Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire (22 page)

But the Terminator’s legs, at least, were working just fine. The machine reached the edge of the swirling water and strode in, leaning against the current to keep from being knocked over.

Preston shot a quick look to his left. Three meters away, Hope was standing straight and ready beside her own covering tree, her arrow nocked, a look of nervousness tinged with determination on her face. To Preston’s right, Half-pint Swan also stood ready.

Preston turned back to the river, gripping the heavy rope noose in his hands, making sure the rest of the rope trailing from it was free of any entanglements in the undergrowth around him. The Terminator was nearly to the trap now...

It reached the position, then continued past it. Preston hissed viciously between his teeth, wondering what they were going to do now.

And then, the Terminator jerked to a halt, nearly pitching forward onto its face. Apparently, Preston had been slightly off in his estimation of where the bear trap was actually positioned.

But Connor and Halverson were using bear traps against their Terminator, too. With the two T-700s linked via short-range radio telemetry, that meant this one already knew how to deal with bear traps. It didn’t waste any time trying to pull out the chain, but simply leaned over at the waist and reached its metal arms into the whitewater to get a grip on the trap’s jaws and pry them apart.

And as its eyes shifted downward, Preston leaped out of cover and raced toward it, holding the noose straight out in front of him.

Even with its eyes turned away and the roar of the water in its auditory sensors the Terminator must have sensed Preston’s approach. It looked up as he neared the river, its glowing red eyes staring, its useless teeth clenched, its skeletal face an image out of human nightmares.

But there was no turning back now. With the Terminator’s leg trapped, its body hunched over as its fingers tried to pry the bear trap open, and its head turned upward, the machine was at this moment the most unmoving it was ever likely to be. Baring his own teeth in defiance, Preston picked up his pace.

The Terminator was still glaring cold death at him when Preston heard a sharp double twang from behind and to either side of him.

And the twin red glows of death abruptly vanished as a pair of arrows jammed themselves into the machine’s eyes.

Terminators didn’t scream, in pain or rage or anything else. Nor did they get angry. The machine merely jerked back with the double impact, then straightened up, abandoning the task of freeing its leg, and grabbed at the aluminum shafts sticking out of its skull.

It had succeeded in pulling out one of the arrows and snapping off the other when Preston reached it. Jumping into the frigid water, he threw the noose over the machine’s head, gave a quick tug on the rope to tighten the loop around its neck, then leaped backward again out of the Terminator’s reach.

“Go!” he shouted.

For a single, awful second nothing happened. The Terminator’s hands reached toward the noose, fumbling for a grip—

And then the trailing rope snapped upward toward the sturdy branch it was looped over as the men behind Preston hauled on the loose end. The noose twitched out of the Terminator’s groping fingers and closed solidly around its neck.

Preston looked behind him as the two big men hidden in the tree leaned backward, one of them above the other, and fell toward the ground.

And as they did so, the rope wrapped around their waists snapped taut, their combined weight pulling upward on the Terminator’s neck, stretching the deadly machine between the bear trap around its leg and the noose around its neck.

Instantly, the machine abandoned the noose now snugged too tightly around its neck to be gripped and shifted its attention to the rope itself. But its damaged right hand was unable to get enough grip for it to simply tear the rope apart.

It was still trying when Chris, Dowder, and Pappas came running up and opened fire with their shotguns and Barnes’s long sniper rifle. Twenty seconds later, its arms severed from its shoulders, the Terminator was helpless.

Five minutes after that, it was dead.

“Not too close together,” Preston warned as Half-pint started to set one of the Terminator’s legs down beside the other. “Magnetic reattachment, remember?”

“Oh. Right.” Half-pint took a couple of long steps farther to the side and set down the leg.

Preston looked over the scattering of Terminator pieces spread out on the riverbank. It was an impressive array, all right. Rather like a live-action version of the exploded-machine diagrams from his auto mechanic days.

“So what do we do with all of it?” Half-pint asked.

A movement caught Preston’s eye, and he looked over to see Connor and Halverson coming through the trees, their team lugging pieces of their own wrecked Terminator.

“I think we’re about to find out,” he said.

“Excellent job, Mayor,” Connor said as he and the others arrived at the riverside and dumped their fragments of Terminator onto the grass. “Clean sweep. And the fact that Skynet sent in yours to try to rescue ours means it hasn’t got any other resources in the area. Good news all around.”

“Doesn’t mean it won’t put together another group and send them in,” Halverson warned.

“Life is uncertain,” Connor conceded. “But at the very least we’ve bought ourselves some time. And it’s still possible that Skynet will decide you’re not worth the effort of rooting out. That certainly seems to have been its assessment up until now.”

“Except that things have changed,” Halverson pointed out. “For one thing, we’ve just wrecked four of its Terminators. For another,
you’re
here.”

“Nothing we can do about the first,” Connor said. “As to the second, I won’t be here for long.”

“What about the base you said you wanted to set up?” Preston asked.

“That’s something I still want to explore,” Connor told him. “But later. When I return, it’ll be with a full Resistance force.”

“Why not just stay here and send for them?” Preston persisted. “Skynet’s probably expecting you to move on. In that case, staying here might be safer”

“We know you’ve got a radio you can call them with,” Hope added, coming up beside Preston. “You’ve been making broadcasts.”

“A small one, yes,” Connor said thoughtfully. “An interesting suggestion, and one I’ll have to think about.” He looked down at the scattered Terminator pieces. “But first we have a lot of junk we need to dispose of. I don’t suppose you have any thermite back in town?”

“We have a pretty decent forge,” Halverson offered.

Connor shook his head.

“I doubt it’ll melt T-700 alloy. Our best bet is probably to dump the pieces into that ravine west of the river.”

“You and Williams already did that,” Preston reminded him. “The machine got out just fine.”

“Only because it was more or less intact,” Connor said. “As long as we make sure to scatter the pieces far enough apart, we shouldn’t have a problem.”

“Well, whatever we’re going to do, let’s do it,” Halverson rumbled, looking up at the sky. “I want to be back in town before it gets dark.”

“Good point.” Connor raised his eyebrows. “Mayor?”

“I guess the ravine’s as good a spot as any,” Preston agreed reluctantly. “Fine. Everyone? We’re heading across the river. Grab something, and let’s go.”

“We don’t need everybody,” Halverson said as the men and women began picking up the dented and scarred pieces of metal. “Connor and I can handle this. You can take whoever we don’t need and head back.”

Preston was used to Halverson throwing his weight around, and he’d more or less become accustomed to it. But doing it in front of John Connor himself was proving far more embarrassing than it usually was.

But until and unless Connor actually brought in his Resistance group—his group, and the food supplies he’d mentioned—Halverson would continue to have all the weight that his expert hunter status gave him.

And in this case he also happened to be right. There was no point in everyone tromping off into the woods if they weren’t needed. There was plenty of other work to be done in town.

“All right,” he said. “But take a few guards along, too. In case you run into something you can’t handle with your arms full.”

“Fine,” Halverson said. He walked away, tagging a few of the armed men and women who weren’t currently hefting a piece of broken Terminator.

“Speaking of which, Mayor,” Connor said, “I wonder if I might borrow that sidearm of yours. The .45 you loaned me is empty.”

Preston looked down at his waist, where Williams’s Desert Eagle was riding snugly in its holster.

“I don’t see why not—”

“We should keep that one with us,” Hope interrupted suddenly. “You’ve still got their shotgun, right. Won’t that do?”

“Hope—” Preston began warningly.

“That’s all right,” Connor soothed. “Actually, she’s right—we have more than enough firepower already.” He smiled at Preston. “We’ll see you back in town. And once again, Mayor, you and the others did a superb job today. You should be very proud.”

“We are,” Preston said, his annoyance at Halverson fading. Whatever points Halverson thought he was scoring with Connor by ordering Preston around, it was clear that Connor was seeing right through it. “Watch yourselves out there.”

“We will,” Connor assured him.

Walking past the line of waiting townspeople, Connor waded into the rushing water.

“Any particular reason you didn’t want me to give him Blair’s gun?” Preston muttered to his daughter.

For a moment she was silent. Preston watched as Connor made it across, followed by Halverson and Half-pint.

“I don’t trust him,” Hope said at last. “Something about him doesn’t seem right.”

Preston looked sideways at her, his reflexive objection dying in his throat. The only person in town, he reminded himself, whose opinion he genuinely trusted.

“In what way?” he asked instead.

“John Connor’s supposed to be some kind of legend, right?” Hope said. “What in the world would someone like that be doing way out here? Especially alone and on foot?”

Preston pursed his lips as an unsettling thought suddenly occurred to him.

“Unless this is all there actually is to the man.”

Hope frowned. “You mean like maybe the Resistance doesn’t exist?”

“No, I’m pretty sure the Resistance exists,” Preston said. “But maybe Connor himself is nothing but smoke and mirrors. Just some high-sounding broadcasts and a bizarre itinerant preacher game.”

The team’s rear guard was crossing the river, and the people who’d been left behind were heading down the trail toward town before Hope spoke again.

“In that case, why would Barnes and Blair say they work with Connor?” she asked. “Unless they’re lying. There has to be a real John Connor out there, a John Connor who really is the big Resistance leader he claims to be.”

“So
someone’s
lying,” Preston concluded. “Of course, we knew
that
two hours ago. The question is who?”

“I think it’s Jik,” Hope said firmly. “I don’t think he’s John Connor at all.”

Across the river, the last of the townspeople disappeared into the woods.

“Could be,” Preston said. “Fortunately, thanks to Halverson, you and I now have a bit of time to explore that very theory.”

He picked up the backpack they’d taken from Barnes and slung one of its straps onto his shoulder. With most of its ammo magazines now with Jik and Halverson, it was considerably lighter than it had been.

“Let’s head home. I feel like a long, serious conversation.”

* * *

“Well?” Barnes asked from his end of the couch.

Blair consulted her watch. Since the last sounds of distant gunfire had died away... “About half an hour,” she told him.

Barnes grunted. “Means they got ‘em.”

“What do you mean?” Smith asked anxiously from his guard post by the window. “Who got who?”

“I mean they nailed the machines,” Barnes told him. “If they hadn’t, you’d still hear shots every once in awhile from survivors trying to get away.”

Smith exhaled heavily. “Thank God,” he muttered.

Blair looked sideways at the two men, both of them visibly relaxing with Barnes’s news. The other possibility, unfortunately, was that there was no survivors’ gunfire because there were no survivors.

But there was no point in bringing that up. If it was bad news, they’d find out soon enough.

“So who do
you
think he is?” Barnes asked.

Blair made a face. She’d been poking at the whole Jik question ever since Preston had stuck them in here, under armed guard.

“My guess is he’s a con man,” she said.

“Looking for what?”

“Here and now?” Blair shrugged. “Food and shelter would be a decent enough reward for any scammer these days.”

“Mm,” Barnes said.

Blair eyed him. “You’re not convinced.”

“You might be right,” he said. “Probably are. You like their story about Marcus?”

Blair felt her throat constrict. Was Barnes going to throw that name in her face for the rest of her life?

“I don’t see—”

“Because I don’t,” he cut her off gruffly. “There’s something about it that doesn’t add up.”

She frowned at him, her reflexive reaction fading away as she belatedly noticed the concentration on his face. For once, he wasn’t simply trying to goad her.

And he was right, she realized. There’d been something about the scientists’ description of the Theta Project that seemed a little off.

“I agree,” she said. “Any idea what it is?”

“For one thing, they were pretty damn casual about the whole thing,” he said. “You saw them.”

“They wouldn’t be the first people to lose their consciences.”

“Yeah, but—” Barnes shook his head. “I don’t know. Forget it.”

And then, abruptly, Blair had it.

“No,
don’t
forget it,” she said, her breath tight in her throat. “You’re right.
Damn
it.”

“What?” Barnes demanded.

“They said Marcus was a prototype,” Blair said, her mind racing as she tried to make something coherent out of the sudden updraft of thoughts and suspicions swirling through her head. “Remember?”