Terminator - T3 01 - Rise of the Machines (12 page)

Two LAPD remote units were harrying Connor, but to this point they had not been completely effective. The human showed the unusually strong resilience and inventiveness that Skynet had programmed her to expect.

T-X punched a hole in the windshield, morphed her right arm into her plasma weapon, and quickly charged the unit.

Her head-up unit displayed a reticle roughly centered on the pet van. Her target-acquisition stabilizing circuitry popped up and the reticle locked on the pickup truck.

Her weapon indicator showed fully charged as the pet van and flanking police cars raced through a red light, just avoiding collisions with two automobiles.

T-X fired at the same instant a semi tractor-trailer entered the intersection, filling her targeting frame.

For an instant nothing seemed to happen. But then

the semi was engulfed in a blue plasma charge field and exploded with an impressive flash-bang that sent flames and debris hammering off the fronts of the commercial buildings on either side of the street.

The Champion crane plowed through the debris like a hot knife through soft butter, and on the other side, T-X glanced in her rearview mirror.

Terminator, his motorcycle laid over on its side, skidded through the flames, then shot upright, apparently unharmed.

Behind it, the first ambulance ran headlong into a major piece of the semi's frame and disintegrated, while the second ambulance emerged from the fire, leaving behind twin vortex swirls in the dense smoke.

A huge explosion obliterated the intersection behind Connor. He looked in his rearview mirror in time to see the Champion crane crash through the fire and debris, followed a second later by Terminator on the police bike, and one of the ambulances directly on his tail.

It was Terminator! Somehow he had caught up.

They weren't out of the woods yet, but Connor felt a small measure of relief. He and Kate were no longer alone. Terminator might be an older model of cyborg, but he'd been there in the past for John, and it looked as if he would be there again.

For the briefest of instants, Connor wished that his mother were here. But then he put that thought out of his mind.

First, he would have to survive this trouble.

The driverless cop cars still flanked him. And it wouldn't take much more for them to finally box the pet van in and run it off the street.

"Hold on," he shouted to Kate in the back.

He slammed the brake pedal as hard as he could,

locking up the pet van's wheels, smoke pouring off the tires.

The cop cars shot past, and Connor made a sloppy but effective four-wheel drift to the right, just missing a delivery truck at the corner.

The pair of cop cars locked up their brakes in unison and made perfect 180s, jumping back on Connor's tail as quickly as they'd been thrown off.

The Champion crane took the corner wide, the extended boom taking out the entire side of a building, brick and wood and plastic exploding in every direction.

Whatever kind of weapon the cyborg had fired had been big enough to take out an entire semi truck. One hit, even a near miss, would make short work of the pet van.

Connor kept checking the rearview mirror as the huge crane actually gained on him, rolling over cars whose drivers weren't quick enough to get out of the way, whereas he could only weave in and out of the slower-moving traffic.

But the ambulance and Terminator were still back there, along with the cop cars in some kind of a crazy Fourth of July parade complete with fireworks.

There was a large hole in the Champion crane's wind-shield and something jutted out from inside.

Connor swerved hard to the right, nearly sideswiping a row of parked cars, and then swerved sharply left, laying on his horn for cars to get out of his way.

Kate was being thrown from side to side in the back. He could hear her body slamming against the cap.

"Stop it!" she screamed in desperation. "Stop it!" But he could not. Their lives depended on his driving. He could see a bright blue glow around whatever it was sticking out of the crane's windshield. It was the cyborg's weapon. And it was ready to fire again.

c,14

The Valley

Terminator could see the blue glow in the cab of the Champion crane as the T-X made ready to fire a second time.

Ahead, Connor was maneuvering wildly, but that would not work for long. The police cars would box him in and T-X would destroy him and Kate.

Terminator took the Mossberg from the saddle rack, cycled a round into the breech, and fired at the crane's left rear tire. The machine had eighteen wheels, but the one shredding tire was enough to cause T-X to lurch a little to the side at the same moment she fired.

The shot went wild. The beam of raw energy struck the rear of the squad car off Connor's right, instantly incinerating it. The flaming wreckage tumbled end over end.

Terminator prepared to take a second shot when the ambulance behind him jolted his rear tire, almost making him lose the bike.

The crane's boom accelerated to the left as it ex-

tended, dropping a massive hook on thick cables that swung like a lethal wrecking ball.

The hook smashed into Terminator's chest, slamming him off the motorcyle. At the last moment he grabbed on to it with one hand, still holding the shotgun in the other.

Suddenly he was swinging wildly to the left. He twisted his body just as he slammed hard into the pursuing ambulance, shoving it over on its side, sending it skidding down the street in a trail of sparks.

Terminator swung right again in time to see Connor, still harried by one of the squad cars, duck down a side street and disappear.

It was too sharp a turn for the crane, which roared through the intersection. Terminator, dangling from the hook, smashed off parked cars, lampposts, and anything else in his path as he continued to try to bring his shotgun to bear on the T-X's head.

The crane suddenly swerved to the right, crashed over two parked cars, jumped the sidewalk, and smashed into the glass wall of a building.

Terminator found himself crashing into pieces of brick and steel and wires and pipes and girders as the massive machine careened down a long work area and burst through the opposite wall, back out onto the street in the next block.

As the big crane made the impossibly sharp right turn with the boom extended, carrying Terminator's two hundred kilos out at ninety degrees, it lifted off the nine wheels on the left, balanced there, ponderously, like a huge whale about to be beached by a gigantic comber,

but then regained its balance when the front end finally came around.

Connor was on the next street over, and Terminator's head-up overlay map of the local streets showed that the pet van would have to come down this street. T-X had the same overlay.

Terminator twisted around and brought his shotgun to bear directly on the T-X's cranial case, hoping to at least take out its optical lenses, when something large, horns and sirens blaring, loomed directly in front of him. He turned at the same instant a mammoth hook and ladder fire truck, moving at high speed, struck him square in the torso. The force of the collision was so great he lost his grip on the crane's hook, which went flying upward to the right, and his shotgun, which arched overhead to his left

The Champion crane flashed away. Terminator felt the much weaker metal and glass of the fire truck collapse under his weight. The entire ma-

chine shuddered from front to rear, two massive motor

mounts on its Cummins diesel snapped like dry twigs. Ladders broke loose and lights shattered under the sheer

mechanical shock wave that coursed through the truck's

frame.

Terminator's head and upper torso passed through the shattered windshield, and he found himself, one hand on

the big steering wheel, looking up at two firemen, shocked beyond movement, mindless of the blood streaming from

the cuts on their faces from the flying glass. What they were witnessing simply could not be happening.

"I'll drive," Terminator said.

Both firemen came to life at the same moment They shoved open the doors and bailed out, hitting the street and tumbling end over end, protected by their helmets and heavy fire suits from any serious injuries.

Terminator, still holding the wheel, climbed into the cab of the rapidly decelerating fire truck, studied the controls for just a moment, then jammed the gas pedal to the floor as he prepared to make a 180.

Connor had managed to shake the big crane, but he'd also lost Terminator at the last turn. The one cop car was still on his tail, repeatedly smashing into the Toyota's rear fender, trying to spin him out.

The temperature gauge on the panel was just about in the red and the fuel tank was getting low, but other than that he figured his luck was holding so far. Some luck, he thought.

"Kate, are you okay?" he shouted over his shoulder.

The cop car came up on his left side again, edging closer. It was almost as if the driverless squad car was trying to herd him.

"What do you think?" Kate shouted angrily.

The squad car was trying to herd him.

Connor made a sharp right turn, then left again, coming back out onto the main avenue through the industrial district.

The Champion crane was there. Less than fifty yards

down the street, barreling right at him. Its boom was extended forward and its hook was throwing up showers of sparks as it tumbled and banged along the road.

Connor slammed the gas to the floor, but the squad car pulled ahead and swerved directly into his path. He had to hit the brakes.

He hauled the pet van left and tried to get around the cop car, but he was cut off again.

The crane halved the distance between them, and T-X recharged her weapon for a final shot that could not miss at this range.

Terminator pulled up alongside the Champion crane.

The T-X was preparing to fire again.

Terminator knew that she could not possibly miss at this range. Even if he could somehow shove the crane aside at the moment the T-X fired, she would fire again and again until she succeeded. Or, at the very least, she would simply run over the pet van, crushing John Connor and Katherine Brewster to death.

The T-X had to be stopped.

Terminator found the control for the fire truck's stabilizers and activated it. The thick metal arms, which were meant to provide a broad footing for the truck when its ladder and basket were deployed, extended from the bottom of the truck's high chassis.

When they were nearly fully deployed, Terminator hauled the fire truck hard to the right. The stabilizers bit

into the eight remaining tires on the crane's left side, chewing them apart like office paper through a shredding machine.

The crane swerved to the right, almost impossible even for the T-X to maintain a straight track.

Terminator pulled away and immediately hauled the fire truck back toward the crane, hoping to knock the big machine over the curb and onto its side.

The Champion's much larger stabilizers deployed at that moment, slashing into the side of the fire truck in two places, the thick metal arms impaling the hook and ladder unit, lifting it partially off its wheels.

Terminator now had no control over the fire truck, but neither did the T-X have much control over the combined mass of both machines.

He looked up in time to see T-X point her fully charged plasma cannon at him.

The cab of the fire truck disintegrated in a blue flash, molten metal and glass bursting outward as if the truck had been a mass of mercury dropped onto the pavement

T-X found that she still had enough control of the Champion crane to complete this element of the mission. In fact, the fire truck attached to her left side acted like an outrigger.

The Emery pet van was less than ten meters ahead, just out of the range of the dangling hook, but still effectively boxed in by the squad car.

All other traffic on the road had pulled out of the way. It wouldn't be long before the LAPD arrived in force. Already the 911 switchboard was being flooded with calls, even more not getting through because of computer problems at Pacific Bell's main LA. exchange.

T-X waited indifferently for her weapon to recharge.

As the power cell came into the green range, she aimed the weapon at the back of the van, her target-acquisition stabilizing system switching to active.

Terminator, his chest smoking from where his torso had caught the edge of the plasma beam before he could get out of the cab and the bare metal of his cranial case exposed where the patches of flesh on his face had been seared away, grabbed a fire axe from its bracket in the back.

The T-X was getting ready to fire again. The blue plasma glow was rapidly intensifying.

Terminator scrambled up on the fire truck's ladder basket and swung over the top of the Champion's cab, the roof sagging under his weight.

He stepped back, balancing on the edge, as the sheet