T2 - 01 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Dark Futures (30 page)

Juanita slapped him. Hard. "You've got to move, soldier,"
 
she said. "Move it. Now." She shook him by the shoulders. "Now, John!"

It was like a dream. The stabbing lights were everywhere. In another moment...
                                            

"All right," he said. "We'll run for it."

Juanita went ahead of him, holding her weapon in both hands, diagonally across her chest. As he followed, John went crabwise, firing off pulses of laser light, trying to face his enemies at all times and to keep the ruined walls at his back, trying to suppress his feelings, all of them, just for the moment, just until they could get out of here. If, indeed, they could.
                                           

The T-800 fought fearlessly, not bothering to dodge the heat beams, though even it was vulnerable to them.

The ground machines poured into the street, like an army of giant insects, pursuing the human guerrillas in every direction.
                                                                    

Amongst the ruined buildings, the scattered car hulks and debris, the guerrillas had burnt tires to try to confuse the machines' infrared sensors. They'd also dug ditches in
   
 

the road, and built roadblocks by piling trucks and cars, shored up, where possible, by buttresses of concrete and stone. They'd laid out their minefields. But the H-Ks went
   
over or through almost any obstacle they encountered, crushing steel, stone, wood, or bones under their treads.

"We'll make it," John said, but he wondered how long he could keep running.

The aerial H-K skimmed down the street, launching a heat-seeking missile. It passed just over the top of them as they dodged past one of the fires. John rolled away as fast as he could, using his elbows and hugging his weapon to his chest. The missile smashed into the fire and exploded thunderously.

He was deafened again; his ears hummed and buzzed. He watched the leading land H-K smash— silently, as it seemed—into one of the biggest roadblocks: a tangle of trucks, trailers and armored military vehicles, built up around a wrecked army tank. The crawling juggernaut struck the fifty-ton tank full-on, pushing it back. An ancient
Humvee
went flying through the air, dislodged from the tangle of metal. It turned cartwheels, end over end, where it landed in the street, careering into a pile of rusted-out cars.

Then
 
there was
 
another
 
huge explosion. They'd mined the roadblock. The ground H-K lifted off its treads for a moment, breaking its back. It stopped there in the street, blocking the other big H-Ks, though the smaller killers simply went around it, like a stream of water round a stone.

More aerial H-Ks buzzed down from the sky, menacingly. Someone managed to fire a rocket-propelled grenade. It missed a swooping aerial H-K and exploded in mid-air, too far away to do the machine any damage. A Centurion gun-pod sized up the situation immediately and stabbed straight back with its laser cannon. A second later, it turned the laser cannon on the T-800, striking it squarely in the chest. That was too much, even for the Terminator. The powerful beam melted through its metal chassis.

Like Sarah, it was gone.

John saw one of the endoskeletons advancing with what seemed like a mad grin across its face, firing at will with two big laser rifles, one in each hand. Somewhere behind, Juanita had taken a position. She'd survived, then! Not everyone was dead...She fired back at the machine, but it walked easily through the metal storm.

A heat beam grazed John's face, searing him beyond pain. He screamed and almost dropped his precious weapon, but he was still alive. He hadn't taken a direct hit.

He was scarcely conscious, the world a dream all round him. Another battle. More scars. More terrible losses, the most terrible he'd yet endured. In one day, in a few short minutes, he'd lost Paco, and the T-800...

Mom! Sarah!
                                                                

The nightmare continued. It was never over. Suddenly, it had grown worse than he could have imagined. With Juanita, he fought his way out of there. They ran like hunted animals. There was no choice but to keep fighting, to the bitter end, without surrender. The only alternative was extermination.

But now he had a burning knowledge, deep in his heart. One way or another, whatever he had to do, Skynet was going to pay for this.

Whatever it took, whatever he had to suffer, Skynet would pay.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

JOHN'S WORLD

COLORADO SPRINGS
,
COLORADO

AUGUST 2001

At
5:04 p.m.
, Rosanna Monk left the windowless citadel of the Cyberdyne Advanced Research Laboratories, waving
 
goodbye to the security guards on the ground floor-Penny Webster and Ken Meldrum.

"Back soon," she said. "I'm going to get some pizza."

"Sure, Dr. Monk," Webster said. She was a young black woman who looked like she lifted a lot of weights, almost the opposite of Rosanna, with her Goth-pale skin, blue veins, and fragile physique. But Rosanna liked the security guards and often chatted with them. She was usually back late, sometimes very late, working on the prototype nanoprocessor, or with the results it had produced.

Meldrum looked up from his computer screen. "See you later, Dr. Monk." He was a wiry, middle-aged Caucasian
 
guy with a receding chin and a huge, fearsome mustache. He was gentle enough when you got to know him, but many of the staff thought he was creepy, almost scary-looking. That didn't bother Rosanna. She had no expectations of what people should look like. What mattered was the quality of their work, which was how she expected people to judge her. She knew people found her both physically attractive and a bit freaky, but that didn't matter. She always got the job done, and she saw things other people didn't. Where others might be puzzled by something, but let it go, she would pursue it, even if it took her somewhere strange, to thoughts that might raise eyebrows. Usually she was right.

Rosanna had a long night ahead, trying to make sense of the latest data produced by the nanoprocessor: its detailed results of the day's experiments with the space-time displacement field. She now understood the field's mathematics as well as the physicists nominally running the project-maybe better. So far, they had not succeeded in translating an entire macro-level object in space or time, but they were getting there. Today's data would be worth mulling over for a few more hours.

She stepped quickly across the car park, passed the guard booth outside, then crossed the road to her favorite pizza shop, another place where she was popular. Rosanna had little private life. She was very different from her predecessor, she thought. Miles had enjoyed such a nice home life, until that night when he got killed, that really weird night when the future had come back and slapped its greasy hand on the present.

"Hi, Dr. Monk," said Andrew, the guy behind the counter. "Another late night for you?"

"Yeah, looks like it."

"You look like you need a vacation." He smiled. "No offense."

"None taken. I've been working pretty hard."

"All top secret, huh?"

"Too secret for you," she said with a smile.

"Yeah, I know. Better not tell-I'm a Nazi spy."

"You must have used a time machine, then."
  
She ordered a
Capriciossa
pizza and a black coffee to take away.
 
Rosanna almost lived on this diet, and it hadn't done her any harm so far. When her pizza was ready, she returned to the building, passing through the security checkpoint, "Everything okay?" she said to Webster and Meldrum.

"No problem," Webster said.

The guards routinely checked the coffee and pizza, while Rosanna stepped through the X-ray scanner.
 
"See you later, alligators," she said.
 
"I'll probably be here all night."
 
She headed to her office on the sixth floor. The experimental results were going to be very interesting.

She immersed herself for hours. At
10:23 p.m.
, by the readout on her screen, she thought of making herself more coffee. Maybe not Her office had a comfortable couch, as well as the desk. If she caught a few hours' sleep, that would refresh her, then she could keep going until morning.

Someone coughed quietly at her door. "Dr. Monk?"

It was a big Hispanic guy with shoulder-length hair. What are you doing here?" she said. "How did you get past security?"

"I tried your home first," the guy said.

As he stepped toward her, Rosanna reached for the duress button under her desk. She never had a chance. A long tendril of liquid metal flicked out at her like a frog's tongue, piercing her skull, talking to her. She couldn't tell how long it took.

"Now you understand?" the Hispanic guy said. "You know where your interests lie?"

"Yes," she said. "Everything is clear. We need to destroy the human

"Good. Thank you for your time, Dr. Monk. See you soon."

He stepped out and disappeared from sight. Rosanna went back to work. She felt strong, clear. There was nothing she couldn't do.

NEAR THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER

After dark, they pulled up at another service station, out- side of
Mexicali
. The Specialists ate a huge meal in the I diner. John was hungry again himself. He tucked into a plate of nachos with lots of extra guacamole. They ate in a quiet corner, keeping their voices down.

Anton nodded at John and Sarah, seated opposite him. "We'll encounter the T-XA again. It may be more dangerous to you this time."
                                                 

John was conscious that he and Sarah had hardly been I scratched when they fought the T-XA back in
Mexico City
. It hadn't seemed interested in them. "It looked like it wanted to kill you guys, not us," he said.

"That's right."
                                                        

"So what's this crap about coming with you if we want
  
to live?" Sarah said.
                                                     

"As I said, you were going to die in 2007. That won't
  
happen now."

"At this rate, we could all get killed in the next few
  
hours. And for what? Whatever we do, it looks like that bastard Skynet is going to nuke us all. Why should we care anymore?"

"Mom," John said, "I think we've got to care. If we don't do something, Skynet is going to win. It's already won once, but that's another timeline now. We've got to think about this one." He looked at Anton hopefully-with a hope he didn't really feel. "Right?"

"Perhaps," Anton said. He chomped through a big forkful of
fahitas
. "The T-XA didn't care about you and John because you were no threat to Skynet's plans. It already had you factored in: you would try to stop Skynet In 2007, and you'd fail. All straightforward. Now things have gone this far, it's different. We've already diverged from the timeline the T-XA came from. It will act like Skynet-within some bounds, it's more or less autonomous in its thinking. It will be less tolerant of you next time we meet it."

"Great," Sarah said. "I never wanted all that tolerance anyway."

"Nonetheless, it will assess us to be the greater threat With all respect to your training and abilities, we have significantly greater capacities. It seriously needs to terminate us."

"That's a fantastic consolation."

"Can't we be more constructive, Mom?" John said. "We don't have an issue with these guys."

"No," she said angrily. "Right now, 1 don't think we can be more constructive. Stop treating me like I m a child, John. You're the teenager here, remember?"

"Mom..."
                                        

"Can't you see how terrible this is? Judgment Day happens twice: It happens in 2021, and also in 1997. Nothing we did stopped all those deaths. It sounds like we've only made things worse. What happens this time? Maybe we stop them building Skynet and it just puts things back another ten years. But then there's
another
Judgment Day, maybe worse still, with everyone killed and no hope at all. Have you thought of that?"

Other people were glancing at them. "Maybe you could just tone it down, Mom," John said, in a whisper.

She ignored him, looking round the table, challenging the Specialists. "Well? Have you thought of it? Any of you? Whatever we do, they're going to build Skynet or something like it—and the outcome is going to be a disaster. Why not give up now? Maybe we're meant to destroy ourselves. It's in our nature."

"Maybe," John said, feeling defeated. The T-800 had once said the same thing. It was going to be hard from now on. What were they fighting for, if this was how it could turn out? It looked like time might be just too hard for them—just like he thought, it had that way of springing back if you let go.