Rise of the Machines

TERMINATOR 3

RISE of the MACHINES

DAVID HAGBERG

PROLOGUE

July 2029 Outside What Was Colorado Springs, Colorado

Travel anywhere for humans had become next to impossible over the last twenty years with the intensification of the machine wars.

Human settlements, sometimes hanging on only by sheer determination, were critically important because they were the last pockets of resistance. They also were important because of the sharp decrease in the human birth rate. Who wanted to bring a child into a world of chaos, death, and destruction? These days the sparks of human existence were reduced to dim flickers around the world.

The center for machine activity and Skynet control was two thousand feet beneath Navajo Mountain near the Continental Divide west of the Colorado Springs. The installation had been home to old U.S. military installations. Since Judgment Day when Skynet started and conducted the global thermonuclear war that all but wiped human beings off the face of the earth, Navajo Mountain had become the primary target for the human resistance.

Skynet's Artificial Intelligence unit anticipated this, of course, so it began the systematic extermination of all human life in ever-expanding circles starting with Navajo Mountain itself, then spreading throughout the Rocky Mountains and beyond.

The years had taken their toll. In the Navajo Mountain Strategic Region there'd only been Air Force Colonel Steve Earle and a handful of resistance fighters: Academy instructors and students, local cops, and a few firefighters.

After years in hiding, tramping around the mountains, evading machine search-and-destroy patrols, they had stumbled upon one unguarded, unblocked ventilation shaft into the heart of the mountain. A back door.

Their plan was to send a five-kiloton suitcase-size nuclear demolition device down the shaft to explode in the inner chamber of Skynet's AI. Kill the brain and the body would of necessity stop functioning.

Colonel Earle and his band of volunteers had started the mission clock at 1800 GMT on June 1.

That was thirty days ago.

No one had heard from them since, and Skynet continued to function.

Lieutenant Joel Benson, 1st Resistance Rangers Special Incursion Unit Red One, pulled himself the last few meters to the top of the rocky ridgeline. It had snowed last night, and he and his four operators were damn cold. They had

nothing like this in Los Angeles. Not even in the mountains. Not on a first of July.

He raised his vintage Steiner mil specs light-intensifying binoculars to study the broad road that led up from the main highway and old Interstate 25. It switched back and forth in angry slashes through living rock over the extremely steep gradients.

Human engineering, Benson thought bitterly. There wasn't much of that these days; no bridges were being constructed, no new dams, new airports, new ocean liners. There was only destruction. He could smell death and decay deep behind his nostrils, taste it at the back of his throat It was everywhere.

Benson scoped the access road, following it to the massive traffic jam that Colonel Earle had described for them. When Skynet closed the blast doors, and word started to get out what was happening, those personnel who were caught on the outside tried to get away from what they figured would be ground zero.

Skynet had anticipated that The road out from the installation's main entrance had been lined with the old Cyber Research Systems T-l-5 and T-l-7 warrior robots armed with 50-caliber depleted uranium chainguns capable of firing nearly three thousand rounds per minute. Like the old Navy's Phalanx systems mounted on aircraft carriers, the guns were directed by a sophisticated onboard suite of radar, infrared, and optical sensors.

There had been no escape for any human caught on the access road that evening.

Their bodies, hundreds of them, were still down there, mummified by the super dry, high mountain air. Nothing moved.

Payback time, Benson thought, pulling back below the ridgeline. Not only for the people on the road and the untold hundreds and thousands of millions around the world, but for his own wife, Jane, and their three children killed in a machine ambush three years ago in the San Bernadino massacre.

At one meter eighty, Benson carried his hundred kilograms with the compact ease of a trained athlete. His dark, luminescent eyes never seemed to miss much. His friends swore that he was more efficient and more reliable than a reprogrammed T-850, and even the few people who sometimes found his manner abrasive conceded that he would be a good man to cover your ass in a knockdown brawl.

But sometimes he wore a bitter halo because of how his family had died. If the truth were known, he was even more dedicated and motivated than any T-800 robot that ever came out of Skynet's manufactories. He had just cause.

Benson's number two, Sergeant Toni Battaglia, huddled beneath a snow-covered rock overhang talking into the mike on the lapel of her white camos. The resistance was down to one radiation-hardened KH-15 surveillance/ communications satellite that Skynet hadn't managed to take out yet They used a forward scatter encryption program that was so crude and so old that so far as they knew the machines had not yet been able to break it No one thought that the situation could last much longer,

though Benson personally felt that Skynet simply did not care. It was a supreme gesture of arrogance.

"Looks like we're in the clear," Benson told her. "No ground-based defense towers that I could see. And no H-Ks in the air."

H-Ks, or Hunter-Killers, were helicopterlike machines that had been designed by CRS in California for one purpose and one purpose alone: to detect and kill human beings, whenever and wherever. They were fully automatic and damned difficult to bring down. Everyone gave them a great deal of respect

Toni relayed the information to Home Plate, the resistance's headquarters deep underground of what had been Beverly Hills. She had lost her husband and one child in the San Bernadino battle and like Benson, she was having trouble regaining her capacity to love again, but also like Benson she had thrown herself into her work.

Toni held her earpiece closer. She looked up. "John wants to know if we've been spotted?"

"Apparently not. But tell him that we haven't seen any sign of Steve or his people either."

She nodded and spoke softly into the mike. She looked up again. "When are we making the incursion?"

Benson glanced at his watch. "It'll be dark in an hour. We'll head to the other side now. It'll take at least that long to get over there."

She relayed his message. "John says, 'Kick some machine ass.'"

Benson had to smile. It wasn't exactly religion, not in

this day and age, but it was as close as many of them could get.

Corporals Simon Anders and Bill Taggert trudged up the steep ravine with Dr. Donald Hess, their machine systems and programs expert, from where they had finished camouflaging their Humvee from detection by a chance flyover of an H-K. Their M-28 assault rifles were slung over their shoulders, barrels down. They were bright kids who had grown up after the blowup, never knowing the old life. Traveling cross-country all the way from Los Angeles to Colorado, across the deserts and over old mountain pass roads at night, had been an exciting adventure for them. Before now they'd never been more than twenty miles from where they were born. But they were highly trained and very efficient killers—of machines, not people.

"Everything's covered?" Benson asked.

"We packed snow against the muffler and tailpipe, and piled the hood," Hess assured him. "No heat signature."

Benson nodded. Hess was an egghead who looked like a blond surfing bum from another era, but he was well liked. He was smart, but he wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty. Like just about every human left on earth, he had lost someone close to him. He had cause.

"Okay, people, let's move out, we have a job to do," Benson said. He hefted the nuke's twenty-kilogram physics package, slung it over his shoulder by the straps, and headed across the face of the ridgeline on a path that would eventually take them to the broad rockfalls on the far side of the mountain. It was where Steve and his people had discovered the shaft.

It was also Colonel Earle's last known position before communications abruptly ceased.

An ominous silence hung over Los Angeles. For the past three days there had been almost no machine activity in any sector. Everyone was glad for the respite, but no one was happy. Especially not John Connor, who, along with his headquarters staff, had stuck it out in the comm center to monitor Red One's progress to Colorado.

With Skynet's AI destroyed, the war would be finished for all practical purposes. It would just be a matter of mopping up the stray machines programmed for limited independent action.

"Home Plate, Red One, we're coming up to the base of the north ridge," Toni radioed. Her encrypted voice sounded flat, emotionless. But John and the others could hear that she was out of breath from the altitude.

"Copy that," he replied. "Still no signs that you've been detected?"

"Negative, Home Plate. It's been real quiet so far."

Just like here, John thought He brushed back a strand of graying hair. It was an unconscious gesture he'd had since he was a kid. Of medium height and build, he was an unremarkable-looking man, who'd never once consid-

ered himself the savior of mankind, and certainly not a hero. You just did what you had to do. His mother had taught him that lesson.

His instincts wanted to pull Benson and his people out of there right now. But the prize was simply too great for that. They had to push on.

They had no other choice.

Benson signaled for them to hold up as he climbed the last ten meters to the top of the ridge. Navajo Mountain towered above them, the summit covered with enough snow that avalanches were a constant danger. In the distance they could see Pikes Peak and the mountains beyond it that formed the spine of the Continental Divide.

It was very cold now. By tonight the weather would be brutal. Benson wanted to finish the job and be long gone at lower elevations no later than midnight

The nearer they got to the area where Steve said he'd found the shaft, the more Benson became spooked. It seemed as if the mountains themselves were holding their collective breath, waiting for something to happen.

He got down on his hands and knees and eased himself to the top of the hill. Rising up so that he could see what was below, his heart skipped a beat. All the spit in his mouth dried up and he dropped back, his muscles suddenly weak, his jaw slack.

Toni and the others scrambled up to him as fast as they could climb. Anders and Taggert had their weapons unslung, safeties off, their shooting ringers flat across the trigger guards.

"My God, Joel, what happened?" Toni demanded. "Are you okay? What is it?"

"There're hundreds of them down there," Benson said. He couldn't get the picture out of his head. "Maybe thousands."

The others crawled to the top of the rise and looked over to the other side. Benson took out his Steiners and joined them.

"Nothing's moving so far," Hess said in a hushed tone.

"What the hell does it mean?" Anders asked, but no one thought that he expected an answer. Leastways not at this moment.

For millions of years avalanches and weathering had caused massive rockfalls down into a broad valley that swept dramatically up toward the summit This was the back face of Navajo Mountain beneath which Skynet was entrenched, and where Colonel Earle and his people had found the ventilation shaft.

But at the bottom of the rockfall, spread out for a kilometer, or possibly farther, were tens of hundreds, maybe tens of thousands, of gleaming metallic bodies. T-l-5s and T-l-7s, along with hundreds upon hundreds of T-600s and T-800s. They were piled in jumbled heaps, in some places in mounds fifty meters or higher. The raw power the junkyard represented was awesome.

Benson handed his binoculars to Hess. "What do you make of it, Don?"

Hess studied the graveyard for several long minutes,

humming something to himself, some toneless melody that was actually Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D minor with a full orchestra in his head. He always listened to that concerto when he was thinking.

He dropped back, a serious, worried expression on his face. He shook his head as if he had come to a conclusion that he didn't like, and then looked up at the others. "We'd best call this in to John, and then get the hell out of here." He glanced up at the deepening sky. "It's already getting dark in the valleys, and I don't think I want to be stuck up here tonight."

"What about the mission?" Taggert asked.

Hess looked at him. "Not a chance. We'll be lucky to get off this mountain alive."

"Home Plate, Red One, this is Don Hess, is John there?"

Connor keyed the mike. "I'm here, Don. What do you have?"

"We've got big trouble coming our way. We're near the bottom of the north slope. We came across a junkyard filled with T-l-5s and l-7s, along with a lot of T-600 and T-800 models. Maybe a kilometer across. Piled high. They're discarding their old models."

Connor looked at the others gathered in the bunker's comm center. "We've been expecting that What's the problem?"

"There's more than that down there. I spotted T-1000s. A bunch of them. And I do mean a bunch."

The significance of what Hess was reporting hit everyone in the command bunker at the same time. Connor's breath caught in his throat. "They're pumping out a new model," he radioed to Hess and the Colorado team. "Something to replace the T- 1000s. Something so good that Skynet can afford to discard everything else."

"That's what I figured—" Hess was cut off. Someone screamed, and then the radio went dead.

Toni's scream echoed in the canyons as her head disintegrated in a blue laser flash. Benson and Taggert turned and tried to bring their M-28 assault rifles to bear on the ten sleek silver and burnished gold and platinum robots standing no more than five meters away, plasma cannons in their perfectly machined and articulated mechanical hands.

Benson died with his wife's name on his lips, but with the vision from hell of Skynet's newest warrior robot on his retinas.

John Connor's wife closed her eyes for a moment, as if she could somehow blot out what she knew was happening on the north slope of Navajo Mountain.

"We'll continue monitoring their frequency," Connor said.

"Doesn't matter, sir," the young comm tech said, looking up. "Our satellite is down."

Connor's wife opened her eyes and shook her head. "We have to send another one back." She looked inward, and shuddered. "A T-850."

"They'll send a machine," Connor said. "One of the new ones."

"We don't have anything better."

Connor lowered his eyes. His wife was right. There was nothing else they could do. They had run out of options.

Skynet's AI was an absolute marvel of human-machine science and engineering. First stumbled upon by Cyber-dyne's Miles Bennet Dyson, the computer's main central processing units used Quantum Effects chips. Until then computers were powered by chips composed of millions of transistors. Computing the old way was done in the binary system—ones and zeroes, ons and offs. With the QE brain in which 1054 computations could be made each second, quadrillions of switching positions were possible, many of them simultaneously at each quantum level. All this happened down around the Planck length—theoretically the smallest measurement possible—so in-finitesimally small that superstrings were the major-league players; strange ten-dimensional building blocks that were more than one thousand billion billion times smaller than a single proton in the nucleus of a hydrogen atom.

Skynet came to the same conclusion as John Connor. Something would have to be sent back. This second incursion on Navajo Mountain Redoubt had come dangerously close to succeeding.

At stake was nothing less than the futures of man and machine. No longer could the two coexist on the planet.

C.I

July 2003 Los Angeles

The Triumph Bonneville motorcycle pounded through the desert night on U.S. 395.

The bike was battered, well used, and loaded with front and rear saddlebags and packs: bedroll, tent, clothing. Survival gear for a man out camping. Or, for a man on the run. From himself.

It was late and although John Connor was aware of the vast city glow in the sky behind him, he didn't look back. He couldn't look back. It was the same dream that had haunted him every night for half of his life. He knew that if he turned and looked over his shoulder Los Angeles would be gone in a blinding flash. He would see nothing but the aftereffects of a five-or ten-megaton thermonuclear sky burst; a city buster, the mushroom cloud roiling and boiling like some insane storm higher into the sky than even the Concorde jet could fly. Flames reaching to heaven, or to hell. People screaming, people on fire, people running to escape a fate that was impossible for them to escape, for any of them to escape.

Christ. On nights like these, even staying awake and moving, he could not block out the horrible nightmares he had since the T-1000 tried to kill him and his mother when he was thirteen. For the next decade or so, he dreaded the night, dreaded the visions of a world gone insane, dreaded the day on which Skynet powered up and took control of the world. Judgment Day. The day of atonement for all human sins, he'd been told by a crazy old preacher on the Sonoran Desert, maybe eight years ago.

Connor was old for his age. By the time he was in his mid twenties, he had seen too much, had gone through too much trauma for him to have turned out so-called normal. At five feet eleven he was built like a soccer player, lean muscle mass, fine features, dark serious eyes beneath medium-cropped dark hair covered now by a black motorcycle helmet. In jeans, long-sleeved shirt, and old brown suede jacket, he was just an anonymous traveler in the middle of the night.

Going nowhere since August 29, 1997, came and went without Judgment Day. Without the global thermonuclear war that Skynet should have waged on its own.

A war after which John Connor would have emerged as the leader of the human resistance. The man who was supposed to save the world. The man on whom the hope for the survival of humans depended.

But the war never came.

John Connor did not become a hero. Instead he drifted. One town to another. One job after the other. Through the night, on his motorcycle, or in isolated campgrounds, alone with his endless nightmares. No friends. No purpose.

He didn't have to close his eyes to see what the future would have been like. He could see himself, older, grizzled, battle-scarred, and weary. Bodies lying everywhere, many of them reduced to skeletons because of the heat; flesh and muscle and soft tissues completelyjburned away.

It was night, like now, only bonfires burned all around him. His troops were gathered, tired, frightened, yet determined. They wore dirty, tattered uniforms, their eyes glistened with reflections from the flames.

They'd brought down a flying war machine. Hunter-Killers, they were called. How he knew this he could not determine, but he knew it nonetheless.

They were celebrating their meager victory. John strode through the troops, climbed up onto what remained of the H-K, and raised a fist. It was a war cry. A rally. Behind him some soldiers raised a horribly dirty, battered American flag.

The soldiers rose.

Connor turned to face his... wife.

The hot sun beating on John Connor's back felt good, as did the heft of the eleven-pound sledgehammer he swung. After last night any physical labor was welcome. Labor meant life.

Pergo Contractors were demolishing a two-square-block section of old buildings and what had once been a courthouse or a brick school at the edge of Watts. Dozens of day laborers, John included, were hired from the hall to be paid in cash every afternoon when they got off.

It was mindless labor, hard physical work that blotted out his dreams—but only just. Still, when he stopped to take a drink of water, or to wipe the sweat from his forehead, he looked toward the city center to make sure that Los Angeles still survived. That the buildings still stood, that Judgment Day never happened.

Which left him what, he wondered. The bombs didn't fall because the T-1000 had failed to kill him. Had failed to stop the death of Miles Bennet Dyson. Had failed to prevent the bankruptcy of Cyberdyne Systems. The computers didn't take control.

And Connor had become—nothing. Driving into work this morning he had passed through sections of the city that seemed to be nothing more than endless boulevards of strip malls, car dealerships, fast-food joints, billboards. Then slums where transients lived under bridges, in cardboard boxes, their meals gathered from Dumpsters, their clothing discards; throw-aways, them and their meager possessions.

There were others like him somewhere in the city. Probably around the world. People who were supposed to have survived Judgment Day; people who should have become freedom fighters: the resistance led by John Connor. So what were they doing now? Were they having the same nightmares? Having the same impossible time fitting in.

A woman in a car beside him was talking on her cell phone propped under her chin while putting on makeup and driving. Safe, or so she thought, in her own little air-conditioned cocoon.

The kids in their car, the bass speakers booming across the street

The motorcycle cop who gave him the once-over before turning away and driving off with a total lack of interest John Connor was a cipher. A zero. A nonentity.

None of them, not the woman, nor the kids, nor the cop, held any significance for him, though he knew that they should. Intellectually he knew that he could not continue his We as a drifter. He needed a purpose. And if it wasn't as leader of the resistance movement in some future world, then so be it

His responsibility was to himself, here and now. He no longer had his mother to look after. He'd never known his biological father—the mystery man supposedly back from the future—who had come back to save Sarah Connor from death so that she could give birth to John. In fact, the only father he'd ever known, and that was only for a very brief time in his life, was a T-800. The Terminator who'd come back to save the young John Connor from another machine sent by Skynet.

The criminal psychiatrists had thought that John's mother was crazy. He knew how they would classify him if he let himself be known. Like mother like son. Lock him away.

That night Connor had a variation of the dream, which just lately was becoming so real that he was starting to have a hard time distinguishing what was imaginary and what wasn't

He was sitting on a bridge, looking down at the swirling water, a beer in his hand. Jump or not The decision kept flickering in and out of focus for him.

Lean forward. Just a little, until his center of gravity was not behind him, but forward, out over the void.

He dropped the beer bottle instead, and as he watched it fall toward the water he was transported to the future, to the dream within a dream. A landscape of bodies and skeletons; of Hunter-Killer machines in the air, of tens of hundreds, tens of thousands of robot warriors, their metal bodies gleaming in the light from hundreds of fires, as they sought out human beings, killing them with laser cannons. Burning, searing flesh.

This time the battle was fought along a coastline somewhere. In the distance John could see the burned and burning hulks of oceangoing freighters.

Nothing was safe.

The entire world was on fire.

Connor suddenly awoke in a cold sweat and sat up. He raised his hands and watched how they shook.

He was falling apart Disintegrating. The waiting was

driving him crazy. Something was about to happen. Something important

After he'd collected his pay, he'd stopped for some beer and a few groceries and then had set up camp in a trash-filled vacant lot a few blocks from work. He'd started a campfire and after he'd eaten, had fallen into a deep sleep in which he had been transported to the future and the past and the present all in a jumbled mess.

He got out of his sleeping bag, walked a few feet away, and urinated on a pile of trash, an angry animal marking its territory.

For a long time he stood stock still, listening to the sounds of the city: a siren somewhere in the distance, a car alarm in the next block, a single gunshot that he was able to identify as a 9mm semiautomatic pistoL

He turned and stared at his campsite and his motorcycle. He could not stay here. Something, some inner voice, urged him to leave. Right now! Go, go, go, run!

It was the same as always, Connor thought, hastily packing his things and strapping them aboard the bike. There would never be an end to his meaningless existence.

He peeled off into the night, bumping over the curb and savagely hammering the throttle. The bike wanted to climb out away from him, but Connor leaned forward, feathering the gas while still peeling rubber, the throaty exhaust blast echoing satisfyingly off the buildings.

Labor was life. Movement was life. Noise was life.

Somehow he was on the Hollywood Freeway, U.S. 101, heading north in the sparse 1:00 a.m. traffic. The Topanga Canyon exit came up and he took it, leaning into the curve and following the road up into the hills. Twisting, climbing road. Sometimes country, sometimes neighborhood.

Maybe there was no escape for him. Maybe there'd never been a possibility of escape.

He leaned hard into the sharp curves, sparks flying from where the foot peg scraped the road surface.

He could only keep moving. Try to keep the demons from taking over his head.

The speedometer flickered past one hundred, the green instrument lights the only points of sanity for him now. The only things in his life that were solid, that were real, that were rooted in fact The physical laws of the universe. Hammer the throttle and the bike accelerated. Cause and effect. Lean into the curves in order to live.

The small doe that bounded into the middle of the road and stopped, mesmerized by the bike's single headlight, was another sudden immutable fact of reality.

Connor backed off on the throttle, pumped the brakes, and oversteered left to miss the deer, the tires doing a crazy jig on the asphalt

Then there was nothing. Weightlessness, his stomach lurching as the front wheel hit the gravel at the side of the road, sending the bike pivoting sharply on its stem and flipping end over end.

Connor hit the pavement with his knee and left shoulder, then rolled onto his back, sliding on the gravel as if he were an ice cube skittering across a hot griddle.

It was all in slow motion at first. He could feel no pain, but he could clearly see his bike flipping in midair, his packs coming loose. He could see the gravel and dust flying. He could even smell the odors of burnt oil and hot exhaust

Then, like a gigantic Pacific comber, breaking slowly and accelerating onto the beach, Connor's consciousness switched to real time as he came to a breathless stop.

He looked up at a cloudless sky, brilliant with stars for a change, in time to see a meteorite streaking east to west.

Some luck, he thought.

c.2

July 2030

Edwards Air Force Base

John Connor stood up in the open Humvee, raised the powerful binoculars to his eyes, and scoped what was left of the old Edwards Air Force Base and Cyber Research Systems facility on the desert east of L.A.

From the last rise a mile out, one hundred meters east of the impassable Interstate 14, the base looked as if it had been shattered. The south field control tower was down in a heap, as were most of the aircraft hangars, administrative offices, barracks, and research facilities.

It was a carefully maintained camouflage. Anyplace that appeared as if it supported human activity was a certain Skynet target Occupy an aboveground shelter for more than a day, show lights at night, even for one night, or do something as fundamentally mundane as sowing a vegetable garden and an attack was certain to follow.

Humans had learned the hard way to become creatures of the night; burrowers into the earth; underground animals who when cornered fought back viciously.

Nothing moved in the deepening twilight except for a dust devil that scattered debris as it trossed the tarmac and dissipated in the middle of the heavily cratered east-west runway. The silvered mesh dish of the power reception antenna was disguised as debris in the middle of the CRS main research center and control annex.

Connor and the others breathed sighs of relief. It did not appear as if Skynet had moved against this place yet. Though they all figured it was only a matter of when, not if. Each time they came out here and powered up the place, Skynet detected it. Sooner or later the attack would come.

Connor sat down. "It's dear," he said to his driver. They headed down from the rise and raced across the desert in a convoy of three Humvees, carrying the technicians and the soldiers to protect them.

As they came onto the base and approached the shelter of the one standing hangar they kept watching the sky for an approaching line of H-Ks. But they were in the clear so far.

"People, the mission clock starts now," Connor spoke into his lapel mike. "You know the drill. We're at T-minus twenty minutes. Let's get it done."

Cloaked in darkness, the Humvees pulled up inside the hangar. Four soldiers with portable radar and infrared scanners, along with handheld ground-to-air launch-and-leave missiles, hurriedly set up their surveillance positions to cover all four quadrants while Connor and the techs descended into the old CRS underground control center.

As the emergency generator kicked in and the control center's lights came on, Connor approached the T-850 cyborg battle robot recumbent inside the Lexan holding chamber.

The machine was fitted as a human infiltration submodel with a form and face that Connor knew very well. This was a machine-done of the unit that had saved his life and the life of his mother. The same machine that had cared for him with even more loyalty and dedication than any human father could have.

"It's just a machine," John's wife suggested softly at his shoulder.

Connor nodded, but he didn't turn. "I know." A kaleidoscopic collage of images passed across his mind's eye with the speed of light; on the desert, in dark hallways and factories, on motorcyles, explosions, gunshots, fires. Everywhere T-800, nameless except for its model number, protecting him, saving his life.

Machines had no emotions. But looking at T-850 Connor knew better.

The six mainframe techs they'd brought with them set about powering up the transporter head and receptor circuits.

Lieutenant Tom Carter, their machine programs and ops expert gently shouldered Connor aside, slid the clear cover off the holding chamber, and opened his tool kit on the T-850's broad chest. He was an older man, in his middle sixties. He had grown up and got his education at Cal Tech before Judgment Day. Like many men of his era

he had less respect for the machines than the younger people had. They were just machines, after all. Well designed, operationally nearly perfect, but just metal and electronic circuitry, nothing more.

He touched a release point just under the skin on the right side of T-850's neck, and the unit's head lolled slackly onto its right cheek. Next, he found the seams that followed the unit's hairline from the base of its neck behind its ears to its temples. The skin parted easily and peeled back to reveal a metal skull with a tiny access port.

Carter worked like a surgeon. His moves were very quick and very precise. He attached a portable power source to a pair of input points on T-850's skull allowing the dormant motherboard to power out from the port, which he replaced with a reprogrammed CPU from his tool kit

T-850's eyes came alive momentarily, until Carter disconnected the power source.

Carter looked up. "It'll take me three minutes to install the hydrogen fuel cells in its chest So I want a time check." He glanced at Connor's wife. "I don't want to give this thing time to sit up and start singing Dixie before we send it back."

"We'll give you four. Three to get him powered up, and one to get him into the chamber," Connor said.

Carter glanced at Connor's wife who shrugged, but neither of them saw fit to correct Connor's use of the pronoun him instead of it.

The Continuum Transporter, as the device was officially designated, had begun as a series of Special Action Projects (SAPs) carried out at the Air Force's high-security research and test base in the New Mexican desert, known in the popular press of the time as Area 51.

The super black project, funded by the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and National Security Agency, was designed to create an artificial wormhole. Einstein had first suggested such a phenomenon, and the English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had done some work on the possibility. But the problem was power. By most calculations the wattage needed to create an infinitesimally tiny wormhole, in other words a passageway through space-time, would take almost all the energy ever produced in the universe since the moment of the big bang.

But a grad student at Oxford had developed a mathematics model to meld Einstein's relativity with Heisen-berg's quantum mechanics, creating a ten-dimensional wormhole at the superstring level. It would be a passageway that would automatically expand exponentially like a virus gone wild. But only so long as power was applied to what was thought of as an artificial singularity.

In the mid nineties, under the guise of the launchings of dozens of military and NSA technical means satellites, a solar sail made of extremely thin Mylar, two hundred kilometers on a side, was positioned in an extremely rare geosynchronous orbit that kept it stationary over the north pole. When it was spotted it was thought to be nothing more than an aurora borealis.

The sail focused sunlight, beaming it to the reception antenna and singularity equipment at the CRS facility. Capable of transmitting several hundred terawatts of energy over time periods of less than one nanosecond, the wormhole was opened.

Through that brief passageway, objects could be sent backward in time, and theoretically, though it had never been tried before, forward in time.

The twin of this machine was buried deep inside Navajo Mountain. One under human control and the other under Skynet control.

Without the balance the war would be over within twenty-four hours. Why Skynet had never tried to destroy this place was anyone's guess.

But it would happen someday, Connor thought as he watched the main console's indicators shift from red to green.

Alice Skerrit, their chief tech, flipped a series of switches on one of the equipment racks, then turned and gave Connor the nod.

"Your four minutes start now, Tom," Connor told the programs and ops man, who immediately took one of the hydrogen cells from its cushioned container and gingerly carried it over to the T-850 unit.

Each cell, about the size of a book, was encased in a shiny titanium-carbon fiber alloy nearly featureless except for its power points.

Inside the warrior robot's chest, the cells were fairly benign, but if they were mishandled they could blow with

a respectable bang. People would get killed. Even Connor instinctively stepped back a pace.

He keyed his lapel mike. "Watchdog, how's it looking?"

"Clear, so far, boss," Sergeant Doogie "Watchdog" Harris came back from topside. "How much longer before we can boogie?"

"About five minutes. Keep frosty up there." "Will do."

Connor's wife was stationed at the main control console. When the device was fully powered in standby mode, and T-850 was in position inside the transmission chamber, she would uncage the firing switch and flip the toggle. From that moment the main computers would take control of the last four seconds of the operation.

Carter finished installing the second power cell, and he quickly buttoned up T-850's chest, even as the cyborg's units started to boot up.

Even to the technicians, some of them standing or string at consoles ten meters away, it was obvious that T-850 had transformed from an inanimate object to something that was as alive as any machine could possibly be. It made them all nervous. They had been fighting these things for years.

The machine's eyes opened and scanned Carter's face and its immediate surroundings, as the holding chamber worktable lined up with the spherical transmission chamber.

"Position, please," Carter told the machine.

T-850 sat up effortlessly and gracefully moved into the transmission chamber, one bare knee and two hands on the pad.

"Ten seconds," Connor's wife called out.

The transmission chamber's clear bubble door closed.

"Eight seconds... seven... six... five..."

T-850 faced forward, its eyes downcast as it waited for its processors to fully boot up, the parameters of its mission coming clear to him as if he were a human being who had suddenly come out of a deep amnesia and was starting to remember his past and his hopes and plans for the immediate future.

"Four seconds ... three... two ... one," Connor's wife completed the countdown. She uncaged the switch and flipped it to the transmit position.

John watched T-850 as the chamber began to take on an eerie blue cast. He was waiting for... what?

T-850 looked up at the last second, his eyes boring in on John's.

T-850 nodded, the movement of his head barely perceptible as he disappeared.

July 2003

The Mojave Desert

The large diamondback rattlesnake stopped a few yards from a lone Joshua tree and raised its wedge-shaped head. It felt something that it could not understand. There was nothing detectable by the sensitive receptors in its flick-

ering tongue, nor could it sense an animal heat source anywhere close. But something was coming, and it began to rattle its warning.

A thick mist formed around the base of the tree, and heat came with such sudden intensity that the rattler had trouble backing off from what it now considered a life-threatening danger. It bared its fangs, a drop of poison glistening golden at each tip.

A blue, luminescent sphere materialized out of nothing, lightning bolts crackling with raw energy all around it. The tree split in two and began to burn. The sand around it became molten, glowing first red and then white-hot.

When the smoke dissipated, T-850—Terminator—crouched in a small bowl-shaped depression, one knee and both hands on the ground, his head bowed as if he were a man who had come a long way and was weary.

Slowly he raised his head to catalog his surroundings, his onboard sensors giving him instant head-up displays overlaid with real-world vision through his eyes.

He stood and walked away, his bare feet crunching on the half-solidified sand that broke into needle-sharp shards of glass.

The diamondback reared back and struck, sinking its two-inch fangs into the man-thing's left calf, its reflexive muscle action pumping several ccs of deadly venom through the hollow killing teeth.

Terminator's sensors were aware of the creature, and his memory banks correctly identified the reptile as Cro-talus adamantous, dangerous to man and most mammals.

He reached down and picked up the snake, holding it gently just behind its head before it could strike again.

For several moments cyborg and reptile remained eye to eye, each regarding the other with a resigned curiosity. For Terminator the snake was a fact of biological life on earth. For the snake the man-creature was just that, an object that was not food, but that presented an extreme danger.

Terminator opened his mouth and emitted a sound from the back of his voice processing unit that perfectly mimicked the snake's warning rattle, then tossed the animal over his shoulder, turned, and strode away from the still burning Joshua tree, his onboard sensors perfectly attuned to his environment, his processors fully up to speed with the parameters of the mission.

If Terminator could have any emotion at all, it would have been a certain satisfaction that he was back.

c.3

July 2003 Los Angeles

"Stupid thing's not working," Kate Brewster said crossly.

She and her fiance Scott Peterson were in the Bridal Registry Home Accessories department of Bloomingdale's in Century City. She was trying to get the scanner gun to accept the bar code on the bottom of an elegantly engraved sterling serving tray. But the computer was not accepting the code.

Scott held up the tray and took the scanner gun from her. "Hold it like this," he said. "Dirty Harry." He pulled the trigger but the screen on the register showed a string of zeroes. "What's wrong with this thing?" he muttered.

Kate and Scott, the ideal couple, Kate thought with only the slightest trace of sarcasm in her mind. She caught a reflection of herself in a gold freestanding dressing-room mirror. She was of medium height, pleasant figure, small, high breasts, dark brown hair, a rounded nose, strong hips like her mother's.

"Katie, the nicest girl at Ferris High," her pals in school had written. Not "Katherine, the most beautiful," or "Katherine, the most likely to succeed, or the most likely to marry mister-up-and-coming, the next president, the next multibillionaire."

She glanced at Scott, still fiddling with the scanner, and she knew that she should be having warm, gushy bride feelings now. But the best she could do was think what a nice guy he was. Pleasant. Even-tempered most of the time. Good-looking, reasonably so. Innocuous was the word that came to mind.

At five feet eleven, Scott looked good in a suit and tie and drove a Mercedes, a leased C class, but a Benz nonetheless. He had a good if bland job selling pharmaceuticals, which meshed with her job as a veterinarian, and he treated her well.

They were the ideal couple. Everyone said so. But her dad would never know it He was right in the middle of another hush-hush project out on the desert. Lieutenant General Robert Brewster was the military director of a Cyber Research Systems project at Edwards.

His career, and especially his involvement with CRS, had been, she knew, the main reason her mom left him. A man could have only one wife. She made her husband choose: CRS or her. And he hadn't even hesitated.

"It's important, sweetheart," he'd said. "More important than you can imagine.''

So she'd walked out on him.

Now it was Kate's turn to try marriage. And looking at Scott she wondered how he would classify her worth in the scheme of things, if the question was put to him.

Was his career more important than she could imagine? More important than her?

Her cell phone chirped in her purse and as she dug it out, Scott held the scanner gun up and shook his head.

"I hate machines," Kate said. She pressed send on the phone. "Hello?"

"Kate, it's your father," General Brewster said.

For just a moment Kate lit up with pleasure, and she turned away. Her father had always been her Rock of Gibraltar; a steady hand when she learned to walk, when she tried her first pair of roller blades, the first time she got on a bicycle. He'd been there. Maybe he'd not been much of a husband for his wife, but he'd been a wonderful father to Kate, an only child.

Until lately. The last few years had been different, and then Mom leaving while Kate was finishing veterinary school. And suddenly she was really hearing her father's voice; not as a child would, but as an adult. He sounded... how? Regretful?

In the background she could hear a lot of noise; highspeed printers, perhaps. Chimes warning of something, and the constant ring of telephones and people talking; a lot of telephones, a lot of people.

Kate resigned herself. "You're blowing me off again, aren't you, Dad?"

"I'm so sorry, hon. You know how much I wanted to see you this weekend."

She believed that part of it, as far as it went. But he hadn't finished the sentence, so she did it for him. "I

know, Dad, but it's a matter of national security. Right?"

"Sweetheart, please. We're swamped here, that's all. But it'll ease up, I can promise you that much."

"When?"

"Soon. Honest" Her dad let the word hang, and Kate really did understand. It was the damned CRS project he'd been assigned to. It was eating him alive. His wife had been the first casualty and Kate was beginning to wonder if she was next. She softened.

"I know, you can't talk about it." She glanced at Scott who had picked up a sterling picture frame and was trying the scanner on its bar code. But he was watching her, listening. "It's just that Scott was really looking forward to this."

The expression of relief on Scott's face was almost comical. He didn't want to admit it but he was having some trepidation about meeting Kate's father—the general, as he called him.

"Aw, Katie, I'm so sorry. I can't believe I still haven't met him."

"It's okay, Dad," Kate said. "You're bound to run into him at the wedding."

"Please, I'm still in a state of denial about that," General Brewster told his daughter. She could hear the wry note in his voice. He'd told her a couple of years ago that he was having trouble thinking of his little girl out there in the real world on her own. To him she was still the tomboy with pigtails and scabby knees who brought every stray or hurt animal that could fly, hop, slither, or swim home with her.

He definitely was having a much harder time accepting the fact that his only child was about to get married. Which was, Kate had to admit, just about how she was feeling right now.

"You're not the only one—" she said.

"Just a second, sweetheart," the general said, and Kate could hear that someone had come into her dad's office.

"Sorry to bother you, sir, but the Agency needs a fast turnaround on the last DoD promotionals."

"Right, the dog and pony show," General Brewster said. He was apparently holding a hand over the phone, but Kate could still hear the conversation. "When are they screening?"

"Tomorrow. One p.m.," the man said. Kate figured he was an aide. She thought she heard a door close.

"Dad? Are you still there? Dad?"

"I'm here, Katie," General Brewster said. He lowered his voice. "Are you okay, sweetheart? What's the matter?"

Scott had walked over to one of the clerks and was saying something to him.

"Nothing," Kate said, unsure even now just how much of this she wanted to tell her father. But she had no one else. "It's just that I don't know—"

The general said something to someone at his end, but then he was back. "Look, why don't you come see me out here this weekend? If Moses can't come to the mountain, maybe the mountain can come to him."

"I wish I could, but we have to meet with the minister, the wedding planner, and—"

"It's only a few hours away. Why don't you come to see me... you and Scott."

She looked up again. Scott had gotten into some kind of an argument with the clerk.

"Okay," she said, and she could hear the little girl tone creep into her voice. She wanted to be taken care of. She wanted someone else to take the responsibility for a change. For just a little while.

"Hey, kiddo, you know that you don't need me to pass judgment on this guy. You've done the right thing your whole life."

"I know," Kate said glumly. "Maybe that's the problem."

"You won't make a mistake," her father told her confidently. "You never do. I'm the luckiest father in the world, you know. I've never had to be afraid for my daughter."

Kate had to smile. She was on the verge of tears. Her father was still her Rock of Gibraltar.

"Listen, I hate to do this, but I gotta run. Come see me tomorrow. Promise?"

"We will," Kate said. "Bye, Dad. Love you."

"Love you too."

Cyber Research Systems Edwards Air Force Base

General Brewster slowly hung up the telephone and thought about his daughter for a moment He had told

her a white lie. He was worried about her. This Scott person, whoever he was, really didn't matter. The trouble was with Kate herself. She had been distant just lately. Preoccupied, as if something was bothering her. Something that was apparently even more important than her upcoming marriage.

CRS operations was very busy this evening as it had been all day. Troubles seemed to be popping up just about everywhere throughout the civilian as well as military-use computer systems.

They'd expected some start-up troubles as they experimented with the Skynet system. But they had not expected this level of problems. And the system wasn't even fully booted up yet.

General Brewster knew that it was going to be another very long night.

He looked up and waved the project's chief engineer, Tony Flickinger, in. "Okay, what have we got?"

Flickinger, who'd graduated cum laude from MIT in the early nineties, made his mark with Microsoft, then came over to Cyberdyne to work with Miles Dyson. With Dyson's death and the dissolution of the old company, Flickinger transferred to the Cyber Research Systems operation, becoming the Skynet chief engineer four years ago. He was very good at his job. In fact, General Brewster reflected, Flickinger was practically Skynet himself. He knew more about the system and its potential than any man alive.

"It's not getting better," Flickinger said. He went to Brewster's computer terminal and brought up Skynet.

"This new computer virus is a tricky bastard. It's infected half the civilian Internet, as well as a lot of secondary military apps—payroll, inventory."

"Primary defense nets are still clean?"

Flickinger looked up. His thinning short-cropped hair had gone prematurely gray. With his round face and pale complexion he looked the part of a computer engineer who had spent most of his adult life in artificial light.

"So far the firewalls are holding up, but the Pentagon's proposed that we use our AI to scan the entire infrastructure, search and destroy any hint of the virus."

"I know, Tony. But it's like going after a fly with a bazooka."

Flickinger shrugged. To him this was just another engineering problem that needed solving. "Once the connection is made, it should only be a matter of minutes before Skynet is in charge of our national security."

"During which we'd put everything from satellites to missile silos under the control of a single computer system."

"The most intelligent system ever conceived."

Brewster shook his head. "I still prefer to keep humans in the loop. It's a huge step from weapons design to command and control. I'm not sure Skynet is ready."

The Skynet page came up on the monitor. It showed a graphic map of the western U.S. with strategic military installations connected by green lines. The display showed real-time connections of data interchange between systems. The lines pulsated with energy.

Each installation glowed comfortably green, all op-

erations WITHIN PARAMETERS. OPERATIONS NORMAL.

But General Brewster was worried. At War College they'd studied worst-case scenarios in which U.S. strategic defense initiatives became short-circuited so that the nation's Nuclear Release Authority was bypassed.

Missiles flew.

The war began.

Los Angeles

"One day, it's all I'm asking, Scott," Kate tried to convince her fianc6. "It's no big deal. A couple hours out, a couple hours back. We'll be home in time to go out to dinner or something."

"I'm sorry, the computers are down," a clerk apologized, coming up to where they stood. She was an older woman in a stern business suit, glasses perched on her narrow nose, a gold chain from the stems around her neck. "And we're closing soon. Just write out your choices, and I'll input them into the registry in the morning."

"Okay, thanks," Scott said, taking the clipboard from her. She gave both of them a smile, then left.

Scott turned on Kate. He was mildly irritated, which for Scott was something. "I can't believe you told the general we'd drive all the way out to Mojave. Is this so he can show me how important he is?"

Kate touched his arm, a conciliatory gesture. "It won't be so bad."

Scott looked away to make sure no one was observing

what he would afterward call one of their little "tiffs." "It's just, I wanted to meet him on my own turf, you know?"

Kate turned away, irritated too. She didn't want to fight with Scott over her father. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. She picked up a brass picture frame with a photo of a romantic couple strolling hand-in-hand along a deserted beach in the moonlight.

"Yeah, sure," she muttered in answer to Scott's question. She didn't want to fight with him tonight. So, what did that say about their future?

She didn't know. She didn't know anything. And that was a terribly bleak prospect for her just now.

c.4

July 2029 Navaja Mountain

Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Parsons was dead. His body had lain beside his computer console in the second tier of consoles in the control room of the North American Aerospace Defense Command deep within the mountain for the past twenty-six years.

On Judgment Day those personnel caught inside were massacred when Skynet pumped all the oxygen out of the Redoubt, replacing it with pure nitrogen from the spare liquid nitrogen stores used to super-cool the high-power low-mass equipment.

Parsons's body lay on its side, its face dark purple, its flesh surprisingly intact after more than a quarter of a century. But rotting meat required oxygen, of which there was none inside the mountain.

Skynet was indifferent to gas or gas volumes, as it was indifferent to lighting, so the control rooms and various other spaces within the complex were lit only by the indicators and screens on electronic consoles and panels.

But the AI was sensitive to heat and humidity, so Na-

vajo Mountain Redoubt was kept at a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius at twenty percent relative humidity.

Parsons's eyes were open, but neither he nor the dozens of other corpses with him were aware that the cathedral hush of the large domed room was broken when impossibly fast streams of data crossed the main status board and a pair of Advanced Utility T-20 server robots trundled off an elevator.

Between them, walking flat-footed, back arched, head held high as if she were a soldier being escorted by the Praetorian Guard, was what Parsons would have considered the most perfect nude woman he'd ever seen.

But Parsons was dead, and Skynet was indifferent to considerations of human beauty except where such considerations were germane to the parameters of a mission.

She was a T-X, Enhanced Logic Weapons Systems Cybernetic Warrior/Infiltration Unit. T-X, for short.

An absolutely brilliant creation of superior intelligence, beauty, speed, adaptability, lethality, survivability, and supreme indifference, T-X was Skynet's latest advance in projection-of-power technology.

Stripped to her utilitarian battle chassis, protected by malleable ceramic/titanium armor, she was practically unstoppable on the battlefield, as the human resistance fighters under the commands of Colonel Steve Earle and Lieutenant Joel Benson had already found out.

Adorned with her infiltration trappings: muscles, sinews, blood vessels, skin, hair, T-X would be just as deadly among the pre-Judgment Day human population as she was on the current battlefields.

Possibly even deadlier if she could reach and eliminate the right targets.

Although she weighed in excess of 150 kilos, her footfalls were whisper soft across the bare tile floor as she threaded her way through the corpses and computer consoles to a transmission sphere the twin of the one at the old CRS facility twelve hundred kilometers to the west.

The T-20 robots that had escorted her backed off. T-X assumed the position, one knee and two hands on the pad as the sphere closed.

Her head bowed, eyes staring straight down, she waited with complete indifference. One minute, one hundred years, it did not matter.

Skynet's AI powered up the Continuum Transporter's circuits without fanfare, and seconds later the chamber took on a luminescent, electric blue aura.

T-X disappeared.

July 2003 Los Angeles

All the stores along Rodeo Drive were closed, only a few eating establishments and night spots in the vicinity were still doing business.

Traffic was light, the occasional car or SUV, one of them with a Bose stereo system cranked to full volume and bass, where during the day the street teemed with cars and with shoppers all looking for the ultimate dress, the perfect shoes, the neatest toy.

An older woman in tight crop pants, with an artistically clipped full poodle on a leash, walked past the window displays of Sharron Batten: Fine Resort Wear, Beverly Hills, Palm Beach, Cannes.

The woman glanced at the mannequins modeling clothes that only a size four would wear, and then only on the French Riviera. A large black-and-white poster hung from the ceiling and was cleverly backlit so it seemed as if the model standing hipshot, a thumb hooked in the elastic band of her brief bikini bottom, was illuminated by the setting sun. The caption read i like this look!

The gauze print beach shirt on one of the mannequins ruffled in a sudden small breeze. The scarf around the neck of another moved.

A mist began to fill the window display, until a bright blue sphere suddenly materialized in a burst of lightning and intense heat that instantly melted the plastic mannequins, burned through a sizable area of concrete floor, and melted a hole three meters in diameter in the plate-glass window.

T-X raised her head to catalog her new surroundings, numbers and graphs crossing her head-up display with a rapidity that no human could follow. She rose gracefully from her kneeling position, and heedless of the still-glowing concrete and molten glass dripping from the window, she stepped out onto the sidewalk.

In the distance to the southwest, down Rodeo Drive, T-X's infrared systems picked up the heat signatures of a woman and a much smaller quadrupedal mammal das-

sified as Canis familiaris, and immediately rejected either as possible infiltration personas.

She looked northeast. A ground conveyance, classified as a Lexus SC430, was parked in front of a concrete, steel, and glass building, with the legend barclays in brass. The heat signatures from the automobile's engine compartment and exhaust system were consistent with a condition known as idling.

A secondary heat source stood approximately eight meters to the north of the automobile. It was a female human. T-X enhanced her optical system and overlaid the mission's requirements. The female, who was attempting to effect a transaction between herself and an incredibly primitive computer via a small plastic card in which were programmed several hundred bytes of rudimentary information, was not a currently listed target, but she was of the proper weight, height, physical shape, and apparent age for mission purposes.

The ATM machine beeped several times, and a crude, machine-generated voice said, "Sorry, we are unable to process transactions at this time," as T-X crossed the street.

Nancy Nebel was only mildly irritated. She'd never had much luck with machines, partly because she wasn't interested and partly because that's what men were supposed to do for a girl. At thirty-two she was what her friends in the business called a looker. Blond, blue-eyed,

with a knockout figure, she was dressed this evening in a rust-colored leather jacket and skintight pants, beneath which she wore a black lace thong and lace Wonderbra. Why give 'em brains when all they wanted was cleavage, was her motto.

And it had worked so far.

Nancy put the gold American Express card back in her purse, and got behind the wheel of her car, the reasons she needed the money tonight already forgotten. She had just enough time to get over to Spago before Lenny got too worried about her.

She looked up as she was about to reach for the gearshift lever in time to see a tall, very sexy blond woman, stark naked, walking up the sidewalk as if she didn't have a care in the world.

A little thrill of fear tickled Nancy's stomach. Something was way off base here. She leaned out of the car. "Hey! Are you okay?"

The woman didn't miss a beat

Nancy fumbled for the cell phone on the dash. "Did somebody attack you?" she asked the woman. "I'll call nine-one-one—"

T-X stopped at the driver's side door and Nancy looked up at her makeup-free, totally flawless complexion. The woman's breasts were firm and perfectly formed. Her stomach was completely flat. She was perfect. Too perfect.

"I like this car," T-X said.

It started to dawn on Nancy that the broad was some kind of bad news. Somebody's bimbo on a bad trip. "You're on something, aren't you?"

T-X reached in and gently caressed the lapel of Nancy's leather jacket. "I like this look."

"What—" Nancy said, rearing back. This was big trouble. She wanted to get away, right now.

T-X placed a thumb and forefinger on either side of the woman's spinal column at the base of her skull, and pinched. The bone crushed easily.

T-X was not programmed to be squeamish. She dressed in the woman's clothes, including the lace underwear.

When she was done, she got in the driver's seat and studied the dash instruments, the steering wheel, shift mechanism, and pedals for a moment, her processors building a more complete picture of the engineering of the machine than even the original Lexus engineers had.

She dropped it into drive and sped off, peeling rubber as she accelerated, a map of the Los Angeles freeway system appearing in her head-up display.

The telephone rang. T-X answered it, perfectly imitating Nancy Nebel's voice. "Hello?"

A man came on. "Honey, I'm at the restaurant, where are—"

T-X broke the connection. An extremely rapid string of numbers crossed her display, which she entered on the cell phone's keypad, her fingers moving faster than any human's could move.

A crash of static came over the speaker as the connection was made. T-X opened her mouth and emitted a

series of eleven beep tones. The distant circuit rang once, followed by the squeal of a high-speed modem. T-X made the audible connection with the proper signal, and moments later data began to stream back and forth between T-X and a Los Angeles County database computer downtown.

Tiny lines of text along with dozens of charts passed T-X's head-up display: names, addresses, medical, financial, and employment data along with images, mostly head shots.

The photographs of two humans, one male, one female, youngish-looking, lingered for a full second in T-X's display, followed by an address in the foothills above Westwood.

T-X was in no apparent hurry, but she drove very fast, and for normal human response times and abilities, apparently recklessly, weaving in and out of traffic, even running red lights when her sensors registered and computed no obstructions.

She jumped onto the Hollywood Freeway, but got off almost immediately because of the traffic. Her onboard navigational systems booted up, automatically merging with the Skynet system currently in orbit for this era.

She was working her way through streets of strip malls and businesses, traffic sometimes heavy, but most of the time light

An automobile with lights mounted on a roof rack shot out from a used car lot and fell in behind T-X.

She glanced in the rearview mirror with one eye, her

sensors scanning and evaluating the new phenomenon. The automobile was a Los Angeles Police squad car. Its red and white lights were flashing; its siren whooped several times.

She was being pursued.

"You, in the silver Lexus! Slow down and pull over!" the amplified voice of the lone police officer boomed from the radio unit "Pull over immediately!''

T-X considered the situation for something less than one millisecond before getting off the accelerator and braking to a hard stop as she pulled over to the side of the street across from what looked like an office or business complex of some sort behind a tall iron fence. Brightly colored graffiti was painted over all the brick walls inside the empty parking area.

At the end of the block a large, well lit billboard for Victoria's Secret displayed a beautiful model wearing nothing more than a wide, toothy smile, a very low-cut bra, and brief panties.

T-X was aware of the squad car stopping behind her, and of the lone male officer getting out of the car and approaching. He was beefy with a square face and short-cropped hair.

She was also aware of the Victoria's Secret advertisement and what its significance was vis-a-vis the human male-female sexual relationship.

' She flexed her shoulder and back muscles so that her breasts became more prominent, turned her head, looked up, and smiled just as the cop reached her.

"Good evening, Officer," she said.

His eyes strayed to her breasts. "Um, lady? You know how fast you were going?"

"Eighty-two point three miles per hour," T-X said.

The cop had to smile. This was one for the books, something he could tell at the precinct house. Christ, but she was built. "It's a thirty-mile-an-hour zone," he said. He'd opened his ticket book, but flipped it shut. How could you ticket perfection? "I really oughta write you a ticket here."

T-X glanced at the cop's shiny patent leather utility belt. She catalogued the sidearm as a Sig-Sauer P226, with a fifteen-round detachable box magazine. Total length was 196 mm, its weight empty was 750 g, the cartridge was a 9mm Parabellum with a muzzle velocity of 335 meters per second with the 115-grain JHP round.

She smiled again at the cop whose name tag read barnes. "I like that gun."

c.5

The Valley

He had trashed his bike, permanently this time. The frame was bent all to hell, the gas tank punctured, the engine case cracked when it hit the boulder, both wheels folded like pretzels.

Riding in the rear of the ratty flatbed truck back down into the valley, John Connor had plenty of time to feel sorry for himself, and to be pissed off as well by his own stupidity.

He knew what his mother would have said about it; she had been the one talking all the time about how fate was what we made of it. Not the other way around. He had done it to himself, this time, with no help from anyone.

Any of her biker boyfriends would have laughed, clapped him on the shoulder, passed him the tequila, and said something like: "Next time you go rodding around in the middle of the night, maybe you should wear a parachute." Or something like: "Did that big, bad deer knock you on your ass, kid?"

There'd be no sympathy from anyone, but there

would be a grudging acceptance that he'd had the cojones to pull off such a stunt in the first place and the bald-ass luck to survive it

The stuff from his packs had been scattered halfway down the hill to the ocean, and it had taken him the better part of two hours, climbing up and down in the loose sand and rocks, fighting his pains, to find most of it and get back up to the Drive.

It'd only taken one minute, however, from the moment he'd reached the tangled mess that had been his bike, until he came to the conclusion that it was beyond repair. He might have been able to salvage some parts, but he'd been unable to find his tools or flashlight, and he didn't have the heart to lug around a bunch of useless crap.

He'd had the balls, or the stupidity, to pull the stunt, but he had to wonder if he'd been lucky after all. If there was no purpose in living, then why live at all?

It had been a recurrent theme of his. Maybe it was time for him to finally do something about it.

Put up or shut up, his foster mom had told him once. That was when his real mother was in the nuthouse up at Pescadero.

The first vehicle that had come along had been the flatbed loaded with ten Mexican laborers nearly blind drunk, laughing and singing.

They had come from one party and were headed to a sister's house somewhere over near Van Nuys. None of them noticed that John was banged up, his hands raw

with road rash, jeans torn up, blood oozing from a long gash in his leg.

Never mind that the beer was piss warm, and the tequila was so cheap that kerosene would have tasted better. They were willing to share.

They had no trouble deciding who and what they were, or where their lives were going. They had never been fed any delusions about becoming a world leader. Nor probably had they ever been the target of some machine, sent on an assassination mission.

They had come down out of the hills and passed under 1-101 before Connor looked up out of his morose thoughts and became aware of where he was.

The neighborhood was blue collar, industrial. They passed a small bank and a supermarket, and at the end of the block, across from what looked like a construction site or maybe a place where they stored heavy construction equipment, was an animal hospital.

John flexed his leg, which had stiffened up on the long ride, and fresh blood oozed out of the wound. He needed help, but he wasn't willing to go to the emergency room of some hospital. There would be too many questions. And that was the one thing he was very bad at, answering questions, especially the kind that cops were bound to ask. He had no permanent address, no real money, not even a proper ID. He was in no one's database, so far as he knew. He had never applied for a loan or a credit card. He had never owned a house. In fact he'd never owned anything, except for his bike, which he bought from a

down-and-out biker who needed the cash for drugs. If the cops started digging into who and what he was, he figured that he would be in trouble.

He pulled himself up and pounded a fist on the roof of the cab. The driver stuck bis head out the window and looked over his shoulder at John.

"Que?"

"AcA me bap," John shouted at him.

"Si, si," the driver said, and he pulled over, bumping up on the curb and then down again. Everyone laughed. This was great fun.

The sign on the building read universal rentals, and behind the chain-link fence a big yellow mobile crane, its massive telescoping boom fixed over the truck's cab like a tank's cannon, loomed over the neighborhood.

Across the street a small glass-fronted building was lit only from the outside. The sign on the front read emery

ANIMAL HOSPITAL.

Connor gathered his tattered packs and bedroll and climbed painfully down from the back of the truck.

"Gracias," he called to the driver, who waved back.

"Si, si," the man said, and the others waved as the truck took off in a cloud of smoke and dust, leaving Connor standing alone in the middle of the street.

There was no traffic here at this hour, and after the truck was gone the night turned silent.

Connor limped across the street and looked through the front windows into the darkened reception room of the animal clinic. It was unlikely that a place this small would have a night watchman, but you could never tell.

He made his way around to a back loading area. A small window looked into a kennel where animals undergoing treatment were kept overnight

He pulled a towel from one of his packs, wrapped it around a fist, and smashed the window.

Immediately the bigger dogs started barking and growling wildly, while the small animals yipped and a few of the sicker ones mewled or whined.

"Shh, it's okay, guys," Connor told them. He reached inside, undid the latch, and lifted the window. "It's okay," he called. He dropped his packs inside, then climbed in after them.

The kennel was filled with animal smells only partially masked by the odor of a strong disinfectant Water was running somewhere, and the compressor motor for what was probably a refrigerator kicked on. But there were no alarms, and the dogs were already calming down, more curious now than frightened or aggressive.

There was a row of cages, some large, some small, a lot of them empty. The animals here were sick, some of them banged up as badly as Connor. He felt an instant empathy with them.

A big chocolate Lab, its left rear leg in a cast, looked up with mournful eyes. John offered the dog the back of his hand, then scratched it behind the ears. The animal almost groaned out loud in ecstasy.

Love at first sight, Connor thought, following the line of cages through a door into what appeared to be the clinic's medical storage area. The room was small and cluttered with cardboard boxes, many of them unopened,

file cabinets, large cases, and glass-fronted supply cabinets.

"Bingo," he said under his breath. It was exactly what he was looking for.

He went back for his packs, then jimmied open the glass doors of one of the supply cabinets that held tran-quilizers, gauze, antibiotic creams, syringes, boxes of sutures, splints, catheters, and an entire shelf of prescription drugs.

He picked one marked torbutrol. for relief of pain, veterinary use only. He shook out a handful of the pills and dry swallowed them. If they didn't work on humans, he figured he would find out about it soon enough when he dropped down on all fours and started howling at the moon,

From the time he, and the T-800 sent back to protect him, busted his mom out of the sanitarium, Connor had essentially been on his own. He'd been thirteen then, and before his fourteenth birthday he could disassemble, clean, repair, reassemble, and fire more than two dozen different types of weapons, explosives, and even Light Antitank Weapons and Stinger ground-to-air handheld missiles.

It had been quite the education. He could calculate blast radius damage for various plastique explosives, but he had never heard of the Magna Carta let alone the year it was signed.

And he was still alone, he thought, grabbing sutures, gauze, alcohol, disinfectant ointment, and bandages.

He dropped his pants, cleaned the six-inch gash in his thigh with alcohol, then opened one of the suture packs and began sewing up the wound, the animal narcotic already fuzzing out the worst of the pain.

c.6

Mojave Desert

Terminator moved across the open desert like a ship on the sea, homing in on a distant port that his onboard sensors had detected hours ago.

He felt neither heat nor cold nor impatience with the duration of this primary phase of the mission. He had been sent back to execute an operation. Nothing would stop him. No power on earth could divert him from his path, except for the destruction of his neural circuitry or the complete destruction of his battle chassis.

If and when he needed information on file for comparison, measurements, identifications, or decisions, his CPU was alerted to fire a series of networks that would act like an electronic adrenaline to his system.

Without breaking his long, distance-eating stride, Terminator's infrared, optical, electromagnetic emissions, and directed audio sensors continued to pick up a melange of data: heat signatures from dozens of ground conveyances—cars, trucks, and motorcycles—electronic noise from what he computed as excited neon gas, sixty Hz common electrical circuitry, some high-frequency

broadcasts to and from portable communications devices called cell phones, dozens of human body heat sources mixed in ever-changing blocking and additive patterns, and combinations of sounds of mixed frequencies at varying rhythmic speeds that he understood to be music

He enhanced his optical system, focusing on a neon sign, desert star, in front of a ramshackle building.

A highway ran directly past the building, which Terminator classified as a roadhouse/drinking establishment, common to many parts of the continental U.S.; most specifically this variety was to be found in the West and desert Southwest. A gathering place for human ritualized mating and aggressive behavior, catering mostly to a narrow socio-economic range of people.

His CPU pulled up a variety of programmed response patterns and overlaid them on his basic real-time mode. His head came up, he rose slightly on the balls of his feet, and a small, sardonic smile played at the edges of his mouth.

The T-800 series, which had been modeled after a U.S. Marine Corps chief master sergeant, was, in its infiltration mode, a handsome cyborg, with short dark hair, broad craggy features, prominent nose, and deep set intense eyes. It was built with the musculature of a world-class athlete, perhaps an Iron Man gold medalist, with strong pecs, a washboard stomach, narrow waist, and massive but well sculpted thighs and biceps. The Marine sergeant who had been a man's man, who epitomized speed, agility, expertise, reliability, and dedication had been perfectly translated into the various model T-800s.

He did not hesitate at the side of the highway, but stepped up on the pavement that was finally cool after the day's desert heat, and strode directly across the filled parking lot to the front entrance of the rustic redwood bar and club.

The music was very loud, thumping with a heavy bass. By the sounds of the cheering and laughing coming from inside, the bar was packed and people were having a good time.

A large, beefy man in jeans, leather vest, and broad-brimmed cowboy hat sat on a stool next to the main entrance. His eyes narrowed slightly when he spotted the nude Terminator, but he showed no real surprise.

He languidly got to his feet as Terminator approached. He stepped directly in front of the door. He was six five at three hundred pounds, and he looked mean.

He motioned to the left. "You're supposed to go round back."

Terminator gave no indication that he had heard the bouncer, simply sweeping the man aside with one hand as if he were batting away an irritating insect.

"What the hell—"

Terminator pushed open the saloon doors and stepped inside to a loud, smoky room filled with at least two hundred women all cheering, whistling, applauding, and stomping on the wooden floorboards for the male stripper who was just prancing off the small stage at the back. Music blared from big speakers suspended from the ceiling and bracketing the stage. Glittering curtains were lit by red and green and blue and pink rotating baby

spots. A large sign attached to the back curtains read

LADIES NIGHT.

Terminator scanned the audience. A few of the women had turned around and spotted him. Overlaid on his head-up display were the size and shape parameters for clothing to fit his frame. Most of the sizes and none of the styles that the women were wearing would do, though many of them were dressed androgynously in jeans, denim shirts, and boots.

He also correctly catalogued that his earlier assessment about the probable socio-economic class of the people who might frequent such a club as this was correct. In many instances humans were too predictable.

A buxom, floozy blonde, wearing thick makeup and long, fake eyelashes, got unsteadily to her feet and clapped her hands over her head, a toothy grin from ear to ear. "Shake it, baby!" she shouted.

Terminator's sensors evaluated her size. Her short denim skirt, boots, and fringed blouse might fit him, but his head-up display read inappropriate.

A much smaller, younger redhead, nearer at hand, looked Terminator's body up and down, her eyes lingering on his anatomically correct groin area, a lascivious grin on her narrow face. She was mostly inebriated. "Need a date?" she asked.

Other women had spotted him now, and they were jumping to their feet, applauding and giving catcalls and whistles. If this was a part of the show, it was the best part, most of them were thinking.

A loud, super-rhythmic song suddenly blared from

the speakers. Terminator correctly identified it as a piece called "Macho Man," performed by the Village People.

A tall, huskily built male stripper bounced out onto the stage. He was dressed in a cap, a red scarf around his neck, and biker boots and leathers.

Terminator turned to look at the man. His head-up display instantly evaluated a match. He strode through the crowd of cheering women to the stage.

"Take your clothes off," he told the stripper, who shot him an interested smile, but shook his head.

"Patience, honey."

Terminator climbed onto the stage, and the women, still believing that this was part of the show, went wild; cheering louder than before, whistling their encouragement.

"Whoa, bitch, wait your turn!" the stripper said. He was already into his act, swaying his hips and shoulders. Terminator was nice, but just now he was nothing but competition. Irritating.

"Your clothes," Terminator repeated adamantly.

The stripper stuck a hand directly in Terminator's face. "Talk to the hand," he suggested, and he turned away.

Terminator grabbed the stripper's hand, the wrist crunching like a Shredded Wheat biscuit. "Now."

The stripper screamed in pain and fear, stumbling back a step as Terminator let go. This was far worse than competition. The son of a bitch didn't have an ounce of decency. He was probably on something. The stripper hurriedly pulled off his cap and kerchief, then the jacket,

awkwardly because his wrist was dislocated or maybe broken. But his blood was pumping with raw terror so he wasn't feeling much.

The women were on their feet, crazier than ever. This was by far the very best show that any of them had ever seen. It looked so real!

Terminator donned the stripper's clothing, the boots a little tight, then turned without another word, strode across the stage and through the curtain to a back storage area that had been converted into a dressing room for the acts.

A few of the strippers did a double take, realizing that the man in Larry's outfit was definitely not Larry. He didn't have the walk.

"Macho Man" was still playing, and the women were still screaming, as Terminator stepped out the back door into the parking lot.

The heavyset blonde from the audience came right behind him. "Hey, you!" she shouted drunkenly.

Terminator turned to regard her, but he said nothing.

"Will you be back?" the woman demanded.

He looked at her for a long moment, then turned and scanned the parking lot, almost immediately spotting a big-wheeled Dodge pickup truck, an NRA sticker on the rear bumper, a shotgun in a rear window rack.

He headed directly for it, but caught his reflection in the window of a car. He stopped and looked at his image, bringing up one of the memories that John Connor had supplied of what T-800 had looked like twelve years ago. He took off the stripper's star-shaped sunglasses and tossed

them aside. He did the same with the cap and red bandanna. His current image now nearly matched the previous overlay.

He walked to the truck and without hesitation poked his fist through the driver's side window, opened the door, and climbed into the cab. The truck's alarm system shrieked and the lights flashed. Ignoring them, Terminator casually ripped the ignition switch from the steering column, which silenced the alarm, and hot-wired the start and run systems.

The truck's engine roared to life. Terminator's eyes lit on a pair of sunglasses on the dash. He put them on, dropped the truck into gear, and hammered the gas pedal.

The truck shot out of the parking lot, spewing a rooster tail of gravel behind it.

As Terminator bumped up onto the highway and headed west, toward Los Angeles, he looked in the rear-view mirror in time to see the bouncer in the broad-brimmed cowboy hat running after him, a fist raised in the air.

Westwood

Luring the police officer Barnes away from his duties and killing him had been ridiculously easy, though T-X could not think of the act in such terms. It was simply a minor extension of her main mission plan.

She had unbuttoned her shirt and lifted her bra. "Do you like these?"

The cop's eyes had widened, and he nodded stupidly. "Yeah, nice. What do you have in mind?"

She smiled. "Follow me," she said, and the cop had followed her into a dark corner of a hardware store parking lot

T-X glanced at the Sig-Sauer lying on the passenger seat. It was a well-crafted, efficient weapon for this era. There was only the one magazine of ammunition, which gave her fifteen rounds. But it would be more than sufficient for her mission.

The machine-generated voice of the GPS navigational unit in the Lexus advised, "Left turn ahead."

T-X glanced at the in-dash screen on which a map of the upscale Westwood area of Los Angeles was displayed.

She had entered one of the addresses from her program. This first one was for a number on a side street in the foothills above Santa Monica Boulevard, four blocks away, according to the nav system.

Except for the good sex, BUI Anderson decided that he was starting to get real tired of Tammy Triggs, his current love interest. But then at seventeen who had to be choosy? St. Ed's was loaded with hot girls, and even his twelve-year-old sister, Liz, once admitted that her brother was a chick magnet.

He got up from the couch in the den where he and Tammy had gone to be alone and watch TV. "Want another beer?" He was tall, with a lean build that stood him well on the basketball court. With his blond hair and blue eyes he was one hundred percent California.

"Sure," Tammy said distractedly. She had found Liz's stupid robot dog, Aibo, and had been playing with it for the past hour. Instead of making out.

Bill went into the palatial, burnished aluminum and Mexican tile kitchen, grabbed a couple of Buds from the fridge, and headed back to the den.

Dad was in New York on business. Mom was at a Botox party somewhere in Beverly Hills, and Liz was upstairs in her room doing homework.

Which should have left him Tammy, whose parents were both out of town.

He stopped in the Italianate marble hall that ran the

width of the upscale twenty-two-room house on an acre and a half of prime real estate and glanced at Tammy's reflection in the big mirror across from the den. She was down on all fours, coaxing the plastic dog with the remote control unit

The television was acting up again. Lines of ones and zeroes crossed the wavering images. A newscaster was saying something about a super virus.

"... widespread outages in the global digital network have prompted rumors of a new computer super virus."

Bill figured it was probably some loser in Covina or down in La Puente, bored out of his skull with no prospects, hacking the system.

He brought the beers into the den and set them on the coffee table as CNN continued the late breaking story.

"Wall Street analysts are confident, however, that high tech issues will—"

Bill switched channels to the war of the Battlebots. Then flipped again, and again. He had to admit that he was bored out of his skull too.

The number on the steel security gate matched the head-up display T-X was reading. She pulled to a stop at the security keypad and reached to it with the index finger of her left hand.

Nothing happened for a brief moment, but then the liquid metal skin retracted from the finger, and a 1.6 mm titanium alloy drill bit emerged from the fingertip and

cut into the keypad's cover plate like a hot knife through soft butter, but with a high-pitched, almost inaudible whine. A narrow blue aura of the same angstrom length as emitted by the Continuum Transporter flowed through the tiny drill bit into the gate and security system.

T-X transferred a stream of data into the system, then withdrew her hand and the gate opened.

"Tammy, shut the stupid dog off, would you?" Bill asked.

She looked up as headlights flashed across the windows from the driveway below.

Bill jumped off the couch, his heart in his throat. "Shit, my mom's home. Hide the beer!"

He switched off the television as Tammy grabbed the half-dozen beer cans from the coffee table and started stashing them under the long sectional.

Out in the hall he checked the mirror to make sure he didn't look too guilty, at the same moment he heard high heels coming up the sidewalk. About twice a week his mom either forgot the garage door opener or forgot how to use it or was too drunk to care, so she left the Mercedes in the front and rang the doorbell.

This was one of those times.

Bill touched the alarm keypad but the system was already off, and the front door opened without the lock release delay.

A slender blond woman, in a sharp-looking leather suit and high-heeled boots, stood in the glow of the front

light, a killer smile on her narrow face. She wasn't half bad for an older woman. A Lexus convertible was parked in the driveway.

"Um... you must be looking for my mom. She's out—"

"Elizabeth and William Anderson?" T-X asked politely.

Bill glanced over his shoulder. Tammy had come to the hall. He turned back. "I'm Bill, my sister's upstairs. Are you from the school, or something—?" He was confused. This wasn't making sense.

The smile left T-X's face at the same moment she slammed the heel of her hand into Bill's solar plexus, shoving him violently off his feet back into the hall.

Tammy stepped back, her hand to her mouth, not completely sure of what she was witnessing. But it was bad.

T-X pulled the Sig-Sauer from her pocket and fired three shots into Bill's chest as he started to rise, killing him instantly.

Tammy screamed, turned on her heel, and raced for the back of the house.

T-X let her go. The young woman was not in the mission program.

She stepped over Bill's corpse, and turned left up the stairs to the upper floor. Music came from a room at the end of the corridor. T-X followed the sounds to their source, opening the door into a girl's bedroom.

Elizabeth Anderson, Liz to her friends, looked up from the video game she was beating on her television.

She was a cute girl, round face, innocent eyes. She cocked her head quizzically. "Who are you?"

T-X raised the Sig-Sauer and put one round precisely into the lower left center of the girl's chest, the heavy 9mm bullet shattering the heart.

The Valley

The pager beeped at 5:06 a.m. as text crossed the tiny screen.

Kate opened her eyes. It was still dark The pager lying on the nightstand on her side of the bed was beeping. Her eyes went to the luminous numbers on the alarm clock. It was practically the middle of the night. The best part. The last hour of sleep before she had to get up to go to work.

But it was Saturday. "Dammit," she muttered under her breath.

She grabbed the pager and squinted at the illuminated screen. The message: a.n.i.m.a.l... e.m.e.r.g.e.n.c.y. scrolled across the display, repeating the same two words. The alarm system at the clinic was keyed to noise. If the animals got upset and started to make a racket it might mean that something was seriously wrong with one of them. And Kate was nothing if not a conscientious animal doctor.

She shut off the pager and got out of bed. Scott stirred and reached out a hand to her.

"What's going on?" he mumbled, still mostly asleep.

"I've got to go to the clinic," Kate said, pulling underwear out of the dresser. "It's an emergency."

She pulled off her nightshirt and hurriedly put on bra and panties, then got a shirt and slacks from the closet.

Scott got up on one elbow and looked at the clock. "It's five in the morning."

"I'll be back before you're up," Kate said, pulling on her slacks and tucking in her shirt. She stepped into her shoes and half stumbled, half hopped over to the bed. She leaned down and gave him a kiss.

Scott lay back, then turned over and was sound asleep by the time Kate grabbed a light jacket and headed out the door.

Early morning work traffic had already started to pick up as Kate drove the two miles over to the clinic, but it took her only a few minutes.

She'd gotten rid of her lime green VW bug six months ago when Scott moved in, so when she was on animal business she used the clinic's Toyota Tundra pickup with its tan cap and the Emery logo on the side. It was the only sensible solution because she sometimes made commercial calls, mostly to pet stores, and a few times to farms outside the valley.

It was satisfying work, most of the time. Animals were a lot more straightforward than people. They might be

vicious sometimes, but they were always honest and up front. Especially the dogs. You always knew where you stood with them.

She parked in front and as soon as she got out of the truck she could hear the racket in the kennel, and her gut tightened. The last time this happened some junkie had broken into the place looking for drugs. The cops had shown up just ahead of Kate and had found the guy passed out in the reception area. Stoned on something. The dogs had gone wild.

She should have called the cops, but she had her cell phone and if need be 911 would dispatch a unit out here within minutes.

Kate let herself in through the front door, locking it behind her. She flipped on the lights and headed to the back. The dogs were barking like mad.

"Cool it, guys, it's just me," Kate said, heading down the hall to the supply room and kennel.

She pushed through the frosted glass doors, flipped on the lights, and tossed her keys and cell phone atop the file cabinet Turning, she spotted the jimmied supply cabinet that had obviously been rummaged.

"Great. Junkies," she said, walking over to check out what was missing. An empty Torbutrol bottle was lying on the floor. She bent down to pick it up and spotted a splash of blood.

A trail of blood led across the room to the shadows in a corner. Surgical supplies were laid out on top of a box, bloody gauze on the floor, an empty suture set bag discarded.

Kate straightened up and stepped back, a little quea-siness roiling in her stomach. Whoever it was had probably cut themselves breaking in.

She turned and reached for her cell phone as a man about her own age, but beat-up, like he'd been in some kind of an accident, limped out from behind a stack of dog food boxes.

"Please don't do that," Connor said, his voice a little slurred.

Kate's fear evaporated, changing into anger. "I suppose you're the asshole who ripped us off last week."

"No. That'd be some other asshole."

Kate edged nearer to the file cabinet and reached for her cell phone, but Connor pulled a pistol from his jacket and pointed it at her. His hand was unsteady and his eyes were bleary. Kate figured it was the Torbutrol.

"I can't let you call the cops," he said. "Sorry."

Kate stepped back from the file cabinet, and gave Connor a closer scrutiny. He looked as if he hadn't had a decent meal or a decent night's sleep in a long time. His eyes had a—she searched for a word. He looked haunted.

"It was an accident," he explained. "I just—needed medicine."

"There's an emergency clinic a half mile—"

"I can't do that," Connor cut her off.

Kate held up the empty Torbutrol bottle. "How much did you take?"

"Enough."

Kate shook her head. "Well, you took the wrong thing. This is the stuff we use to chemically neuter dogs."

Connor laughed. It was obvious he didn't believe her. But she kept her gaze steady, as if she thought he was stupid, and she felt sorry for him.

Suddenly he wasn't so sure. His eyes dropped to the pill bottle in her hand.

Kate tossed it at him. Instinctively he tried to catch it, momentarily losing his balance. She snatched the pistol from his hand, skipped back out of his reach, and pointed it at him.

"Take it easy," he said, raising a hand as if to ward off a blow.

"Back," she told him.

Connor stumbled backward through the double doors into the kennel where the dogs had finally started to quiet down. A few of them whined when they recognized Kate, but the animals were uncertain of what was going on.

Kate motioned toward one of the empty cages for large dogs. "I want you inside."

"No way—"

Kate raised the pistol. "Now."

Connor reluctantly did as he was ordered, his leg very painful. It was obvious he was watching for her to make a mistake. And it was just as obvious that he was in no shape to do anything about it, if she did. Not until the effects of the Torbutrol began to wear off.

Kate slammed the cage door shut, and dropped the latch. Now the cage was impossible to open from inside, and she allowed herself to relax for the first time.

She hunched down in front of the cage and looked at him. There was something familiar... something she

couldn't quite put her finger on... something bothersome.

"Look, this isn't what you think," Connor told her.

At that moment the buzzer at the front door went off. Someone had seen the lights in the reception room and had brought a sick animal.

"Yeah, right," she said.

She got up and went back into the storage room where she set the pistol aside and got her cell phone. Suddenly she had it! She knew! And it was like someone had dropped a brick on her head.

She turned on her heel and went back into the kennel. Connor looked up at her expectantly.

"Mike Kripke's basement," she said.

The front buzzer was going crazy, and the dogs were starting to get agitated again.

"What?" Connor asked, confused. "What does that mean?"

Kate shook her head in amazement, then went to find out what idiot was at the front door at this hour.

When she was gone, Connor tried for the latch, but it was just beyond his reach. He braced his back against the rear bars and kicked at the door with no results.

"Beautiful," he muttered.

c.9

North Hollywood

T-X waited until a garbage truck lumbered past, then turned into the takeout driveway of an all-night fast-food restaurant.

Twenty minutes ago she had telephoned the home number of Maria Barrera in Reseda, which she had downloaded from the L.A. County welfare database. Her Spanish was perfect, but Mrs. Barrera said that her son wasn't home. He was at work.

"He's a good boy. He's been no trouble. Please."

"Where is he working, Mrs. Barrera?" T-X asked politely.

"Jim's Burgers. It's in North Hollywood. Please, he's a good boy."

There were no cars in line as T-X pulled up to the menu board and speaker, and only a couple of Hispanic kids with their low-riders in the parking lot.

"Welcome to Jim's Burgers, can I take your order?" The voice was of a young, Hispanic male.

"Jose Barrera?" T-X asked.

"Um... yeah."

T-X pulled forward to the order window as Barrera leaned out to see what was going on. He looked to be in his late teens or early twenties. He wore a blue hat and blue shirt with the restaurant's logo.

T-X looked up at the boy and smiled. His name tag read Barrera. Her head-up display showed a match.

She had the Sig-Sauer on her lap. She lifted it and fired two shots into the young man's face, then laid the gun on the passenger seat, drove past the pickup window, around the restaurant, and back out onto the street where she accelerated smoothly into the night

Her head-up display showed a grid:

ANDERSON, WILLIAM - TERMINATED ANDERSON, ELIZABETH - TERMINATED BARRERA, JOSE - TERMINATED BREWSTER, KATHERINE - OPEN CONNOR, JOHN - OPEN

The Katherine Brewster line was highlighted, and a file came up with photographs as well as home and work addresses and phone numbers.

She entered Katherine Brewster's home number into the cell phone. After five rings it was finally answered by a man.

"Yes?"

"Katherine Brewster?"

"Who's calling? Do you know what time it is?"

"Katherine Brewster, please. This is a veterinary emergency."

"She's not here. She's at the clinic. It's the same thing I told the guy who called five minutes ago." T-X hung up.

Santa Clara

Strictly speaking, Terminator was incapable of experiencing human feelings, or of having premonitions. But he could and did constantly evaluate data: old data from his memory banks, and new data that his sensors continuously gathered. From such evaluations he could make predictive forecasts to which he could assign probability values.

He was programmed to know that Skynet was sending or had already sent back a terminator. He was also programmed with the knowledge that it was a T-X assigned to eliminate targets of opportunity, among them John Connor and Katherine Brewster.

Finally, he was programmed, by Connor himself, to understand that in this era Connor was what might be called a loose cannon; no permanent address and only scanty personal records in a few databases.

The T-X would understand this, and would probably view Katherine Brewster as a preliminary target

Terminator's head-up display assigned an 88.97733451 percent probability to such a scenario.

After he had spoken with the man who answered Katherine Brewster's home telephone, Terminator increased the scenario probability to 94.5365555 percent.

From his database he brought up Katherine's place of employment, Emery Animal Hospital, pinpointed the address on a map of the Los Angeles area, and headed there.

Traffic was light at this hour of the morning, mostly semis. With his onboard electronic emissions detectors (which included radar) he pushed the truck to speeds in excess of one hundred miles per hour.

c.10

The Valley

Out in the lobby Kate saw who was ringing the front buzzer, and she groaned inwardly.

She was still in a state of shock that she recognized the guy she'd locked in the cage. But the more she thought about it the more worried she became. There'd been trouble around him.

Kate unlocked the front door, and Betsy Steinberg, one of Emery's regular and more obnoxious customers, pushed her way past with her pet carrier clutched firmly in her grip.

"It's Hercules, I think he's got pneumonia. He just started coughing and he wouldn't stop—" The woman was about Kate's age and general build, but she could be very insistent, something Kate normally wasn't

"Betsy, I've got a problem in back."

"A problem?" the woman shouted, alarmed. "This is an emergency!"

Kate peered into the carrier. Hercules was a pampered, overfed, overweight Siamese cat whose only problem was his owner, who treated the cat like a person and

not like an animal. The cat lowered its head and coughed politely.

"Sounds like a hairball," Kate said.

"I know what hairballs sound like," Betsy shrilled. "Where's Dr. Monroe?"

"It's five-thirty in the morning, I'm sure he's home sleeping. He'll come in if he has to—" Kate smiled, softening. The woman was frightened enough about the safety of an animal she obviously loved to get up and come down to the clinic. "Look, just wait here with Hercules. I'll be just a few minutes, all right?"

Betsy searched Kate's face to make sure that she wasn't being blown off, then nodded. "Okay."

Kate went back into the kennel, picked up the Tor-butrol bottle, and hunched down in front of the cage that held her prisoner.

"Did you call the cops?" Connor asked.

"Not yet."

Connor glanced at the empty bottle. "Am I going to need my stomach pumped or something?"

Kate felt a little sorry for him. He looked forlorn. Lost. "You took a couple hundred milligrams of a narcotic ... you're going to be out of it for a while. That's all."

Connor nodded.

"You're John Connor," Kate blurted.

A look of surprise flickered in his eyes.

"I'm Kate Brewster. West Hills Junior High."

Connor had to laugh quietly; there was nothing much else he could do under the circumstances. He shook his head. "Nice seeing you again, Kate."

T-X came around the corner past the Universal Rentals lot with the big yellow crane behind the fence, and pulled up behind a pickup truck and a Cadillac DeVille parked in front of the animal clinic.

The veterinary hospital was a match with T-X's files.

She got out of the Lexus and started up the walk.

"What happened to you, John?" Kate asked.

It was a good question, Connor thought. He lay back against the bars and closed his eyes. How to summarize his crazy life in twenty-five words or less?

"Middle of the eighth grade, you just disappeared. And there was something about your foster parents—*

"They were murdered," Connor replied, opening his eyes.

Kate reared back.

"I didn't do it," Connor said, matter-of-factly. How to explain that part to her? Impossible. "So, wow," he said, trying to lighten it up a bit "West Hills. Those were the days." He grinned at her. "I don't suppose for old times' sake you'd just let me—"

Something crashed out front. Kate looked up, alarmed. It sounded like a lot of glass breaking. Almost as if a car or truck or something had crashed through the front windows.

She turned back to Connor. "What the hell—? Is somebody with you?"

Connor shook his head. "No."

Kate stood up and hurried into the hall to the reception area. She was just in time at the door to see Betsy come around the corner as a stunning-looking blond woman stepped through the smashed front door, a big gun in her hand.

The woman raised the pistol without a moment's hesitation and fired twice, both shots hitting Betsy in the chest, driving her backward off her feet, blood flying everywhere, her arms and legs splaying out.

Kate took a half step back away from the door, a scream caught in her throat. This wasn't happening. She couldn't move. She could not utter a sound as she watched in horror.

The blond walked to where Betsy lay and bent down over her.

"Katherine Brewster?"

Betsy was still alive. Her mouth moved, trying to form a word, but she could not speak.

The blond touched a delicate finger into the blood that covered Betsy's chest, then raised it to her lips.

A moment later the woman shook her head. "No," she said softly.

The dogs were barking furiously, howling and baying, knowing instinctively that death was nearby. Hercules the cat was out of his pet carrier. He sauntered around from behind the counter, glanced at his owner and then up at the blond woman, a look of indifference on the feline features.

Kate backed up as the woman turned and came directly toward her. It suddenly registered on her that the

killer had used her name! She realized that she had just a second to make a decision; stay and be shot to death like Betsy, or move and try to live.

She turned and sprinted back into the storage room where she snatched her cell phone from the top of the file cabinet and ducked behind the stack of dog food boxes. With shaking hands she managed to enter 9 and then 1 before she fumbled the phone and it clattered to the floor.

Before she could retrieve it, the door opened and T-X stepped inside, the big gun sweeping left to right across the room.

The cell phone was on the floor less than a foot from the killer's right boot Kate could do nothing but hold her breath.

T-X spotted the bloody gauze and other surgical supplies on the floor. She moved forward, picked up the gauze, and touched it to her tongue for a sample to process.

A double helix DNA sequence appeared in her head-up display. lines of genetic code streamed across her eyes with lightning speed.

A moment later her head-up display cleared. John Connor's head shot came up over the legend: john con-

NOR-----PRIMARY TARGET.

Kate watched with openmouthed amazement and fear. It was almost as if the killer had tasted the blood to see who it was from.

But that was crazy. This whole thing was insane. Surreal. It was a nightmare from hell.

Making as little noise as possible, Kate stepped out from behind the boxes, grabbed her keys, and dashed out the door back into the hallway.

The killer turned inhumanly fast, fired at the retreating figure, wood splinters hitting the back of Kate's neck, and continued to fire, emptying the gun as she gave chase.

Kate raced out into the reception area, skirting Betsy's blood-soaked body, her heart hammering nearly out of her chest.

The stupid cat leaped from out of nowhere, tangling with Kate's feet, sending her sprawling on all fours.

The cat howled in rage and pain and shot away as Kate picked herself up, ducked through the broken glass, and sprinted to the animal van.

This had something to do with John Connor. She'd had a bad feeling terrible things were going to happen the second she realized who he was. There had been a lot of weird shit going on when they were kids. It had been more than Connor's foster parents. There'd been other killings, explosions. Strange stuff.

His mother had even gone crazy and had been locked away. The rumor was that the woman claimed that robots from the future had come back to kill her.

Kate tore open the driver's side door, scrambled behind the wheel, locked the door, and fumbled to get the key in the ignition.

She looked up. The killer was right there! The homicidal woman ripped the driver's side door off its hinges. She tossed it aside as if it were nothing more than a piece

of cardboard, and pulled Kate out of the truck, tossing her on the ground like a dishrag.

Kate frantically backpedaled, desperately trying to get away from the killer, but she jammed the heel of her boot into Kate's throat

"Where is John Connor?"

Kate couldn't breathe, let alone speak. She managed to shake her head. Somewhere in the foggy distance she thought she heard the sound of a car or truck or something screeching around the corner at the end of the block, its engine revving high.

"He was here," the killer said in a calm, unhurried tone. "Where did he go?" She eased the pressure on Kate's neck.

Suddenly an impossibly large, dark presence loomed directly over Kate's head; screaming, roaring noise, the strong odors of burnt rubber, oil, gasoline, and something else, tall wheels bracketing her body.

The killer looked up at the same moment the grille of the big-wheeled Dodge pickup truck plowed into her body, carrying her in a seeming instant into the side of the Lexus convertible, bumping over the curb and shoving the entire mass of steel and plastic and cybernetic circuitry and framework into the side wall of the clinic.

For the briefest of moments the crash seemed to hang in midstride, until the leading edge of the wreck, still moving in excess of three meters per second, ruptured a large, three-fourths-full propane gas tank.

A huge ball of fire erupted, blowing straight up and then out, the heat instantly bringing tears to Kate's eyes.

Still dazed, she sat up as tremendous clouds of dust and black smoke billowed up from the great flash-bang of the explosion. She'd never seen anything like that in her life.

It was a pickup truck that had passed over her body, the wheels somehow miraculously missing her. She could see the back end of it sticking out of the wall.

She got unsteadily to her knees and rubbed her bruised neck where the killer's boot had been jammed into her throat.

She figured that the blond woman as well as whoever had been driving the pickup truck had to be dead. They could not have survived the crash and the fire. But something moved within the most intense area of flames.

Kate tried to shake herself out of her daze, unable to believe anything she was witnessing, unable even to believe her own rationality. She had to be dreaming, or hallucinating. Something.

This was not happening.

A tall man, wearing a leather jacket and trousers, boots on his feet, and a shotgun in his left hand, pushed through the jumbled mass of burning wreckage and melting steel and glass, shrugging out of the flames as if the heat and damage had absolutely no effect on him, and strode purposefully to Kate, who was frozen to the spot.

"Katherine Brewster," Terminator said as a statement of fact, not a question.

Kate could do nothing more than dumbly look up at him and nod.

The stranger scooped her up with his right arm, tossed her over his shoulder like a duffel bag, and brought her around to the back door of the animal van.

"Wait!" Kate shouted, coming out of her fog. "What are you doing?"

The tall man got the back door of the van open and he tossed her inside among a couple of empty animal cages, blankets, and some medical equipment. There were no windows in the pickup's cap. A security screen covered the sliding window into the cab.

"Where is John Connor?" the man asked, his tone neutral.

Kate didn't know what to say or do. "Look, if I tell you, you'll let me go, right?"

"Yes," he said.

"In the kennel. I locked him in one of the cages."

The man spotted a lug wrench attached to the spare-tire bracket. He pulled it free, and Kate shrank back, thinking he was going to hit her with it.

"You said you'd let me go!"

"I lied," he said, which strictly speaking was not true. In fact he had merely omitted the time frame. He would let her go, but not now.

He slammed the door, stuck the lug wrench through the latches, and without any apparent effort bent it into a steel loop, effectively locking Kate inside.

Terminator turned and strode toward the animal clinic's smashed front entrance, his processors evaluating the range of likely scenarios he was heading for.

Most of the fire was on the other side of the brick wall that separated the kennel from the rest of the building, but a big section of intersecting wall had collapsed in a heap of rubble, and the room was filling with smoke.

Connor kept smashing at the cage door with both feet, bracing himself against the rear bars with his back for more leverage.

The animals were howling and barking wildly. Like Connor they were frantic that they would burn to death or die of smoke inhalation before someone came to let them out.

One of the door hinges bent then broke. Connor savagely kicked the door one last time, and the second hinge broke, sending the door clattering to the floor.

He scrambled out of the cage, heedless of the wound to his leg. He wanted out of there right now. He started for the door, but then stopped and turned back He couldn't leave.

The animals nervously switched their attention back and forth from him to the smoke pouring through the collapsed wall, almost pleading with him to help them.

"Shit," Connor muttered. He went back and started opening cages. The animals that could leaped out of their cages and raced for the door. Connor helped the others that were too sick to crawl out under their own steam. But once they were free and on the floor they were on their own.

He turned to get out of there when movement at the base of the rubble caught his eye. He stopped and watched

as silver beads of liquid metal oozed out of the debris and began to pool on the concrete floor.

Connor stepped back a pace. He'd seen this kind of thing before. Twelve years ago. It was the T-1000 model that Skynet had sent back to kill him and his mother. It was happening again. "Oh, shit—"

A metallic arm coalesced from the liquid metal, and at even more material began to build on the first, clawlike structure, it was obvious that something very sophisticated was happening. This was no mere T-1000 rising out of the liquid metal.

This was something infinitely more deadly. Connor did not know how he knew such a thing, he just did.

He raced out of the kennel into the storage room where he retrieved his RAK PM-63 9mm machine pistol from where Kate had laid it, and headed out into the reception area, which was filled with dense smoke.

It was hard to breathe let alone see, and he nearly stumbled over the blood-soaked body of a woman. At first he thought it was Kate, but then he heard the distinctive double click of a round being cycled into the breach of a shotgun. He stopped dead in his tracks, trying to figure his options before it was too late. Terminator, the Mossberg 12-gauge 500 pump-action shotgun low at his right hip, appeared out of the smoke, reached Connor, grabbed him by the shirt, and lifted him up.

"John Connor," Terminator said. His head-up display

was slower and less sophisticated than the T-X's, but his processors came up with a very quick match. "It is time."

The first instance a T-800 had come back, it had been sent by Skynet to kill Connor's mother. The second T-800 had come to protect them. Now, twelve years later, it was anyone's guess what this unit—the newest model of the machine which had been the only father figure Connor had ever known—had been sent to do.

"You're here to kill me," Connor said.

"No," Terminator replied, perhaps a mild expression of surprise forming at the corners of his mouth and eyes. "You must live."

c.ll

The Valley

Connor allowed himself to be hustled out of the clinic, partly because he knew there wasn't much he could do about it, and partly because of what was re-forming in the kennel.

"Why are you here?" he asked Terminator. "Where are we going?"

"Keep moving," Terminator said. He led Connor around to the back of the pet van and pushed him through the doorless driver's side. Fire still raged in the back of the building. Propane flames shot straight up into the dark, early morning sky. Debris littered the street. In the distance, Connor thought he could hear a lot of sirens. Someone must have turned in the alarm. The cops and the fire department were on the way. He glanced toward the front of the clinic in time to see T-X emerge through the shattered glass door. "Shit. Look out!" Terminator turned as T-X came toward them, the cyborg's liquid metal skin and clothing peeling back to reveal its formidable battle chassis armored with a

crystalline ceramic that was interlaced with nano fibers of carbon and titanium. T-X's right arm had transformed into the same model of plasma weapon that had been used in Colorado to wipe out the commands of Colonel Earle and Lieutenant Benson. This was Skynet's latest.

Terminator stepped directly between the oncoming T-X and Connor and raised his shotgun.

"Get out of here," he told Connor.

He fired. The 12-bore slug plowed into T-X's armored skull, showing little effect other than opening a small liquid metal crater that immediately closed.

"Now!" Terminator insisted, firing a second time, and a third, and a fourth.

Connor finally got the van started and peeled away, tires screeching as Terminator headed directly for T-X, firing the last four shells.

He took more rounds that he'd found in the pickup truck from his jacket pocket and loaded them into the shotgun as an electric blue aura formed and intensified around T-X's plasma cannon.

A tremendous burst of raw energy, twenty-five or thirty millimeters in diameter, shot from the transmission head of the weapon, striking Terminator square in his broad chest.

He was not capable of feeling pain, but a firestorm raged across his battle-hardened neural networks, and a physical force as powerful as one hundred pounds of TNT picked him off his feet and propelled him across the street and through the front window of what appeared to be a hardware store. Glass and metal and bricks went flying as

if a bomb had gone off just outside the store.

Terminator landed on his side on top of a pile of glass and tools from a display rack, his shotgun gone, his sun-glasses askew. Blue plasma energy crackled through his body.

He was aware of his surroundings; aware of the still burning propane fire, of the approaching emergency ve-hicles, of his internal systems trying to reboot.

He was vulnerable now. Unable to perform his as-signed duties.

Terminator hot-started many of his systems, shunting others, bringing as many battle and defensive subsystems

on line as quickly as possible before T-X came to finish

the job.

T-X turned in the direction that Connor had gone, but the pet van had already disappeared around the corner. A street map of the immediate area overlaid her head-up display. The probable paths that Connor could take in-

creased exponentially with each elapsed minute. She debated giving chase on foot—the T-X was ca-pable of speeds in excess of eighty kilometers per hour for brief periods of time before its power packs began to

show slight declines—or mounting a vehicular pursuit. The solution presented itself as the first two squad cars and ambulances turned the corner at the end of the block, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles right be-hind them.

T-X evaluated the developing situation and moved up the street toward the equipment rental company as her flesh re-formed over the plasma cannon.

The first police officers to arrive immediately began taping off the entire area. Some of the paramedics rushed into the clinic, while others tried to get in close to the rear of the Dodge pickup that was still totally involved in the intense fire.

Two LA. Fire Department pump units arrived, and their crews began setting up their equipment, while pairs of LAPD squad cars blocked off the intersections east and west.

People had materialized from somewhere, forming a small but growing crowd to watch what was happening.

T-X was just one person in the middle of the confusion. No one noticed her, not even the beefy fireman in all his gear who ran headlong into her, and bounced off as if he had run into a brick wall.

He picked himself up and ran off as T-X nonchalantly headed over to one of the unattended LAPD squad cars.

No one was watching as she lifted the hood, breaking the latch as if it were made of straw. She extended the data transfer point drill from her right index finger directly into the engine block.

In a matter of milliseconds she connected with the automobile's extremely crude but effective computers and reprogrammed them.

When she withdrew her finger and closed the hood, a blue glow lingered in the engine compartment.

in Kate's estimation, whatever John really wanted, he was at the very least a liar. She'd got that much from the few words he'd had with that creature she'd seen walking out of the middle of the flames.

God, this wasn't happening. She was still at home in bed having a bad dream. Any minute now Scott would nudge her shoulder. She would wake up suddenly and he would tell her that she was moaning in her sleep. She was having a nightmare.

Only she knew that she wasn't dreaming. She could still smell the fire. She could hear the man firing his shot-gun at someone.

And the sirens. They seemed to come from every di-rection. They were much too loud for this to be a dream. The pet van was bouncing all over the place, but Kate opened one of the emergency medical kits and found one of the clinic's cell phones. The battery was nearly dead, but she braced herself in a corner and managed to dial 911. It rang once.

A woman with a soothing voice answered. "This is nine-one-one. What is your emergency?" "I'm being kidnapped," Kate said, her voice low but urgent.

"Yes, ma'am. Can you tell me where you are?" "I don't know where. It's a Toyota pickup with a tan cup. It says Emery Animal Hospital on the side. I'm

locked in the back." The 911 operator didn't answer.

"Hello?" Kate said. "Hello?" She looked at the cell phone's display. The battery indicator showed discharged. "Shit," she said.

Connor figured that if he could make it to the freeway, he would have a good shot of getting out of the city. Out in the desert where he'd have some breathing room; time to figure out what the hell was going on.

But he wasn't familiar with this part of L.A., and he hadn't paid any attention earlier this morning when he'd caught the ride with the Mexicans. So he was driving blind. Sooner or later he'd have to cross one of the freeways though. It was an unavoidable fact of life in the city.

He just had to get that far.

Someone, or something, banged on the cab's rear window, and Connor nearly jumped out of his skin, almost smashing into a row of parked cars. They were still in a commercial section of the city: warehouses, hardware stores, appliance repair shops, air-conditioning shops.

He glanced over his shoulder. The window was painted black and it was protected by a heavy mesh screen. Whoever was back there banged on the window again.

Connor slid it open, and Kate was there.

"Let me out!" she screeched.

For a moment he didn't know what to say or do. He had no earthly idea how she had gotten into the back of

the truck. He thought she was dead, back in the animal clinic.

"What the—what are you doing back there?" "You tell me!" Kate shouted. "You got me into this!" She searched for words. Frustrated, angry, frightened. "That woman shot Betsy—the man, that man came out of the fire. Who are these people?"

"They're not people," Connor said. He felt truly sorry for her. She seemed like a nice person, although he couldn't remember her from West Hills. But that was a long time ago. A lot of things had happened since then. And somehow she had gotten into the middle of it. "Stop the car!"

"I can't," Connor said. "Not yet." "You can't keep me in here!" Kate screamed. She banged her tack. "Stop the car—please. Stop the car." "Be quiet—"

She exploded. "You bastard! Stop the car!" "Shut up," Connor shouted back. He reached over his shoulder to slide the partition shut, taking his eyes off the

street just for a second.

A black Mercedes C280 came around the corner as Connor missed the stop sign and plowed into its rear end, sending them both to the side of the street. Connor was shoved up against the steering wheel by the force of the impact, and Kate crashed into the front of the cap.

The accident wasn't serious, but the pet van had astalled nd Kate was shouting for help.

The Mercedes's driver, a middle-aged man wearing jeans and a light pullover, jumped out to see how bad his car was damaged.

Connor opened the partition. "Are you okay back there? Are you hurt?"

"Let me out! Now!"

Connor tried to restart the pet van when the Mercedes's driver suddenly looked up.

"Goddammit," the man shouted. He was pissed off.

Connor continued trying to start the pet van.

"Hey, you!" the Mercedes's driver shouted, and he started back.

c.12

The Valley

LAFD paramedic Logan Ballinger had expected to see more bodies when the call came in. The explosion was a big one, and the fire would probably burn for quite a while before it was brought under control. Propane-fed fires were always a bitch.

But so far the only body was the guy in black leathers who'd apparently been blown right through the window of a hardware store.

He crunched through the glass and debris and set his emergency response kit next to the victim who was unconscious and apparently not breathing.

His partner, Eric Kraus, was right behind him. Ballinger knelt down next to the man and touched a finger to the carotid artery in the side of his neck. There was no blood, or any obvious trauma, but the guy was as stiff as a board. "No pulse," he said.

Kraus moved to the victim's opposite side as he pulled on surgical gloves. He opened a plastic sterile wrap and pulled out the CPR mask. "Turn him over."

Ballinger took the guy's shoulder and tried to ease him gently over on his back, but the man wouldn't budge. He was stiff. Some kind of paralysis, or maybe even rigor mortis already. He could have been here before the explosion.

"I can't," Ballinger said. "This guy weighs a ton."

T-X closed the sharply sloping hood of the ambulance she'd reprogrammed, a blue haze in the engine compartment.

The animal clinic was fully engulfed in fire now. Paramedics were bringing out the body of the woman from the reception room on a gurney.

It was obvious that the police were agitated because of the gunshot wounds in the woman's chest

Soon they would try to completely seal off the area and question anyone they could round up. T-X wasn't concerned that such an action would stop her, but they might just slow her down.

Time just now was precious. With every moment that passed finding and eliminating John Connor became more and more problematic.

T-X evaluated her chances of finding Connor based on the continuously expanding time frame that gave him choices, and the likely pursuit of herself by the authorities once she moved out.

She walked over to another unattended LAPD radio car, opened its hood, and reprogrammed its computers,

including those for the fuel, ignition, power steering, and automatic braking systems.

Next, she reprogrammed one more of the half dozen ambulances that had arrived to rescue the expected victims of such a large fire.

Radio cars and ambulances could be stopped by any number of conventional means at the disposal of the various police units on-site.

She needed something larger. Something so large that she would not have the inconvenience of being stopped and having to change vehicles.

She scanned the ground transport units available in the immediate vicinity, her eyes lighting on the huge mobile crane parked behind the National Rentals security fence. The word champion was painted in blue on its yellow boom that was telescoped over the cab of its massive blue tractor.

T-X brought up a file on the machine. It was a hydraulic truck crane weighing more than fifty metric tons, capable of making eighty kilometers per hour, fast enough so that the police couldn't stop it.

She skirted the rows of emergency vehicles and briskly walked to a service gate in the security fence.

The police were busy with crowd control, and the

firemen were intent on battling the nasty blaze. No one noticed as T-X twisted the padlock off the gate and slipped inside. The shadows were deep in the storage yard, and it was not likely that she would be spotted and chal-lenged.

She trailed her fingers along the truck's enormous

front bumper, her head-up display overlaid with the electronic and mechanical schematics for the truck as well as the crane's separate control. The truck was driven as a normal semi from the front cab. But the crane's functions were controlled from a computerized console at the rear.

She went around to the back, climbed up to the control platform, and for a few milliseconds studied the pedals, levers, and indicators, which she optically registered as a match with her head-up display.

She drilled a small hole directly into the control panel, and moments later transferred a stream of data from her system into the crane's computer.

When she withdrew her data transfer probe, a soft blue haze played in and around the crane's controls like a delicate fog backlit by a blue neon sign.

The sky was beginning to get light with the dawn as T-X climbed down from the crane, walked to the front of the cab, and climbed up behind the wheel of the tractor.

She studied the driving controls, which, except for the transmission levers, were not much different from those of a police vehicle.

She brought up twin overlays in her head-up display. To the left she studied a street map, and to the right were four rows of symbols. Two controlled the pair of ambulances she had reprogrammed, and two the pair of police cars. From this point she was in ultra-high frequency contact with each of the vehicles via a downlink with a military communications satellite 22,500 miles out in a

geosynchronous orbit over the Pacific Ocean that already was coming under Skynet control.

She drilled into the truck's steering column next to the ignition switch, transferred a few hundred bytes of data, and the truck's engine roared to life.

Simultaneously, the engines in the two ambulances and two police cars revved up.

Terminator's eyes suddenly opened and he looked up at a very startled Logan Ballinger, who reared back as did his partner, Eric Kraus.

The man was dead. Now he was alive. They'd heard about stuff like this, but they'd never seen it.

"I must go," Terminator said. He sat up, straightened his sunglasses, got to his feet, and strode out of the hard-ware store, leaving the two paramedics with their mouths banging open.

On the street, Terminator picked up the shotgun from where he'd dropped it, and optically catalogued the cur-rent situation.

Police and fire units were busy at work, as were paramedics emerging from the clinic with sick and injured animals in their arms.

A crowd had gathered beyond the police barriers, but there was no sign of either John Connor and Kate Brew-ster, or of the T-X.

More sirens were converging on the scene as Ter-

minator processed the available data overlaid with probable scenarios and suggested courses of action.

John Connor and Kate Brewster were gone. The T-X would pursue them. It was only a matter of finding one or the other.

Which suddenly happened.

Two police cars and two ambulances roared to life and peeled out in the same direction Connor had gone with the pet van. But no one was driving.

Cops and firemen scattered out of the way.

A police officer ran up to one of the squad cars, and made a desperate grab for the steering wheel, but he was thrown dear as the unit burned rubber accelerating.

Terminator's onboard electronic emissions detector immediately pinpointed downlink signals to the four emergency vehicles, but he was not capable of tracking the source to the specific transmitting satellite.

A powerful diesel engine roared to life, and Terminator turned in time to see the huge Champion crane leap forward, crashing through the chain-link fence.

It turned ponderously in the same direction as the police units and ambulances had gone, emergency personnel scrambling to get out of its way.

As it accelerated up the street, Terminator caught a brief glimpse of the T-X behind the wheel. He deduced from available information that she had sent the radio cars and ambulances out as scouts to track John Connor and Kate Brewster.

He would follow the T-X.

Terminator stepped out into the middle of the street

as a motorcycle cop came around the corner, followed by another fire engine.

The cop tried to avoid a collision, but Terminator gabbed the bike's handlebars and swung it around like a

toy.

"I'll drive," he said as the cop skidded across the street on his back.

The motorcycle was an Indian, with a windscreen and wind deflector. Capable of speeds in excess of 130 miles per hour, it would do the job.

In one smooth motion Terminator stashed his shot- gun in the saddle rack, hopped aboard, and hammered the throttle to its stop as he downshifted into second.

The motorcycle took off as if it were shot from a cannon as the mobile crane, still gathering speed, lum-bered around the corner at the end of the block.

c.13

Valley

In the back of the pet van Kate was desperately trying to pry open the rear door, but the latch was jammed.

They'd hit something and Connor had stopped. She could hear a man shouting. He sounded very angry.

"You did something to the doors," she screamed at

Connor. "I can't get the back open."

The man said something else she couldn't quite make

out. But it sounded like he was closer than before. Right in front of the van.

"Help!" Kate shouted. "Let me out of here. Help!"

"What's going on?" the man shouted, and Kate could

hear him plainly now. He was just a few feet away. "What are you doing?" he demanded.

"I'm being kidnapped," Kate screamed. "Call the po-

lice. Call nine-one-one."

The man was right next to the driver's side. "What?

Who's there?"

"Help me!"

Connor was trying to start the pickup truck's engine but it didn't want to catch.

"Where do you think you're going?" the Mercedes's driver yelled. "Hey! I'm talking to you! Get out of there!"

"Help! Let me out of here," Kate cried. "For God's sake, someone please help me."

"What's going on in there?" the Mercedes's driver demanded. He thumped the side of the van. "What are you doing?"

The pet van's engine suddenly roared into life. Connor threw it into reverse and the pickup careened away from the Mercedes.

"Hey!" the driver shouted. "Get back here!"

Kate was thrown against the rear door as Connor dropped the pickup into drive and jammed the gas pedal to the floor.

"Oh, God," Kate cried weakly. It was never going to end. "Oh, God—help me."

In Connor's estimation they had spent way too much time screwing around at the accident scene. Unless he missed his guess, that machine at the clinic was something new, and Terminator wasn't going to have an easy time with it.

One thing he was absolutely sure of, however, was that the new cyborg would not stop coming after him until he was dead, or it was destroyed.

He had been down this path before. There were no other options.

The only question in his mind was how the hell the

new machine, and Terminator, had traced him to the animal clinic. That part wasn't making any sense to him.

Kate pounded on the rear window. "You can't do this to me!" she raged. "Pull over and let me out. Now!"

Connor reached over his shoulder and slid the window open. "I can't let you out. You're just going to have to trust me."

"Yeah, right," Kate said. She was totally frazzled, at her wits' end, frightened.

Traffic was starting to pick up with delivery trucks and workmen making their sleepy way to early shifts. Connor had to dodge in and around the slower traffic, while all the while he kept checking his rearview mirror. At any moment he expected to see something behind him. The cyborg would be coming. He would be willing to bet money on it.

A big ball of flame and black smoke rose in the sky around the corner a couple of blocks behind him, and Connor's gut tightened. It was happening faster than he'd

feared it would.

Suddenly he could hear sirens. He glanced in his rear-view mirror again in time to see a pair of black-and-whites screeching around the corner, lights flashing. If the cyborg caught up with him and Kate, it would not hesitate to kill them on the spot. But if they were stopped by the cops, arrested and tossed in a holding cell, the end result would be the same. The machine would

track them down and kill them.

"That's the cops," Kate shouted over his right shoul-der. "Now you'll have to pull over."

"Yeah, first chance I get," Connor said. He pulled around a slow-moving UPS truck and jammed the gas pedal to the floor.

They were still in a commercial section of the city, lots of warehouses, big buildings, shops, and parts stores.

"What? You think you can get away from them? Are you crazy?"

The first of the two cop cars was right on Connor's tail. It pulled up beside him, and he glanced over, nearly losing control of the pet van and running it up onto the curb.

No one was driving the squad car. There was no one behind the wheel. No one in the passenger seat, or in the rear. The car was driving itself.

The black-and-white swerved right, slamming into the side of the pet van. Connor had just time enough to lean out of the way as part of the squad car's door entered the pet van's cab. He hauled the pickup truck hard to the right, just missing a pair of parked cars, bumped over the curb and up onto the sidewalk, the van's shocks bottoming out with a bone-jarring bang.

The second squad car roared up on the sidewalk behind him, smashing into his right rear fender, metal crunching, glass and plastic breaking.

Connor had just a split second to see that no one was driving this cop car either, before he skidded over the curb and back out onto the street The pet van's left front tire dug in, nearly causing them to flip over, before he regained control.

This was nuts. But he knew damned well it was some-

thing that the new machine was somehow orchestrating. He'd seen this kind of weird shit before.

Something else crashed into the rear of the pet van, this time one of a pair of ambulances, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Connor didn't have to look to know that neither of them had a driver behind the wheel.

He just hoped that Kate was somehow okay in the back.

Abruptly the ambulances dropped back Connor hauled the pet van around a corner and stomped on the gas pedal.

"Hold on back there," he shouted to Kate.

Terminator hung a few meters off the Champion crane's left rear bumper. The ponderous machine thundered like an express train down city streets, taking out cars, trucks, and anything else in its path.

Moments ago the T-X had crushed a car, its gas tank igniting with a big ball of flame and black smoke. Terminator barely avoided the fireball.

He could see the T-X's reflection in the broad driver's side mirror. She turned and spotted him, their eyes locking for an instant. Terminator registered an extremely brief dilation of the T-X's pupils, indicating a mild form of what could be classified as AI surprise.

The T-X had expected that he had been destroyed in front of the animal clinic.

It was a mistake. The T-X was not infallible after all.

The pair of driverless ambulances dropped back in front of the crane, like a shark's remora, and then slid back along either side of the big machine.

Suddenly the Champion's huge boom lifted off its cradle and began to extend, while rotating to the left.

The ambulances dropped back on either side of Terminator, then swerved inward, trying to crush him between them.

At the last possible moment, Terminator slammed on the bike's front brake. The rear tire lifted high off the pavement, but the Indian stopped nearly in its tracks, just managing to clear the rear bumpers of the two ambulances as they crashed together.

The crane's boom continued to extend and swing around, taking out electric wires and transformers above the street in showers of sparks.

Terminator grabbed his shotgun. When the ambulances separated, he hammered the throttle, pulling a wheelie. He roared between them, firing over his left shoulder at the nearest ambulance, taking out one of its front tires.

It dropped back, but did not drop out

The Champion crane surged forward.

Behind T-X was the T-850 that Skynet expected the human resistance would send back, along with the two ambulances that were working the problem.

She was helping that element by using the extended

boom to lay down a continuous debris path that might slow the obsolete model warrior/cyborg.

Ahead of her was the target, John Connor. His van was damaged, and she could sense the heat signature of an overworked engine that was leaking lubricating oil from a rear seal in the aft section of the main mass of the block.

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

metal was blasted from inside, and the T-X burst up

through the blue-tinged opening, moving like some pred-

atory creature out of its lair ready for a battle to the death.

Terminator was waiting. He swung the fire axe with every kilo of his T-850 chassis's strength at the cyborg's skull as she rose up out of the cab.

The axe blade bit into the first layers of the T-X's

cranial case, but immediately struck the malleable ceramic/titanium armor. The axe handle shattered, and although no vital circuits had been damaged, the force of the blow was enough to sweep the T-X off the roof of the crane, and down between the two vehicles locked together as they barreled down the street.

Terminator dropped down into the Champion's cab. The T-X had taken control of the throttle, so despite the unstable condition of the damaged fire truck and the shredded wheels on the left side of the crane, they were actually gaining on the pet van, which was very close now.

He angled the rearview mirror down so he could see what was going on between the fire truck and crane. The T-X was pulling herself up from one of the stabilizers, her plasma cannon charging again.

Time was running short. If the T-X incapacitated him again the way she had in front of the animal clinic, she would be free to destroy John Connor and Katherine Brewster.

He could not allow that to happen.

He was about to steer the crane into the brick wall of a building when his optical system spotted road hazard sawhorses in the middle of the street about fifty meters ahead. Traffic was meant to maneuver around some kind of an obstacle.

He enhanced his optical circuits momentarily. The obstacle was an open manhole. The steel cover was lying to one side.

Connor, behind the squad car, did not spot the barricades in time to avoid them. But he did manage to miss

the open manhole by inches. The pet van fishtailed nearly out of control down the street.

The cop car spun out and stalled at the same time Terminator hauled the Champion's steering wheel hard right, then left, then right again.

The big hook, bouncing and skipping up the street at the end of the extended boom, swung left and then right like a pendulum. It just caught the edge of the open manhole and dropped down inside the tunnel, the thick steel cables unreeling like a fishing line that had snagged a whale.

Terminator pulled himself back up on the roof of the cab as the hook caught on something solid.

The cable suddenly went taut as Terminator leaped from the Champion crane onto the roof of the pet van.

He swung himself over the side through the open

driver's door, shoving Connor aside.

"Hold on," he said, and he stamped the gas pedal to

the floor.

He swung around the cop car and glanced in the rear-view mirror in time to see the entire tangled mass of the Champion crane and the LAFD truck, between which T-X was preparing to take her shot, stop dead in the street as the front of the boom dug into the pavement.

The back of the wreck shot straight up into the air,

the eighty or ninety combined tons of metal and glass

and plastic coming down like an earth-shattering meteor

on the squad car, instantly flattening it. The entire mass

erupted in a huge ball of fire, the blast shattering windows

along the entire city block.

North of Los Angeles

Terminator divided his primary action circuits between driving and checking his rearview mirror and electronic emissions detectors for any signs that they were being followed.

He wanted to get out of the city as soon as possible, but not via the main highways or the more heavily traveled county roads. In the condition the pet van was in they would attract too much attention. They did not have time for diversions.

He also understood that the T-X had not been de-stroyed in the crash. That chassis was extremely battle-hardened. It would probably take more than the crash of even something as large as the Champion crane with its attendant explosion and fire to destroy the cyborg.

Which meant that T-X would continue to follow them, acting on her prime directive, that of assassinating John Connor and Katherine Brewster.

But there was even more at stake than just their lives.

They were finally out of the industrial areas of the

city, and they got on a two-lane highway that led up into the hills.

Safe, Terminator thought. He was not able to detect anyone behind them, nor was he picking up the satellite downlink signals that the T-X had used to control the emergency vehicles that had nearly cost Connor and Kate their lives.

Safe, Terminator thought again. But only temporarily.

He turned to look at John Connor, who'd been staring at him since their narrow escape. He reached out and gently touched Connor's face, raising one eyelid and then the other, his optical sensors set on magnify.

"No sign of brain trauma," Terminator said.

Connor pulled his head away. "Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks."

Terminator glanced at the highway. Traffic was slowly starting to pick up as people headed for work. It was a Saturday, otherwise there would be many more vehicles on the road.

Originally, the T-800 series warrior/cyborgs had been programmed to do battle primarily with other robotic units, and human soldiers from enemy states. After Judgment Day, Skynet reprogrammed most of them to hunt and kill any and all humans. His particular unit had been upgraded to a T-850 and programmed to act as a human infiltration model with one mission: preserve the lives of John Connor and Katherine Brewster.

That was his prime directive.

He neither liked nor disliked humans, Connor included. But he was programmed to protect them, and to

understand their motivations well enough to help predict how they might act under any given set of circumstances.

Humans were, in his estimation, highly irrational organisms. Their directives were continually being influenced, most often for the worse, by emotional considerations: love, hate, envy, jealousy, fear. And many others. In Terminator's main memory he had access to a file with more than one thousand different emotional elements that modified human behavior. And that, his file cautioned, was only a partial list.

Compounding the difficulty was the phenomenon of multitasking; humans were almost always motivated by more than one emotion. Sometimes by a multitude of them, each subtly acting upon the others in an endless series of combinations.

Starting with the one thousand elements in Terminator's files, he could come up with something in excess of 8 X 109, or eight billion, combinations.

It was no wonder, he continued in the evaluation process, that even for humans the job of understanding each other was often next to impossible.

"Do you even remember me?" Connor asked.

Terminator glanced at him, but made no reply.

"Sarah Connor? Blowing up Cyberdyne? 'Hasta la vista, baby.' Ring any bells?"

"That was an old model T-800," Terminator said, which was technically true. That had been a different chassis.

Connor looked away momentarily, and shook his head. It seemed as if he felt the weight of the world on

his shoulders. "So, what—?" he asked. He looked at Terminator. "You guys come off an assembly line, or something?"

"Or something. I'm a new model. A T-850."

Connor was less disappointed than he was bemused. "Oh, man. I gotta teach you everything all over again."

Terminator looked over his shoulder through the dividing window. "Katherine Brewster. Have you sustained injury?"

Kate came to the screen. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth where she'd bitten her lip. Her hair was a mess, and the rear of the pet van was in complete disarray. She looked as if she'd been through the spin cycle of a washing machine.

"Drop dead, asshole," she told him.

Terminator closed the window. "I am unable to comply," he said.

The Valley

Sirens converged, it seemed, from all over the city of Los Angeles on the mangled, burning wreckage of the National Rentals' Champion crane, the LAFD hook and ladder unit, and the LAPD squad car.

People were already gathering closer to the scene of the accident, drawn to the flames like moths.

Someone had to have been killed. No one could have survived. There was wreckage strewn along a five-block area. There had to be bodies, though a few of the spec-

tators had witnessed what they thought was a man leaping from the crane just before it crashed. But nobody was going to believe that.

A high-pitched whine came from deep inside the tangled mass of metal. People stepped back. There was no telling what dangerous chemicals were in there.

At the base of the fire truck's chassis a gap appeared that widened as if someone or something was opening a tent flap.

T-X, her left hand formed into a diamond-toothed metal saw, stepped out of the wreckage. She glanced with indifference at the small crowd, then walked away, her hand morphing back into human form, her skin and clothing in perfect condition. Not so much as a strand of hair out of place.

No one tried to stop her, or even talk to her.

Around the corner in the next block, she hot-wired a blue Saturn and headed back into the city. Her head-up display was overlaid with a street map on which was pinpointed the home address of Katherine Brewster.

c.16

The Foothills

The Toyota's temperature gauge hovered just below the red mark and the needle on the gas gauge bounced half- way between 1/4 and E.

Terminator's head-up display showed a map of the

countryside in the hills above Los Angeles. Most highways

eventually led over the mountains down into the Mojave

Desert. He had a destination, but there was little value in

[informing either John Connor or Katherine Brewster at

this time.

They would be told what they needed to know, when they needed to know it.

Something crashed in the back. Connor turned and looked through the dividing window. Kate was kicking at the back door, trying to force it off its hinges, or to break free whatever was holding it shut.

He'd almost forgotten about her. He turned back to Terminator. "Get off the highway as soon as you can. We have to let her out"

Terminator glanced at him. "Negative. Katherine Brewster must be protected."

"Why—?"

A curl of acrid smoke rose from Terminator's chest. He looked at it. His internal diagnostic programs had warned him that one of his fuel cells was going critical. But the rate of failure was evidently accelerating. "I require a cutting tool," he said.

Connor looked doubtfully at the smoke, but he handed Terminator his Gerber from his belt pouch. "I thought I was the one they're after."

Terminator opened the utility tool and studied the longest blade for a moment. "You could not be located, so a T-X was sent back through time to eliminate others who could become enemies of Skynet. Your lieutenants."

Connor glanced at Kate in the back. She was huddled now in the far corner by the door, her knees up to her chin, a sullen look on her round, pretty face.

"So, she's going to be in the resistance—" he started. But that didn't make any sense. Judgment Day had never come. "But if—No, no." He looked at Terminator, trying to gauge the cyborg's meaning by the look on his face. Which was futile.

Terminator waited patiently for Connor to work it out.

"You shouldn't even exist. We took out Cyberdyne over ten years ago."

"Cyberdyne backed up its research data," Terminator explained. "They saved it off-site. When the company went bankrupt in 1993, Cyber Research Systems acquired the assets and developed the technology in secret."

"But we stopped Judgment Day," Connor insisted. He'd lived with that knowledge for the past twelve years.

"You only postponed it. Judgment Day is inevitable."

Connor sat back, defeated. There was no defense against this kind of circular logic. As he'd been from the beginning, he was nothing more than a pawn between the machines and humans in some future war. And time travel made anything possible.

Or, perhaps, impossible.

"Take the wheel," Terminator ordered.

Connor snapped out of his thoughts and he grabbed the steering wheel as Terminator, his foot still on the gas pedal, opened his jacket and lifted his T-shirt, totally indifferent to the fact that they were traveling sixty miles per hour down the highway.

The Toyota swerved to the right, nearly down into a ditch before Connor got it back up on the pavement and under control.

The flesh on the left side of Terminator's chest was charred black, an area about the size of a package of cigarettes completely burned away, exposing his metal chassis.

With the Gerber blade, Terminator cut a long curving incision around the burned skin and muscle. There was no blood, and Terminator felt no pain. The skin was dur-aplast, a form of pliant plastic.

Connor had seen this kind of weirdness before, but he was still amazed. "What are you doing?"

"I am powered by two hydrogen fuel cells," Termi-

nator said. He cut the flap of tissue free and casually tossed it out the door. "The primary cell has been damaged by the plasma cannon."

"Plasma cannon?" Connor said. The last time Skynet had sent a cyborg back to kill him, it hadn't been equipped with anything like that "So this thing is worse than a T-1000?"

Terminator folded the knife blade and opened the prying tool that he used to release his chest plate. Next, he swung open a small panel that was just beneath the most severely burned area of flesh to expose complicated circuitry and a maze of mechanical works.

"That model was discontinued in 2029. The f-X is designed for extreme combat, driven by a plasma reactor and equipped with onboard weapons. It's a far more effective killing machine."

He opened the Gerber's pliers and got to work inside his chest.

"Okay, so she's like a tank with liquid metal skin," Connor said, and even he was having trouble believing what he was saying. "She can't be melted down?"

Terminator shook his head. It was an oddly human gesture, out of place with his chest open exposing the electromechanical innards. "The battle chassis is heavily armored, hardened to withstand external attack."

Connor shrugged. "You'll find a way to destroy her," he said, because it was his only hope for survival.

"Unlikely," Terminator replied, without looking up from his work. "I am an obsolete design. The T-X is faster,

more powerful, more intelligent. Its arsenal includes nanotechnological transjectors."

"Meaning?" Connor asked.

Terminator glanced at Connor. "It can control other machines."

Connor nodded after a moment. He'd seen her handiwork with the police cars and ambulances. "Great," he muttered.

Terminator had gotten down to the pair of fuel cells in his chest. One of them smoked and sizzled. It was leaking something that was starting to react, like an acid, with bis other circuitry, and a residual blue plasma energy still shifted and rippled like an aurora around the unit.

"My presence in this time has been anticipated. The T-X is designed to terminate other cybernetic organisms."

"So, she's an anti-terminator terminator," Connor said, working it out. He shook his head again. This was getting worse, much worse by the minute. "You've got to be shitting me," he mumbled.

"No," Terminator replied. "I am not shitting you."

He moved a pair of contacts, rerouting the last of his power circuits, then looked up for a moment as the circuitry displayed in his head-up unit confirmed that he had successfully isolated the damaged power cell.

Terminator handed the tool back to Connor, gingerly unplugged the power cell, and carefully removed it from his chest. It was about the size of a small book, and it looked battered, but not particularly dangerous.

With a snap of his wrist, Terminator threw the power

cell out into a sloping field of scrub brush and boulders. It arched one hundred feet into the morning sky, hanging at apogee for a long moment before it came down, a thousand feet off the highway.

When it hit the ground it exploded with a tremendous flash-bang. The shock wave hammered off the nearby foothills and slammed into the pet van, nearly shoving it off the road. Terminator had to help hang the Toyota back under control.

"When ruptured, the fuel cells become unstable," he said.

He pulled down his T-shirt and zippered his jacket to hide the surgery as Connor glanced back at the sizable mushroom cloud rising out of the field.

An hour later they were over the foothills and headed down toward the desert, the Toyota's gas gauge on empty, wisps of steam coming from under the hood.

A large gas station-truck stop-convenience store was nestled up against a low hump in the desert.

"We must stop here for fuel and coolant fluid," Terminator said. "Do you require supplies?"

"Something to eat, maybe some water, would be okay," Connor said. "Where are you taking us?"

Terminator ignored the question. He slowed down and pulled into the gas station just as the Toyota's engine began to buck and stall, finally out of gas. He coasted to a stop at one of the pumps, got out, and went into the

store, leaving Connor to fill it up, check the oil, and get some water into the radiator.

No one was inside the station except for the cashier behind the counter. He was a teenager, wearing a striped cowboy shirt and a baseball cap. He could see the battered condition of the pet van, and the still obvious injuries to Terminator's face, though much of the skin had reformed, hiding the metal cranial case. It made him nervous.

Terminator took a moment to scan the contents of the store, spread down four aisles with rows of coolers along the back wall. He picked up a basket and walked

up and down the aisles, methodically selecting various food items including beef jerky for protein, potato chips for carbohydrates, cookies, ice cream bars, and Twinkies for sugar, and bottled water for hydration.

The cashier was fiddling with a small television set behind the counter, but every channel he switched to displayed the same message: please stand by.

He had taped a hand-lettered sign in front of the cash register. no credit cards—computers down.

"Man, this is crazy," the kid said, switching to another

channel that showed the same please stand by message, "It's been like this for hours. Every goddamned station."

Terminator stopped at a rack of sunglasses, studied

the styles for a second, and then picked a pair of Sama wrparounds and put them on.

He turned and headed for the door.

The cashier looked up from the television set. "Hey,

man, you gonna pay for that?"

Terminator ignored him.

"Hey," the cashier shouted.

Terminator pulled up short, turned to the kid, then stuck out the palm of his hand, just like the stripper had done to him in the desert roadhouse. "Talk to the hand."

The cashier shrank back, not sure what to do, and Terminator turned and walked out the door.

Connor was just finishing with the water in the radiator. He set the can aside and closed the hood.

Terminator unbent the lug wrench locking the pet van's back door with one hand and pulled it open.

Kate leaped out past him. "Help!" she screamed. "Help me!"

Terminator wrapped his free arm around her waist before she took two steps and pulled her back.

Kate suddenly attacked him like a madwoman, kneeing him in the groin with every ounce of her strength, chopping his windpipe, driving her thumbs under his sunglasses deep into the sockets of his eyes.

Terminator was not affected. His diagnostic circuits were clear of any serious damage indicators.

He gently pried her away and shoved her back into the pet van. He adjusted his sunglasses, which had been knocked askew, then placed the basket of groceries in back with her.

Connor, who had watched everything, spotted the cashier through the window. The kid was on the phone. Probably calling for help.

"I think we should go," he said.

Terminator nodded indifferently, and he went around

to the driver's side as Connor climbed in back with Kate and closed the door.

Kate was huddled again in the corner, her knees up to her chin. She braced herself as the pet van took off and swerved sharply back out onto the highway.

Connor didn't know how he felt about her now that he knew she would become an important part of the human resistance. But she sure could fight He had to grin.

"You've got some good moves on you," he told her. A flash of something came to him. "I remember now. You were like an army brat or something, right?"

Kate didn't look at him. He pushed the basket of food over to her. "Ice cream?" he suggested.

She kicked the basket away, scattering the contents. Connor held up his hands and shrugged. "Okay," he said in an effort to be conciliatory.

"You're kidnapping me," she said after a few moments.

"Look, I—"

"God, you were always a delinquent," Kate said. It was as if a dam had broken inside her. The words came put in an angry rush. "And look at you now. Sitting there like the bad boy thing still works." She gave him an ex-tremely critical once-over. "What are you, some kind of a gang member? A drug dealer?" She was disgusted. Her loathing dripped from her tongue and attitude like venom. "How do you live with yourself?" she asked.

Connor shook his head, another smile coming to his

lips. How was he supposed to tell her the real story when

he had trouble believing it himself?

Kate's nostrils flared. She thought he was laughing at her. "What?" she demanded.

Connor rapped on the divider window, and Terminator slid it open. "Tell her who I am," Connor said.

"John Connor is the leader of the worldwide resistance and the last best hope of mankind."

Kate shook her head again. was painfully obvious that she thought they were raving lunatics, probably high on something. "Right," she said. "And him?" She nodded toward Terminator.

"He's a robot from the future. Living tissue over a metal skeleton. Sent back in time to—"

Kate sat back morosely. She was tired of the game. "Go to hell."

"He doesn't mean you any harm," Connor assured her, knowing how this must sound.

Kate held up her left hand, showing him her engagement diamond. "I have a fiance. He's going to be looking for me."

Connor sat back too, suddenly morose. His mood matched hers. If Terminator was right about the abilities of the T-X, they didn't stand much of a chance.

Kate watched him. "I... What is it you want?."

Connor lowered his eyes. "I don't know," he answered. And it was the truth. He didn't know what he really wanted. He looked up after a beat. How to tell her? What words? "I guess... Imagine if you know you were going to do something important with your life. Something amazing. Maybe the most important thing anyone's ever done."

He had her attention. She looked at him in a slightly different light, though it was clear that she didn't understand what he was trying to say. But she was beginning to believe his sincerity.

"But there's a catch. Something terrible has to happen. You couldn't live with yourself if you didn't try to stop it. But if you do... The rest of your life is pointless."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Kate asked.

"I mean someone normal. Someone sane—" He wanted her to understand. "It's just that... The life you know, all the stuff you take for granted, it's not going to last."

She still wasn't getting it. Connor could see the skepticism and confusion in her pretty eyes. And there was something else. Something in the way she held herself. Something in the way that she was looking at him at that moment that seemed familiar. It was something she'd said to him earlier.

"Wait. Back at the clinic. Why did you say, 'Mike Kripke's basement'?"

Kate didn't answer.

Connor was suddenly remembering. "Kripke's house. That's where the kids used to make out." He was trying to bring it all back. "So you and me. Did we—?"

Kate looked away, more uncomfortable now than confused.

"Holy shit—we did!" Connor said. "We made out in Kripke's basement. I can't believe you remembered."

Still Kate held her silence, but a slight color had come to her neck.

"I guess I must've made quite an impression," Connor said.

Kate turned on him. "Gimme a break. I only remembered because the next day you were in the news."

Suddenly the impossibility of the coincidence dropped into place for Connor. He glanced through the mesh at Terminator, then back at Kate.

"You and I hooked up the day before I first met him? And then again now, twelve~years later?"

"Right," Kate said sarcastically. "We were supposed to meet. Fate, right?" She shook her head. "Coincidence."

But it wasn't coincidence and Connor knew it "Yeah," he said to appease her, nothing more. He glanced at the back of Terminator's head. "What was going on?"

The Valley

The bedroom was still dark because the shades were drawn. Kate's nightshirt lay on the floor where she'd tossed it a few hours ago, and her fiance", Scott Peterson, was still asleep in the double bed.

T-X stood in the doorway, cataloguing the homey scene. Kate had not returned yet, but she would have to come back here sooner or later.

Either that or someone would come looking for her. She was the key to finding John Connor again. Her fiance was expendable.

T-X moved silently across the room and sat down on

Kate's side of the bed. She picked a framed photo off the nightstand and studied it. It was Katherine Brewster at her graduation. Robert Brewster stood beside her. Smiling. The proud father.

Scott stirred on the bed. T-X put the photo back as Scott sat up. "Hon? You just get in?"

T-X swiveled her torso 180 degrees to face Scott, who stared at her with incomprehension. She reached over with one hand, almost gently caressing the man's face, before she lowered her hand, thrust it deep into his chest, and destroyed his heart before he could utter a sound.

He fell back in a bloody heap.

T-X went to the bathroom where she fastidiously washed the blood from her hand as the front doorbell rang.

She cocked her head, her sensors picking up electronic emissions from a plain sedan parked on the street. Police frequency emissions.

She glanced at Scott's body, then headed to the living room, her body thickening, her clothing melting away and changing so that by the time she opened the front door she had assumed the infiltration mode of Scott Peterson, including the boxer shorts and T-shirt he wore for bed.

Two men stood in the corridor; one a bald white man, the other a black man with short dark hair. They were dressed in cheap suits and ties.

They held out their gold shields. "Detective Martinez, LAPD," the one introduced himself. "We're looking for Katherine Brewster. Is she here?"

T-X, as Scott Peterson, shook his head.

The detective consulted his notebook. "You're her fi-anceScott Peterson?"

T-X nodded.

"A few hours ago there was an incident at the veterinary hospital where she works. We're concerned something might have happened to her."

"Where is she?" T-X asked without inflection, as if the Scott character were in shock.

"Well, we got a report from a gas station attendant out toward Victorville about a possible kidnapping. Might be related."

T-X nodded his head. "I can help you find her."

The two detectives glanced at each other and nodded. "Sure. Any idea where she might have gone?"

17

Valley of Peace Cemetery

In the back of the pet van John Connor watched through the dividing window over Terminator's shoulder.

He and Kate had finally eaten something and had drunk some water, but she refused to say anything else to him. He almost hated to turn his back on her. She looked as if she were on the verge of going berserk again. There was no telling what she was capable of doing.

Connor hadn't been able to figure out where they were going, although he knew that the desert was off to the east and LA. back the other way. But now they were in an area of grass and tree-covered rolling hills, the occasional long driveway up to a house in the distance, or a small horse ranch nestled against a steeper hill. Pleasant countryside. He figured that a lot of people escaping from the daily grind in Los Angeles came out here.

Terminator drove at a steady sixty miles per hour, on the straight stretches or on the curves, it didn't seem to matter to him.

They were off the main highway, on a blacktopped secondary road that suddenly came around a hill to a

broad vista of trees, grassy slopes, and narrow roads that wound their way in and among headstones, classical statues, small family plots enclosed by low iron picket fences, and mausoleums of all sizes, styles, and ornateness.

No one seemed to be here this morning, except for a hearse and a Cadillac limousine parked at the base of a hill in the distance. At the top was a Gothic stone building that was an entrance to a crypt. But there didn't seem to be any people nearby. Nor were there any signs that caretakers were at work this early.

Without slowing down, Terminator made the sharp turn onto the entrance road, flashed past a sign that read valley of peace cemetery, and crashed straight through a tall iron gate, knocking it half off its hinges.

He drove directly across the cemetery, following the narrow roads, finally slowing down and coming to a halt near where the hearse and the limousine were parked.

The morning was cool and beautiful out here, the sun very bright in a crystal clear sky. i

Terminator opened the rear door. Connor jumped out first, blinking in the brightness. He turned and offered his hand to Kate, but she batted it away and jumped down on her own.

"Come with me," Terminator said. He turned and strode up the hill to the crypt entrance that was flanked by tall stained-glass windows showing angels ascending to heaven. Connor almost expected to hear organ music playing softly.

The heavy bronze doors were locked, but Terminator

simply pulled them open as if they had been held in place by straw.

Inside, he led them down a flight of stairs into the crypt Coffins were set behind marble slabs in tombs that were stacked five high. The morning light was diffused and colored by the windows, lending the place the solemn air it was supposed to have.

Connor suddenly had an uneasy feeling that he knew who was buried here, but he couldn't stop himself from seeing with his own eyes.

Terminator stopped in front of one of the tombs near the center of the crypt.

Connor pulled up short, hesitating, as he saw what was chiseled in the marble cover of the tomb. He'd never been here before. He didn't even know about this place.

He took a few steps closer, Kate just behind him. The inscription read sarah connorሗ-1997—no fate

BUT WHAT WE MAKE.

Kate was obviously confused. Nothing that had hap- pened to her this morning made any sense. She looked from the inscription on the tomb to Terminator and then to Connor.

"Your mother?" she asked.

"I never knew where she was buried," he said, his voice soft but filled with emotion. "I hit the road the day she died." He looked at Terminator. "Why did you bring

me here?"

Terminator didn't answer. Without warning he slammed

his fist through the marble slab, shattering it into a mil-

lion pieces, sending chunks flying everywhere, dust rising from the pulverized stone.

Connor couldn't believe what was happening. He tried to muscle the cyborg aside, but it was like ramming his shoulder into a brick wall. "No! What are you doing?"

Terminator shoved him away, reached into the tomb, and pulled out the polished stainless-steel coffin with one hand as if it were a toy. He slammed it on the floor, popped the locking bolts out of their seats, and threw open the lid.

Connor was speechless. He didn't know exactly what he expected to see after all these years; his mother's skeleton, probably. But he wasn't expecting to find a steel coffin completely crammed with weapons and loads. A .30-caliber machine gun, several Russian-made AK-47 assault rifles, 9mm Glock pistols, a bandolier of H&W stun grenades that U.S. Special Forces used, a LAW antitank rocket, a 40mm Mk-19 grenade launcher with its loads, small bricks of C-4 plastic explosive, and a lot of other weapons, all of which Connor knew how to use.

"Sarah Connor was cremated in Mexico," Terminator explained. "Her friends scattered her ashes in the sea. They stored these weapons in accordance with her will."

Connor's eyes were drawn away from the weapons to a larger piece of the marble tomb on which the name connor was legible. So many years wasted. So many lives lost. So much damage and heartache.

Now this.

"What happened to her?" Kate asked at Connor's shoulder.

"Leukemia."

"I'm sorry," she said, staring at the weapons.

Terminator was going through them, checking to see what had been left behind, in what condition everything was, and discarding some of the things.

"We were living down in Baja when she was diagnosed," Connor said, not looking up. He was still in his own thoughts. Still back in Mexico with his mother. "They gave her only six months, but she fought for three years." He lowered his eyes. "Long enough to make sure."

"Make sure?" Kate prompted.

"That the world didn't end," he said. His life for the past twelve years had been surreal. But these past four hours had been the worst " 'Every day after this one is a gift,' she told me. 'We made it, we're free.' But I never really believed it." He glanced at the weapons. "I guess die didn't either."

He and Terminator looked at each other.