Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire (3 page)

And right now, Susan was the only one who wasn’t doing that. Nathan Oxley had been a molecular biologist, and his general medical training was also augmented by a leather-working hobby. Remy Lajard had been a computer programmer, but he’d also dabbled in microbrew beers in his spare time, a skill he’d brought with him to Baker’s Hollow. That had made him very popular among the residents, even more popular than Oxley.

But Susan had nothing. She’d been a metallurgist, dealing with high-tech alloys and materials that were miles beyond the iron, copper, and steel that were the best anyone here had or would ever hope to have. Up to now, she’d demonstrated no other skills except the ability to put an arrow into a piece of soft wood fifty yards away. If she could parlay that into the ability to hunt, great. If she couldn’t, it would be useless.

Hope’s father wouldn’t want to send Susan away. But he wouldn’t have a choice. Duke Halverson would insist that she be expelled, and Halverson had enough clout to get his way on things like that.

Hope had seen him do it at least once before, five years ago, when that clothing store manager had stumbled half-dead into town. Three months later, having exhausted every attempt to make him useful, he’d been taken to the edge of town and ordered to leave. Halverson had seen to it personally.

Three months was Halverson’s rule of thumb... and Susan’s three months were nearly up.

It wouldn’t be just Halverson who would insist, either. There were still fair numbers of deer and elk out there, but the wolves, coyotes, and cougars had also been coming back and were starting to seriously compete with the humans for those precious resources. Hope’s hunting party had had to travel nearly seven miles from town to find this buck, and that was going to translate into a long and wearying trek back home.

A trek the town’s best hunters were getting royally tired of. From the bits and pieces of her father’s conversations that Hope had overheard, some of the hunters were starting to talk about abandoning Baker’s Hollow and striking out on their own. Their argument was that a group of five or ten experts could survive far better alone than they were doing right now.

Which was undoubtedly true. Unfortunately, while that plan might work fine for them, it would devastate the town. Baker’s Hollow only had about fifteen good-to-excellent hunters, with another ten who Hope could charitably call competent. Skimming off ten or even five of the best would leave everyone else in serious trouble. The remaining woodsmen would have to scramble like mad to bring the competent hunters up to speed, and they would absolutely have to add new people to the rolls as quickly as possible. And they would have to immediately dump anyone and anything that constituted a drain on the town’s resources.

One way or another, Susan’s time was running out.

Hope had finished cutting the second arrow out of the deer when she heard footsteps in the undergrowth behind them. Not the quiet and stealthy movements of fellow hunters, but the casual strides of men and women on their way to collect a kill.

“Hope?” Ned Greeley’s deep voice called.

“Over here,” Hope called back, standing up and waving her bow.

A minute later the big man stepped through the trees and joined them.

“Nice,” he said, looking approvingly at the dead buck. “How’d she do?”

Hope suppressed a grimace. Ned was one of the expert hunters, as well as being a decent blacksmith. But if you weren’t one of his inner circle he had a bad habit of talking about you as if you weren’t there, even if you were standing three feet away. If Halverson ever decided it was time for the top hunters to strike out on their own, odds were that Ned would be the man right behind him when they hit the trail.

“Susan did fine,” she said.

“Um,” Ned rumbled, tilting his head and gazing pointedly at the marks of two retrieved arrows in the deer’s side. “Good save, anyway. Signal the others again, will you? It’s pretty thick there to the west, and Pepper may have drifted off target.”

Hope nodded and reached for her whistle.

Everyone had a talent, her father always said. That meant Susan had one, too. All they had to do was figure out what it was.

Hopefully before she was sent back out into the forest and the mountains to die.

They’d been flying for nearly three hours, and Blair Williams had watched the landscape sliding beneath the Blackhawk helicopter gradually change from forest to sparse grassland and finally to desert. Above her, the sky was mottled with a mixture of feathery white cirrus clouds and long dirty gray stratus ones, interspersed with occasional patches of blue sky. All around her the air was filled with the hum of the Blackhawk’s engines and the rhythmic throbbing of its rotors.

Beside her, scowling in the copilot’s seat, was Barnes.

Blair sighed to herself. She hadn’t wanted to take on this mission, and it had been abundantly clear that Barnes hadn’t wanted her along, either. But Connor had insisted, and John Connor wasn’t the sort of person you said no to.

Especially when the only reason Connor’s dark eyes were even alive to gaze at, into, and through you was because Marcus Wright had given his life to save him.

Marcus Wright. The man who in a few short days Blair had learned to love.

Not the man
, a bitter-edged corner of her mind corrected mockingly in Barnes’s voice.
The
machine
you learned to love
.

Blair shook her head sharply.
Stop that!
she ordered herself. Yes, Marcus had been mostly machine by the time Blair met him, a hybrid of man and Terminator that was far beyond even Skynet’s usual blasphemies. And yes, he’d been created for the express purpose of luring Connor into Skynet Central to die.

But buried somewhere beneath all that machinery had been a man. A man with a living heart, a determined mind, and an unquenchable spirit.

There was no way to know if he’d still had a soul. Blair hoped that he had.

“There!” Barnes’s voice growled into her headphones.

Blair blinked away the bittersweet reverie. Ahead on the horizon she could see the still smoldering remains of the massive Skynet dish array and hidden underground lab that the Resistance had hit over two weeks ago.

And in doing so had walked squarely into a devastating, multilayered trap.

Blair still winced whenever she thought about how close they’d come that day to losing everything. The self-destruct explosion that had taken out the lab and killed the entire assault team—except Connor—had been the first, most obvious trap. The data download that the techs had managed to transmit before they died had been the far more subtle, far more dangerous one. Buried inside that data had been a radio kill code that had promised a way for the Resistance to simultaneously shut down Skynet’s vast armies of Terminators, T-1 tanks, and H-K Hunter-Killers.

But the promise had been a lie. The code had worked perfectly in Connor’s small-scale tests, perfectly enough that Command had given the order for a massive, simultaneous transmission to be followed by a scorched-earth attack on Skynet’s huge San Francisco hub.

But when the multiple signals were sent out, the supposed kill code morphed into a homing signal, allowing Skynet to pinpoint and destroy most of the Resistance cells worldwide.

Of all the leaders only Connor had smelled a rat in time, and had shut down his team’s transmitter before it could join the party. Only Connor’s group and the ones who had heeded his plea for more time were still alive and functioning.

And only Connor’s group was back there in the remains of San Francisco, cleaning up the remnants of Skynet’s once massive forces.

So far, the clean-up had been relatively easy. A duck shoot, even, at least the mopping-up part that Barnes had been engaged in. Nearly all the surviving T-600s and T-700s were hopelessly crippled, and their demolition was giving some good firearms practice to the new recruits who’d joined up from among the civilians Connor’s pilots had rescued before the balloon went up.

But the duck shoot wasn’t going to last much longer. Blair had heard rumors that there was some kind of prophecy wrapped around Connor, that he was destined to lead the Resistance to victory over the Terminators. She didn’t put a lot of stock in such things, and she couldn’t imagine Connor himself taking it very seriously either.

But considering the time and resources Skynet had poured into luring the man into his own private corner of the trap, it was clear that the big computer wasn’t ready to dismiss Connor or this so-called prophecy nearly so quickly.

And
that
meant Skynet wouldn’t simply write off western North America as a loss and content itself with trying to dominate and wipe out the rest of the world’s population. It would be moving resources here, as many as it could, as quickly as it could.

They’d won a major battle. But the war was far from over.

“Well?”

For the second time in ten minutes, Blair found herself jolted out of private thoughts. “Well what?” she asked.

“You going to take us down?” Barnes demanded. “Or you just going to circle around up here looking at the pretty scenery?”

Blair felt her cheeks warm. She had indeed been flying with her brain on autopilot, running them in a lazy circle around the western periphery of the remains.

“I was trying to find a spot that wasn’t actually still on fire,” she countered, hoping the excuse didn’t sound as pathetic to him as it did to her. The big pit in the ground where the team had rappelled down to the lab... okay, there it was. Connor had told them Barnes’s brother Caleb had been on the western side when Skynet blew the lab.

She frowned as something caught her eye. It was a small, slender hump in the ground, like a tree root that had been forced aboveground by some obstruction beneath it.

Only there weren’t any trees nearby. Not for miles around.

“There,” Barnes said sharply, pointing toward the edge of the pit. “I see some bodies. Take us down.”

“Okay,” Blair said, feeling a shiver run through her. This was not going to be pleasant.

It wasn’t. The bodies were in bad shape, burned and mangled by the massive explosion that had taken out the lab. What was left had had two weeks’ to begin decaying, though the dry desert air had alleviated the effects somewhat. The human remains were scattered amid tangled debris from the antenna array and the metal skulls, torsos, and limbs of the Terminators that had been defending it.

There were a lot of those pieces, too, along with plenty of T-600 miniguns and the big G11 caseless-round submachineguns that Skynet was arming its T-700s with these days. A lot of the weapons were useless, though a few of the miniguns looked in decent shape and some even had ammo belts still attached. Clearly, Skynet had thrown a huge number of resources into this battle, and Blair found herself wondering how much of a role that desperate-looking defense had played in persuading Command that they were genuinely onto something.

Slowly, methodically, Blair and Barnes continued their grisly task. Each face had to be looked at closely, with the body often first having to be turned over. Here and there Blair spotted someone she recognized, either one of the people from Connor’s original team or someone she’d gotten to know in the months since they’d been pulled out of Los Angeles and put under General Olsen’s overall command. Each time, she felt a tug at her heart, and a small diminishing of herself. Some poet, she remembered vaguely, had once written about such things.

Caleb wasn’t in the first group she and Barnes checked out. Nor was he in the second, or the third, or the fourth. Midway through the fifth Blair’s aching heart and churning stomach finally got the better of her, and she had to move away for a few minutes to settle both of them.

Barnes, predictably, didn’t seem to notice her distress. He certainly didn’t say anything as Blair stood a dozen paces away, breathing shallowly through her mouth. He continued on, as emotionless and machinelike as any Terminator, checking each broken body before moving on to the next.

He was so silent and straightforwardly determined in his quest, in fact, that he had unhooked his entrenching tool from his pack and started digging before Blair even realized that he’d found his brother.

Gingerly, feeling like she was setting off across a minefield, she walked over to him.

“May I help?” she asked.

“No,” he said flatly, not looking at her.

For a minute Blair watched him jabbing the tool into the loose sand and throwing it to the side, wondering if she should just take him at his word and go wait in the Blackhawk. Then, moving a few feet away from him, she started to dig.

She half expected him to order her away. But he didn’t. Maybe he realized that she’d been Caleb’s friend, too, and deserved the chance to help him to his final rest.

Maybe he just didn’t consider her worth the trouble of yelling at.

The sun was dipping close to the western mountains by the time they finished the grave. Again, Blair expected Barnes to order her away as he picked up his brother’s body and laid it gently in the hole. But again, he simply ignored her as she stood quietly by. He spoke over the grave for a few minutes, his voice too low for Blair to catch more than a few words of the farewell. Then, straightening up, he threw his brother a final salute. Blair did the same, holding the salute for probably half a minute until Barnes finally lowered his arm to his side and again picked up his entrenching tool.

Ten minutes later, it was done. While Blair waited by the grave, Barnes constructed a cross out of his brother’s rifle and a slightly warped Terminator leg strut. He dug the cross into the sand, and for another minute stood gazing at the grave and the marker. He took a deep breath, and for the first time in probably an hour he looked at Blair.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“All right,” Blair said, her mind flicking to the hundreds of bodies still lying out beneath the open sky. But there was no way she and Barnes could deal with so many. All she could do was put them out of her mind as best she could. “Before we go, I’d like to check out something I spotted on our way in.”