair really wanted from it.
On the up side, after all the shooting tonight the HK had to be running low on ammo. On the down side, so was Blair. Of the 1100 rounds she’d started with, less than 150 were left. At the A-10’s cycle rate of 3900 rounds per minute, that was roughly two seconds’ worth.
It was definitely going to be tight.
They were nearly to the buildings now, and despite Blair’s evasive jinking the HK was starting to get the range. She could feel the thuds and hear the whining screeches as the enemy’s Gatlings tore bits and pieces off the A-10’s skin and dug furrows into her wings and tail. Just fifteen meters between buildings, she reminded herself as she turned north, putting herself on a vector that would pass her along the left sides of the buildings. A fifteen-meter gap didn’t leave much clearance for an HK, and on paper, at least, it was pretty much impossible for the A-10’s own seventeen-and-a-half-meter wingspan.
The HK made another surge forward, closing the gap even more as Skynet apparently decided that Blair was on her last legs.
She shot past the first building.
And with a hard yank on her joystick, she turned the plane into a tight right-hand turn. The maneuver banked the A-10 halfway up onto its right wingtip, the angle shortening its effective wingspan, and without scraping even once against the half-demolished structures, she curved neatly through the narrow gap.
Putting the first of the two buildings directly between her and the HK.
Three weeks ago, with all four of Skynet’s radar towers providing intermeshed coverage of the L.A. basin, this trick would never have worked. But three of those towers were down now, with only the one at Capistrano way to the south still in operation.
Which meant that unless there was a stray T-l or T-600 somewhere nearby on the ground, being out of the HK’s sight also meant Blair was out of Skynet’s sight.
She had maybe five seconds before the HK maneuvered its own way through the gap. But she’d spent a lot of time mentally working this through, and she knew exactly what to do. With the A-10 still curving to the right, she fired up her supposedly dead starboard engine and simultaneously hauled back on the stick.
And with that, her tight right-hand circle turned into a tight right-hand upward spiral. She rode skyward, gripping the stick with two hands as she fought against the g-forces that were trying to pull the blood away from her brain. The spiral took her over the top of the first building, and she shoved the stick forward again, dropping her nose toward the ground, curving over the broken steel girders and into a power dive headed toward the narrow strip of ground between the two structures.
Which, exactly as she’d anticipated, put her directly above and behind the pursuing HK.
Skynet must have known instantly that it had lost this round. But it still wasn’t willing to concede defeat without a fight. The HK tried to roll itself over far enough to bring its Gatlings to bear, just as Blair’s last 143 armor-piercing rounds blew it to hell.
She puffed a little sigh as she pulled out of her dive and eased back on her engines. The sky around her finally showed clear, and it was time to head back to the new hangar Connor had set up near Fallback One. Blowing a drop of sweat off the tip of her nose, she sent the A-10 in a leisurely circle that would take her back eastward toward the team’s territory. She glanced at the ground, scanning for the distinctive shapes and glowing red sensors of Skynet’s Terminators.
And abruptly felt her heart seize up.
Six blocks to the south, squatting motionlessly on the ground like silent gray moths, were four more HKs.
And Blair was out of ammo.
Automatically, she kept the A-10 turning on the curve she’d set for it, her pulse pounding in her neck as she gazed at the enemy aircraft. They were sitting at the four corners of a narrow parking lot around a half-crushed warehouse surrounded by a lot of rubble, their lights dark, their turbofans either completely off or else turning slowly enough that they weren’t throwing up any dust. Their noses were pointed outward from the warehouse, the kind of arrangement soldiers used when they had to bunk down for the night in enemy territory.
But HKs didn’t sleep. Skynet didn’t sleep.
Could Skynet somehow have missed the fact that Blair was still alive? Ridiculous, not with the Capistrano tower still functioning. Could it have decided it had spent enough of its precious resources for one night? That was at least possible. The honchos at Command were pretty sure that Skynet was still in the ramping-up stage, still building its fleet of HKs and its armies of tanks and Terminators.
But whatever the reason, all that mattered to Blair right now was that she seemed to be off the hook for the rest of the night.
The A-10 finished its turn, and Blair straightened the plane out again. Keeping one eye on the city in front of her and another on the view in her mirrors, she headed home.
CHAPTER
THREE
Orozco was at his usual night-guard post, sleeping with his back to a broken pillar beside the archway that led into the half-crumpled building known to its residents as Moldering Lost Ashes, when he was startled awake by the sound of an approaching aircraft.
He pried his eyes open, wincing at the grit that had worked its way beneath the lids. His hands, which had been cradling his M16A2 rifle in his lap, shifted automatically into a proper firing grip on the weapon.
The plane was coming closer. Muttering a prayer under his breath, Orozco rolled half over and got to his feet. He hefted the M16, made sure his holstered Beretta was secure at his side, and stepped cautiously through the archway and out into the street.
It was a plane, all right, a dark shadow cutting across the patches of stars as it headed westward maybe half a klick south of him. It was too dark for a recognizable silhouette, but from the sound of the engine he guessed it was one of the A-10 Warthogs that the Resistance forces in the area liked to use for air support.
Orozco felt his lips press together as a second silhouette shot across the stars close behind the first. Unfortunately, the Resistance probably wouldn’t be using this particular A-10 much longer.
The second shadow was one he did recognize: one of Skynet’s cursed Hunter-Killers, moving in for the kill.
The A-10’s engine pitch changed. Orozco frowned, trying to find it again against the dark sky.
And then, suddenly, there it was, bearing practically straight toward him.
Reflexively, he ducked as the A-10 shot past overhead, heading due north now with the Hunter-Killer right behind it. Probably making for the San Gabriel Mountains, Orozco decided. Maybe hoping to lose the HK among the slopes and valleys there.
But at this point, and from this distance, that was a pretty forlorn hope. Sure enough, a few seconds later there was a flash of reflected light and a rolling boom.
Closing his eyes, Orozco sent a prayer skyward for the dead pilot.
He opened his eyes again, frowning. The echoes of the explosion had faded, leaving the sound of a single aircraft drifting through the cold night air…and to his amazed disbelief, it was the sound of the A-10.
Shaking his head in admiration, Orozco let go of his M16 with his right hand and threw a salute in the fighter’s direction. He wasn’t very familiar with the A-10—it was an Air Force jet, and the Marines had always used Harriers and Cobras for their close-air support. But he was familiar with HKs, and any pilot who could take one down in single combat was worthy of admiration.
Turning away from the sound of the distant plane, he took a deep breath of the cold night air and let his eyes drift around the ruined street he’d called home for the past two years.
Los Angeles had been lucky, he mused, if such a word could be applied to any spot on the globe these days. The nuke that had hit the city had been a smaller one, or else had misfired enough to lower its yield a little.
More importantly, its actual target had apparently been the Camp Pendleton Marine Base south of the city. Together, those two factors had worked to leave more of the city standing than had been the case with some of the world’s other major metropolitan areas.
Paris, for one, was gone completely, at least as near as he’d been able to glean from the scattered Resistance reports he’d pulled in before his radio had finally died. New York and Chicago were in worse shape than L.A., and it sounded like everything for a hundred kilometers around D.C. had been turned to slag.
An empty can somewhere across the street rattled. Orozco swung the muzzle of his M16 in that direction, probing the darkness for movement. Most of the local gangs had learned to leave Moldering Lost Ashes alone—several of them learning the hard way. But you never knew when some loner would drift into the neighborhood and think he’d found easy pickings.
You also never knew when Skynet would decide it was this area’s turn to be cleansed of the humans that infested its shiny, brave new world.
But the time for that final battle apparently wasn’t tonight. The can across the street rattled again, and this time Orozco caught a glimpse of a large rat scurrying past and disappearing into the shadows. The rats, at least, had done all right for themselves in the post-Judgment Day world. So had the cockroaches.
Orozco knew eight recipes for rat and three for roaches. Some of the residents here knew even more. Some of those recipes were even pretty good.
Judgment Day. Sighing tiredly, Orozco continued his visual sweep of the street, the bitter irony digging under his skin like the ever-present dust dug beneath his eyelids.
A stupid name, “Judgment Day.” Someone in the Resistance had apparently coined it, and it had spread by radio and word of mouth until it was the universally accepted name for the destruction that Skynet had unleashed upon the world.
But there had been no true judgment to it. None at all. Good and evil, rich and poor, sinner and saint—everyone had suffered equally in the attack.
Unless perhaps the judgment aspect was in the way •death and life had been handed out. That the chosen had been the ones granted the quick death of nuclear holocaust, while the evil had been those consigned to this living hell of hunger and cold and darkness.
The good die young. The old saying echoed through his mind. He’d never believed that before.
Maybe it was time he did.
But tonight, at least, the darkness out there concealed no fresh horrors. Taking one last look around, Orozco went back inside.
He was heading to his sleeping mat when a pebble clattered softly across the ground at his feet.
His first impulse was to look upward, through the broken sections of flooring toward the building’s top floor, where the group’s lookouts were stationed. But a second later his brain caught up with him and he realized it couldn’t have come from one of them. The lookouts always dropped their pebbles onto metal plates, where the clatter would alert Orozco or one of the other watchmen.
The nearest such plate was a good twenty meters away, and impossible for the lookout to miss.
Which made the source
of the pebble at his feet obvious.
He peered a few meters down the broken tiles and cracked walls of what had once been a luxurious apartment building lobby to the pair of sleeping mats tucked into a small alcove. Nine-year-old Star was half sitting up on her mat, her wide-open eyes gazing unblinkingly at Orozco, a taut questioning look on her face.
He gave the girl a reassuring smile and a thumb’s up. Her questioning look lingered another few seconds, as if she was wondering if there really was something wrong and Orozco was merely humoring her. But then she nodded, lay back down, and closed her eyes.
He watched her a moment, then shifted his gaze to the sixteen-year-old boy sleeping soundly on the mat beside her.
People at the Ashes wondered about the two kids. They didn’t wonder a lot, of course—with basic survival the top item on everyone’s list, no one had much time left to spend pondering anyone else’s oddities. Certainly everyone here had a long list of peculiarities of their own.
But even against that backdrop, Kyle Reese and Star stood out. They weren’t brother and sister—that much Kyle would readily tell anyone who asked. But how and where and why the two of them had linked up, that no one knew. Not even Orozco, and he was closer to them than probably anyone else in the building. It was something Kyle simply wouldn’t talk about. Not even when asked point blank, which a couple of the less tactful residents had done on occasion.
Star didn’t talk about it either.
But then, Star didn’t talk about anything. Whether she was physically unable to speak, or whether the trauma of Judgment Day or its aftermath had sent that part of her personality into a hole too deep for anyone to reach, was just another of the mysteries surrounding them. The system of hand signals she and Kyle used to communicate bore no resemblance to any formal sign language that Orozco had ever seen. Presumably it was something the two of them had created themselves over the years.
But for Orozco, at least, the most striking thing about the two of them was their almost symbiotic relationship. They did everything together, from their work to their sentry duties to the general struggle of life, often with only a hand signal or two between them for coordination.