by Timothy Zahn
“Of course, we don’t know when the attack will happen,” Tunney pointed out.
“Which is why we need to get started right away,” John said. “Barnes, what’s the status on Fallback Two?”
“It’s mostly ready,” Barnes said. He looked at Blair. “We don’t have a good hangar setup yet, though.”
“You want me to go hunting for something tomorrow?” Blair asked.
“Either you or Yoshi—you can sort it out between yourselves,” John said. “Make sure that whichever of you goes takes along an escort, just in case. We’ll work out the details after everyone’s had some sleep, but I’m thinking now that we keep the infiltration team to about twenty.”
“That few?” David questioned, frowning.
“Any more than that and we’ll leave the bunker and the rest of our people unprotected,” John pointed out. “Besides, this whole thing hinges on surprise. If twenty of us can’t pull it off, doubling the number isn’t likely to make much of a difference.”
“I suppose,” David said. Kate could tell he wasn’t convinced, but his voice and expression nevertheless showed his willingness to follow John’s lead. “May I suggest that we go in as Resistance recruiters?”
“Good idea,” John said. “Who knows? We might even find a few people who are ready to stop being victims and help us take the fight to Skynet. I’m thinking we’ll go in two groups of ten, with me taking one group and Barnes taking the other. Once we’ve scouted the territory a bit, we’ll regroup, compare notes, and set up a temp base as our launch point.”
“Can I choose my own ten men?” Barnes asked.
Tunney cleared his throat.
“You know, Barnes, it really isn’t our job to clear the streets of every brain-scrambled gang of punks that’s out there.”
“It is if they get in our way,” Barnes said, his voice going flat and dangerous. Barnes had grown up in one of L.A.’s worst gang areas, Kate knew, and his hatred of them had never faded. “Besides, sometimes they’ve got spare ammo and other stuff.” He looked back at John. “I get to choose my men?”
“Knock yourself out,” John told him as he started folding up the map again. “Only you can’t have you brother,” he added. “I’ll be leaving him in command of the group here.”
“Will you want Yoshi and me as part of the attack?’ Blair asked.
“I definitely want you,” John said wryly. “Whether I get to have you or not will depend on how fast Wince can get your planes put back together.”
“Oh, they’ll be ready,” Blair promised, her tone the exact same level of flat and dangerous that Barnes had just used.
Kate suppressed a smile. Blair and Barnes didn’t always get along, not because they were opposites, but because they had far too many of the same hard-ass traits in common.
“Then we’re adjourned,” John told them as he stood up. “Get some sleep, and I’ll see you back here in six hours. And don’t forget to make sure the sentries get rotated.”
John was silent as he and Kate walked down the long corridor to their new quarters. Kate, for her part, was content to allow him his moment of quiet. Particularly since she knew that it wasn’t going to last.
They reached their room, a slightly bigger space than they’d had at the previous bunker, but with oddly angled walls and a rather lumpy floor. There was no door either, just a curtain that could be pulled across the opening for minimal privacy. Together, she and John took off their weapons belts and pouches and outer jackets, keeping on enough clothing to push back the cold night air. Kate finished first and climbed beneath the sleeping mat’s covers, trying to figure out how exactly she was going to broach the subject she and John needed to discuss.
Wasted effort, as it turned out. John knew her as well as she knew him. He climbed onto the mat and pressed himself against her side, one arm draped lovingly and protectively over her, his breath warm against her cheek.
“Let me guess,” he whispered. “You want to go with my infiltration team.”
Here we go, Kate thought.
“It’s not that I want to go,” she whispered back. “It’s that I have to go.”
“Because we need a medic?” He shook his head. “We can’t risk you, Kate.”
“It’s not just that,” Kate said. “It’s that... John, I’ve seen how they look at me. Seen how they treat me. They respect me, yes, but as a surgeon and medic.”
“Nothing wrong with that.”
“Yes, but I’m also supposed to be one of their leaders,” Kate said. “You and the others call me that, and I sit in on your meetings. But I never actually lead.”
“Neither does Williams,” John pointed out. “No one’s thrown her out of a meeting yet.”
“It’s not the same,” Kate said, hearing a hint of desperation creeping into her voice and ruthlessly forcing it back. She needed to convince him, not manipulate him. “I don’t ever share the same risks they do. They respect me, John, but they wouldn’t follow me. Not the way they follow you.”
“And someday they’ll have to?” he asked.
Kate felt her chest tighten. Don’t say things like that! she thought fiercely.
But stifling the words wouldn’t change the reality that had already been foretold by that last Terminator they’d met before the horror of Judgment Day. Just as John would one day rise to lead all of Earth to victory over Skynet, one day he would also die at Skynet’s hand.
“That’s still a long way down the road,” she said instead. “All I’m saying is that I need to do this. I need to do this.”
John reached his hand up and stroked her cheek.
“I hate this,” he said quietly. “You know that, don’t you?”
Kate pulled her right arm from beneath the blankets and took his hand.
“More than I hate watching you go off without me?”
“Touché,” he admitted. “Does anybody say ‘touché’ anymore?”
“You can say it in private,” Kate assured him, feeling some of her tension fade away as she sensed his change from solid refusal to reluctant consent. “And I don’t have to actually lead anyone, not this time. That part can wait until later. I just need them to see me fighting alongside them.”
John didn’t answer. Kate waited silently, her mental fingers crossed, letting him work it through.
“Compromise,” he said at last. “You can come with the infiltration teams and help with the recruitment part of the trip. Actually, you can probably take point on that—you’re much better at talking to people than Barnes or even Tunney.”
“I’m better than Barnes, anyway,” Kate said. “I think Tunney ought to handle the actual recruitment speech, though. I’d rather watch him this first time, and maybe just answer a few questions.”
“Well, you can sort out the duties however you want,” John said. “But once the actual attack starts, you’ll stay put in whatever temp base we’ve set up in the neighborhood.”
“At least until you need a medic?”
“Until we need work that our junior medics can’t handle,” John corrected firmly. “Is it a deal?”
For a moment Kate considered pointing out that sitting alone in the middle of a fire zone wouldn’t be a lot safer than being out in the middle of the action. But bringing that up would probably get her summarily left here at the bunker instead. “Okay,” she said. “So I can recruit, hide, and maybe bandage.”
“You just can’t shoot,” John said, nodding.
“Well, I can shoot,” Kate said in the prim voice a couple of her mother’s upper-crust friends had always used. “I’m a woman of many talents, you know.”
John squeezed her shoulder, pulling her closer.
“Definitely,” he said. “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Breakfast at Moldering Lost Ashes that morning consisted of a handful of dried seed pods from one of the wild plants that had popped up around the city over the past few years, plus a slice of three-day-old coyote.
Kyle didn’t really like sentry duty. Not so much because it was boring, but because if Skynet ever launched an attack he and Star would be stuck up here, instead of downstairs where they could help.
Chief Grimaldi, the man running the building, didn’t think that would happen as long as the people here minded their own business. But Orozco said it would, and that was good enough for Kyle.
The southeast sentry post had once been the outside corner of a fancy apartment’s living room. It wasn’t so fancy now, though. The firestorm that had swept the city on Judgment Day had blown off one of the living room’s outer walls, along with half of the other wall and most of the ceiling. The result was a roughly three-metersquare section of floor that gave a clear view of that part of the city, but which was largely open to the elements.
Today, those elements consisted of a sporadic southwest wind that grabbed at the collar of Kyle’s thin coat as he and Star stepped off the stairway onto the platform. He pulled the collar back into place as he went to the equipment alcove set into the sentry post’s inner wall. There was supposed to be a spare blanket up here, but a quick check of the alcove showed no sign of it. Apparently, whoever had been on duty during the night had taken it with him when he left.
That, or else someone had sneaked up between shifts and stolen it. Chief Grimaldi said things like that didn’t happen here, but Kyle knew they sometimes did.
Orozco didn’t much like Grimaldi. He’d never actually said anything, but Kyle could tell. Grimaldi had run some sort of group before Judgment Day, something called a corporation, which had made him think he could run anything. Some of the other people on the Board that made all the decisions had worked in the same corporation he had, which was probably how Grimaldi had been chosen chief.
Orozco hadn’t been there when the Board was set up. He’d arrived only two years ago, a year after Kyle and Star had stumbled across the building and had been allowed to move in. What Kyle couldn’t figure out was once Orozco had shown up, why he hadn’t been put in charge instead of Grimaldi. Orozco had been a soldier once, and in Kyle’s book that had to count more than anything anyone else had been doing before Judgment Day.
But Kyle was only sixteen, so of course he wasn’t on the Board. He didn’t get a voice in any of their discussions, either, the way some of the adults did. The way it worked was that Grimaldi or one of his men told Kyle where to go scrounging for food or supplies, or Orozco told him which post he’d been assigned for sentry duty, and Kyle would do it.
It irritated him sometimes, especially when Grimaldi tried to use words like tactics or strategy or logistics when Kyle could tell from Orozco’s expression that Grimaldi didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. Sometimes, usually late at night, Kyle thought about saying good-bye to Orozco, packing up his and Star’s few belongings, and getting out of here.
But bad moods like that never lasted very long. The Ashes could be annoying, but he and Star were eating at least one meal every day here, and had a safe place to sleep. Considering some of the places they’d been, that all by itself made it worth putting up with a little irritation.
Beside him, Star shivered. “Cold?” he asked.
I’m okay, she signed back even as she shivered again.
“You could go sit over there by the alcove,” Kyle suggested. “You’d be out of the wind there.”
But then I won’t be able to see anything, she pointed out.
“That’s okay,” Kyle assured her. “I can watch alone for awhile.”
Star shook her head. I’m okay.
Kyle sighed. Star considered his sentry duty to be her sentry duty, too, and she took the job every bit as seriously as he did. Aside from physically carrying her over to the alcove, there was no way he was going to get her there, and aside from physically sitting on her, there would be no way he could make her stay.
“Fine,” he said. Standing up, he walked around her and sat down again so that he was at least between her and the wind.
She gave him one of those half patient, half exasperated looks that she did so well, and for a moment Kyle thought she was going to get up and go sit in the wind again just to show him she didn’t need babying. But Kyle was as stubborn as she was, and they both knew it, and so rather than playing a pointless game of leapfrog with him and the wind, she just rolled her eyes, drew her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her thin arms around them.
Smiling to himself, Kyle turned his eyes back to the ruined city.
The wind apparently wasn’t nearly so potent down at street level, and he could see a soft mist rolling in from the direction of the ocean, the drifting tendrils masking some of the jaggedness of the streets and rubble-filled lots below.
Unfortunately, the mist did an equally good job of masking the movements of people and animals, which was going to make Kyle’s job that much harder. Keeping his eyes moving, paying particular attention to the spots where he knew some of the neighborhood’s troublemakers liked to gather, he settled down to the long hours ahead.
There wasn’t much activity today. A few of the other residents were out and about, mostly scrounging for canned food that might have been missed by earlier searchers. Some of the Ashes’ residents were out, too, though mostly they were digging through the rubble for building materials to prop up a section of the building’s southern wall that Grimaldi’s people said was in danger of collapsing. There was very little gang movement, with only a few members of one of the packs roaming the streets several blocks to the south. That would change when darkness came, though.
As for Skynet, all Kyle could see of its presence was a single HK moving back and forth across the eastern sky. If any of the T-600 Terminators were out and about, they were someplace he couldn’t see them.
Noon came and went. He and Star each had a few sips from the post’s water bottle, and about an hour after noon they shared a small piece of coyote that Kyle had saved from breakfast. By mid-afternoon most of the locals had finished their foraging, either finding what they were looking for or else giving up, and had headed back to secure their homes against the nighttime gang activity.
It was late afternoon when Star tapped Kyle urgently on the arm and pointed to the east. Hunching over a little, Kyle sighted along her arm, searching for whatever it was that she’d seen.
There it was: a group of people approaching down one of the area’s better east-west streets. There were six men in the main party, escorting two heavily-laden burros each, and there were at least two outriders Kyle could see traveling along a block ahead of the others. The main group was keeping to the middle of the street, where it would be harder for someone to ambush them.
“Did Orozco say anything about traders coming here today?” he asked Star.
Not to me, she signed.
Kyle pursed his lips. This could be exactly what it looked like: a visit by the traders who came in sometimes from the hardscrabble farmlands to the east and north. Just because Star or even Orozco hadn’t heard they were coming didn’t necessarily mean anything. Traders didn’t exactly operate on a regular schedule.
But it could also be a gang of robbers masquerading a traders in hopes of getting the people in the area to let their guard down. The burros might not be carrying trade goods, but merely the robbers’ collection of loot. I was a ploy that Orozco had often warned his sentries t watch out for.
“Binoculars, please,” he said.
She nodded and retrieved the scuffed leather binocular case from the equipment alcove. She handed the case t Kyle, then returned to the alcove, standing ready beside the tray of signaling stones.
Carefully, Kyle removed the binoculars from the case. Technically, he remembered Orozco saying once, this was actually a monocular, since the left set of lenses was broken. Lifting the instrument
to his eyes, he focused on the approaching men and animals.
They were definitely not the same men who’d been with the traders who’d come through the neighborhood six months ago.
Kyle grimaced. The fact that he hadn’t seen them before also didn’t necessarily mean anything. People out in the farming regions came and went as often as people here in the city did. Still, Orozco’s number one rule was that it was better to be safe than sorry. Lowering the binoculars, he gave Star a nod.
“Three and two.”
She nodded back and selected five of the fingertip sized stones from the tray. Crossing to the ragged-edge opening between the alcove and the stairway, she got down on her knees and carefully dropped the first three stones, one at a time, down the hole. She paused, and Kyle watched her lips move as she counted out five seconds, then dropped the other two, again one at a time.
And with that, there was nothing for them to do but wait and continue watching. Lifting the binoculars again, Kyle first gave his whole sector a careful sweep, then turned his attention back to the approaching men.
The party had made it about half the distance to the Ashes when Kyle heard the sound of footsteps on the stairway. He lowered the binoculars just as Beth, one of the building’s fourteen-year-olds, stepped into view.
“I’m supposed to take over,” she announced, panting with the exertion of her climb. “Orozco wants you down at the main entrance.”
“Got it,” Kyle said, standing up and handing her the binoculars. The girl winced like he was offering her a live snake, but gamely took them. A few months ago Beth had been unfortunate enough to be present when her older brother Mick had been goofing around and had dropped one of Orozco’s other sets of binoculars. She’d also been present when Orozco chewed the boy out over the incident, and had been terrified of binoculars ever since.
Going down the stairs was just as hazardous as going up, but at least it was faster and didn’t take as much effort. Kyle and Star reached the main entrance to find Orozco and three of Grimaldi’s men in quiet but earnest conversation beneath the archway. All four were armed, Orozco with his usual M16 and Beretta, the others with some of the building’s collection of hunting rifles and shotguns.