The Future War t2-3

by S. M. Stirling

  That was what they were called anyway. Just people who took to the road hoping to find a place better than the one they were in, and kept on going since there was no such place.

  They were mostly harmless, though criminals of opportunity; thieves and traders. They were welcome everywhere for a day or two, then they were welcome to leave. The resistance left them alone, or on occasion lent them a hand. For which the gypsies sometimes gave them intel at a cut rate.

  This group had two wagons, three broken-down horses, and a mule. It looked like they were a single extended family with four older people, six adults in all, and seven children of various ages.

  They seemed like the kind of people who had survived rather than thrived even before Judgment Day.

  The instant he saw them Sam lifted his assault rifle and began firing. Jeff and Mona joined in with cries of glee. The mules made their displeasure known by dancing and, in the case of the one Sam was riding, essaying a buck or two. He whacked it on the side of its head with the stock of his gun. Mary was too stunned at first to move, and it wasn't until the mule bumped her that she got out of its way.

  She watched the gypsies fall. They'd barely had time to scream, let alone be afraid. Mary started forward a step when the children began to drop, then forced herself to stop. There was nothing she could do, except hope that Sam hadn't noticed that one step. Suddenly she became aware that someone was firing from a small copse of trees to the southeast. Retreating behind the mule, she tried to tell Sam.

  A rocket, immediately followed by another, roared from the trees, striking the two wagons and turning them and the animals into flaming debris. The smell of burning flesh frightened the mules, and the Luddites had all they could do to keep them under control for a few minutes. Leo held on to the pack mules'

  reins for dear life, but he never took his eyes off the copse for a moment.

  "What's your problem, asshole?" Mona bellowed. She skipped back from Jeff's mule and swatted it on the rump.

  "Shut up!" Sam said, in a stage whisper. "It's one of them."

  "Has to be," Jeff said, looking as white as paste.

  Mona looked toward the copse and went still, swallowing hard.

  Watching them, Mary became even more afraid. If these vicious killers were frightened of whoever hid in the trees, there was even more reason for her to be afraid. She looked up into Kyle's terrified eyes and wanted nothing more than to grab him and run. But she knew she wouldn't get two paces before they killed her. If she waited to see what happened, she might live. A slim chance at survival was better than none. Especially since her death assured Kyle's.

  The trees began to thrash, and then to lean forward, as a massive machine lurched out of the copse on caterpillar treads.

  It was at least sixteen feet high, and from a distance looked narrow. Its entire front was a wall of gun ports and to either side were missile launchers, the missiles themselves racked on its sides. There were spotlights atop its turret and no doubt its body was packed with ammunition. It trundled toward them with surprisingly little sound. It crushed some of the gypsy children's bodies as it came on, causing Mary to wince, but she kept silent.

  Finally it stopped.

  "Luddite Patrol A-36," Sam barked. "Sam Marshall, AS-783490 commanding."

  The machine was silent. All of the humans remained silent and immobile, waiting for its response.

  "Patrol A-36," the machine said in a slight Austrian accent. A red laser spot appeared on Mary's chest. "What is this?"

  "This prisoner is a medic," Sam explained. "Standing orders are to acquire such persons and convey them to the camp."

  "And this?" The red spot appeared on Kyle's forehead.

  "This is the prisoner's offspring," Sam said. "By retaining him, she becomes more tractable and less inclined to suicide."

  Mary stared at him. What had happened to the good ol' boy she knew and loathed?

  The machine was quiet and still for so long it might have been turned off. None of them made that assumption, though. Mary had the impression that if the machine didn't answer until the following morning, then sunrise would find the humans in exactly these positions.

  "Acceptable," the machine said at last. "Carry on, A-36." It backed up slightly, turned, and moved back down the road.

  Sam motioned them forward, riding the mule carefully around the flaming wreckage. No one spoke; no one but Mary and Kyle watched the killing machine trundle away.

  They'd been walking for at least half an hour before Mary got up the courage to ask Sam, "What was that?"

  He didn't answer for a long time, riding on without even looking down at her. They rode and walked on for a mile or more before he spoke. "That was a Hunter-Killer machine," he said at last. "Its job is to seek out humans and destroy them."

  Mary looked at him. "I thought, from the way you were all acting, that it was going to kill you."

  Sam's lips thinned. "Sometimes they do. But we're all good Luddites," he said. "We've had ourselves fixed. So there's no need to kill us; we won't be breedin' anytime soon and we're good at our jobs. That's what makes this patrol an A unit."

  "Oh," she said.

  They walked on for several more miles before she began to notice a definite industrial tang in the air.

  "We're almost there," Mona called out.

  Sam called a halt and pulled an instrument out of his pocket.

  He tapped a code into it and they waited. After five minutes there was a chime from the unit and they started forward again.

  Shortly thereafter they walked up a hill, and when Mary came panting to the top, she stopped breathing altogether in shock.

  Before her, in what once must have been a small valley, was a single one-story building. It must have been two miles square by three. Smoking chimneys appeared every five hundred feet or so and there were towers at each corner and a small satellite dish every thousand feet. The whole structure was surrounded by a wire fence, which had guard towers every fifty feet. It was ugly and had a thrown-together look, common to all completely utilitarian buildings. She hated it on sight.

  "It's a lot worse inside," Sam said.

  She looked up at him and could have sworn she saw pity on his face. Maybe that's why he wears those glasses, she thought.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CORUNA, MEXICD THREE YEARS LATER

  The Terminator turned its head toward the ill-defined heat signature, trying to refine its focus. After a few seconds, when the brightness refused to become distinct, it turned away. Its processors told it that the bright mass was probably rock with a high metal content still hot from the recently set sun. It was the last evaluation the Terminator would ever make, because its neural net processor was completely wrong.

  John grinned as he raised his head from behind the rock and watched the Terminator turn away. Snog's new gizmo might not have much staying power, but it was a real lifesaver while it did last. It offered a false signal for a space of about four feet around its wearer, evening out the heat signals, making the body appear a bright, amorphous mass, such as might be left behind by an explosion. He carefully lined up the Terminator's head; the plasma bolt struck in a beam of actinic light, and the hard resistant alloy of the thing's skull turned into a strobing mass of molten gobbets and burning gas.

  John's night-vision goggles automatically turned the brightness down; he rolled to another rock—always displace after you shoot— then flipped the switch on his unit and moved forward.

  Others moved forward with him, the HQ strike unit. They went from rock to rock across the stony hillside, scattered with chamisos and cactus. The night air smelled of the herbal scents of desert shrubs, and of ozone and hot metal as bolts split the darkness.

  It was unusual for John to do fieldwork these days. Most of what he did now was plan and organize and give orders. Actually carrying a rifle into the fray? He honestly didn't have the time for it.

  But in this case, nothing would have kept him out of it. His mother was in troub
le.

  From out of nowhere a spring box leaped up before him, multiple legs reaching, acid-filled hypo already exposed. John swung the butt of his plasma rifle like a baseball bat, knocking the thing flying and followed up with a blast that turned it to melting parts—one of which stung his arm through the coarse strong fabric of his uniform. He swore and batted it away; the cooling metal crackled as it spun away, leaving a discolored spot on his sleeve.

  Up until now most of the Central and South American auto-factories had mainly produced these small but quite deadly killers. They were very simple, with very simple programming: the mechanical equivalent of a weasel. Leap up from the front, inject the heart with hydrochloric acid; leap up from the back, inject the brain. Small, cheap, and easy to produce, their only defect from Skynet's point of view was that they could kill only one human at a time.

  And so Skynet had slowly expanded its smaller south-of-the-border factories until they could produce full-scale HKs and Terminators. The resistance had taken out the factories that they knew about, but knowing they would, Skynet had built many more of them, not always in remote areas. The HKs had seemed to come out of nowhere and twenty small villages had been destroyed before the resistance in Mexico had even been able to get the word out.

  The attackers crested a rise; the maps said it was an abandoned lead-silver mine, with an equally deserted village gradually crumbling back into the adobe mud it had been made from.

  Instead, it was seething with not-life. Before him, John could see the ground moving, a glittering ripple as the tiny robot killers came forward, and his stomach clenched. There was something about an infestation like this that brought the hair up on the back of his neck and made him want to kill mindlessly. He swept the plasma beam from right to left and back again, retreating before the tide of them, cursing as the rifle began to burn his left hand through the insulated forestock.

  Beside him a soldier came up and swept the ground with a low-tech—but for this operation, equally effective—flamethrower.

  His heart beating overtime, John put up his rifle. He should save the batteries for the big killers. Skynet was keeping them back, sending in these little monsters to wear the resistance fighters down and to use up their ammunition.

  Not gonna work, John thought. When's the damn thing gonna learn? If the future wasn't something he could change significantly, then neither could Skynet. The humans were going to win. Not yet. Probably not for a long time, but piece by piece, bit by bit, they were gaining ground. Biologicals had a distinct advantage over the machines. They could reproduce without having to mine, refine, transport, mold, and construct themselves; the biosphere took care of that.

  The soldier stopped spraying and the two of them waited to see if anything would come out of the flames. When nothing moved, they did, cautiously making their way through the burned parts. Stepping on an acid-filled needle would be a stupid way to lose your foot.

  According to reconnaissance, the factory was in this basin.

  John gripped his rifle a bit tighter. It had been a long time since the factories were easy targets. Skynet didn't rely on keeping them remote anymore; it would fight the resistance for this factory with all its power.

  John ducked down when he saw the lights. HKs had huge spotlights mounted on the top of their metallic carapaces, not that they needed them. Like the Terminators, they had IR

  sensors that tracked by body heat. But there was something about those huge lights that intimidated, and distracted, and, unfortunately, rendered night-vision goggles less effective.

  John flipped his own up. "HKs," he said succinctly, informing everyone in the network that Skynet was sending in the big guns.

  He relayed coordinates so that their own big guns could respond to the threat.

  It was better when the things were destroyed sight unseen.

  Skynet liked, on occasion, to bind prisoners, or bodies, or both to the machines. Not knowing which was which tended to make firing on them difficult. Even though those manning the guns knew they were not in any kind of position to save those people, still, they would hesitate. It had been one of Skynet's many psychological experiments.

  The problem is, John thought, every time it does something like this and we have to act against our own instincts, we lose something of our humanity.

  War, Dieter had told him, tended to do that. But in John's opinion, Skynet, through trial and error, was making them all more machinelike.

  "What are we going to be like when this is over?" John had asked.

  "Happier," Dieter replied. "In the meantime, we have to do what we must to survive."

  John ducked behind an outcropping of rock and waited for the HK to make its appearance. You'd think they'd have learned not to outline themselves against the skyline, John thought. But then, there wasn't any other route the big machine could take out of the valley where it had been manufactured.

  The rocket screamed by his position and John curled into a fetal position, trusting his armor to catch any fragments and his luck to save him from the explosion. The detonation was about fifteen yards in front of him and the concussion felt like someone hitting him hard on the back, pushing the air out of his lungs.

  The heat was briefly intense.

  He rolled back to see the machine trundle forward a few more meters, most of its top half blown away, the bottom a furnace. It rolled away, mindless and blind. Behind it, illuminated by the flames, came a gleaming squad of T-90s, the skeletal Terminators, red eye sensors gleaming, grinning with human-shaped teeth.

  John barked an order and the artillery behind him opened fire again—25mm chain guns this time, mounted on Humvees. The killing machines scattered like bowling pins in the blast, parts twinkling away like stars in flight. Those on the outside of the explosion were struck dormant for a few seconds. Stooped over, John ran forward and shot a blast into the head of the nearest Terminator. The one beyond it came slowly back to life, found its plasma rifle by feel, and began to raise it.

  A burst of fire blinded it and John himself fired again, destroying it. He turned to the soldier with the flamethrower and found it was a young woman—no, a girl. If she was more than fifteen, he'd be amazed.

  "Thanks," he said briefly, feeling suddenly senior. "Sweep these bushes; confuse their sensors so that we can move in under cover."

  "Yes, sir."

  She went to work and in moments the heat was almost more than he could stand. He was squinting, lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace. But the girl had her visor down and what expression he could see was serene. It was weird to feel safe enough to bring his people through in all this light, but the machines had difficulty adjusting their sensors to this much heat. John gave the order and men and women came streaming through, scattering over the rocky terrain.

  "Careful," he said. "Spring boxes." You could almost feel the tension go up. Everybody hated those things.

  Below, an HK moved into position.

  "Clear the gap," John shouted, and soldiers dived away from the rise and the burning bushes; he rolled down the hill toward the factory, stopping himself by grabbing onto a low-growing bush.

  The Hunter-Killer fired and the ground behind him heaved and burned in the blast, the rocks themselves melting. It moved forward and John could tell that it was going to sweep the ground behind him in descending arcs. Even blind, that would allow it to do maximum damage.

  "Fire!" he shouted. That blast would give the artillery some idea of trajectory.

  All around the HK were Terminators, also blind, no doubt.

  They would wait for their big brother to finish; then they would come forward to mop up any resistance.

  Only two HKs, John thought. And none of the flying kind, thank God.

  But what did it mean? Why was the factory so lightly guarded? His eyes went to the factory itself. The outer surface was honeycombed with little rectangular slots for the spring boxes; it looked like some kind of high-tech nest. The thought made him swallow. On the roof wer
e antennae that would directly connect it to Skynet.

  No doubt the bastard is watching this right now, he thought.

  He got some satisfaction in knowing that Skynet wasn't seeing any more than its creatures could show it. Lots of white heat haze and black background, and the same thing from orbit.

  The factory was small up top, but he knew from experience that it could go down as many as six levels. A place like this would probably have no human slaves. They'd check, just to be sure, but there had been no signs of cultivation, as there usually were when humans were present. Nor any sign of a waste dump.

  Still. Skynet was a tricky bugger. And these days every human life was of value.

  And now for the really tricky question, he thought. Now, if I were my mom, where would I be?

  "Major Hopkins," he said aloud. "Standard attack on the factory. Give me a schematic—is there an outlying relay com dish?"

  "Yes, sir. Just about… here."

  The data came in over John's optic; he noted it, and matched the view to the terrain. "Which means Mom is over there," he said. "HQ squad, follow me!"

  An IR scan showed a thermal bloom halfway up another one of the endless rocky hills; there was another on top, where the melted remains of a transmission tower showed.

  Good tactics, Mom, he thought. Taking that out would reduce the enemy's coordination throughout the area. Getting trapped in a cave, not so hot.

  The ruins of the machines were thick about the entry to the cave; which meant Sarah's squad was probably about out of charge and ammo.

  "Mortars," he said. "Gimme a strike on the following position."

  * * *

  Sarah was propped up against a rock outcropping, giving orders to a young man who knelt on one knee by her side. A medic was just fitting her arm into a sling.

  "AH!" Sarah barked. She glared at the medic, then, turning away, sullenly apologized.

  There was a large bandage wrapping the greater part of her shoulder, showing a seepage of blood at the center, and burn cream glistened on her neck and upper arm. Dark circles surrounded her eyes like shiners, but it was exhaustion and too little food that had put them there.