T2 - 03 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Times of Trouble

by Russell Blackford

  Angelo stood carefully, wiping some of the dust from his gray military fatigues. He carried an AK-47 rifle and wore a Beretta 9mm. pistol tucked into his belt. In a small cavity in the trench wall, he also kept an RPG tube and half a dozen rocket propelled grenades, carefully preserved for when they might have maximum effect. Just now, the enemy helicopter was too far away. He lifted his foot, trying to feel his with a gloved hand, but could tell nothing about how bad the injury was. There was no time to pull off his leather boot and two layers of socks, and look for bruises or swelling. Besides, the pain seemed to be stopping. He tried to put it out of his mind, glancing over at his nephew, Curtis, who looked concerned --as if some minor injury mattered, when both of their lives might end at any moment.

  "I'm okay," Angelo said, lowering his foot to the door of the trench and testing his weight on it gingerly trying not to cry out when it hurt more than he expected. "Really, I'm okay."

  Another shell landed close by, with an ear-splitting explosion. The never-ending noise of battle could drive you mad. That was one of the military purposes of any bombardment: to break the enemy's nerve.

  There was nothing for it but to fight on, try to survive until the Resistance leadership actually did something. Even as he thought that, he realized it was too late. They couldn't last more than minutes, hours if they were lucky. Soon it would be dark, but the attack would probably go on. Even with a lull, they were as good as defeated. They couldn't hold out for days while the Resistance leadership worked out how to help—or if it was prepared to sacrifice them. How much were their lives worth, he wondered. How valuable was the territory that they held loyally for John Connor's militia?

  While people shouted, fired back with rifles, machine guns, and impact grenades, Angelo's black, crossbred dog, Kukulkan, kept surprisingly calm. He was well trained to sit through a firefight without panicking. Just one thing made him bark wildly: the appearance of a Terminator. But there were no Terminators in this battle: human being fought human being in the old struggle for territory and power, dating back thousands of centuries.

  Ramona Vasquez squeezed into the trench from one of the tunnels that connected it with other trenches, and led to the deep, armored bunkers that Raoul Tejada had built here many years before. Ramona had been fiercely loyal to John Connor's cause in its latest struggle against the Rising Army of Liberation. Her father had led the Rising Army in its original form, three decades before, but he'd allied himself with the Resistance when his forces had first been defeated here—trying to attack this very estancia. Many veteran fighters from the Rising Army, and their sons and daughters, had stood by General Connor, while others revived the old name, the old ambitions of local power and glory.

  Ramona offered her hand to Kukulkan. The dog sniffed at her with little interest, not making a sound.

  "What happened?" Angelo said. "Did you have any luck?"

  She shook her head vigorously. "I spoke to Gabriela Tejada. She is in New York for some kind of summit with General Connor. I told her if they don't hear from us after tonight it means we've all been captured or killed. She's got the message—I couldn't have been clearer."

  "Can't she get help to us?"

  "She didn't promise anything."

  "Damn! It's already too late. This is desperate."

  "I know," Ramona said. The gunfire and shelling never let up. "I told you.. .I couldn't have been clearer."

  "This used to be her property. I suppose it still is."

  "We're not the only ones under attack. She says there are no loyal forces they can get to us. We have to hold out."

  That seemed like someone's idea of a grim joke. It really meant Go down fighting. "All right," Angelo said. "They're giving up on us."

  "I know." She gave the merest hint of a wry smile. "But what are they supposed to do?"

  "Don't start me on that."

  More shells pounded the casco—the mortar bombardment had already reduced much of it to rubble. It had been an impressive two-story mansion, built of gray stone. Back before Judgment Day, it had been surrounded by gardens, lawns, and groves of trees, but the nuclear winter had come, followed by the first battles with the warlords who'd risen in South America. After them had come a worse menace: Skynet's machines, moving south from the old U.S., through South America's mountains and strangely morphed jungles.

  Since 1997, the casco had been ruined, then patched together, many times. It was now an ugly building, where it had once been fine and elegant. Rebuilt in thicker stone, it had stood like a harsh, gray fortress. What was now left of it squatted under a sky through which little light ever came, even at noon, surrounded by miles of arid land—the sad remnant of what had been the fertile Argentinean Pampas. Its miles of once-rich pasturelands scarcely provided the means to scratch out a subsistence living.

  It seemed as if the main building was finally going to be destroyed, but that was more symbolic than strategically crucial. What really mattered were the well-stocked bunkers, the stores of supplies and machinery, and the remaining farmland, poor though it was. At least the land kept some people fed; that alone gave a certain amount of power to whoever controlled it.

  Back in the 1990s, Raoul Tejada had run this place like a military operation. He'd been a survivalist, expecting a nuclear war, even though he'd been skeptical about Sarah Connor's claims as to how it would happen. Raoul had kept the property stockpiled with food, clothing, medicines, fuel, weapons, and ammunition. The bunkers were designed to protect against any nearby nuclear explosions and the effects of fallout. No one in Argentina had been better placed than Raoul and those under his protection when

  Judgment Day had come—followed by famine, cold, dark, and chaos.

  The property and its garrison had survived, but now the warlords had risen again. This time, they met little opposition. General Connor's main forces had all moved north, years before, to engage more directly with Skynet. The vast bulk of his militia had battled Skynet's forces in the mountains of Colorado, only six weeks before, and been almost annihilated, before capturing the war computer's vast facility in the Rockies. The forces left here in South America were minimal, their task being to hold precious land against the last marauding war machines.

  Angelo shouted above the battle noises. "If they won't help us, we're going down!" Just eighty of them were left here—enough to provide the thinnest line of defense. Through their network of internal tunnels, they could move rapidly from one area of the trenches to another, and they still outnumbered the enemy. But the Rising Army could bring even more soldiers, mortars, tanks, helicopters, and guns. Its strength was increasing, day by day—almost hour by hour. In fact, he realized, he was fooling himself. The Rising Army didn't need to bring in more of its weaponry. The game was already over.

  He retrieved his RPG tube and climbed his portable wooden ladder to the top of the trench, favoring his ankle with each step. The enemy helicopter came closer, but still not near enough to make a good target when ammunition was so precious. The Resistance depended heavily on munitions left over from before Judgment Day. Under endless attack from Skynet's machines, it had never been able to build significant factories of its own. Most of its effort had gone into destroying Skynet's factories and supply lines, trying to keep a balance of power.

  Curtis climbed another of the ladders. He squinted over the top of the trench, with his own RPG tube in his hands.

  "It's useless," Angelo said. "They're too far away for that, or too well protected." There was a massive Abrams tank among the possible targets, but it kept its distance, much like the helicopter gunships. There was little chance of taking it out cleanly at this range, even as it targeted the trenches and buildings with high explosive shells from its 125mm. main gun.

  "I know," Curtis said with a trace of bitterness. He lowered the RPG tube and backed down the ladder. He was a very dark young man, darker even than his mother—Angelo's sister, Maria—had been, and far more so than his Caucasian father, a big, loud American soldier who'
d been killed, fighting the machines, three months before his son was born. Curtis was now nineteen years old, with a long, somewhat wispy, downturned mustache. Maria had died only two years after her American lover, cut down by a bolt of searing light from a land H-K's laser cannon. Angelo had brought up her young son, acting like a father to him.

  Life had been uncertain in the years since Judgment Day; such arrangements were the rule now, more than the exception. It was an unusual family where the parents and the children all survived for long after the children were born.

  Suddenly, the trench seemed to come alive like a snake, prodded by the explosive impact of a shell hurled from the sixty-five-ton tank. The Rising Army seemed to have only about forty of its soldiers in this force, those manning the tank, the mortars, and the gunship, plus a couple of truck drivers and some infantry grunts. But Angelo's soldiers had no mechanized weapons platforms more powerful than Humvees —no tanks, no airborne gunships. Anything like that had long been moved north to take the fight to Skynet. If they could just take out that tank, or the circling chopper, perhaps it would break the Rising Army's spirit. Perhaps. If they failed, they would be crushed.

  As Angelo thought about that, Curtis shouted to get his attention, and pointed at a distant speck in the increasingly dark sky. It grew larger, beginning to take on a definite shape. "You know what that is?" he said. Angelo raised a pair of field binoculars that he wore around his neck, focusing them quickly to check out the worst. It was a second helicopter gunship. Friend or foe? It came straight toward them.

  Foe, then. The Rising Army had brought in its own reinforcements to finish them quickly. Something flared, on the chopper's wing-mounted weapons pods. "Get down!" Angelo shouted, not sure just how loud. For the second time in minutes, he got into the bottom of the trench, howling with pain when his foot hit the ground. He curled into himself as the missiles hit, some of them penetrating into the trenches...then exploding with horrific force.

  Those had been anti-tank missiles, left over from many years before. How many more did they have? Where had they been hoarding them? How many more choppers could they bring? How many fighters? It was clear that elements in the Resistance had long concealed some of their weaponry, waiting until Skynet had fallen, so the Rising Army could truly rise again. Such treachery bewildered him.

  He lay, shaken and bruised in the bottom of his trench, hurting too much, too shocked by the relentless pounding they'd taken, to know who else was still there. He hardly knew who he was. All he could think of was the two choppers in the sky, one with missiles...both, no doubt with heavy guns for "suppressing" ground fire, which meant exterminating any infantry opposition. The choppers had to be kept away. Move yourself, he thought. You've got to move. But his body did not respond. In a moment, he would go on; he promised himself that he would. He couldn't just lie there, stunned, waiting for the hammer to fall. He had to rally the other troops, try to fight back, fight this battle to the bitter end.

  No more missiles came, not just now. Angelo looked about, getting his breath back at last. The pain in his ankle was now just throbbing, not searing like white heat. He saw death everywhere: good soldiers—men and women—smeared against the trench walls. Curtis was not moving, though he still appeared to be breathing. The living ran to assist dead or dying comrades, some just gritted their teeth and hauled themselves, one more time, up the ladders of wood or rope, looking for enemy targets. Once more, some fired their guns.

  Then came more fire from the Rising Army's mortars. More explosions. The gunships hovered menacingly, ready to make the kill. More missiles speared down from the air, and the ground moved like the waves of a giant, tossing sea.

  COLORADO SEPTEMBER 5, 2029

  Danny Dyson trod carefully on the steel grating steps down to the lower levels of Skynet's huge underground complex. The stairway had no railings, for the machines that had used it had not been susceptible to human weaknesses, such as momentarily losing their balance. Everything here was subtly inhuman, even those parts of the complex that had been built prior to Judgment Day, before Skynet and its mechanical servants had taken over and dug more levels, going deeper into the bowels of the mountain. The original levels had been stripped by the machines; they looked nothing like the photographs that Danny remembered seeing as a child, back in 1997 when the Skynet military surveillance system had been installed.

  He stepped off at Level H, where two well-armed guards met him, both of them dressed much like Danny, in gray military uniform, including long coats that fell past their knees. Fiedler was a middle-sized black man, like Danny himself. He had a 12-gauge shotgun at the ready, a weapon with enough stopping power to slow down a Terminator. The other guard, Messner, was a short, thickset Caucasian woman whose reddish hair was cropped almost back to her scalp. She held a large German shepherd dog— known as Athena—on a very short leash. An M-16 assault rifle was strapped around her shoulders.

  "Greetings," Danny said, trying to lighten the mood. They all exchanged tense nods and smiles, and Danny bent to pet the dog near its collar. The dog tolerated it, recognizing him as human. If he'd been anything else—some kind of Terminator—it would have started barking hysterically at his approach. He offered his hands for sniffing. "Good girl. Good girl." The dog sniffed once, then seemed uninterested.

  "Athena looks bored," Fiedler said, still sounding more than a little tense.

  Danny straightened up. "Story of my life—so far. Let's hope it stays that way."

  "At least she's given you a clean bill of health," Messner said. She crouched for a moment to pat the dog, rewarding her for her work.

  Through the long war against the machines, guard dogs had become indispensable. Skynet had set about creating machines indistinguishable from human beings, to infiltrate the Resistance and attack its bases from within. Its first efforts, the T-600 Terminators, had been failures. With their rubberized molding over hyperalloy endoskeletons, the T-600s looked human from a distance. Skynet's artwork was highly convincing in that sense. But they could not get close enough to infiltrate. At close range, most people could pick them out quickly enough with the naked eye.

  With the T-600s, the war computer must have learned some lessons about the subtlety of human pattern recognition. It had underestimated the human mind, perhaps too confident of its own superiority. But it had moved on, displaying a ghastly kind of ingenuity. It had invented more advanced, far more sophisticated, Terminators, based on entirely new technologies. Who could imagine what had prompted its imagination? First there'd been the T-799s and T-800s: cybernetic organisms that imitated humans in appearance, sound, and even smell. Each one was based on an alloy chassis—essentially a combat endoskeleton —just like the T-600s. But genuine human flesh, hair, and skin grew over their skeletons. Those were the most advanced machines that Skynet had deployed in the American theater of war.

  Before it had been destroyed, Skynet had taken an extra step. It had invented its experimental T-1000 series: almost indestructible, chameleon-like night-

  mares, each the size of a man. They were made from a liquid polyalloy whose shifting shapes and colors could totally deceive the human eye. Their social interaction was highly convincing for the few minutes they needed before striking at anything human. The team that had finally destroyed Skynet's hardware in Spain had fought two T-1000S, assigned to protect their master from human attackers.

  Such cunning cybernetic devices as T-800s and T-1000s could trick human senses, but dogs and some other animals almost always knew the difference, picking up tiny clues. From the beginning of the Resistance, its leaders had trained guard dogs to respond to anything that looked like a human being—but was not. Indeed, it had not required much training, for dogs seemed to have an instinctive fear and hatred of the not-quite-human Terminators.

  "Gabriela Tejada and Juanita Salceda will be here soon," Danny said. "They're due in half an hour." He was early for his morning meeting with them, but he would make good use of the time. There were some
final checks to carry out on the time vault, the ectogenetic pods, and his own computer equipment. He'd make sure everything was in order.

  "No problem," Fiedler said, just a little stiffly.

  Right now, no one seemed relaxed, much as Danny tried to radiate calm. It was worse than the days immediately after the great battle here, when they'd seized the complex from Skynet's control. That, of course, had been a terrible day. Thousands of men and women had gone into the battle, which had driven Skynet to its alternative headquarters in Spain. Out of every ten who'd fought their way into the Rockies, only one had survived. Yet, amidst the pain of so many lost human lives—and so many survivors left crippled or horribly mutilated—there'd been jubilation, a feeling that they'd gotten through the worst.

  How quickly things changed! Now the whole complex was jumpy. Nobody felt safe. No one was wholly trusting—of their comrades, or the leadership. Danny could see it in the guards' eyes, in those of everyone he met. The human Resistance, unified for so many years, was beginning to break apart, and that had come as a shock. Some, it now appeared, had even planned for it, holding back equipment and supplies, ready to mutiny once Skynet was finished. In South America, self-proclaimed warlords had turned against the Resistance, and started to carve out their own territories—some in the name of the Rising Army of Liberation, an organization Danny had considered long beaten.

  General Connor's absence in Europe hadn't helped things—at least not here in Colorado—but the man couldn't be everywhere. Perhaps his personal visits to the European Resistance centers had helped avoid mutinies and rebellions on the other side of the Atlantic. Morale was still high over there, or so Danny had heard. All the same, it seemed like an evil fate was acting against them. As well as the warlords, there were the remaining war machines, many of them still unaccounted for. Unknown numbers lurked in the countryside on every continent where battle had been joined with the machines, their final instructions from Skynet unknown.