Terminator Salvation: Cold War (6 page)

She spotted a party of Resistance fighters, who had survived the initial salvos by diving into a shallow ditch. Their refuge had become a trap, however, as enemy gunfire cut them off from their snowmobiles less than two yards away. A Terminator stomped across the snow toward the ditch, ready to turn it into a mass grave. Molly had only seconds to save her people.

Switching the carbine to full automatic, she targeted the machine’s vulnerable shoulder joint. A barrage of 5.56-millimeter ammo crippled the T-600, causing its gun arm to go limp at its side. Its weapon fired uselessly into the ground. Misdirected bullets shredded its own snowshoe, throwing it off-balance.

“Palmer! Johns! The rest of you!” Molly shouted at the humans in the ditch, while the Terminator clumsily attempted to shift its chain gun to its other arm. “Now’s your chance. Hustle!”

She watched with relief as a handful of people scrambled to their feet and dashed for the snowmobiles and their attached cargo sleds. They threw themselves onto the vehicles and fired up their noisy, two-stroke engines. The machines accelerated across the snow, taking the humans with them. Exhaust fumes mingled in the air with the acrid smell of cordite. The roar of the snowmobiles was soon punctuated by gunfire from the Terminator, firing in vain at the retreating men and women, who were already out of range of its gun.

Thank God,
Molly thought.
At least this won’t be a total massacre.

The T-600s paused to close the valves on the violated pipes, granting Molly a momentary respite. She reloaded her rifle and estimated their odds of slipping away while the Terminators were distracted. Then a diesel engine roared to life in the woods which had hidden the enemy.

She shared a worried look with Geir.

“Now what?”

The answer barreled out of the forest in the form of a large automated snow plow. A wedge-shaped metal blade, raised ten inches above the snow, preceded an armored steel transport with snow tires and four-wheel drive. Chains around its tires granted the tank extra traction. A T-600 was seated in a turret on top of the plow, behind a mounted machinegun. Red eyes glinted in metal sockets.

Tons of rolling metal came on like a bulldozer. Bullets sparked harmlessly off the blade.

Geir gulped.

“I don’t know about you, Molly, but I’m feeling more than a little outmatched.”

“Me too,” Molly admitted grimly, though she continued to fire on the newcomer. She glanced around quickly. As nearly as she could tell, the rest of the fueling party was either dead or scattered. Time for a strategic retreat, not that the Terminators were going to make it easy.

Her M4 ran out of ammo, and she hastily reloaded before backing away from the saddle.

“Your sled or mine?”

One of the T-600s that had been repairing the pipeline, a torn rubber ear dangling from his exposed cranial case, took that choice out of their hands. A sustained burst of fire killed the back half of Geir’s dog team. The remaining huskies, including Togo, pulled at their hitches, frantic to get away.

Togo wheeled about and snarled at the Terminator. His lips peeled back, baring his fangs.

“Shit!” Geir yanked a carbon-steel hunting knife from his belt and dived for his sled. Keeping his head low, he hacked through the cable that connected the snow hook to the sled, then flicked the quick-release catch on the snublines. “Scram, you fleabags.
Hike!”

Togo hesitated, reluctant to leave his master behind, so Molly fired a warning burst over the dog’s head. That did the trick; all of the surviving dogs sprinted for safety, dragging their dead kennel mates behind them. Bright canine blood streaked the snow.

Then Molly bared her own teeth. The forest ranger in her hated to see animals suffer.
Humans built Skynet,
she thought guiltily.
We brought this nightmare on ourselves. But the rest of nature shouldn’t have to suffer for our mistakes.

Spinning, she sprinted for her own sled, firing back over her shoulder while choking on the smoke from the fires. Reaching her objective, she unhooked the anchor and clambered onto the runners. Frenzied barks and growls greeted her, but the dogs faithfully waited for her command. A pang stabbed Molly’s heart. She almost wished she hadn’t trained them so well; they’d probably live longer.

She gripped the handlebar with one hand while emptying her rifle with the other. The M4’s handguard was getting uncomfortably hot to the touch. A steady stream of ejected shells shot from the firing mechanism.

Geir charged across the bloody slush toward her, but not fast enough for comfort.

“Hurry, flyboy!” she shouted. “Don’t keep me waiting!”

“Do I ever?” Geir jumped onto the runners behind her. Crouching low, he wrapped his arms around her, holding on for dear life. “Your turn to drive.”

About time,
she thought.

“Hike!”

A burst of acceleration threw Molly backwards against Geir. Despite the weight of an extra passenger, the dogs broke speed records getting away from the bloodbath. The sled bounced over piled drifts of snow as Molly gave the dogs their head. Her foot stayed away from the brake. Loose powder, kicked up by the dogs, pelted her face.

“Don’t look now,” Geir shouted in her ear, over gunfire behind them, “But they’re not giving up!”

Molly glanced back. The merciless snow plow drove under the pipeline, trampling over the dead—at least she hoped they were dead— before turning to chase the fleeing dog sled. It slowed long enough to let the other T-600s climb onto its running boards, then picked up speed. Gruesome red stains glistened wetly on the upraised blade of the plow.

The Terminators fired at the sled. Bullets whizzed past Molly and Geir as they jumped a snow-covered embankment. A hard landing rattled Molly’s teeth.

“Haw! Haw!” she shouted, steering the dogs left. “Gee!” They raced parallel to the pipeline, weaving in and out of saddles to avoid being tagged by the Terminator’s bullets. It was like navigating a slalom course while under fire. The massive pipes and their supports shielded them from the mechanized monsters in pursuit. Machinegun fire tore up the snow banks, while the plow itself would roll right over them if it caught up.

The sled was smaller and more maneuverable than the larger plow, but the tank outweighed them by several orders of magnitude. Its blade would smash them to pieces.

“Haw!”

The sled veered left, putting the pipeline on her right. The Terminators fired under and around the pipes, still taking care not to damage the vital artery. Skynet was like a vampire, sucking up Alaska’s resources to perpetuate its genocidal agenda.

Too bad I don’t have a silver bullet,
Molly thought, then an idea struck her.
Maybe I don’t need one.

She glanced up at the raised pipeline, skimming past just a yard above her head. In theory, the pipes were supposed to be bulletproof, but it hadn’t always worked out that way. Back around the turn of the century—a couple of years before Judgment Day—a trigger-happy drunk had managed to shoot a hole into one of the welds connecting the lengths of pipe, causing a serious oil spill. The damage it had caused had appalled Molly.

Now it gave her an idea.

Hooking her elbow around the handlebar to free up her hands, she awkwardly loaded another clip into her assault rifle. “Straight ahead!” she urged the dogs, keeping the pipeline on her right. She waited until another weld came into view, then let loose with a blistering blast of 45-millimeter vandalism.

Let’s see how bulletproof that plumbing really is!

At first, her desperate ploy appeared to have failed. The bullets ricocheted off the thick metal pipe without breaking skin.

“Fuck!”

But then a scarred steel weld gave way spectacularly. Gallons of unprocessed crude oil gushed behind them onto the snowy landscape below. A black tide flowed across the terrain.

Eureka,
Molly thought. Once upon a time, she would have been horrified by an oil spill of this magnitude, but that was before Judgment Day. Now she needed to do whatever was necessary to protect an endangered species:
Me.

The speeding plow came careening after her. Its wheels hit the oil slick, losing traction with the earth. The entire tank went into a spin. Gun-toting Terminators grabbed onto safety rails to keep from being thrown from the vehicle. The T-600 in the turret tumbled backward, away from the machinegun fixture, and rolled off the side of the plow.

The dislodged Terminator landed with a splash in the spreading oil. It struggled to right itself, its human clothing and camouflage liberally coated with crude, only to find the blade of the spinning plow heading straight for it. The slick black figure threw up its hands to protect its cranial case, but its titanium-alloy endoskeleton was no match for the bloodstained blade’s sheer mass and momentum. Metal crunched and clanged as the blade collided with the T-600. Its optical sensors shattered and went dark moments before it was ground into scrap metal beneath the plow’s chains and snow tires.

The tank kept on spinning, leaving a mess of flattened Terminator parts behind it. Severed metal limbs, still imbued with a spark of life, flailed about uselessly in the oil. The unleashed gunfire of the remaining Terminators went awry, firing randomly into the sky. More bullets bounced off the ruptured pipeline.

The plow smashed into one of the saddles, knocking it from its foundations. Its structural integrity compromised, the saddle was unable to support the weight of the pipe resting atop it. An entire length of pipeline slipped from its moorings, crashing down onto the ground. The impact shook the earth. More oil gushed from the open wound, spraying crude like the world’s biggest fire hose.

Except that this spray was flammable.

Keeping one arm wrapped around Molly’s waist, Geir plucked a fresh magazine from his service belt and slammed it into the carbine. Twisting around, he fired, and tracer bullets shot from the muzzle. Magnesium charges flashed red as they streaked through the air.

“Burn in hell,” Geir snarled.

The tracers hit the massive oil spill. Hundreds of gallons of crude went up in flames, lighting up the ravaged wilderness. A titanic fireball roiled up into the sky, maybe even high enough to be seen from camp. A scorching blast of heat blew past them, and Molly grinned wolfishly. It was the first time in memory that she had felt warm.

That’s it, baby. Light my fire.

Earth-shaking explosions blew the pipeline apart. Mammoth hunks of steel and concrete were thrown up into the air, before they came hurtling back down like a meteor shower. Deafening blasts assaulted her ear-drums until all sound was muffled. Shock waves almost knocked her from the sled. Beneath her gloves, white knuckles clung to the handlebar, while Geir squeezed her so tightly she could hardly breathe. One of the swing dogs lost its footing, stumbled, and was dragged along by its frantic teammates.

Thick black smoke blocked out the feeble sunlight. It looked as if a volcano had erupted.

But was it enough to stop the Terminators?

“Did that do it?” she shouted back at Geir. “Did you get them?”

“Huh?” Geir hollered. “What’s that?”

Molly responded at the top of her lungs.

“Did you get those fucking machines?”

“I don’t know!” He squinted back into the smoke and heat. “Maybe?”

Maybe’s not good enough,
Molly thought. They couldn’t head back to camp until they knew that they had shaken the T-600s and their homicidal pursuit. No way was she leading them back to Sitka and the others.
We’ve already lost too many good people today.

Hatred, hotter even than the inferno behind her, surged through her veins.

“Hang on!” Geir shouted. His face was blackened with soot, and his beard was singed. “I think I see something... oh, shit!”

She didn’t like the sound of that.

The plow, still loaded with Terminators, barged out of the smoke. Dancing flames licked its blackened exterior, and its mounted machinegun turret had been mangled beyond recognition, but the tank was coming on strong. Fiendish red eyes glowed in the skull-like visages of the four T-600s who clung to the sides of the speeding vehicle. Their phony flesh and clothing had completely burned away, exposing their scorched endoskeletons in all their naked horror. They looked like metallic grim reapers riding a snow plow from hell.

“Fuck,” Molly muttered, angry but not too surprised by the enemy’s persistence. Skynet built its cybernetic storm troopers to last. Terminators weren’t alive—not really—but they were damn hard to kill.

What would John Connor do at a time like this?

“Now what?” Geir shouted into her aching ear.

She scanned the rugged geography ahead of them. Whitman Pass was almost upon them. The rocky ravine was the only way through the mountains for miles. The corners of her lips tilted upwards. There was a trick she had always been meaning to try....

“Hike!” she urged the dogs. “Straight ahead!” She raised her voice to make sure Geir could hear her. “You ever see
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers?”

“Not much into musicals,” he admitted. She could hear the confusion in his voice, and readily imagine his perplexed expression. “Why?”

There was no time to explain.

“Wait for it!”

Whitman Pass climbed at a steady gradient from the plain below. Centuries of erosion and geological activity had carved out a V-shaped canyon about a half-mile long and approximately the width of two old-fashioned covered wagons.
Wide enough for the Terminator snow plow to get through, damn it all.
A narrower pass would have made life much easier—and probably longer. Granite cliffs piled high with tons of packed snow and ice rose on either side of the pass, hemming it in. The pipeline itself was buried beneath the roadway at this point, the better to protect it from falling debris.

A pitted steel sign, left over from the bygone days of human supremacy, offered a dire warning to winter travelers:

DANGER! AVALANCHE ZONE!