Terminator - T3 01 - Rise of the Machines (21 page)

"Oh, God," Kate said. "Hurry." She turned to Connor. "Cover up that stuff. I'm going to talk our way onto the base."

Connor grabbed a blanket and covered the weapons and explosives as Terminator slowed for the gate.

A pair of Air Policemen stepped out and motioned for Terminator to stop. He pulled up and opened the side window. Kate leaned across to talk to the security cops. "I'm Kate Brewster. My dad, General Brewster, is expecting us," she said.

The security officers were dressed in BDUs with black berets, M16s slung over their shoulders. "May I see some identification, please?" the tech sergeant asked.

Kate took her driver's license out of the wallet in her jacket pocket and handed it down. "My fiance, Scott Peterson, is in back," she said. She smiled and placed a hand on Terminator's arm. "This is... Tom Peterson... his brother. Our best man."

The sergeant went into the guardhouse with Kate's ID, while the other guard kept a watchful eye on them. There was no traffic.

A couple of minutes later the sergeant came out and handed Kate's driver's license back. "The general's a little busy right now, ma'am. But his secretary's authorized your visit."

The second guard swung the gate open. "Straight ahead to the main entrance," the sergeant instructed. "Someone will meet you there and get you signed in."

"Thank you," Kate said. "Please hurry," she said under her breath to Terminator.

CRS Computer Center

CRS was at the highest state of readiness it had ever been. There was an air not so much of panic, but of expectation. Awe. A little trepidation.

General Brewster stood next to the Mainframe Duty Officer's console, looking up at the display on the large plasma screen on the back wall.

The field was deep blue, a Mercator projection of the western hemisphere centered on the North and South American continents, with the shoulder of Africa off to the right and the Pacific out to Guam to the left.

U.S. air, naval, and ground stations were highlighted by icons, the electronic networks connecting them marked by lines, along with the great circle flying and sailing routes to battle zones.

The display was labeled skynet battlefield management system. Tool bars were labeled firewall penetration. LOCAL DEFENSE NETS. SYSTEM STATUS.

In rapid succession every military network, base, unit, or weapons system currently en route came up with an on-line icon.

At the end of the list was the simple interrogative: y/n.

The big room quieted down by degrees as the last of the installations came on-line.

Skynet was telling its human controllers that it was ready. It was asking if they were ready too.

Tony Flickinger was at Brewster's elbow. "Sir, shall I?" Brewster shook his head. "No. It's my job now." He had trouble dragging his eyes from the display. He hesitated.

This was what they all had worked for over the past several years. This was what the Pentagon had spent more than fifteen billion dollars on. Actually more had been spent, but the above-the-line budget, the number that Congress saw, was fifteen billion.

Skynet was going to assure world peace. No national leader in his or her right mind would dare attack when such an efficient, emotionless, capable system stood watch, unblinking twenty-four/seven.

Attack the U.S. or one of her allies and die. Simple. All the power of the mightiest nation on earth would be unleashed.

An unstoppable force.

Worldwide domination
—
benevolent domination
—
was possible for the first time in the history of man.

Still Brewster hesitated. Maybe Mr. Watchdog
—
Congressman Stevenson
—
was right. Maybe turning over our entire defense network to a goddamn computer was nuts.

But they had run out of options. The U.S. and her allies were, because of the virus, totally defenseless at this moment.

Brewster reached out, almost languidly, and touched

the y key on the Mainframe DO's console, and a moment later enter.

The console monitor brought up the CRS logo, and the message skynet link established.

The system began to shift and change, slowly at first, but rapidly accelerating as tens of thousands of Skynet links were established worldwide.

"We're in," one of the techs at a computer console announced. "We're past the firewalls. Local defense nets, minutemen, subs
—
"

It was moving too fast now for the technician to keep up with it verbally.

"Skynet is fully operational," another of the techs reported. "Processing at sixty
—
now ninety terafiops a second
—
"

"Sir, it should take less than a minute to find the virus and kill it," Patricia Talbot advised.

Brewster glanced at the systems chief tech. He didn't know if he shared her optimism. "Let's pray to God it works," he said.

The plasma screen and every terminal in the Mainframe Center and out in the main room suddenly went blank.

It was as if someone had pulled the switch.

Brewster looked up, his heart in his mouth. "What the
—
?"

"Power failure?" someone asked.

"Lights are still on," someone else observed.

The monitors and the plasma screen suddenly came back to life, and for a few seconds Brewster breathed a

sigh of relief. Skynet had merely been clearing its throat.

But then it became obvious that something very wrong was happening. The screens and monitors were filling with line after line of some alien code, symbols racing across the videos at inhuman speeds.

"What the hell is going on
—
" Brewster muttered. What indeed.

c.25

CRS

T-X was ready to move now; the last of the operational robots on the floor had been reprogrammed.

The door to T-l Storage Bay 3 opened, and Lieutenant Hastings stepped out into the corridor just as her boss Captain McManus got off the elevator.

He was angry, and the moment he spotted her he charged down the hall like a bull on the rampage.

"Lieutenant, where in hell did you go?" he demanded. "Where in hell is that police chopper pilot? And
—
" He glanced at the placard on the door. "What in hell are you doing here?"

"How did you know I was here?" T-X asked without inflection.

"Jones spotted you
—
"

"Who else knows?" T-X asked.

Something suddenly occurred to McManus, and he stepped closer. "Say, you're not Hastings." He looked again at the placard. "Who the hell
—
?"

T-X grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off his feet. Opening the door to the T-l Storage Bay she shook

him like a rag doll, breaking the vertebrae in his neck. She took his sidearm and tossed him in a corner.

T-X stared at the dying captain for a moment, only his left leg still twitching, considering taking his persona to more easily reach the Computer Center.

She looked up, her sensors attuned to the electronic emissions inside the building. There was a powerful interference here, strong electrical and electronic sources that dulled some of her sensors.

But she could feel that Skynet was coming on-line now, and very soon it would be next to impossible to shut it down.

She cocked her head. Next to impossible. But there was still a way to do it. General Brewster was the key.

She turned without another glance at the chief of security and headed to the elevator as she began to morph out of her Lieutenant Hastings persona.

A pair of Air Force security guards were stationed inside a bulletproof glass partition just past the front door.

"Where would your father be if there was trouble with the system?" Terminator asked Kate.

"Upstairs in the Computer Center," Kate told him. Her father had said that was the heart of CRS. But now that they had come this far she didn't know what to do the rest of the way.

"Do you know how to reach the Computer Center?"

Kate nodded. "Yes." She nodded toward the elevators

across the lobby from them. "But they won't let us go up there
—
"

One of the security guards slid a clipboard through the slot "Please sign in," he said pleasantly. "Someone will be out in just a minute to escort you upstairs to the general's office."

"We're going now," Terminator said. He smashed the thick glass with his left fist, and shot both guards in the knee with a Glock pistol, dropping them to the floor with yelps of pain.

"What... are you crazy?" Kate shouted.

"There is no time," Terminator told her. "We must reach your father."

He strode off to the elevator, while Connor took Kate's arm and followed after him.

"He's been programmed not to kill people," Connor assured her. "Doesn't mean he can't disable them."

All their terminals were locked out.

General Brewster emerged from the Mainframe room out onto the Computer Center floor. His technicians were scrambling to regain control of the system. Doing everything they could to take back just one base, one military installation. Any satellite.

But even the CRS complex power station and air-conditioning plant were no longer responding. Nor were internal communications, including telephones, working.

One of the techs who had been trying to get through

to a friend on the other side of Edwards looked up and shook his head. "Cell phones are all down too, sir."

The only ray of hope in the entire mess was the virus they had been plagued with. Skynet was eliminating it, although it was taking more than the one minute that Talbot had promised.

But at what cost?

No one knew how long this situation would last, or where it was going.

"Daddy?" a woman getting off the service elevator at the back of the center shouted.

Brewster knew that voice. He turned on his heel as his daughter, Kate, came across the room toward him, her right hand extended as if she wanted to come into his arms and be held.

But her being here now, at this moment, made no sense. Then he suddenly remembered that he had asked her to bring her fiance out today. Practically begged her, and he told his secretary to take care of security if and when she actually did show up.

But not now.

"Kate, honey, what are you doing here?"

The main elevator to Brewster's left opened and he saw several people out of the corner of his eye coming toward him.

He started to turn when machine-gun fire erupted, the noise shockingly loud. One part of his brain automatically registered the fact that the gun was a Russian AK-47. They had a distinctive sound.

Another part-of his brain reacted in horror as Kate's body was hammered with bullets.

She was shoved backward, crashing through a partition in a shower of glass, computers exploding in sparks and plastic and metal shards, Kate falling to the floor in a heap behind a console.

Pandemonium erupted as technicians dove for cover, screaming in panic, trying to get out of the line of fire.

This was some kind of a nightmare. All the air had gone out of the room, and Brewster could not breathe, let alone cry out his daughter's name.

He started forward when a woman to his left shouted at him.

"Get away from it!"

It was Kate. He would know her voice anywhere. Behind him. But he could see her feet on the other side of the destroyed console where she had fallen.

He turned in time to see his daughter coming toward him in a dead run. A young man in torn, bloody blue jeans and a scuffed-up suede jacket, a knapsack over his shoulder, came right behind her. He carried an AK-47.

A large man, vaguely familiar, dressed in black leather, sunglasses covering his eyes, strode across the room. He dropped the AK-47 he'd just fired and unslung a Mk-19 grenade launcher from his right shoulder.

A mass exodus out of the two emergency exits was taking place as technicians scrambled, some of them on all fours, to get out of what had become a battle zone.

Kate was coming across the room toward Brewster,

but that was impossible. He'd seen his daughter hit at least a half-dozen times and fall to the floor,

He turned again in time to see a bullet-riddled figure rise up from behind the computer console quad. It was Kate, and yet it wasn't.

Brewster staggered back a half step with the enormity of what he was witnessing.

There was no blood. Something that looked like liquid metal was coalescing around the wounds, closing them, impossibly healing her injuries.

But she wasn't Kate now. She was a blond woman dressed in rust-colored pants and a jacket.

T-X raised the Beretta 9mm pistol she'd taken from Captain McManus's body, and fired two shots, both slamming into Brewster's stomach, shoving him back as if he'd been hit by a freight train coming at full speed.