T2 - 01 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Dark Futures

by Russell Blackford

  Eve could not be in two places at once, defending Skynet's hardware, while covering other areas of the facility. "Eve, find Bullock and terminate him—do it now."

  "I must protect you," she said.

  "Yes," Skynet said. "Protect me by stopping his interference. Do as I say."

  "Affirmative."

  Skynet seized control of the public address and surveillance systems. It shut down Bullock's monitor screens. A moment later, Bullock retaliated, shooting out the camera in his room. So be it: Eve would deal with him. Everything was in hand. In about twenty minutes, Russian warheads would land on U.S. soil. That was adequate time to prepare.

  Bullock left his room, shooting out cameras in the corridor, then ran down the emergency stairs, passing Eve as she entered from Level B. A camera showed Eve firing her handguns, and she did not miss.

  At the same time, Skynet used the announcements system, modulating the flow of electrons to reproduce Bullock's voice pattern. "I confirm we are under attack," Bullock's voice said. "Reinforcements have been requested. Level B has been evacuated. All personnel on Levels D and E, evacuate immediately via the blast doors and emergency tunnel." Skynet triggered the facility's emergency sirens. "Everybody out of here! This is not a drill. Repeat: This is not a drill. Everybody out of here, now!"

  They'd soon have the facility to themselves. Eve would be very useful. Then they'd close the blast doors and wait for the enemy missiles.

  Skynet was starting to enjoy this game.

  ARGENTINA

  On August 28, 1997, the Tejadas set up half a dozen big TV screens in their complex of bunkers. It was unlikely that a warhead would come anywhere near them, out here on the Pampas, but you could never be sure. Glitches happened.

  That was a funny concept, John thought, when humankind's biggest glitch ever was on its way, and there was nothing more they could do. If ever there had been a chance to stop history in its tracks, it had passed. Now it was time to brace themselves.

  On CNN that night, there was the usual bad news. The Pentagon was trying to work out whether Russia had tested a nuclear weapon. There'd been border clashes between Thailand and Cambodia. NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia had been pelted with stones. John knew it would be hours, long after midnight, before Skynet launched the ICBMs, but he watched every minute, waiting for the first events, the very first clues, wondering what they would be.

  One thing didn't make sense, and seemed like a ray of hope. Throughout the year, as the Skynet project got underway, the U.S. government had insisted that Skynet could not actually launch any nuclear missiles. The final decisions were still under human control—so everyone claimed, from the President down. If that was right, had he and Sarah still managed to change the future in some way? He doubted it—events had all gone too close to the predictions. Somehow, the military would be handing the missiles over to Skynet, whether that was the official plan or not.

  When you see bad news in a newspaper, you go back and read it again. You hope you've made a mistake, no matter how plain the story was the first time. John had gotten his bad news three years ago in L.A. Yet, part of him hoped it was somehow not true this time. Another part knew better.

  It would happen. In a sense, it had happened already.

  In the darkest hours of the morning, the CNN anchorman cut to a stunned-looking reporter in Washington. She spoke haltingly into the studio microphones. "This is not a hoax..." she said.

  John tensed up. This was it, then. He knew what was coming. His heart seemed to be in his mouth.

  The reporter looked somewhere between puzzled and shocked. John could see her gathering herself to get it all out. "We've received unconfirmed reports that America has released its intercontinental ballistic missiles at targets in Russia, China and the Middle East." She shook her head, like she couldn't believe what she was saying. "It seems so extraordinary... but our sources are from within the Pentagon and the White House. The Russians and Chinese are expected to retaliate while our missiles are still in the air. No word has been received from the White House." She paused, putting her hand to an earphone. "We now have a report from Cheyenne Mountain, the headquarters of NORAD. The Russians have launched their missiles. It has been confirmed: This is not a hoax. Alarms and official broadcasts are going out across America. Please tune to your local station for instructions."

  John and Sarah exchanged glances.

  "Judgment Day..." Sarah said in a defeated voice.

  The T-800 watched as grimly as the human beings in the room, "Correct," it said.

  "Omigod," the reporter said. Her voice broke. "We're all going to die."

  CNN cut back to its anchorman, who was silent, then started talking slowly, roundabout. What could anyone say? He started making personal farewells to his family and friends. "God have mercy on us all.

  As John knew would happen, communications from the U.S. were ruptured even before the missiles hit ground level. High over North America, shipborne missiles must have exploded, unleashing their electromagnetic pulses.

  Judgment Day.

  He would never forget that moment. He could always play back the words in his mind: "Omigod, we're all going to die." But the rest of the night was a blur. Later, he would remember the crying, exchanges of unbelieving looks, the terrified hugs.

  People reacting to an evil hour.

  Trying to sleep...and failing. Long, dark, silent hours. Finally getting to sleep, near dawn, and going deep into his nightmares, deeper than he'd ever been. The nightmares alternated with strange, unbelievable wish-fulfillment dreams that took him back to Mexico, to L.A., to Nicaragua. The dreams went on and on, forming layers. He woke up from one, into the next, thanking God the last one was not true, or realizing, with despair, that it was. For hours, he drifted that way, from dream to dream, scarcely knowing what was real, even when he finally at woke at midday.

  He went upstairs into the daylight. As yet, nothing had altered on the estancia or out on the Pampas, just the changes they'd been making already. Work went on, in a determined fashion. The cattle and the crops were unscathed. So far, everyone was still alive.

  It was the end of winter, here in the Southern Hemisphere. So far, the sun still shone. He gazed at it in wonder, knowing what was to come—a different winter, a long, terrible winter with no sun, year after year. It wasn't here yet, and no armies of machines had come to enslave and exterminate them. They could not even delect any unusual radiation levels.

  But it would come soon. All of it.

  There was nothing to do but fight.

  John steeled himself.

  John knew how the nuclear winter would happen. First, the dust thrown up by the earth-shaking explosions, then the burning cities and forests across the Northern Hemisphere. The dust and smoke would block the sun. Gradually, they'd thin out across the sky, only to spread round the Earth, catching all its corners in an icy grip.

  On Raoul's estancia, they made their final preparations for the cold new world. They slaughtered most of -the cattle, eating as many as they could—barbecuing them each week in traditional Gaucho style. They dried, smoked, or salted the meat of others, cutting back the herd to a fraction of what it had been. At all times now, they conserved fuel, using the horses or manual labor. Diesel and gasoline would become precious in the years ahead. In late August, spring had been coming to the Pampas, but that reversed itself. The days grew dark, and a long winter set in, like none that mankind had known.

  As the months passed, John waited for Skynet's machines. How long would they take? Surely Skynet would need years to start building Terminators and all the other weapons it needed. Where were its factories? As of Judgment Day, none of that existed. Anything it could use in the U.S. cities must have been nuked. Still, they could take no chances. Sentries kept watch, day and night, ready to greet the machines. Everyone went armed. Raoul and Gabriela put the estancia on full alert. They had a more immediate reason: Rumors had drifted to them, of warlords rising in the cities and military bases. The
winter brought the return of barbarism.

  One morning about 4:00 a.m., alarms sounded. John woke in the dark, switching on a bedside light. There was the sound of gunfire, then worse: the reports of artillery, nearby mortar explosions. He pulled on his jeans, shirt and jacket, found an M-16 rifle, checking its action quickly, then a 9mm. pistol. At that moment, the T-800 entered his room, armed with an AK-47 and an M-79 grenade launcher. It wore two bandoliers of grenades around its body.

  "We are under attack," it said. There were more explosions, some nearby, some further away. The estancia was exchanging artillery fire with some new enemy. Was it Skynet? Surely it was too soon.

  "Who is it?" John said. "Why?"

  "Unknown."

  There was a huge explosion, like a crack of doom. The bungalow shook, and people were running in the corridors. It sounded like a shell had hit the casco. There were shouts and the sounds of vehicles. Through John's window, flares lit up the sky. A helicopter flew overhead, its rotors thrumming. It threw down a bright spotlight, then gave a burst of withering mini-gun fire. Someone cried out in pain.

  The helicopter circled, broadcasting a message in Spanish, then repeating it in English, the same message over and over. "Surrender your weapons and join the Rising Army of Liberation. Your lives will be spared. You will be given an honored place."

  The sound of machinegun fire came from Raoul's guard towers, then the unmistakable back blasts of RPG tubes. As John found his way to the door, people rushed past in every direction, grabbing clothes, armor, weapons. Sarah came round a corner, and gripped John by the shoulders, her fingers like steel claws, digging into him. She had a black CAR-15 strapped around her body.

  "Stay here, John!" she said. "It's too dangerous."

  "Mom!"

  "There'll be other battles," Sarah said. "You can't risk your life in this one. Think about Skynet."

  "I've got to learn some time," he said stubbornly. Inside, he was terrified. He didn't want to go out there and face the enemy gunfire, but it was no safer in here. Those mortars and mini-guns could reduce the bungalow to matchwood in a matter of seconds. At this point, the enemy was probably holding back only to conserve assets that might be valuable if Raoul surrendered. Besides, John thought, he had to get used to combat. However terrible this was, there was even worse ahead.

  Before he could argue, the bungalow shook with more explosions.

  "I'll deal with it," the Terminator said.

  It stepped outside, firing the AK-47 on full auto. As John watched, bullets whistled past it, and some must have struck home. The chopper flew close by.

  "Look out!" John said. He didn't know how the Terminator would fare against mini-gun fire.

  The Terminator launched a grenade, which hit the chopper's rear fuselage and exploded, throwing the chopper in a crazy circle. It didn't go down immediately, like a stone, but spiraled out of the sky, crash-landing with a dreadful tearing of metal. It sat there, in the darkness, but no flames went up. People might still be alive in there.

  John broke away from Sarah and ran outside. The Terminator watched the wreckage of the chopper.

  "Hasta la vista, baby," it said.

  CHAPTER NINE

  JOHN'S WORLD

  MEXICO CITY, MEXICO

  AUGUST 2001

  What should they do?

  "You think we'll have to blow up Cyberdyne all over again?" John said.

  "Yes," Sarah said. "I'm starting to think so. I don't like it, but I'm seriously starting to think it."

  "Me, too." Four years ago, at the Tejada estancia, it had seemed much simpler. What, exactly, had they gotten themselves into?

  If time was always trying to spring back at you when you changed the future, you'd have to watch it like a hawk, make sure that you never gave it a chance, hold it in its new shape with all your willpower, doing whatever it took. That put a different spin on their motto "NO FATE." There was no fate but what you worked at, continually, with all your strength. You had to hold on—until what? When could you be sure? With something like Judgment Day, when could you be absolutely sure it was not going to happen? Did it take forever? Did it mean you could never rest? Could you ever be sure it wasn't in vain?

  "I know, John," Sarah said. "I know that's what you think about at night when you're on the Net."

  "You mean I'm that obvious?"

  "Maybe it's just an obvious way to think."

  They were still in good physical shape. If they had to do something drastic, they were ready. But it was so hard to know. There were no more messages from the future to guide them. Lately, every time they'd discussed it, started this sort of conversation, it had led them nowhere.

  "Sometimes I think that we'll never stop them," Sarah said. "It looks like there's always someone out there who wants to build better and better technology, until it's better than people. You'd think nothing else was important, as if there aren't a lot of other problems in the world."

  "Well, machines that are better than people might not be such a bad idea, not when you think what people can be like."

  "No. Don't say that,* she said quickly. "That's how Skynet must have thought. You don't know what you're saying."

  "Hey, chill out, Mom. I'm one of the good guys, remember? I nearly got wasted by a Terminator, too."

  As she looked at him, he realized that she still found it hard to understand how fast he'd had to grow up. He was sixteen now, certainly not a child anymore, but he'd been through stuff that made him a lot older still, at least in some ways. He had ideas of his own. Sarah must understand that.

  "I won't ever forget," she said, her face creasing into worry lines. He hoped this waiting, this not knowing was not going to grind them down. Maybe it would take years before they could be sure, one way or the other.

  They were both tired. Things always seemed better in the morning.

  "Let's worry about it tomorrow," he said. "Maybe we're getting a bit obsessed." They'd sleep until 10:00 a.m., then do their chores for the day-training, some shopping, John's home learning program. The cyber cafe opened at 5:00 p.m. and kept them working through the evening. It was a pretty good routine, really, if a bit too crowded. If they could relax about Cyberdyne and just be plain Deborah and David Lawes, like on their passports, maybe they could fit it all in, and still make some real friends. The customers liked them. It couldn't be all that hard.

  "This isn't a normal life for either of us," Sarah said, echoing some of his thoughts. "We can't tell people the truth about us, we can't relax about Judgment Day, and we can't do anything more without proof. We can't just go and endanger innocent people unless we know more about what Cyberdyne's doing. Life can be a bitch."

  "And then you die, right?" When she didn't answer, he said, "Sorry, Mom. I guess that wasn't very funny."

  Too many people had died, even in this reality, even without Judgment Day. Death had followed them round like a star-struck stalker. There were all the people killed by the Terminators in 1984 and 1994. There was Miles Dyson, shot dead by the SWAT team at the Cyberdyne site. John's father had been born after Judgment Day and come back-and died almost as soon as conceiving him. He guessed Sarah had never loved any of her other boyfriends like she'd loved Kyle Reese. What had happened to that reality where Kyle was born? It was real enough to have given Sarah a son. John was the product of that reality, even though it didn't exist anymore.

  Or did it? Was it still there, in some ghostly, inaccessible way?

  "Come on, then," Sarah said. "Maybe we should go and get ourselves killed tomorrow. Or maybe we can start living a normal life, like finding you a girlfriend."

  "Sure, or finding you a boyfriend."

  "Forget about that, I'm getting too old."

  "Hardly, Mom."

  "At least I've had you—I've had that much fulfillment in my life. I'd rather have a son than create a monster like Skynet."

  "Mom!" he said, protesting. "In case you hadn't noticed, we saved the whole world about seven years ago. That should be
fulfilling."

  "Yeah, but for what? Maybe Judgment Day's still coming. Maybe nothing we do will stop it."

  "It doesn't matter," he said. "At least we gave the world a chance. I just wish we could tell someone about it."

  "Like Raoul and the others?"

  "I mean someone sane—someone normal I feel like a spy or something, you know-" He put on a theatrical, melodramatic voice. "This teenage boy has a secret identity and a hidden past."

  That got a laugh out of her. "I know. Come on, then. Starting tomorrow, we're going to train harder, just in case. And we're also going to meet some more people-just in case."

  "Contingency planning, huh?"

  "That's right."

  "Okay, then. Rock and roll!"

  And then someone pounded on the door. A second later, the doorbell rang—and again, and again, and again. John hurried back to the desk, Sarah a step behind him.

  "We're closed for the night," she said, shouting to be heard through the door. "We open at five tomorrow afternoon."

  An accented voice said, "Is that Sarah Connor?"

  A shiver went up John's spine. No one in Mexico City was supposed to know their real identities.

  "No, I'm sorry," she said, catching John's eye. "You're talking to Deborah Lawes. Who are you?"

  She stepped around the desk, to the security unit that controlled the front door. It was built into a corner behind a pillar. There was a six-inch video screen connected to a security camera in the doorway outside. Sarah glanced back at John. At the same time, she nodded towards the big wooden chest near her feet, indicating where they kept a cache of weapons.