by Timothy Zahn
Kate, as Connor had expected, was the last one out before the rear guard. At the very end of the line, also as expected, was Barnes.
“You seen my brother?” he asked Connor, hefting his grenade launcher as he looked around.
“Yes, he’s already out,” Connor assured him. Along with his launcher, Connor noted, Barnes had also picked up a Galil assault rifle somewhere along the way and had the weapon slung over his shoulder along with his gear bags. If all the extra weight was bothering him, it didn’t show.
“Good,” Barnes said. “We’re splitting up, right? I’ll get my squad and take point.”
“David will handle your squad,” Connor told him. “I want you to take Blair to the hangar.”
Blair rose from her crouch, a look of outraged disbelief on her face.
“Is that why you made me wait?” she demanded. “For him?”
“I don’t want you trying to get to the hangar alone,” Connor told her.
“I don’t need him,” Blair insisted.
“Right—she doesn’t need me,” Barnes seconded.
“More importantly, Wince and Inji are still in there,” Connor explained patiently. “Once the planes are out, someone has to get them to safety.”
Barnes bared his teeth, but reluctantly nodded.
“Fine. Come on, flygirl. Try to keep up.”
He set off down the street, his head moving back and forth as he watched for trouble. Blair paused long enough to roll her eyes, then followed.
“I’m sure they’re secretly very fond of each other,” Kate offered dryly.
“As long as they dislike Skynet more, I’m happy,” Connor said. “Come on, let’s get these people out of here.”
CHAPTER TWO
The gunfire back at the abandoned bunker was starting to trail off as Blair flitted down the street like a ghost, her eyes automatically picking out the quietest route through the debris and rusting cars and occasional pieces of shattered human skeletons. She took advantage of every shadow, and since the main source of light was the HKs’ spotlights three blocks away, the shadows were both plentiful and deep. She’d done this sort of thing a thousand times, and was very good at it.
Certainly better at it than Barnes. He wasn’t bad at shadow-hopping, but the sheer bulk of the gear he habitually lugged around automatically made him noisier than she was. In addition, he had a habit of turning his whole upper body back and forth instead of just his head as he scanned the area, which tended to jingle his equipment belts and ammo bandoleer. Blair had pointed it out once or twice in the past, and had gotten a highly ungracious and extremely unoriginal expletive for her trouble.
She didn’t trust Barnes. Not because she thought that he would ever betray them to the Terminators, but because he was a loose cannon who tended to act without thinking. Sometimes in the heat of combat that was what you had to do, and Blair had certainly done her share of such flailing. But Barnes not only did way too much of it, in Blair’s opinion, but he also seemed perversely proud of his refusal to think things all the way through.
Besides that was the man himself. He was good to have on your side once the fighting began, but he had none of the idealistic courage that Blair could sense in both of the Connors, the commitment to the people whose lives had ended up in their hands. Barnes fought because he liked to fight, and because he hated Skynet.
Which wasn’t, for Blair, a particularly durable motivation for this kind of long-term war. As far as she could make out, Barnes didn’t particularly like people, had never gotten along with authority figures of any sort, and probably hadn’t been a particularly outstanding citizen of the pre-Judgment Day world. In fact, she could easily envision him running along these same streets, in this same darkness, carrying a flat-screen TV from a broken store window instead of the grenade launcher he was currently clutching to his chest.
But he was hound-dog loyal to John Connor, and Blair was one of Connor’s people, and for that reason alone she knew Barnes would get her to the hangar safely or die in the attempt. The big man might not be the best argument for saving humanity, but if humanity was to be saved, Barnes would probably be one of those who would make it happen.
Probably dying somewhere before it was all over.
Possibly while saving some flygirl’s butt.
The hangar was just ahead, a broken remnant of an old airspace museum whose roof had caved in so far that it was obviously no longer able to conceal anything bigger than a Piper Cub. Barnes lifted up a closed fist in warning as they approached, trotting to a crouching halt beside a mangled sign just outside the grounds.
Blair crouched down beside him, adjusting her grip on her Desert Eagle as she studied the open space that lay between them and the hangar. A handgun, even one this powerful, wouldn’t do much against T-600s except slow them down, and would be of even less use against a T-1, unless she got in a lucky shot. However, there were also human gangs still roaming the streets, scavenging for buried supplies or stealing from the people who’d gotten there first, and the Eagle’s .44 magnum rounds were more than adequate for opening their guts to the cool night air.
But either it was past the gangs’ bedtimes or else the ruckus a few blocks away had scared them back under their rocks. Nothing was moving out there, human or otherwise.
“Looks clear,” Barnes murmured. “You want me to walk you in?”
“You just stay here,” Blair murmured back. Did the man deliberately go out of his way to tick her off? Probably. “I’ll send the crew out to you.”
Barnes grunted. “Make it snappy.”
Blair took a deep breath, and headed toward the hangar, taking the open ground in as fast a sprint as she could without risking a broken ankle. She spun halfway around as she reached the building, landing her back against the wall beside the door as she gave the area one last quick look.
Still nothing.
Panting a little, she slipped inside and pulled the door closed behind her.
And jerked back as a bright light exploded in her face.
She had just enough time to slam her eyelids shut before the light disappeared.
“Sorry,” Yoshi’s voice came from behind the purple blob floating in front of her eyes. A hand reached out and took her arm. “Come on.”
“Where’s Wince?” Blair asked as she let Yoshi guide her across the broken floor.
“He and Inji are prepping your plane,” Yoshi said. “I’m assuming Connor wants us to blow this popsicle stand?”
“Yeah, that’s kind of a given,” Blair said. “Why, were you thinking of staying?”
“Not if everyone else goes,” Yoshi said, an odd wistfulness in his voice. “I just hate to see the place go, that’s all.”
Blair looked around. Actually, so did she. The purple blob was fading now, and behind it the familiar cramped area beneath the hangar’s crushed roof was coming into view.
Or rather, now that the false floor had been rolled aside, the uncramped area of the basement storage room, a sublevel that Skynet’s initial surveillance had missed. By removing the floor and installing a winch-equipped ramp, Connor’s people had turned an expanse of otherwise useless space into a very cozy spot for stashing the team’s two A-10 “Warthog” attack jets.
Blair ran a quick eye over her plane as she and Yoshi headed down the ramp. It was as banged-up as everything else in Connor’s meager arsenal, though the wild flying-shark paint job she’d adorned it with hid a lot of the damage. But to her, the nicks and bullet holes were nothing to be ashamed of. They were marks of honor, wounds suffered in the cause of humanity’s war for survival.
And scarred or otherwise, the plane was no more ready to give up the fight than Blair herself was. A pair of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles hung from two of the A-10’s four remaining under-wing pylons, while the seven-barrel GAU-8 Avenger Gatling gun nestled beneath its nose promised a hornets’ nest of 30mm explosive and armor-piercing rounds to any HK or T-1 foolish enough to get in her way.
Her rem
aining two pylons, she noted, were sporting equipment nacelles, undoubtedly loaded with everything Wince and Inji could pry up and pack inside. That was going to play hell with the A-10’s balance and maneuverability, but Blair would just have to deal with it. It wasn’t like the two men could lug everything out on their backs. Not even with Barnes to help.
“Is everyone okay?” Wince’s disembodied voice drifted out from somewhere behind the two planes. “It sounded pretty nasty there for awhile.”
“It was,” Blair said, deciding there was no point in burdening him with the news of Piccerno’s death. He’d find out about that soon enough. “We need to get moving, too. If Skynet follows its usual post-raid pattern, the T-600s could be knocking on the door anytime now. We don’t want to be here when they do.”
“No argument there,” Wince agreed, coming into sight around the rear of the plane, his white hair glistening in the starlight that filtered through the cracks in the roof. “You probably saw the cargo pods we strapped on. You going to be okay with that?”
“I’ll be fine,” Blair assured him. “Barnes is waiting outside by the west sign. You and Inji grab whatever you’re carrying, and get going.”
“We’ll get the door first,” Wince said, looking around. “Inji?”
And then, abruptly, the cracks in the hangar roof blazed with light.
“Cover!” Blair snapped at Wince as she sprinted toward her plane. Damn the HKs, anyway. “And get clear of the door!”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the silence of the night was shattered by the thunder of automatic weapons fire.
But not the drawn-out stutter of an HK’s miniguns. It was the slower, higher-pitched sound of a Galil assault rifle.
Like the one Barnes had been carrying over his shoulder.
Blair swore under her breath. Leave it to him to pick a one-man fight with a flying weapons platform.
“Forget the winch!” she shouted to Yoshi as she bounded up the ladder and dropped into her cockpit. “Blast and burn.”
“Right,” Yoshi called over the gunfire as he headed for his own plane. “You or me?”
“Me,” Blair shouted, punching for engine ignition. “Go as soon as it’s clear.” There was no time for her to do a proper flight checklist. She would just have to hope Wince and Inji had done the prep right.
They had. Even as she pulled the canopy closed she could feel the vibration of the twin GE turbofans behind her coming to life. Flipping up the safety bar on her stick, she raised the muzzle of her GAU-8 to point at the center of the hangar door and squeezed the trigger.
A normal door would have simply disintegrated at the center of fire, leaving the bulk of it still sitting there, blocking the way. But this particular door had been carefully warped most of the way out of its guide rails and fasteners, and its center had been heavily reinforced with large pieces of superhard alloy, scavenged from wrecked HKs and T-4 tanks. The result was exactly as planned: even as the door’s center began to shred in the face of Blair’s onslaught, the sheer impact of two-pound shells striking it at a thousand meters per second blew the whole door out of its housing and hurled it in a twisting arc across the open area outside. Blair caught a glimpse of an HK swooping down toward the spot where she’d left Barnes—
And with a teeth-tingling screech of metal against metal, the flying door slammed into the HK’s tail.
The HK nearly lost it right there and then, as the impact threw it violently to the side. Its left tail fin hit the ground and dug in, spinning the whole aircraft a quarter turn around the pivot point.
But the computer controlling the craft was faster than any human pilot. Before the HK’s nose could slam into the tarmac, it managed to pull up and out of its spin, its engines revving madly as it tried to regain its equilibrium.
It was still trying when Barnes sent a final burst of fire squarely into its nose, igniting its fuel and munitions and blowing the whole thing to scrap metal.
The fireball was still billowing skyward as Blair snagged her helmet and jammed it on over her head.
“Jinkrat: go!” she barked into the mike.
“Roger,” Yoshi’s voice came back. The hum of his engines became a sudden roar, and Blair’s plane bucked beneath her as the backwash blasted against the rear wall of the hangar and bounced off again in all directions. Yoshi’s A-10 lurched forward, rolled up the ramp, and turned sharply right as he made for the pockmarked runway and the relative safety of the open air.
Blair grabbed for her safety straps and started pulling them on as she peered through the dust and fire and the pieces of raining metal. Wince and Inji were on the move, weaving their way through the buffeting turbulence of Yoshi’s backwash as fast as the weight of their backpacks and shoulder bags would allow. Another few seconds and they should be out of the way of her own exit.
Until then, here she sat in an open hangar, as vulnerable a sitting duck as could be imagined.
Apparently, Yoshi had the same kind of imagination.
“Hickabick, what’s the trouble?” his voice called through her headset. “Get your butt out of there.”
“Can’t—penguins are still on the move,” Blair told him.
“The penguins may just have to hump it,” Yoshi warned. “You’ve got three bandits on the way; repeat, three on the way.”
“Check,” Blair said, resettling her grip on the throttle as she watched Wince and Inji running across the open space.
Another three seconds...
Two...
One...
“Clear,” she called, and threw power to the engines.
The A-10 surged forward, again swaying and shaking as the big turbofans bounced their streams of superheated air off the back wall. Blair maneuvered the plane up the ramp, easing back slightly on the engines as she negotiated the tight left-hand turn that would take her onto the other section of runway. She left the throttle where it was for another three seconds, rolling relatively slowly down the runway, giving Barnes and the ground crew as much margin of safety as she dared. Then, bracing herself, she kicked it into full power.
The runway here had been short to begin with, and the meteor storm of falling debris on Judgment Day had left it riddled with pits and ridges. But the A-10 was a close-air support fighter, specifically designed to work on the less-than-ideal airstrips typically found near the front lines of battle. The jet bounced badly as Blair did her best to steer around the worst of the damage, but it kept going, its speed increasing.
The three incoming HKs had just reached the edge of the grounds when she pulled back on the stick, sending the A-10 rocketing up into the sky.
“Three on your tail, Hickabick,” Yoshi’s voice snapped in her ear. “Jink right—I’ll see if I can shake them off you.”
“Check,” Blair said, twisting the A-10 hard to the right. She caught a flicker of movement as Yoshi crash-dived from somewhere above them, his GAU-8 spitting armor-piercing shells at the deadly machines behind her.
Spitting it accurately, too. Blair was halfway through her turn when the ground lit up behind her as one of the three HKs blew to splinters. She straightened out momentarily, then jinked right again. Her turn brought her into sight of the two remaining HKs, and she armed one of her Sidewinders, locked it onto the nearest bandit, and fired.
There was another blast, this one even more spectacular than the last, and the enemy count was down to one.
But Blair’s combat instincts were screaming like an Irish banshee. This was too easy. It was way too easy. She twisted the A-10 around as the final HK opened up with its own Gatling guns, reflexively dodging the enemy fire as she searched the sky.
The two backup HKs were coming in dark and low, weaving smoothly between the ruined buildings, hugging the ground where a careless pilot might easily miss them.
“Eight o’clock low,” she snapped a warning to Yoshi, twisting her stick hard around in an attempt to bring her plane into firing position before Skynet tumbled to the fact that its little s
neak play had failed.
The race ended in a tie. She squeezed off her last Sidewinder just as both HKs opened fire, one targeting her, the other targeting the missile. A second later the Sidewinder blew up, well short of its intended targets, as Blair shoved her joystick forward, trying to duck under the lethal stream of lead coming in her direction.
She shoved the stick forward perhaps a bit too hard. The sudden change in direction, coupled with her lack of sleep, sparked a wave of lightheadedness that sent the universe tilting violently around her. Dimly, she was aware of her pulse throbbing in her throat, of Yoshi shouting in her ears, of the ground rushing up toward her—
She snapped out of it just in time, yanking back on the stick and pulling up out of the dive close enough to the ground to feel the buffeting as her shockwave bounced off it and up against the A-10’s underside.
“You all right?” Yoshi called.
“I’m fine,” Blair managed, twisting the A-10 sideways and clawing for some altitude. “Are you—?”
She broke off as another explosion ripped through the air.
“Jinkrat!” she snapped, looking frantically around.
“S’okay,” Yoshi assured her. “Just reminding Skynet that we usually come in pairs.”
And as the glare of the explosion faded, Blair saw that one of the two sneak-attack HKs had been turned into a heap of blazing rubble. The remaining newcomer, still running dark, had escaped and was angling across the airfield, clearly heading for a link-up with the last of the original three attackers.
“Looks like they’re pairing up, too,” she said. “What’s your status?”
“I’m at Geth Pete,” he said.
Blair grimaced. Geth Pete—Gethsemane Peter. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. In other words, Yoshi was completely out of ammo.
But Skynet was unlikely to have picked up on such an oblique reference, in which case it might still think its HKs were facing two armed fighters.