The Future War t2-3

by S. M. Stirling

  The thermite grenade was a smooth heavy green cylinder in his hand. Usually he despised people who pulled the pins on grenades with their teeth—showy, hard on your teeth, a macho-asshole sort of thing to do—but this time there wasn't any alternative. It came free, and he spat the pin aside without any damage to his enamel.

  There was a huge crump sound from behind him. He ducked lower, conscious of rock fragments whistling by, then skidded to a halt where a twisted pine gave him some shelter from the roadway. There he looked behind; the ten-ton granite boulder seemed to be floating in midair, and then vanished as it plunged toward the roadway fifty feet below.

  CRA SH- TINKLE- TINKLE- WHUDD UMP.

  John craned his head to see; the noise had been stunning, even thirty yards away. The boulder had landed right over the rear wheels of the lead bus, and the fuel tank had already caught fire— probably sparks, as the ponderous weight tore metal and sheared pipes. The last truck was already beginning to reverse.

  "Naughty, naughty!" John shouted, and opened his hand to let the spoon fly away from the grenade.

  He didn't have to toss it far; more of a drop with a bit of a boost. It fell where he'd aimed it, at the gap right behind the cab… just as the fuse set off the filling of powdered aluminum and ferric oxide packed into the magnesium shell. The stab of light was white and painful; that reaction went fast, and it hit nearly five thousand degrees. The fuel tank blew a few seconds later and sent the cab and engine of the last truck catapulting forward into the rear of the next.

  Ain't none of you homicidal transports going nowhere, John thought with savage satisfaction.

  That left nearly two hundred and fifty people back there, with the Terminators approaching. They'd have heard the explosions.

  "Gotta surprise 'em," he muttered to himself. Now, where won't they be expecting me to come from?

  He looked back. The slope off to his left was fairly clear; there was even a lip or ramp projecting out a few feet. The cut was fairly narrow…

  Even as he raced back to give himself enough of a run, he could hear his mother's voice screeching in his head that it was too risky—that he carried humanity's hopes with him, and a few hundred individuals were nothing compared to that.

  "Fuck it, Mom. No fate but what we make! Eeeee-ha!"

  Besides, what sort of leader never took risks for his people? He was going to need a lot of people willing to take a lot of risks to win this war. Crazy risks, the sort a computer would never take.

  He wasn't going to inspire anyone to take them by hiding in a bunker.

  The rear wheel skidded again, then caught. He felt the wind pushing at him, forcing its way through the thick fabric of his jacket as he built speed in a frenzied dash. Then he hit the upward-sloping lip of rock and he was in the air, soaring above the burning trucks below—all of them had caught now.

  Balancing on nothing, heat buffeting him, scraps of burning canvas going past.

  He hit the solid rock on the other side of the cutting perfectly, but hard enough that he nearly lost control and smeared out for a moment.

  "Spine compressed like a Slinky," he wheezed, then pulled up and used one booted foot to skid himself into a left turn. "She'll no take much more, Cap'n."

  The slope ahead of him was fissured rock and boulders and pine, growing thicker as he headed down toward the beginning of the cut and the roadway—where the people were trapped in a slaughter pen they didn't even know about. He couldn't take it slowly; right now, recklessness was the only safety.

  "Go, go, go!" he shouted to himself, bending forward and pulling the shotgun out of its scabbard.

  Down into the forest, branches slashing at his face… and a glint of polished alloy steel.

  Right behind a fallen log. The motorcycle left the ground again, and a bolt of eye-hurting light speared below the wheels.

  Where it struck, rock and wet wood exploded into fragments.

  "Eat this!" John shouted, and fired the shotgun like a giant pistol.

  The recoil nearly tore it out of his hands, and nearly threw the cycle on its side as he landed. He recovered in a looping sideways skid, waiting for the plasma bolt that would turn him into an exploding cloud of carbon compounds.

  It didn't come. The solid slug from the shotgun had hit just where he aimed it; all those years of shooting everything his mother could find from any and all positions, moving and still, had paid off. Dieter's training, too…

  "Thanks, guys," he said, pulling up beside the Terminator.

  The door-knocker round had hit just below where the metal skull joined the neck-analogue. It wasn't dead, but a shock like that could knock it out for a few seconds and make it reboot; he tossed the shotgun up, caught it by the slide, jacked another round into the breech, and fired again. This time one of the red-glinting eyes shattered, and the "skull" turned three-quarters of the way around.

  The Terminator's weapon lay near it; John grunted as he lifted it. "Thirty pounds, minimum," he wheezed as he put-putted slowly away.

  There was even a trademark on the side: cyberdyne systems PHASED PLASMA RIFLE, 40 MGWT RANGE.

  Skynet really had a don't-fix-it-if-it-ain't-broke complex; under other circumstances, he'd admire that. Right now he was puzzling out the controls; this model was made for a Terminator, which meant that it probably used a physical trigger… yes.

  He pointed the blocky, chunky weapon at the prone metal skeleton, which was already beginning to stir. Squeeze the trigger…

  Crack!

  The plasma bolt struck the curve of the skull; John threw up a hand as the metal that sublimed away from the bolt burned in a hot mist. When it died, there was only a stump of metallic neck left.

  Wow, he thought. Well, that's what my dad meant.

  He'd heard every detail of Kyle Reese's conversations with his mother, over the years; everything she could remember, and she remembered nearly all of it. Including Kyle complaining about how difficult it was to kill a Terminator with the feeble weapons of the twentieth century.

  He looked down at the smooth metallic and synthetic shape in his hands, and shivered a little. Skynet hadn't invented this.

  Neither had humans. He, John Connor, had pulled information about plasma guns from the skull of a Terminator whose computer brain had been sent back in time, full of information from Skynet-in-the-future, and Skynet-in-the-future had the information because it had received it from its own future self…

  "Time travel makes my head hurt," he muttered as he turned off the motorcycle and began ghosting through the woods toward the trapped humans. "Oh, fuck it, probably some unknowable cycle of cycles of history-changing time travel 'before' this one, someone did invent these things…"

  Screams and explosions brought him sprinting forward, caution abandoned. Eye-hurting brightness as plasma bolts hammered flesh and asphalt, and the stink of burnt flesh; he threw himself over a final rise and caught the glint of metal.

  That nearly killed him; some reflex below the level of conscious thought made him turn his leap into a dive, and a bolt split the air above his head.

  The ozone stung his nose and teared his eyes, but he knew where to shoot. A great silence fell as the Terminator toppled forward and crunched into rock and pine needles; they hissed as gobbets of molten metal and silicon poured from an alloy-steel skull that had opened like a hard-boiled egg.

  * * *

  People lay in twisted heaps where they'd been mown down in windrows during the first moments of the attack. It looked to John as if more than half of the refugees were dead. Many of the survivors were severely wounded.

  Okay, he thought. I've got a small first aid kit, some guns and ammunition, and a motorcycle. How can I use these to save these people? Mom would know… Dieter would know…

  There seemed to be a lot of children. Most of them were unharmed, all of the youngest seemed to be crying, the very youngest were screaming their distress.

  "Megan," he called out when he saw her standing in shock over her fath
er's body. She looked up, pale and startled. "Get some of the older kids to help you gather up the little ones. See if anyone is hurt." She stared at him. "Now!"

  Megan blinked and walked over to a blond girl, touching her on the shoulder; she spoke and the girl nodded numbly. Then the two of them started rounding up the other children.

  One thing done, Connor thought. "Does anybody here know first aid?" he called. No one looked up. He shouted louder. "First aid!" That brought some heads up. "Does anyone know any, any at all?" One man stood up and came toward him, then, more hesitantly, a young woman.

  "I took a CPR course," she said.

  "I took a general first-aid course," the man said.

  "Good," John told them. "This is what we've got for supplies."

  He paused, looking as grim as he felt. "We may need to take clothes from the dead to make bandages," he said. The two in front of him looked horrified.

  "I'll do it." John turned to find himself looking down at an older woman, red-eyed from weeping. "Had to stay with my husband," she said, indicating a body nearby with a jacket covering the face. "I know he'd want to help. Won't be the most sanitary bandages, but we need to stop the bleeding and clothes will do for that."

  She turned and went back to her husband. On the way she said something to another woman, who recoiled, then after watching her, started to do the same.

  "We need shelter," another woman said.

  John turned to find Paul's wife at his elbow. It occurred to him that he'd never learned her name. She smiled, tired. . "I'm Lisa," she said. "I was just remembering something your

  ^mother said to me when we first met. Your priorities should be shelter, water, and food in that order. That's what she said. But I I don't think we should stay here."

  "Maybe that's what I should do," John said. "Scout out some place we can sleep tonight while you folks patch up the wounded as best you can."

  Lisa nodded. "Good plan."

  I "I'll be back," John said. He went to his bike and revved the motor. Dammit, he thought as he drove off, I'm supposed to be leading, not asking permission or begging advice.

  Still, it was a good sign. He could take these people to shelter, but they'd have to look out for themselves after that.

  John Connor looked at the piled bodies. "Because I have a lot of work to do."

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MISSOURI

  Dennis Reese had gone about fifty yards before he realized that Mary wasn't with him. He looked in all directions, then headed back along his trail to find her sitting on a boulder beneath a huge shagbark hickory, just coming into leaf. She was sitting with her legs crossed at the knee, leaning her chin on one fist, staring at nothing.

  "I thought I'd lost you," he said.

  Mary just looked him over.

  Now what? he wondered. "Hello?"

  "I think we need to talk," she said, sitting up.

  "I think we need to get away from that thing."

  "We have, for the moment. Now we need to figure out what to do and where to go. I honestly don't think the camp would be our best choice."

  He looked away from her, folding his arms across his chest, then took a few steps away from where she sat. Mary raised an eyebrow and one corner of her shapely mouth, but said nothing.

  He turned and they looked at each other, neither wanting to be the first to speak, until finally Mary rolled her eyes.

  "Pull up a rock," she said. "We could use a break at least."

  After a beat she said, "I'm sorry I hit you." Which she'd done a number of times as he dragged her into the trees. Hard.

  Lucky she didn't have any combat training, he thought. She hit as hard as she could… which is exactly what you should do in a situation like that. Too many untrained civilians just made symbolic hitting gestures, particularly women.

  He waved her apology aside and sat down. "You're taking this well," he commented.

  "Bullshit." She sneered. "I'm taking this very badly and I'm thinking things that scare me." She looked him in the eye. "But I'm not the type to run around in circles yelling 'the sky is falling.' "

  Reese lowered his eyes and nodded. He was taking this pretty badly himself. He kept hearing the sudden barrage of shots and the pitifully few screams from their abandoned patients. While it was true that most of those people were probably going to die anyway, exterminating them like that was vile. Especially if what Mary had overheard was true and they'd been deliberately infected in the first place.

  "I hate to sound like a conspiracy nut," the young nurse said,

  "but this couldn't have happened without some sort of cooperation from elements in the army."

  What she'd said was a reflection of his own thoughts. "If you were a conspiracy nut, you'd have just said 'the army,'" Reese pointed out.

  Some of the tension visibly left her body. "It's good that you caught the difference. Because, much as I'd like to think that what just happened was a nightmare…"

  "Same here," he agreed.

  "So, is Yanik involved, or is he just following orders?" Mary asked.

  Reese frowned. "I don't know him well," he said. "But I got the impression that he's an all right guy. He's not enthusiastic about running herd on a bunch of civilians, but then, none of us are. As for following orders, if they come from the right place, bearing the right names and codes, why wouldn't he obey them? We did."

  "So the army's been infiltrated."

  He spread his hands. "By what? Trailer trash?"

  Mary tightened her lips. She'd been about to call him on his assumption that people who lived in trailers were automatically trash, when she realized she was just looking for a distraction.

  "We've got to warn them," she said.

  "And how will we get them to believe us?" he asked.

  "Well, we've got neither trucks, nor patients, and we can take them… back there," she pointed out. "What do you think we should do? Hide out in the boonies and hope someone else takes care of the problem?"

  He gave her a look. "How about we talk a little less and think a little more," he suggested.

  They were silent after that. Then Mary raised her head excitedly.

  "Do you hear that?" she whispered.

  The lieutenant strained his ears, and after a minute he heard a rushing sound.

  "Water!" Mary exclaimed happily. "Let's go find it." She leapt to her feet and started off in the direction of the sound.

  "Hey!" Reese said, but quietly and started off in pursuit. He'd just grabbed her arm when he heard the sound of a rifle being cocked.

  "Who goes there?" a young voice barked.

  Reese froze and Mary looked at him with eyes like saucers.

  "Lieutenant Dennis Reese," he said, carefully holding his hands away from his body, "U.S. Army Corps of Engineers." He nodded meaningfully at his companion.

  "Uh, Mary Shea, nurse."

  From out of the greenery came a slight figure in fatigues and camouflage paint carrying an M-16 pointed unwaveringly in their direction.

  "You got ID?"

  "Yes." Reese reached for his orders.

  " Slowly," the youngster barked. "Using two fingers, take it out of your pocket and toss it to me."

  The lieutenant did as he was told; then he nodded at Mary, who slid a laminated badge from her pants pocket and tossed it over as well.

  Not looking away for even an instant, the youngster stepped forward, scooped up the two IDs, and stepped back. Then, constantly flicking eyes from page to prisoners, he read them.

  "I'll hold on to these for now," the kid said. "I better take you in."

  Gesturing with the rifle for them to turn around and start walking, the youngster followed, barking out terse directions now and then. It seemed to Reese that occasionally he'd glimpse a human form disguised with brush and paint, but he honestly couldn't be sure. Having a cocked automatic weapon behind his back, in the hands of someone barely old enough to shave, was nervous making enough.

  Finally they came upon a cabin o
n the edge of a small clearing, overshadowed by a group of oaks sprouting from a rocky cleft; their massive writhing limbs formed a virtual platform over it. The cabin itself was notched logs chinked with mortar, the door and shutters weathered and splintered; it looked like thousands of others in varying stages of decay up here in the hollows of the Ozarks.

  Hmm. Reese decided that appearances could be deceptive: despite the cabin's rustic appearance there was a keypad under a wooden catch by the door. The kid gestured them to one side, then entered a code—carefully keeping his body between the pad and the prisoners, Reese noted. There was the sound of a lock being tripped and Mary and Reese were silently ordered to enter the cabin.

  A man was seated at a rough-hewn table sipping from a tin cup.

  "Daddy?" the kid said.

  "Good job, honey," the man said. "Just give me their papers and I'll take it from here. Y'all get back to your post."

  Uh-oh, Reese thought. Good thing I didn't make that joke about being too young to shave.

  The girl, which they now saw her to be, grinned and pulled the two prisoners' IDs out of her breast pocket. "Betcha they thought I was too young to shave," she said, glancing aside at Reese. "Or at least this guy did."

  "Maybe you shave your legs," Mary replied with a slight snort.

  The girl handed the IDs over, saluted, and left, pulling the door closed behind her.

  "Lieutenant Reese," the man said, pursing his lips. "Army Corps of Engineers; always a useful occupation. And Nurse Shea." He smiled a welcome at Mary. "We can always use someone trained in the medical profession," he said sincerely.

  "Welcome to our little hideaway."

  "You survivalists?" Reese asked. He had a sinking feeling about this. He'd known a few survivalist nutcases in his time; some who were the kind who would decide to keep him and Mary as slaves on the grounds that they would help him survive.

  He'd known a few who weren't crazy, but the way today was going, what were the odds he'd meet a sane one?

  "I'm Jack Brock," the man said. "That was my daughter, Susie. Sit down, take a load off," he invited. "Have some mint tea."