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

by Russell Blackford

  "So what do you think about it? I mean the view. Surely you cannot enjoy it?"

  "Well, not exactly—" In his own world, John had traveled in many aircraft—training with Sarah, in the hills of Nicaragua and Guatemala, fleeing from law enforcers all over Central and South America, crossing the U.S.A. from one side to another. But he'd never flown across the ocean, and never seen a body of water so powerful and threatening. The sea and the storms, the low, dark sky, were terrifying, yet beautiful in a way he couldn't define.

  "This is what it is like in my world, as well," Jade said. "Everything is gray. It is nothing like life in your world, your time."

  "I know. I can understand that."

  "Before I traveled back in time, I had never seen the sun. Not in real life, only old recordings. I must have seen it as a baby, of course, but I can't recall things from when I was a just a few months old."

  "Not even you?" he said.

  She laughed, then looked sad again. "Not even me."

  He turned his back against the window to look at her more easily. "I was thinking about the sea and the sky. You know, they're so huge and dark. I don't know..." They seemed, he thought, indifferent to anything human. The sea and the sky just didn't care. Would Jade understand that? He let it drop. It was no use making everything too complicated.

  Over the past weeks, he had seen a lot. He'd visited a dozen Resistance bases in Europe, moving from place to place in helicopters or land vehicles. He'd driven through the shattered remains of once-great cities: Madrid, Rome, Berlin, Paris, and he'd come to understand the true enormity of what had happened on Judgment Day. He'd seen the vast dustbowls of Europe, where almost nothing could grow, and crossed in heavily-armed vehicles through miles of dead lands, where fires had blazed from one end of the continent to the other.

  "You seem unhappy," she said, "and you didn't sleep."

  He managed to give a false smile. "Not exactly unhappy."

  Except she was right: he did make himself unhappy, thinking about her and what she meant to him.. .and how little he meant to her. Did she care for him in any way at all? Sometimes, like now, she seemed to, but he couldn't hope. He wished he wasn't so ordinary looking, that there was something about him that might make her take notice. Of course, he knew he looked okay—good enough to win people's trust, make them want him to like them. He could charm people, even flirt with the right people. But that didn't cut much ice with Jade.

  She was perfect...no, she was more than perfect: she was superior to the most perfect human being. She was even superior to other enhanced warriors from her world, such as Anton, who'd been genetically engineered later in life. Their improvements were more limited, more specific. Jade's were fundamental, involving every cell of her body.

  "I tried to sleep," he said. "I napped a little."

  "Hardly at all." She looked directly into his eyes.

  "Nobody slept last night. That is a pity—we have a long day ahead."

  She hadn't slept, either—of course. She was like Anton. Sooner or later, they needed rest like anyone else, but John had seen how long they could work with no sign of fatigue. When badly wounded, they'd had to draw on their bodies' resources to heal up fast, aided by the millions of tiny nanobot mechanisms in their bloodstreams. Then they needed to flood their bodies with protein and other nutrients to get back to normal. To absorb it all, they did actually need sleep. But, except in those cases, they just seemed to work on indefinitely, for as long as it took.

  "It's going to be a tough day for everyone," he said, then paused, not wanting to big-note himself to her. She could see right through any of that. "Not so much for me, I guess. A lot of it falls on General Connor." He glanced at the front of the plane where the General sat beside Sarah, talking quietly, their body language a little strange. Neither, it seemed, wanted to get too close. "This is kind of like crunch time, huh? For everyone—you and Anton as well."

  "We have to make important decisions. That is true. All the same, you need to rest."

  "I was worried," he said. He spoke softly, not wanting to be overheard. Jade's hearing was so acute that he could have whispered from the front of the plane and she would have picked it up accurately. She doubtlessly knew exactly what General Connor and Sarah were saying to each other. Anyway, he was tired of standing over her. He sat on the floor of the plane, looking up until she joined him. "Like I said, I was worried...and—" He hesitated, wondering how frank he should be with her, not wanting to offend her in any way.

  "What, John?"

  "I have to admit, I was excited, too. I mean, what happened in this world is terrible, you know? But, given that it is has happened..."

  Had he started to go too far? Her world had also been ruined by its own version of Skynet. Judgment Day had come twenty-four years later than here, in June 2021, but—from what the Specialists had told him—it had been even worse. Not so much in the damage and immediate death toll, but in the humans' situation when the nuclear holocaust was over. In Jade's World, Skynet had been integrated into the U.S. defense and supply systems, controlling so many weapons and factories that it was almost invincible.

  She sat an inch or two closer. "You mean that we had the chance to make a difference?"

  He looked at her closely, trying to gauge her feelings. "I guess so," he said.

  "You're right." Her calm face lit up with excitement, just for a moment. "We did...and we used it well."

  "Hey, that's what I think, too. I mean, I'm glad we came here."

  "This is a terrible world, John. Dreadful things keep happening here. But at least there's hope. You and Sarah should be proud of everything you've done. If not for the two of you, this whole world would have fallen to the machines."

  "I guess that's true."

  "Don't forget it. This world owes you everything." She spoke as quietly as he did, but she was so intense—he hadn't expected that. Something had sparked it in her, though who could say what it was? Jade knew everything about her environment with a kind of clarity that ordinary people could never achieve, train all they might. She wasn't telepathic, or anything of the kind, but she knew stuff...knew what was going on in a way that no one else could even imagine.

  "I guess that's right," he said carefully. "But we all made a difference by coming here...especially you, Jade. Anton as well, but especially you." He dropped his voice to the merest whisper. "Without you, they'd never have beaten Skynet. They'd never even have found it."

  "Perhaps with more difficulty."

  "It would have been a lot harder, maybe impossible. That's why they went looking for help, in the first place—why they had to send back another Terminator to find it."

  "I know." She was silent for half a minute, looking away from him, lost in her own thoughts. She stood once more, gazing outward over the ocean. "Look," she said suddenly. "Come and look forward."

  He stood to join her, and saw something extraordinary. The ruins of the vast metropolis of New York City stretched inland and along the coast for miles. Nothing else he'd seen since coming to this world had prepared for him for it. Seen from this height, the vista was immense. The sheer scale of it exceeded even the great, shattered cities of Europe.

  None of the famous skyscrapers of Manhattan remained standing. The island itself looked as though it had been largely vaporized by the multiple warheads that had struck it on Judgment Day. Its surface was scarred and cratered, totally inhospitable, and the sea had encroached on its boundary, as if some giant had picked it up like a pizza, taken random bites, then set it down once more. Yet, the remnants of some buildings still stood, even though their upper stories had been blown away, and their glass walls

  were totally destroyed. Most were no more than a few floors of steel, bent and twisted into grotesque tendrils that stretched out, as if for help. Elsewhere, massive blocks of concrete had shifted, cracked, and broken to form unrecognizable shapes.

  The Hercules circled to make its landing. As they flew lower, John could make out the rusting me
tal shells of millions of vehicles. He'd absorbed much of the history of this world, and knew very well that the nuclear exchange in 1997 had taken place during the darkest hours of the night, New York time. The cars that had filled the streets could not normally have been on the road at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. No, their owners had been woken by alarms, or by their neighbors—or by loved ones from other time zones, desperately calling, in their own last moments of life. They'd heard warnings of nuclear missiles, heading their way from sites in Russia, or from Russian submarines.

  They'd tried to flee the doomed city.

  All futile, like sand thrown into the wind.

  John knew all that—It made sense to him. But there was nothing like seeing the evidence to bring home the full horror of it.

  There was loud talking up in the front of the plane. Sarah relayed the message down to John and Jade, though Jade must have heard it already, and understood.

  'We're going to land," Sarah said. "You'd better brace yourselves."

  FOUR

  COLORADO SEPTEMBER 5, 2029

  Danny boiled the water in the urn, then made a mug of black coffee to warm his bones. Cecilia and Juanita were due in just a few minutes.

  When the Resistance forces had burst in here, those weeks ago, there had been ferocious opposition from the war machines that had been Skynet's final line of defense. Danny would never forget the slaughter, the destruction, the pain and blood. Level H had been piled with the dead and covered in the remnants—mainly metal, but some organic—of shattered machines, such as gunpods, endos, and Terminators. Since then, they'd cleaned all that out, but the place was still littered with strange devices left behind by Skynet—amongst them, the multiple rows of ectogenetic pods.

  He wandered amongst these, still fascinated by the weird machinery that Skynet had invented. The pods were rectangular metal slabs reminiscent of coffins, each with a lid of clear armorglass to display the morphology of the tissue being grown on a state-of-the-art combat endoskeleton. Right now, most of the pods were empty, standing upright, with their lids swung open on hinges. Inside each of them, there was space for a large human body. Danny could have fitted in there fairly easily.

  At the rear of the array were a few rows of pods that lay down flat, even more like coffins. These pods had not been emptied. Danny placed his coffee mug on the surface of one, and leant against it very carefully, not daring to rest his entire weight—though he was confident that the machine was built far too strongly to suffer any damage just from the pressure of a human body. Seen through its armorglass lid, a new Terminator floated naked in nutrient fluid—like in a high-tech womb—restrained only loosely by metal-mesh straps. If woken, it could probably have burst out of there. This Terminator was a T-799 model, female in appearance, with a tall, lean, muscular body, like a top-level runner or perhaps a pole-vaulter—some kind of strong, lithe athlete. Its blonde, almost white, hair was long enough to fall past its waist, and drifted unrestrained in the fluid. The T-799s were the prototype for the T-800 series, and had much the same capacities.

  The pods seemed like coffins and wombs—both at once—home to humanoid beings that were not really alive...and yet who waited to be born.

  The dormant T-800s came in several standard models. One row of ten pods included two that had been opened, the other eight still containing Terminators, floating in their fluid, awaiting the call for action from Skynet—a call that would never come. These eight were the 101 model, male in appearance. The two that had been hatched, leaving their metal wombs empty, had been sent back in time, one at Skynet's behest, to 1984. Its target had been Sarah Connor; Its instructions had been to kill her before she gave birth to her son. That Terminator's mission had failed. The other had been sent back by General Connor himself, to act as his protector, ten years later, in 1994. Against the odds, it had succeeded.

  There were other T-800 models, in other rows of unopened pods. One model looked like a middle-aged man, not especially tall—certainly less than six feet—but immensely broad through the chest and shoulders. They were much like aging professional wrestlers. Another model copied the appearance of a young, trim man, athletic-looking, but not, to look at him, especially powerful. Of course, appearances were deceptive. The musculature of the T-799s and T-800s was purely cosmetic. It was camouflage, to enable them to pass for human and attempt to infiltrate the Resistance, or carry out other missions where human form could enable them to operate close to their enemies. A Terminator's muscles did not move its underlying skeletal structure, as with a human being. Rather, its motive force came from its primary and backup power cells, which drove its hyperalloy skeleton. The surface tissue just went along for the ride.

  That was why a Terminator could be totally stripped of its flesh without in any way becoming less dangerous. It also meant that all Terminators, except the prototype T-1000s, had much the same abilities, no matter that some looked more impressive than others.

  The sound of voices caught Danny's attention. He looked up to see two tall women coming down the stairs, one of them doing most of the talking, while the taller of the two was almost silent. He watched quietly as they dealt with the guards: Fiedler and Messner. When they were finished, he waved his empty coffee mug, and headed over to meet them.

  Cecilia Tejada obviously had little to say. The other woman, Juanita Salceda, was talking more, though she had never been especially garrulous. It was more that Cecilia became very intense, withdrawn into herself, when about to go on a mission. Once she was in action, she was one of their best fighters, but she didn't use small talk or banter to deal with the dangers that Danny had seen her face. The most she would do in battle was applaud her own artistry with firearms, something of which she was proud. Her marksmanship was certainly impressive, no doubt about that.

  She would soon be leaving on a mission that could end her life. He'd known her for many years, since he'd arrived at the Tejada estancia in 2006, and hated the thought that this might be the last time he'd ever see her. But that was how it was. It was how every battle had been. The only way to win their struggles and build a new world was to keep putting their lives on the line, again and again and again—as often as needed. Cecilia would be making a journey through the time vault...becoming one of the few human beings to have done so.

  Of those few who had taken the journey, some had survived. Just as many had never returned.

  As Cecilia and Juanita arrived at Level H, the two guards welcomed them. Juanita chatted amiably for a minute, though she must have had a lot on her mind, especially now that General Connor had returned. At least, they assumed he was back; so far, there'd been no news out of New York to confirm his safe arrival. Whatever the case with Juanita, Cecilia knew very well that she had a lot to think about. Her friend might be preoccupied by Connor's flight from Europe—indeed, with thoughts of both John Connors—but Cecilia had grimmer thoughts. She had been chosen to lead a counterattack on the Rising Army of Liberation, down in Argentina. That meant being teleported thousands of miles by the time vault, possibly on a suicide mission. It had largely been her own choice, so she couldn't complain or curse her fate. She knew she was right for the job. For many reasons, no one else could do it like she could. All the same...

  What had she let herself in for?

  Juanita patted the guards' dog, Athena, and they headed over to Danny, where he'd set up his work site near the time vault and the rows of ectogenetic pods.

  Despite the hard lines inscribed into her face, Juanita was still beautiful: athletic, almost Cecilia's height, with dark hair that scarcely showed any signs of gray. She had a strong features and a brilliant smile that flashed her white teeth. She and John—General Connor—were obviously in love, always had been, for as long as Cecilia could remember, though they'd never admitted it, not even to each other, as far as she knew.

  Juanita had endured the rigors of the desolate world after Judgment Day better than most, and perhaps the world could still offer her some happiness amidst the ruins
of last century's civilization. She'd been burnt badly on the leg during the great battle here in Colorado, when they'd seized this facility from Skynet, but she'd made a good recovery. Now she had a definite limp, plus some additional scars—which were really nothing. All of them in the Resistance had scarring, some more than others. Cecilia had plenty of scars of her own. They were like badges of honor;

  no one who'd fought against Skynet was repelled by mere scars. So many who'd survived were permanently maimed or hideously mutilated.

  "How are you feeling?" Juanita said, obviously picking up on how quiet Cecilia had been. "You okay?"

  "It's the uncertainty that gets to me," Cecilia said. She knew she was not a coward. She'd faced death many times—if anything, she had a reputation as a gung-ho warrior, stronger, braver, a better shot than the rest, always carrying the biggest gun she could find. But this was something different. Her future could flip-flop on a single decision, then she'd have to face it almost immediately. She'd do what she had to do, but she'd like to know what it was.

  The question was whether she would go to Argentina with a group of human fighters—which probably would be suicide—or whether they could start using the "unborn" Terminators still floating in their ectogenetic pods. She supposed the mission might be canceled entirely.

  If she had Terminators with her, there was some chance of success, but every extra step they took in using Skynet's weapons stretched the boundaries of what was acceptable. They'd started by taking the war machines' phased-plasma weapons when they could, and they'd moved on to reprogramming two Terminators for journeys in time, offering or seeking help. They'd then used one of those Terminators on a military mission. Now they were thinking of using whole groups of them, essentially as soldiers. It might be necessary, but where could you draw the line? At some point, they'd have to say, No more! The last thing the Resistance leadership wanted was to send themselves down the same path that had destroyed civilization only thirty-two years earlier, and almost destroyed the human species itself.