Rise of the Machines

Terminator stepped to the left, blocking her exit.

She pointed the pistol at his face. "Out of my way!" The gun trembled in her grip.

"My mission is to protect you," Terminator told her

evenly. He took a step toward her and she backed up, keeping the gun trained on him.

"That's enough," she warned. She took another step back and was at the wall. There was nowhere to go. She tightened her grip on the gun and steadied her aim. "Move, or 111 do it. I swear I will. I'll shoot you!"

Connor hadn't moved. "Go ahead," he told her. "See what happens."

Kate was distracted by what Connor was suggesting. She glanced at him to make sure that he wasn't laughing at her again.

Terminator snatched the weapon out of Kate's hand. Her finger jerked the triggers back, past the safety guard, and the weapon fired point-blank into his face.

He flinched, and Kate stepped aside in horror, stifling a scream, not believing what she had just done. '

Terminator rolled something around in his mouth, turned his head, and spat out the deformed bullet, a drop of artificial blood on his lips.

"Don't do that," he said mildly.

Kate was beside herself. She didn't know what to do. Where to turn. What to say. "Oh, my God," she muttered. "Oh, my God."

Something metallic banged against the entry corridor wall and clattered down the stairs with a tremendous racket, belching dense white smoke.

It was tear gas. Connor jumped back from the canister as the sharply pungent smoke filled his nostrils and burned his eyes like acid. He had been taught as a kid to

breathe shallowly when you found yourself in this kind of situation. But Kate wouldn't know that.

"This is the police," a powerfully amplified voice came from outside the crypt. "We have the building surrounded. Release your hostage."

Connor reached for Kate, but she spun on her heel, managed to skip past Terminator, and was gone up the stairs in a flash.

He tried to go after her, but Terminator kicked the tear gas canister aside and hauled Connor back to a relatively smoke-free niche behind a couple of marble statues of angels.

"Just leave me here," Connor protested. His eyes were red and filled with tears. His vision was blurry at best. "You're wasting your time. I'm not the one you want."

"Incorrect," Terminator replied firmly. "John Connor leads the resistance to victory."

"How?" Connor shouted. "Why? Why me?"

"You are John Connor," Terminator said without inflection, as if Connor had just questioned a fundamental law of the universe.

But Connor shook his head. "Christ, my mom fed me that bullshit from the cradle. But look at me. I'm no leader. I never was. I'm never gonna be."

Terminator grabbed Connor by the throat and lifted him bodily off the floor so that they were eye to eye.

Connor struggled desperately to get free. "What are you—Let go—"

Terminator squeezed harder, as if he were going to

choke the life out of the human. "You are right," he said. "You are not the one I want I am wasting my time."

Connor's eyes went wide with rage. The injustice of what was happening to him now was beyond bearing. After all he had gone through. After his mother. After everything. The struggle. All the bullshit for twelve years.

Not this way. He wasn't going to die here and now. Not this way. He slammed his hands into the sides of Terminator's skull, kicking, thrashing wildly, fighting for his life with a rage that threatened to blot out every last sane thought in his head. '

"Fuck you!" Connor screamed raggedly. "You fucking machine!"

Terminator nodded. "Better," he said. He tossed Connor aside.

Connor picked himself up and rubbed his throat as he tried to catch his breath. He had been close to fuzzing out. "Why did you do that?" he croaked.

But Terminator showed little or no reaction.

"You were dicking with me?" Connor demanded.

"Anger is more useful than despair."

"What?"

"Basic psychology is among my subroutines," Terminator said as if he were discussing the weather. He pulled the modified Stoner 63A .30-caliber machine gun out of the coffin, then grabbed a belt of ammunition and efficiently loaded the weapon, pulled the slide back and released the safety.

Connor suddenly remembered what Terminator was capable of doing. "Jesus, don't kill them."

"My reprogramming will not allow it. I am incapable of taking human life."

Connor grinned wryly, still rubbing his bruised neck. "Good to know."

c.18

Near Victorville

They had left the BP station a few minutes ago. The black detective was driving the plain blue Chevy sedan, while his partner, Detective Martinez, spoke to someone by cell phone. Something was haywire with all the police frequencies, but so far cell phones didn't seem to be affected.

T-X, as Scott Peterson, dressed now in a light sweater and slacks, sat in the backseat listening. There was trouble not too far away from here. The San Bernadino County Sheriff's office and State Police had been called in, along with an LAPD SWAT team.

"Perps are still holed up?" Detective Martinez said. He nodded. "Gotcha." He broke the connection and turned to T-X. "Good news, your girlfriend's okay."

"Where is she?" T-X asked.

Martinez glanced forward. "Valley of Peace Cemetery. But they're going to bring her downtown—"

T-X drove its left hand through the back of the front seat, its fist emerging from the black detective's chest, the fingers grabbing the steering wheel in a spray of blood, shattered bone, and torn tissue.

Martinez reared back, not able to grasp what he was witnessing except that it was bad. Worse than he'd ever seen.

"Oh, Jesus, God—" he blurted.

He grabbed for his piece beneath his jacket, but T-X smashed the man's head into the passenger side window with its free hand, breaking out the glass and shattering the detective's skull.

T-X drilled into the Chevy's dash panel and connected with the automobile's computers. The cemetery was highlighted on a map in its head-up display.

Its arm still through the detective's chest, T-X hauled the car into an accelerating U-turn and headed off.

Valley of Peace Cemetery

The LAPD SWAT team leader hustled Kate down the hill to one of the waiting ambulances, where he turned her over to a paramedic whose name tag read stewart.

Police radio units, the SWAT team van, and fire rescue units were parked along the base of the hill thirty yards from where the hearse and Cadillac limousine were parked. No one had found the drivers of the two vehicles. They had probably taken off the moment the trouble started.

Officers, some of them dressed in dark jump suits with visored riot helmets and Kevlar vests, armed with various weapons including the Colt Commando assault rifle and the 9mm Heckler & Koch MP5 room broom,

were fanned out behind headstones, statues, and one of the large mausoleums near the crypt

Other cops were positioned behind their squad cars, their sidearms drawn. Still others held shotguns at the ready.

Dense clouds of tear gas poured from the entrance to the crypt as shell after shell was fired through the open doorway.

Kate shivered, and the paramedic put a blanket around her shoulders.

A heavyset man, with thinning white hair and a smarmy look on his round face, came over. He had a manner that Kate supposed was meant to be comforting.

"You're safe now," he told her.

She couldn't determine if he was for real or not. But then he hadn't seen that thing that had kidnapped her.

He dropped the cigarette he'd been smoking and ground it out. "Kate, my name is Dr. Silberman. I'm a post-trauma counselor for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department" He smiled pleasantly, trying to reassure her that everything would be okay. "How are you feeling?"

"He's not human," Kate said softly. "He's really not human—"

An understanding look came into Silberman's eyes. He sat down next to her in the back of the ambulance. "I know what it's like to be in a hostage situation. I've been there myself." He looked away and stared into the distance. He had been there. He knew. "The fear, the adrenaline. You find yourself imagining things. Impossible things. It can take years to get over it"

Six SWAT cops wearing gas masks made a dash for the entrance to the crypt, leapfrogging by twos so that they could provide covering fire for each other if need be.

Kate shrank back, but Silberman patted her hand. "It'll be fine, you'll see."

One of the stained-glass windows burst outward in a spray of colored glass shards. Terminator stepped through the opening. The machine gun was cradled in his right arm, and with his left he balanced the stainless-steel coffin on his shoulder. Dense smoke swirled around him.

The SWAT chief waiting farther down the hill raised his megaphone. "Drop your weapon." His sharply amplified voice rolled across the cemetery. "And the coffin!"

Terminator headed down the hill away from the crypt toward the pet van without breaking stride, looking neither left nor right.

Kate's heart hammered out of her chest Dr. Silberman jumped to his feet.

The SWAT team at the entrance to the crypt swung around and opened fire. Bullets slammed into Terminator's back, ricocheted off the coffin with angry whines, and tumbled away at oblique angles.

They crab-walked behind him down the hill, laying down a continuous line of intense fire. Some of the bullets struck the pet van, opening the gas tank, and it caught fire with a dull thump.

Terminator paused momentarily, then turned and took a couple of steps toward the hearse parked about twenty yards away. He was still taking heavy fire to his torso, his legs, and to the back of his head.

He stopped again, raised the Stoner machine gun, and began spraying the cemetery in a long, looping arc; the large caliber bullets shattered headstones, cut down small trees and statues, and destroyed several police cars.

His targeting computer, which showed up as a reticle in his head-up display, overlaid with the heat signatures of humans, was meticulous in avoiding nonmechanical targets.

The police officers and SWAT team crew dove for cover.

Silberman's face turned ghostly white. He stammered something incomprehensible.

Kate got to her feet, the blanket falling off, and she backed away from the ambulance. "They can't stop him," she babbled. "We have to get out of here—"

She turned, but Silberman was already gone, running as fast as his legs could carry him from the battle zone.

"Oh, God," Kate cried, and she started after him.

Terminator reached the hearse during a momentary lull in the return fire. He tore open the rear door, shoved the coffin inside, and slammed the door shut.

The police units opened fire again as he moved around to the driver's side, got in behind the wheel, yanked the ignition set out of the steering column, and hot-wired the engine.

Bullets had retorn the flesh from Terminator's neck and head, exposing bits of his metallic cranial case, but

doing nothing other than superficial damage to his main systems.

The hearse was beginning to take fire, some of the windows blowing out, bullets slapping against the sheet metal like hammer taps in a tinsmith's shop.

The lid of the coffin opened, and Connor, who'd been jammed inside with the weapons, rolled out, keeping below the level of the windows.

"Get us out of here!" he shouted.

The engine caught. "We must reacquire Katherine Brewster," Terminator said. He swiveled his head and did a quick scan of the cemetery with his sensors.

"Why?" Connor demanded. "What makes her so goddamn important?"

"Through her you make contact with the remnants of the U.S. military and learn to fight Skynet, forming the core of the resistance," Terminator said.

They were taking a lot of heavy fire, but Terminator acquired two moving targets. One of them was a 96.55534 percent probable match to Katherine Brewster. He slammed the hearse into low and peeled out.

"Later, your children become important when—" Terminator continued as if nothing else were happening.

"Whoa," Connor stopped him. "What?"

"She is your wife," Terminator said, matter-of-factly.

think the cops stood a chance against that—thing. Not after what she'd seen it do.

A dark blue Chevy sedan came roaring up the road and through the broken gate into the cemetery. Someone was slumped in the front seat.

Kate pulled up short as the car screeched to a halt fifty feet away. The back door popped open and Scott jumped out.

Instant relief poured over her like ice water on a blistering hot day. She couldn't believe it. Scott. Here.

"Scott," she cried, starting for him. "Thank God!"

T-X moved toward Kate, morphing, as he seemed to glide over the grass, back into the persona of Nancy Nebel in the rust-colored Gucci leather suit.

Her right arm was changing into the plasma weapon, and Kate stopped in midstride.

This was the same monster from the pet clinic. The one who had killed Betsy. The one who had nearly killed them all.

"No—" Kate moaned, stepping back Was there no end to this insanity?

T-X raised her plasma weapon, the blue glow sur-rounding her arm as the unit came to a full charge.

Silberman had disappeared, and the shooting was still going on behind her. Kate had no one to turn to. She didn't

c.19

Valley of Peace Cemetery

"Give me an RPG," Terminator ordered.

"You said you can't kill anybody," Connor argued.

"John. The RPG. Now."

Connor had spotted the heavier Russian-made RPG-7 Rocket Propelled Grenade Launchers in the coffin. He'd practiced with them in Baja a couple of years before his mother had died. One of her biker friends had come up from Honduras or someplace like that with a bunch of shit.

He dug one of the weapons out of the coffin, loaded the 85mm shell, and slapped it into Terminator's outstretched right hand.

The rocket, which carried a five-pound HEAT warhead, could penetrate a foot of armored steel plate. The Russians had built them to bust tanks. Terrorists used them to stop cops.

Connor was trying to figure out what Terminator wanted to shoot at. He suddenly spotted Kate standing alone, her hand up, as if she were trying to ward off an attack.

Then he saw the T-X, her right arm engulfed in a blue glow, pointing the plasma cannon directly at Kate. "It's Kate," he shouted.

Driving with his left hand, Terminator rested the tube of the RPG on the windowsill across his chest. He uncaged the firing circuit and without hesitation pulled the trigger.

The shell was ejected from the tube, and about fifteen feet out its rocket motor ignited, propelling it almost instantly the last few meters to the T-X's right arm just as the plasma cannon was firing.

A sharp, bright explosion engulfed the T-X's weapon arm, staggering her backward a few feet. A split second later the misfiring cannon erupted in a huge blue flash-bang that hurled the cyborg off her feet, sending her flying twenty meters onto her back.

Terminator veered the hearse sharply to the right, just missing a row of headstones, and slid to a stop next to an openmouthed Kate, who seemed to be rooted to the ground where she stood.

Connor reached over and opened the passenger door. "Get in," he shouted to her.

She didn't move. The cops were charging toward them, guns drawn, but the firing had stopped for the moment. But only for the moment.

"Do you want to live?" Connor shouted. "Come on!"

Kate looked over to where the T-X had already gotten

to her feet The cyborg's weapon was a mangled ruin, but

she ripped off the tip of the cannon and the artificial skin

began to form over the machinery. She was damaged but not out of commission.

T-X looked up, and started for the hearse.

Move or die, the thought was like a high-power bolt of electricity to Kate's brain. She jumped into the hearse and pulled the door shut.

Terminator slammed the gas pedal to the floor and the hearse shot across the cemetery, spewing grass and dirt from its back wheels.

He glanced in the rearview mirror as the T-X picked up speed, crashing through gravestones as if they were not there.

But she was not gaining on the hearse. The dispersal of the plasma energy had apparently caused an overload in her power circuits. But that reduced capacity would not last for long. Terminator had been programmed with what few specs the resistance had managed to gather. Among them was the T-X model's ability to recharge its own power cells. The tiny fusion generator in its chest cavity took a finite amount of time to replace such a large loss of power, but the recharge time was very short.

Measured not in minutes, but in seconds.

Terminator hauled the hearse around a mausoleum, bumped up onto the driveway, and shot through the gate back to the blacsktopped highway.

The T-X was no longer visible in the rearview mirror.

"What the hell was that thing?" Kate demanded. She was all out of breath. "Why is it after me? What did I do?"

"It's what you're going to do," Connor said from the back. He pulled out another RPG rocket in case the T-X caught up with them. "You're important in the future. We both are."

Terminator headed to the highway that led away from LA. and back out onto the desert.

There was almost no traffic, only an occasional fanner in his pickup or delivery truck, and a tractor pulling a flat wagon on car tires loaded with hay.

There would almost certainly be police units, but for the moment the only thing that Terminator's sensors were picking up was a helicopter. Judging by its attempt at radio communications it was probably a police chopper outbound from Los Angeles.

Kate looked nervously from Terminator to Connor, fear and uncertainty in her eyes. "It was Scott," she said. "How could it be Scott?"

"Your fiance?" Connor asked.

Kate nodded, Unable to speak.

"The T-X is polymimetic, able to take the form of anything it touches," Terminator told her with no hint of emotion. "Your fiance is dead."

Kate's complexion paled. She looked like a ghost.

Connor had to wince at Terminator's lack of tact, but he kept his eyes on the road behind them. The T-X would not stop coming after them. Not until her entire chassis was destroyed.

If such a thing were possible.

"Looks like we lost her," he said without much conviction. It was mostly wishful thinking on his part.

The road swept around the base of a steep, boulder-strewn, wooded hill. The embankment loomed close to the highway.

The T-X suddenly emerged from the woods at the top of the hill at a dead run and leaped out into space, landing with a tremendous bang on top of the hearse.

The roof was crushed inward almost to the level of the coffin by the impact of the T-X's 150-kilo mass. The back windows shattered into thousands of pieces, and the windshield starred but held in place.

Connor had just pulled an AK-47 assault rifle and a thirty-round box magazine out of the coffin. He barely managed to roll left and flatten himself on the floor before he was trapped by the collapsing roof.

The hearse swerved sharply left, nearly off the road and down into a ditch before Terminator was able to bring it under control.

Kate screamed in absolute terror, crouching as low as she could get in the front seat.

A high-pitched angry whine came from above the hearse, and suddenly the lower half of a circular saw cut through the roof in a shower of sparks.

Terminator hauled the hearse to the right, laying rubber on the highway as he slammed on the brakes.

He immediately jammed the gas pedal to the floor and swerved sharply left in an effort to dislodge the T-X from the roof.

But it did not work.

The T-X's left arm had morphed into a high-speed metal cutting saw that was opening a U-shaped flap in

the roof as easily as a razor blade through tissue paper.

"Do something!" Kate screeched in desperation.

Terminator ignored her. A map of the rural area was overlaid in his head-up display with a thermal imaging picture. The road they were on intersected with the highway in three hundred meters. Barreling down the highway from the west was the heat signature of what Terminator identified as an eighteen-wheeler.

His processors did the math, and he reduced his speed slightly to 71.3 miles per hour, which gave him the solution.

The saw retracted from the roof and the long, rectangular flap peeled open like the lid on a sardine can.

No longer hemmed in by the collapsed roof, Connor swung the AK-47 to bear on the T-X as he pulled the cocking slide back and flicked the safety catch forward.

He pulled the trigger, firing the 7.62mm rounds directly into her face, emptying the magazine in three seconds flat.

The T-X recoiled after each shot, but then came back to the opening and reached down to grab Connor, who scrambled a few inches forward just out of her grasp.

A semi's air horn suddenly blared right on top of them.

Terminator shoved Kate farther down in the seat as he hunched over, steering the hearse beneath the trailer just behind the turnbuckle with a last-moment burst of speed.

The roof and the T-X suddenly disappeared as the bottom of the semi trailer sheared off the top of the hearse

with a shriek of tearing, twisting metal, breaking plastic, and shattering glass.

Connor got a split-instant glimpse of the semi's rear wheels less than one foot from the side of the hearse when they were on the other side and clear on the empty highway.

A tremendous wind roared through the now open hearse. Connor sat up cautiously as they rounded a curve, the semi sliding sideways across the highway behind them.

Kate sat up too. Tentatively, as if she couldn't believe that they had come through the crash alive.

Terminator was impassive. They had merely completed another phase of his assignment

"We need a new vehicle," he said to no one in particular.

Kate looked at Connor and he couldn't help but laugh with relief. She laughed too. This was insane. All of it. His entire life. This morning. This moment.

T-X sat up. She had landed at the side of the road fifty meters from the jackknifed semi.

Her diagnostic circuits registered some damage to her infiltration overlay, but only superficial damage to her battle chassis.

The most severe damage had been done to her plasma cannon by the small missile's explosive warhead that had made a perfectly timed hit.

Her flesh retracted from the mangled discharge head

of the cannon. She studied the damage for a few milliseconds, her diagnostic-repair processor immediately devising a solution.

With her free hand she artfully twisted and bent the various plasma magnetic containment conduits into a new, much smaller, cruder transmission head.

Only a fraction of her available power could be transmitted with the new arrangement, but the repaired weapon would still be formidable.

The trucker jumped down from his rig and took a few steps up the road toward T-X. He was dazed, and still uncertain of what had happened.

T-X glanced at him. He was typical of humans of his socio-economic class in this era: round shoulders, potbelly, wearing a red baseball cap, yellow checked shirt, and dark trousers and work boots. Probably not well educated.

The trailer bore the advertising legend for something called xenadrine efx, with the advice, experience the

POWER.

Ignoring him, T-X raised her jury-rigged weapon and fired a short plasma burst at the side of the hill. Grass and bushes went up in flames and a small area of gravel and rocks was instantly reduced to slag.

Out of the corner of her optical sensors she saw the truck driver turn and run away as fast as his bandy legs could take him.

She would not kill him. He was meaningless.

Her electronic emissions detectors picked up the transmissions from what she determined to be an LAPD

helicopter, flying at one hundred meters above the terrain, two kilometers away.

She adjusted her internal communications circuitry and made contact with the helicopter. "Nancy-one-zero-zero-niner, LA. base," she radioed. "Copy?"

c,20

Angeles National Forest

Beneath the protection of a canopy of trees Connor stared at the empty, mostly cloudless sky.

There had been police activity all morning and into the afternoon. But it was coming up on two-thirty and he hadn't seen a spotter plane or helicopter in at least forty-five minutes.

Kate was still in a state of semishock. Other than drinking from the cool mountain stream, she hadn't spoken or moved to try to escape. Nothing.

The T-X was still out there, coming after them. If being crushed beneath a crane and fire truck hadn't destroyed her, then being struck by a semi truck had probably not even dented her armor.

Terminator had done something to the hearse's engine and he slammed the hood as Connor came over.

"It's been clear for almost an hour."

Terminator didn't bother looking up at the sky. "I am unable to fix this vehicle."

"Will it run?" Conner asked.

"Yes. But not long."

"Then let's find something eke and get as far away as we can," Connor said.

They got back into the hearse and headed farther up into the mountains where within a couple of miles they passed twenty or twenty-five trout fishermen working the stream that was just off the road there. A registration table was set up under a bright red canopy.' The sign flapping in the light breeze read fifth annual angeles forest

TROUT FEST.

No one noticed the heavily damaged hearse as it passed, and minutes later they came across an RV campground filled with campers, but devoid of people. The RVs belonged to the fishermen in the trout contest downstream.

Terminator pulled alongside a midsized Winnebago that appeared to be in good condition, and shut off the hearse's engine. The motor bucked and dieseled for a few seconds and then died.

He got out, went over to the Winnebago, and yanked open its locked door.

Connor jumped out of the hearse. "Come on," he said to Kate. "We have to keep moving."

Terminator came back, scooped up an armful of weapons, and took them to the RV. Connor grabbed the AK-47 and a bag of magazines and brought them over to the Winnebago.

"He was killed because of me," Kate said from the passenger seat. She made no move to get out

Connor gathered four canvas satchels of C-4 explosive and acid fuses. He stopped and looked at her. He could

feel her pain. He knew what it was like to lose someone who was very close.

He shoved a 9mm Beretta pistol into his belt, first making sure that its magazine was loaded and the safety catch was engaged.

"I know it won't help, but sometimes things happen that we just can't change." He shook his head. He didn't know what to say to her. He didn't have words to make a difference. "It's not your fault."

Kate looked at him without moving, without saying a word.

Connor took the plastic explosives over to the RV and placed them inside. Terminator was there.

"You're sure about this?" Connor asked him, keeping his voice low enough so that Kate couldn't hear him. "About her and me, I mean."

"I do not experience uncertainty," Terminator replied.

Connor laughed. "Must be nice to be you."

Terminator studied him for a moment. "Your confusion is not rational. She is a healthy female of breeding age."

"I think there's more to it than that," Connor said, feeling a little warmth at the base of his neck.

"My database does not encompass the dynamics of human pair bonding," Terminator said. He went back to the hearse for more weapons. Connor followed him.

"This Terminatrix, how many others does she have on her hit list?"

"Twenty-two," Terminator replied, gathering the belted ammunition for the machine gun. "Anderson, Elizabeth.

Anderson, William. Barrera, Jose. Brewster, Robert—"

Kate sat bolt upright, her eyes wide. "My father?" she demanded.

Terminator turned his optical sensors to her, noting her pupil dilation, the tightening at the corners of her mouth, and her increased heart and respiration rates. But there was no need to lie by omission at this time. "Having failed to acquire its primary target, the T-X will resume its default program."

Kate leaped out of the hearse. It looked as if she was getting ready to spring at Terminator or at Connor. She just hadn't made up her mind. "She's going to kill my father too?"

"There is a high probability."

"No," Kate shrieked. "No!"

This was something new, and it wasn't making sense to Connor. "Who is he? What does he do?"

"He's in the Air Force," Kate snapped. "Weapons design. Secret stuff." She pushed her hair off her forehead. "I don't know exactly—"

Terminator started back to the Winnebago with another load of weapons. He stopped. "General Robert Brewster is program director at CRS—Cyber Research Systems—Autonomous Weapons Division."

Suddenly it began to make sense to Connor. "Autonomous Weapons—Skynet. You're talking about Skynet, aren't you?"

"Skynet is one of the digital defense systems developed under Brewster's supervision."

"Oh, God," Connor said. Everything was crystal clear

now. Chillingly clear. "It all makes sense now." He shook his head in amazement. "If you hadn't come back when I was a kid, if everything hadn't changed, she and I—" He glanced at Kate. "She and I, we would've gotten together then. I would have met her father a long time ago, and—" There was even more. It was unrolling like a gigantic map in his mind's eye. "Do you see? This was always supposed to happen."

Kate shook her head in confusion. It was clear she had no idea what he was talking about. "I don't understand."

"Your father, this is all about your father," Connor told her excitedly. "He's the key! He always was—not Cy-berdyne. Don't you see? We couldn't stop them from creating the technology. That part was inevitable, but we can stop it from being used. Your father's the one who can shut Skynet down. He's the only one who ever could." His jaw tightened. He turned to Terminator. We have to get to him before the T-X does."

"Negative," Terminator said. "I cannot jeopardize my mission." He turned and went back to the Winnebago with his load of weapons.

"This is your mission!" Connor shouted after him. "To save people."

Terminator turned. "My mission is to ensure the survival of John Connor and Katherine Brewster."

"I'm giving you an order," Connor said with a sharp edge in his voice.

"I am not programmed to follow your orders," Terminator replied indifferently. He put the weapons into the

RV. "After the nuclear war you will both lead."

"Nuclear war?" Kate shouted. This was way over the top for her, even after everything else she had been put through this day.

"There doesn't have to be a war," Connor insisted.

Terminator went back to the hearse for another load. Connor grabbed his arm to pull him back, but it was like trying to stop a moving locomotive.

"We can stop it," Connor told him.

"There is insufficient time. The first launch sequences will be initiated at 6:18 p.m."

Connor was caught flat-footed. "Today?" he blurted.

"Affirmative," Terminator said.

Connor was more deeply shocked than he'd ever been in his life; even more unsure of what he was supposed to do than he had been the first time Terminator had come for him and his mother.

"John, what is he saying?" Kate asked.

"Judgment Day," he told her, but he didn't take his eyes off Terminator. "The end of the world. It's today. Three hours from now."

"Two hours and fifty-three minutes," Terminator said precisely. "We must continue south into Mexico to escape the primary blast zones."

"We have to get to her dad."

"The Mojave area sustains significant nuclear fallout. You will not survive."

"You mean we just run and hide in a hole somewhere while the bombs fall?"

Terminator looked Connor in the eye. "It is your des-

tiny." He said it as if there were no other possibility.

But there were other possibilities. Connor looked away toward the distant desert. If he and Kate were supposed to become the leaders of the human resistance in some future time, why couldn't they begin right now? Here and now by doing something—one thing—to try to stop Judgment Day. Nothing was inevitable. His mother had drummed into his head fate was what we made it.

He glanced at Kate, then back at Terminator, and made his decision.

He pulled the pistol from his belt, switched off the safety, and pressed the muzzle to his own temple.

"Fuck my destiny," he said with determination.

Terminator moved toward him, but Connor held up a warning finger, and he stopped.

"John... ?" Kate asked uncertainly.

"You cannot self-terminate," Terminator said.

"No, you can't," Connor told him. "I can do whatever the hell I want. I'm a human being, not a goddamn robot"

"Cybernetic organism," Terminator automatically corrected.

"Whatever," Connor said. He girded himself. "Either we go to her father, get him to shut down Skynet, and stop this shit from ever happening, or so much for the great John Connor."

He pressed the muzzle of the gun a little harder against his temple. He would do it if he had to.

"Your future, my destiny—" Connor's jaw tightened

in anger. "I don't want any part of it. I never did."

Terminator's sensors did a complete body scan of Connor. "Based on your pupil dilation, skin temperature, and motor functions, I calculate an eighty-three percent probability that you will not pull the trigger."

Kate took a step toward Terminator. "Please, do what he says." She glanced at Connor, then back. "You have to save my father."

Terminator watched the subtle interplay between Kate and John. He nodded, the gesture very human. He came to a decision in the same way most humans came to decisions, by weighing all the options and possible outcomes.

"We can reach CRS in approximately one hour, depending on traffic conditions."

He turned without another word or gesture, placed the last of the weapons and loads into the Winnebago, and then got behind the wheel, ripped the ignition set out of the steering column, and started the engine.

For a long time Connor stood very still, the pistol still held to his head. He had won. But at what cost?

He could hear the rippling water of the trout stream as it splashed over the rocks. He could hear the light breeze rustling the leaves. He could smell grass and sweet pine and perhaps even the dry, sandalwood odors of the distant desert.

Slowly he lowered the pistol. Kate stared at him, an unreadable expression in her eyes. He smiled at her.

They had gotten through another crisis.

There were more to come.

c.21

Cyber Research Systems Edwards Air Farce Base

Three-star General Robert Brewster paused in the doorway to the expansive CRS presentation lounge a few minutes after four. He was a compact man with short dark hair and an air of resigned authority. These had been a tough few days.

A dozen high-ranking civilians and Air Force officers with whom Brewster had worked over the past four years were seated in front of the big video screen watching the start of the new CRS disk.

The slick promotional piece, complete with multiplane graphics, computer-aided animation, music, and sound effects had cost the corporation nearly two million dollars, and that for only fifteen minutes of what his wife would have called techno babble.

But the promo disk wasn't meant for the Saturday matinees. It was targeted at key members of the Pentagon, many of them still skeptical, as well as a large segment of the Congress who thought the entire Skynet project was

not only astronomically expensive, but exceedingly dangerous.

"Turning over our entire defense network to a goddamn computer is nothing but nuts," New York Representative Howard F. Stevenson argued. He was the ranking member on so many House oversight committees that the media called him Mr. Watchdog.

The disk was for Stevenson, if for no one else. Convince him, and everyone else would fall into line.

The CRS symbol, interlocked branches within a six-sided figure, came up on the screen with the words cyber

RESEARCH SYSTEMS.

The narrator, who was actually a tech sergeant from Andrews Air Force Base, spoke over the logo.

"Cyber Research Systems, America's first line of defense—creators of the weapons technology of tomorrow—invites you to preview the most exciting ordnance of the twenty-first century."

Music swelled from speakers around the room as the video ran through the opening montage of weapons and weapons systems: high-tech hydraulics, highly reflective metal surfaces, sculpted into compound curves, plastics, electronic circuitry, advanced electromechanical devices, the uses of which could only be guessed at, and finally the barrels of a deadly looking chaingun.

"No ordinary think tank, our mission here at CRS—to make human warfare a thing of the past—is just a funding cycle away."

General Brewster squared his shoulders and marched into the room. Yesterday and last night had been disasters,

with outages throughout the system, from Alaska to Guam, and from Andrews outside Washington, D.C., to Ramstein outside Kaiserslautern, Germany, and even right here at Edwards.

None of them had gotten much sleep, and so far, today had been a repeat performance of putting out fires as fast as they popped up.

Now it was his task to begin selling a system he was no longer as sure of as he had been two days ago.

"Sorry I'm late, gentlemen," he said.

A young CRS executive operating the video system hit pause as Thomas S. Shelby, CRS's chief financial officer, looked up.

"We just got started, Bob. Take a seat," Shelby said.

Brewster slipped in next to the CRS money man.

"Once you all sign off, I'll send the promos to the Joint Chiefs and Armed Services Committee," Shelby's young assistant said. His name was Sherwood Olson. He was a Harvard MBA. He clicked the remote and the video came on.

"Say hello to the soldier of tomorrow," the narrator said.

The screen widened on a sleek, menacing robot, armed with an array of sensors in its small head structure, with heavy, articulated arms that ended in deadly looking chainguns. The machine moved nimbly on a pair of wide treads, and it was very tall, nearly eight feet.

"The T-l battlefield robot. A fully autonomous ground offensive system."

It would have to be explained to the Washington

crowd that T-l was deadly, but it was nothing more than a first generation. The T-l-7s were more sophisticated. But there were even better projects on the near horizon. Much better.

The narrator continued. "And in the air, the H-K aerial weapons system—or, as we like to call it, the Hunter-Killer."

An H-K drone hovered in midair, It looked like a futuristic, rotorless helicopter, armed with a variety of weapons systems, but with no pilot.

Like the T-ls, the Hunter-Killers were autonomous battlefield systems. They could think and fight for themselves.

The H-K fired a missile that homed in on a target tank in the distance, completely obliterating it

"This isn't science fiction," the narrator assured his audience. "It's reality, thanks to our top-secret innovation—Skynet—the revolutionary, artificially intelligent battlefield management network."

The video displayed a computer screen that showed the Skynet worldwide network of satellites.

"From strategic weapons to the individual soldier in the field, Skynet is able to control it all."

A model of the neural net computer chip that Cy-berdyne's Miles Bennet Dyson had used as the basis for the first models of Skynet came up on the screen. It looked otherworldly. From another time or place. From what could have been an alien, nonhuman mind. Brewster thought that Dyson had been anything but an ordinary man.

Without Dyson leading the way before his tragic death, there would have been no Cyber Research Systems, and certainly no Skynet

On the screen, Boris Kuznetskov, one of the best chess players in the world, moved his white knight into a position threatening the black queen and king.

He played against a robotic arm of gleaming copper-gold metal, with finely articulated fingers. The Russian's board position appeared to be unbeatable.

"Not only can Skynet outthink the most inspired human adversary, but it designs the weapons it needs to meet its war-fighting plans.

"It is the definition of thinking outside the box." The robotic arm moved a rook from a middle rank. Suddenly the outcome of the chess match wasn't so clear. The Russian was rattled.

"During this match alone, Skynet invented twenty-six thousand one hundred twenty-three new variations of chess, and over six million new moves."

It was clear that the Russian was defeated and he knew it.

"Meanwhile, human generals are still playing a four-thousand-year-old game," the narrator said.

Kuznetskov flipped over the chessboard in exasperation, looked bleakly at the robot arm, and then stalked off camera.

"Great leaders are not born," the narrator continued. "They're made. Right here. With technology developed at CRS."

Typical of multinational corporations, Brewster

thought. If something is said loud enough, often enough, and with absolute conviction, it will be believed.

"Actually the patents were obtained from a private vendor. Cyberdyne," he said as an aside to Shelby.

"Ancient history," the CRS financial officer replied.

Images of high-tech workshops where T-l battlefield robots were being readied for service came up on the screen. Scientists and technicians in white lab coats used a variety of test equipment to check every system in the machines.

"T-l and H-K research and development is complete," the narrator reported. "On budget, ahead of schedule."

Rows of T-ls ready for action were moving into holding areas.

"Working prototypes are now up and running, ready to face action in the conflicts of tomorrow."

Suddenly the video image cut to a military funeral on a bleak, overcast day. A coffin was draped in an American flag.

"Today, the loss of even one soldier in combat is intolerable—ask your constituents."

The video image switched to a chart that showed the evolution of robotics from the first primitive factory machines to the T-ls, to the skeletal Terminators, and finally to cybernetic figures in full battle armor and infiltration coverings.

"But with sufficient funding we need no longer risk the well-being of our men and women in uniform," the

narrator promised. "Robots will take their place on the front lines."

The image cut to a lab where an extremely well-muscled athletic man with narrow hips, broad shoulders, and powerful legs was running on a treadmill. He was dressed only in Spandex shorts. Sensors were placed all over his body, which glistened with sweat Doctors and medical techs monitored the man's progress.

"Motion capture studies are being applied even now to the development of the next generation of robotic defense systems," the narrator said.

In an inset an animated steel robot mimicked the human test subject's motions.

The camera moved to the front of the athlete who stepped off the treadmill and wiped his square, ruggedly cut handsome face with a towel.

The new cybernetic systems were being called Terminators, Brewster thought. This one, the T-600, with a similar model, the T-800, in development.

"I'm Chief Master Sergeant William Candy," the athlete model said, his Texas drawl thick. "I was honored to be selected in the ongoing effort to save American lives." Brewster frowned. He hadn't seen this part before. He glanced over at Shelby's assistant running the video. The man had been responsible for much of the production work "Laying it on a little thick, wouldn't you say?" "It's a sales tool, General," Olson replied. "I don't know about that accent," Shelby groused. "We can fix it, sir," his assistant assured him.

Brewster's chief engineer, Tony Plickinger, came into the presentation room and went to his boss.

"Systems are crashing all over the place," he said in Brewster's ear so that no one else could hear him. "I don't know if we can stop it."

Brewster got up, his heart skipping a beat, his stomach tied in a knot.

Shelby looked up, puzzled, even a little angry by the interruption. "Bob?"

"Sorry, something important," Brewster said.

"What could be more important than this?" Shelby asked. The video image on the screen was on pause. The others in the room didn't look happy either. "Budget hearings start next week. If we don't land the production contract—"

"You'll have to excuse me," Brewster said, and he left with his chief engineer.

"That man will not focus," Shelby's assistant muttered, and he hit the remote to continue the video presentation.

Sergeant Candy was in uniform. He stood beside the skeleton of a nonfunctioning Terminator.

"It's now within our power to make war safe," Candy said. "And that truly is priceless."

The image cut to an injection mold from which the shell of a head had been formed. There were no teeth, no eyes, no flesh tones, but it was the face of Sergeant Candy.

"CRS brings you the face of the future," Candy said.

c.22

Above the Mojave

As they crested Soledad Pass and started down into the desert, Kate tried the dash-mounted cell phone again to see if she could get through to her father.

She got a dial tone, but after the first three numbers, the signal strength faded and dropped to zero.

Thirty seconds later it was back. She cleared the keypad and tried again. This time after only one number the phone received a series of squeals and warbling tones as if a computer were trying to connect with them.

It was frustrating to her. And frightening not only because of what might happen to her father if the T-X got to him first, but also because of the chaos in everything else that seemed to be going on.

Last night she would not have believed any of what she had gone through this morning was possible. Nor had it been conceivable to her that the world was on the brink of all-out nuclear war. Global thermonuclear war. The ultimate sword of Damocles.

Now she wasn't so sure of anything. Least of all her

own senses. This had to be a dream. Yet she knew that it was not.

She broke the connection and replaced the cell phone on its bracket. "The whole cell network's down," she said.

She sat in the Winnebago's passenger seat. Terminator drove and John was at the dinette table in back putting fuses into blocks of C-4 explosive.

They were heading north out of the mountains, Edwards Air Force Base less than thirty miles away.

Terminator glanced at her. "Skynet is assuming control of global communications, in preparation for its attack," he said.

She was still having trouble buying into the entire scenario. But she had to ask the next question, no matter how crazy it sounded in her own ears.

"So—if this is a war between people and machines, why are you on our side?"

"The resistance captured me and reprogrammed my CPU," Terminator said blandly. He could have been discussing the weather. "I was originally designed for assassination missions."

Like the T-X model, Kate thought with a shudder. "Does that bother you now?"

"Remorse is a human concept based on the illusion of free will. It has no meaning to me."

"So you don't really care if this mission succeeds or not," Kate said. She looked back at Connor who was watching them. "If we get killed, would that mean anything to you?"

Terminator seemed to give her question serious con-

sideration. "If you were to die, then I would become useless," he answered. "There would be no reason for me to exist."

Kate had to turn away, her eyes wanted to fill. "Thank you for doing this," she said softly.

"Your gratitude is not required," Terminator told her indifferently. "I am programmed to follow your commands."

Connor was suddenly very interested. "Her commands?" he asked.

Terminator glanced at his reflection in the inside mirror. "It was Katherine Brewster who had me reactivated and sent through the time displacement field."

Kate held up a hand. "What exactly am I in this future of yours?"

Terminator turned to her. "You are John Connor's spouse and second-in-command."

Kate was shocked, though she knew that she shouldn't be. Nothing should be surprising to her ever again. She turned back to take a good look at Connor. Her future husband, if Terminator could be believed.

"Don't look at me, it's not my idea," he told her. Kate continued to stare at him. She tried to remember what it had been like in Kripke's basement, making out with him. Although she remembered his face, she was fuzzy on the details of what exactly they had done. She shook her head slowly. "No way." Connor was obviously stung. "What?" "You're a mess," Kate told him. Connor shook his head and grinned wryly. "You're

not exactly my type either," he said. He turned to Terminator. "Why didn't I send you back?" he asked.

"I am not authorized to answer your question."

"Right," Connor said. "You ask him," he told Kate.

"Why didn't he send you back?" Kate asked.

"He was dead," Terminator answered.

It was another hammer blow to Kate's already bruised emotions. Terminator seemed to be indifferent to the impact of what he had told them. To him it was just another dry bit of data. But Connor had been affected. That much was obvious.

"Oh, that sucks," he said, trying to make light of it

"Humans inevitably die," Terminator said reasonably.

"Yeah, I know," Connor said. "How does it—" He shook his head. "Maybe I don't want to know."

"How does he die?" Kate asked.

"John Connor was terminated on July fourth, 2032," Terminator said. "I was selected for the emotional attachment he felt to my model number, due to his boyhood experiences. This aided in my infiltration."

"What are you saying?" Connor asked.

Terminator did not take his eyes off the road. "I killed you," he said.

Edwards Air Force Base

"Edwards Air Force Base, this is LAPD helicopter, Nancy-one-zero-zero-niner, inbound. Request permission to land," T-X radioed.

Staff Sergeant Gloria Sanchez raised her binoculars and studied the sky to the west The helicopter was too low for radar. She spotted the dark blue LAPD chopper low out of the sun. She keyed her mike.

"LAPD, Nancy-one-zero-zero-niner, this is Edwards Control Tower. What can we do for you this afternoon?" "I'm probably on a wild goose chase, Edwards, but we're looking for a kidnapping suspect," T-X radioed pleasantly in a man's voice. She wore the dark blue jumpsuit and LAPD badge of Sergeant Ricco, the pilot. "The suspect may be headed out this way. I was wondering if I could talk to someone from security. I have photos. And you guys are about the only people I can raise right now." "We're having problems with our comms too, zero-niner. Stand by." She telephoned the OD at Base Security, Captain McManus.

"Have him set down on the flight line, in front of 2004," the captain said. "I'll send someone over to talk to him."

"Yes, sir," Sanchez said. She got on the radio. "Zero-niner, Edwards. You have permission to land. Pressure is two-niner-point-niner-seven. Winds out of zero-eight-five at eight knots."

"Roger that," T-X radioed. "Where would you like me to set down?"

"On the flight line, just east of the tower. We'll have someone with wands to show you where." "Much obliged," T-X said. "My pleasure, zero-niner."

c.23

CRS

General Brewster moved en masse with Tony Flickinger and several of his senior engineers down the tech country corridor to the Computer Center.

It was business as usual here, except on the global net where, according to his people, everything was falling apart like a house of cards. Nothing they tried seemed to work.

"There has to be a mistake," Brewster said, his stomach sour. He couldn't remember if he'd eaten lunch. "As of fifteen hundred hours, all primary military systems were secure."

The hallway went through the Research & Development wing; glassed-in tech areas and clean rooms where some of their cutting-edge work was being done. Scientists and engineers in white suits, paper caps and booties, and respirators operated a wide range of remote manipulators, electronic test equipment, and biohazard glove boxes. The latest cybernetic prototypes were being put together here.

The people behind the glass walls, enclosed in their

hermetic spaces, seemed oblivious to the mounting chaos outside. But they were the purists, Brewster thought. They were the creators of the individual bits and pieces, so they did not have to worry about the whole.

The environment was comfortable for them. CRS made sure of it.

"They were secure," one of the senior engineers said. Brewster couldn't recall his name. "Only the civilian sector was affected—the Internet, air traffic, power plants, that sort of thing."

"But then?" Brewster prompted.

"But then a few minutes ago we got word that guidance computers at Vandenburg crashed."

"We thought it was a communications error," one of the other senior engineers said. Brewster thought his name might be Tobias.

"But?" Brewster asked. There were always buts in this business.

"Now it looks like the virus," Tobias admitted.

Flickinger wore a headset that connected him to the mainframe. He pressed the earpiece a little tighter. They were even starting to have trouble with internal communications. "Early warning in Alaska is down," he said.

Brewster stopped in midstride. "Why?" This wasn't happening.

"Signals from half our satellites are scrambled beyond recognition," another of the engineers said.

"What about our missile silos, our submarines?" Brewster demanded.

"We've lost contact," Tobias said.

To the engineers this was merely a problem in systems integration; a technical glitch, a problem that in the aircraft industry was called an unk-unk. An unknown-unknown. Troubles were certain to pop up in the start-up of any complicated system. And most of them were expected. But there were always the few problems that no one could predict. Except to predict that they would occur.

They were the unk-unks, which were happening this moment with the worldwide network of communications systems; what the military called Technical Means.

"Dear God. You're saying that the country is completely open to attack?" Brewster demanded.

His chief engineer glanced at the others, and nodded. "Theoretically we could be under attack already, and we wouldn't know it."

"Who's doing this? A foreign power? Or is it some teenage hacker in his garage?"

Flickinger shook his head. He was at a loss. "We can't trace the virus. We can't pin it down."

"It's like nothing we've ever seen," Tobias added. "It keeps growing. Changing. Like it's got a mind of its own." Brewster moved to the glass wall of the Power Lab. A humanoid torso, its chest open to reveal a pair of power units and a maze of electronic circuitry and servos, was set up on a test stand. A white-coated lab tech was taking a reading on a frequency spectrum analyzer. Wires snaked from several pieces of test equipment to the cybernetic device.

To the technician doing his work this afternoon every-

thing was crystal clear. They all were on overtime, but sooner or later he would go home, perhaps to a wife and children. A cold beer, a shower, dinner, and afterward lovemaking. Brewster felt far removed from that sort of a simple existence. With each star that had been pinned on his shoulders, he'd taken a giant step away from any kind of a normal life.

"I don't understand," he said to his engineers. "This can't be happening."

Watching the lab tech work, Brewster wondered if he would trade with the man right now; even up, life-for-life. But he didn't have the answer. It wasn't that simple.

"Sir, the Pentagon's on the secure line," Flickinger said. "It's the chairman."

Brewster tore his eyes away from the lab tech, and nodded. "All right."

At the end of the corridor they went through double doors into the two-story open Computer Center that took up the entire end of the R&D wing. Dozens of technicians and operators, some of them military, some of them civilian, worked at computer consoles scattered throughout the big room. Many of them worked in open quad cubicles, while others worked in the Mainframe Control Center behind glass partitions. There were no windows in the room, only the louvers of large air-conditioning vents.

There was a hum of feverish activity here this afternoon that wasn't normal. Blinking warning lights, hurried telephone conversations as operators tried to reestablish communications, flashing computer screens, error mes-

sages all warning that the global net was in the process of totally collapsing.

Brewster strode directly over to one of the duty officer's positions, snatched the red secure phone, and punched the bunking encrypt light.

"Brewster," he barked. His engineers and several of the techs gathered around him to find out what was going on.

Admiral James F. Morrison, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was on the line. "We're hoping to hell you've got some kind of solution for us," he shouted. He was angrier than Brewster had ever heard him. And the admiral was well known for his short fuse.

"I know what you're looking for, sir, but Skynet is not ready for a system-wide connection," Brewster said.

Washington had been pressuring him to at least bring Skynet on-line. All the high-tech weapons and other toys could wait. But Skynet was ready now, at least it was in the estimation of a lot of congressional and Beltway insiders. And that included Admiral Morrison. Brewster was damned if he didn't and damned by a different but no less powerful contingent if he did.

"That's not what your civilian counterparts over there just told me," Morrison railed. "They're telling me that whiz-bang project I just spent fifteen billion dollars on can stop this damn virus."

"Sir, there are other steps that we should consider first—"

"Bob, I don't have time for that," Morrison countered.

"I've got nuke boats and silos, and I don't know what the hell messages this virus is sending them."

Brewster glanced at his people and shook his head. He was on the losing side of this argument.

"I understand there's a certain amount of performance anxiety over there, but your boys are saying that if we plug Skynet into all our systems, it'll squash this thing like a bug and give me back control of my military."

It had to be Shelby talking to the admiral. But Shelby was only a bean counter.

"Mr. Chairman, I need to be real clear about this," Brewster started. He would try one last time to get Morrison to slow down and think it out "If we uplink now, Skynet will be in control of the military."

"But you'll be in control of Skynet, right?" the admiral shot back.

"That's correct," Brewster answered cautiously.

"Then do it," Morrison ordered. "And, Bob? This thing works, you got all the funding you ever need."

"Yes, sir," Brewster said. He slowly replaced the red phone on its cradle.

He stood for a moment, thinking it out. The nets were all crashing, so uplinking to Skynet could in itself be problematic.

But, and this was a very large but in his mind, if they could uplink with Skynet, and the system took out the virus, could they just as easily shut it down?

Skynet was nothing short of tenacious, and ingenious. It had been designed to think for itself; to adapt to any and all threats against it.

Brewster wondered when all was said and done if Skynet would consider them a threat

He turned to his people. "Okay. Set it up," he ordered.

"Yes, General," Patricia Talbot replied. She was a CRS systems chief tech. A sharp woman.

She strode across the room to the Mainframe Control Center, issuing orders like a destroyer captain taking her ship into battle.

c.24

Mojave Desert

The big green highway sign said edwards afb. rosa-mond gate, 11 miles. A hundred yards later they passed a sign that said exit 6. Lancaster, quartz hill, i mile.

"Turn here," Kate told Terminator.

So far no one had come after them. The sky was clear of police helicopters, and traffic was very light on the interstate.

Kate had tried twice more to reach her father, with the same results as earlier. The cell phone networks were down. Even the radio didn't work, especially on FM, although she'd been able to pick up something that sounded like music in the very faint distance on AM.

Terminator got off the interstate and headed east across the desert. There were three ways onto Edwards: the Rosamond Gate off 1-14, the North Gate off Highway 58, and the South Gate at the southeastern extremity of Rogers Dry Lake.

The South Gate was the least used entrance for the air base itself, but was the primary entrance for the CRS Research & Development facility.

Edwards was a large place, more than five hundred square miles in which a lot of black projects, including CRS, had been and continued to be hidden from the public's view.

Kate had been out here only twice before; once at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for CRS. That was before she started college, and before her parents' divorce. There hadn't been many family members at the opening, and Kate remembered how proud she'd been of her father. He'd just received his second star, and to her he'd seemed to be twenty feet tall that day.

The second time she'd come out here was last year when she'd talked to her father about her engagement to Scott. Her mother had been all for the marriage, but she'd always been her daddy's girl, and she'd desperately wanted his approval.

Which he'd given. But she'd not seen him since, not once. They talked on the phone, but he was always too busy to come into L.A., even for a weekend.

She glanced back at Connor, who was still working on getting the explosives ready. By the looks of it he meant to destroy the entire complex. But he had no idea how big the place was.

When he'd started making suggestions how to get onto the base, Kate had cut him off. "I'll take care of that part," she told him.

He'd exchanged a glance with Terminator, but then nodded and went back to his work.

"About ten miles and there'll be a sign for Cyber Research," she told Terminator. She got up and went to

where Connor was stuffing bricks of C-4 into satchels, and sat down across from him.

There seemed to be weapons and ammunition, rockets, grenades, explosives everywhere. She shook her head. "This is so..." She was at a loss. "God, there isn't even a word for what this is."

"Yeah," Connor said. He fastened the flap of a satchel and set it aside. "Look, none of it's going to happen. We get to your dad, pull the plug on Skynet, and the bombs won't fall." He nodded toward Terminator, driving. "He won't have to kill me someday. He'll never even exist."

Terminator looked up at them in the interior mirror, but said nothing. The rolling desert hills were bleak, almost like a moonscape.

"And you and me," Connor said. "We can go our separate ways."

Kate was confused. She didn't know how to take what John was telling her. She looked out the window at the passing desert, her thoughts drifting back to when she was a kid. She had to smile.

She turned back to Connor. "You know Mike Kripke's basement? That was the first time I ever kissed a guy." "Really," Connor said, grinning. "Now that's weird." Kate returned his grin, and they both laughed a little. Terminator glanced at their reflection. "Your levity is good," he said solemnly. "It relieves tension and the fear of death."

Connor gave a derisive snort, shook his head, and sat back. The up mood had evaporated in an instant.

CRS

A pretty young first lieutenant whose name tag read Hastings got off an elevator one floor below the Computer Center and headed down the broad, well-lit corridor as if she were on a mission.

There was a sense of urgency throughout the complex. Worldwide communications were failing, military networks were crashing, and a lot of the people here whose job it was to see that such things did not happen were in a near panic.

Hastings was blond, slender, and attractive in her Air Force blue cotton blouse and dark blue skirt Halfway down the corridor she stopped at a door that was marked by a placard:

CRS

T-l STORAGE BAY 3

Please make sure T-l unit power charge

connection is complete and secure at

hook-up point for proper charge transference.

The corridor was empty of people for the moment. Hastings tried the door, but it was locked. She turned the handle past its stop, snapping the lock pins as if they were matchsticks.

Checking again to make sure she had not been ob-

served, she slipped into the large, dimly lit room and closed the door behind her.

Row upon row of large, plastic-shrouded figures were packed into the storage bay. T-X hesitated only a moment to study the sensor readouts in her head-up display, before she ripped the plastic off the first T-l robot and tossed it aside.

The index finger of her left hand morphed into a long, slender drill bit that she used to enter the warrior robot's tiny skull case.

A millisecond later her fingertip glowed blue with plasma energy and she transferred a stream of data into the T-l's processor.

Finished almost as quickly as she had begun, T-X withdrew her data probe and moved to the next robot in line.

Edwards South Gate

Both times Kate had been out here the CRS complex had come as something of a surprise to her. First there was nothing but desert; rolling sand hills, scrub brush, Joshua trees. Then, over the crest of a low hill the complex was suddenly spread out in the distance.

Protected by a double row of razor wire, the gate manned by serious-looking armed Air Force Security Police, the main Research & Development facility was housed in an ultramodern three-story glass and steel

building that bristled with satellite dishes, laser guidance transmission heads, and its own separate power station and air-conditioning plant.

Some distance behind the rambling building from which a dozen different wings branched in all directions was the antennae farm for worldwide communications and data links from the upper gigahertz frequency range all the way down to ELF—Extremely Low Frequencies—used for communications with submarines.

In the basement and subbasement levels were beehives of laboratories where sensitive experiments took place around the clock. Beneath the hangars and stretching in a huge circle nearly a half mile in diameter was a supercooled particle accelerator, the electromagnets of which in themselves constituted a radiation hazard when operating at full power.

An airstrip ran east and west with a modern control tower and several hangars and maintenance buildings nearby. Several military transport aircraft, a number of helicopters, and several small private aircraft were parked on the ramp or inside the hangars.

Terminator spotted the LAPD helicopter in front of one of the hangars.

"T-X is already here," he said.

Kate scrambled to the passenger seat as they started down the long hill to the gate, still a half mile away. "How do you know?" she demanded, her heart in her throat

"The police helicopter. N-one-zero-zero-nine. It was in the air near the cemetery." Terminator pointed to the chopper on the ramp.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRS Computer Center

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An unstoppable force.

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

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

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

Brewster reached out, almost languidly, and touched

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was as if someone had pulled the switch.

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

"Power failure?" someone asked.

"Lights are still on," someone else observed.

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

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

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

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

c.25

CRS

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

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

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

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

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

"Jones spotted you—"

"Who else knows?" T-X asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All their terminals were locked out.

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

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

One of the techs who had been trying to get through

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

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

But at what cost?

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

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

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

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

But not now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Get away from it!"

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

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

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

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

Kate was coming across the room toward Brewster,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate screamed.

At that moment Terminator fired the first 40mm grenade, hitting T-X squarely in the chest with a tremendous explosion that shoved her back several steps, almost off her feet.

But she recovered, and had taken a step forward when Terminator fired a second grenade at her, which hit her chest again, shoving her backward.

Not waiting for her to recover, Terminator fired again as he moved toward her. Each time she was pushed back several feet by the force of the blast. And each time before she could regain her forward momentum from the attack, Terminator fired again.

With the last grenade T-X was pushed back into the

broad louvers over the main ventilation shaft that shattered from her weight She disappeared through the opening.

Alarms were ringing, sirens shrieking as technicians continued to get out of the Computer Center as fast as they could move.

Kate raced to her father's side. He was spitting up blood, and obviously was in great pain. He could not talk above a whisper as Kate set to work checking the extent of his wounds.

"Katie, thank God. I thought—"

"Don't talk, Daddy," she said. She opened his blood-soaked blouse and shirt Black fluid leaked out of one of his belly wounds. He had to be taken to a hospital soon or he would die.

Terminator walked over to the busted open ventilator shaft and looked inside. It ran straight down for a couple of stories, ending at the shattered blades of a large fan.

Terminator turned to Connor and Kate. "She'll be back," he told them.

Connor nodded grimly. He hunched down beside Kate and her father. "We have to shut down Skynet," he told the general. "Where's the system core, somewhere in this building?"

Brewster had trouble digesting what the young man was telling him. It wasn't possible. "Who are you?" he whispered, the words gurgling in his throat "You can't know about that"

Connor grabbed his shoulder. "Cut the top-secret shit!"

Kate batted his hand away. "Stop," she screamed. "You're hurting him!"

Connor turned on her. "If he can't tell us what we need to know, we're all dead." He grabbed a handful of Brewster's uniform blouse. "Where is it? How can you shut it down?"

"Skynet," Brewster mumbled breathlessly. "It's fighting the virus."

Connor took a breath. His eyes never left the General's. "You don't understand, do you? Skynet is the virus," Connor shouted over the noise of the alarms and sirens. "It's the reason everything's falling apart."

This was even more impossible to believe than anything else. "No, that can't be true," Brewster croaked. "I just gave the command to... link to all secure military systems."

Terminator came over, reloading the grenade launcher. He'd retrieved the AK-47 and he slapped a magazine into its receiver.

"Skynet has become self-aware," he said. "In one hour it will initiate a massive nuclear attack on its enemy."

Brewster looked up. He knew this man. "What enemy?" he whispered urgently. He had to know what was happening.

"Us," Connor said with bitter finality.

There was automatic weapons fire from somewhere in the distance, but still within the building. Whatever kind of a weapon was being used, it sounded extremely fast and powerful.

People started to scream, desperate sounds rising out of the stairwells from the floor below.

Kate looked up. "Oh, God—"

"It's the machines," Connor said. "They're starting to take over."

Brewster reached up and grasped Connor's arm, finally realizing that this was no nightmare. The young man was right.

"My private office," he said with great difficulty. "On this floor. We have to get there. The access codes, they're in the safe."

Between Connor and Kate they managed to get the general to his feet.

Terminator led the way as advance guard, his AK-47 and Mk-19 up and at the ready.

CRS

Brewster directed them toward the corridor to the right that led, he said, to his office and the offices of the principal engineers and administrators.

The entire building was in a panic now. They could hear gunfire from every direction, some of which was the sharper sounds of the Ml6s the Air Force security troops carried.

But the guards were outclassed by the chainguns the robots were equipped with.

Just as they were leaving the Computer Center, they looked back in time to see the main elevator doors opening. A group of eight or ten technicians sprang up from behind consoles meaning to scramble aboard the elevator and get away.

But a T-l robot, massive on its twin treads, its red optical sensors in the tiny cranial case ominous, its bulk almost completely filling the elevator car, immediately opened fire with its twin chainguns. The depleted uranium slugs tore into the people, ripping their bodies

apart, blood and shattered bones flying outward like geysers.

Terminator stepped around the corner and had started down the corridor, his weapons at the ready.

Connor and Kate half carried, half dragged the general out of the Computer Center, moving as quickly as they could.

Kate's heart pounded nearly out of her chest as they held up at a corner. Terminator took a quick look, then stepped out across the empty corridor.

"What was that?" Kate asked.

Terminator glanced back at her. "A T-l, first generation terminator. Primitive targeting system, heat and motion sensitive."

Brewster suddenly struggled to get his balance. To stand on his own two feet. "You're Sergeant Candy," he blurted.

Terminator took a quick look up the still empty corridor, then turned back. Brewster's eyes widened. A small section of Terminator's metal cranial case was exposed.

"Negative," Terminator answered.

"Jesus—where did you come from?"

"I was built here," Terminator said.

A sudden burst of chaingun fire in the vicinity of the conference room to their left sent them hurrying down the corridor.

They could hear more screams now, and crashing sounds; shrieking metal, breaking glass, sporadic return fire from the Air Force security people.

Brewster could not understand how Skynet had taken

over the entire system so quickly, but he was even more confused about the T-l robots. Someone had reprogram-med them, or at the very least was controlling their actions.

But how? And why? What was the purpose behind all this? There had to be reasons.

Ultimately, however, all of this was his fault. He had been the driving force behind integrating CRS research and development results in the military structure.

Skynet and its control of all U.S. forces and weapons systems had been his passion from the beginning.

He had earned his first star when he had straightened out the mess left by the destruction and bankruptcy of the old Cyberdyne company. His second star came when this CRS facility was opened six years ago. And his third star was added six months ago when the major work on Skynet had been completed.

He was tired. He wanted to lie down and go to sleep. He missed Kate's mother, and he missed a normal life that he'd never had.

He turned and looked at his daughter, a wave of love welling up inside of him.

"Kate, I'm sorry," he whispered. "I'm so sorry."

"Sssh, it's not your fault," she told him. Her face was screwed up in fear and worry.

"It is. I opened Pandora's box," Brewster said. He glanced at Connor. "You did the right thing, Katie."

"What?" She was having a hard time focusing on what he was trying to tell her, while still maintaining the pace behind Terminator.

"Your fiance," Brewster said. "He's a good man."

Connor gave Kate a brief smile. Brewster could see that they were a team. It was a good sign.

Terminator pulled up short at another intersecting corridor and immediately stepped back. He motioned for them to keep quiet and then laid his weapons on the floor.

Brewster looked over at the glass partition to one of the offices. He could see the hazy reflection of a T-1 robot at the end of the intersecting corridor.

It remained there, motionless. Its sensors were trained down the corridor in their direction. It might have heard or detected something, but it wasn't certain.

Terminator was seeing the same reflection.

A second T-1 robot trundled around the corner and stopped next to the first unit.

Terminator motioned for Connor, Kate, and her father to keep very still, then he reached up and silently removed a foam-core panel from the false ceiling. Above, in the four-foot crawl space, were the hangers for the ceiling tiles and channels, the lights and the wiring for the closed circuit security cameras at every intersection, and the electronic and optic fiber runs in sheet-metal ducts.

Terminator pulled himself up into the crawl space with impossible ease, and then, moving hand over hand along the cable runs, disappeared into the darkness.

He was one of the advanced cyborg warrior robots modeled after Sergeant Candy. Brewster was certain of it. But what was so confusing to him was that the Sergeant

Candy terminator model wasn't operational yet.

Where did this one come from?

Kate and Connor spotted the reflection in the glass partition. They stood stock still as one of the T-1 robots moved a few feet up the corridor.

It was obvious that the machine sensed something. Possibly their heat signatures from around the corner.

It moved forward a couple more feet.

Connor started to pull Kate and her father back, when a ceiling panel directly behind the second T-1 burst open and Terminator dropped out of the crawl space like a Special Forces paratrooper landing in enemy-held territory.

Both T-1 robots immediately swiveled toward the movement, bringing their weapons to bear.

Keeping one step behind the second T-1, Terminator wrenched its cranial case off its blunt torso, then grabbed the barrel of the unit's chaingun as it started to fire.

The first T-1 opened fire down the corridor, but Terminator used the second unit as a shield, forcing its shorted chaingun to bear on the first robot, firing at its cranial case where its CPU was located, and at the center of its torso where its power units were shielded.

The first T-1 fell silent, its red optical sensor winking out, the muzzles of its chainguns drooping toward the floor, a second before the unit Terminator was manipulating stopped functioning.

Both T-ls were badly shot up, and would not soon be brought back into service. Terminator cocked his head

for a moment, his sensors alert for the close proximity of any other T-X controlled weapon. But his head-up display was dear,.

He went back to where Connor and Kate and her father were waiting around the corner. He retrieved his weapons and they went the rest of the way to the general's office.

Brewster's secretary was gone as was everyone else in this wing. Kate and Connor helped him into his office where they eased him into a red leather club chair, across from a built-in sectional couch that was curved like a banquette. The walls were richly paneled in cherry wood, and across from a large, busy desk was a full bar set up on a built-in buffet. The American and Command flags were displayed along with pictures of WWII fighters and bombers. Large windows overlooked the tarmac and hangars.

Connor found the safe, and he looked back to Brew-ster for the combination.

"Thirty-two left," Brewster started.

Terminator brushed Connor aside and simply ripped the door off the safe, dropping it on the carpeted floor with a heavy thud.

Kate was looking out the window at the carnage going on below, tears in her eyes, her lips quivering. This was what hell had to be like.

Several T-l robots like the one in the elevator and the

two they'd encountered in the corridor were on the flight line, shooting indiscriminately, killing or destroying everyone and everything they encountered. Bodies littered the ramp. Trucks and cars and aircraft were on fire, and smoke poured from some building in the distance.

"They're killing everyone," she cried. "Why?"

"To destroy any possible threat to Skynet," Terminator told her.

Connor pulled papers, envelopes, and folders out of the safe, tossing them aside. "Where are the codes?"

"Red envelope," Brewster croaked.

Connor found a large red envelope and pulled it out of the safe. He held it up so Brewster could see. "These'll shut everything down?"

Brewster remembered when Kate was born. They'd been stationed at Ramstein in Germany, and he'd raced up to the Army medical center at Vogelweh just in time.

She was so incredibly beautiful and so incredibly helpless and dependent.

"Take care of my daughter," he cried.

Kate was right there at his side. "Daddy!"

The room was getting dark. It was becoming hard to focus on anything. He felt a deepening flutter in his chest that frightened him. "Crystal Peak," he muttered. "You have to get to Crystal Peak."

"What's he saying?" Connor asked.

"Crystal Peak," Terminator said. "It's a hardened facility in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, fifty-two miles northeast. Bearing zero-one-five degrees."

"That's the system core?" Connor asked the general.

"It's your only chance," Brewster said, his voice now barely a whisper.

"Daddy," Kate pleaded. "Stay with me."

Brewster slumped back, his eyes blank, his eyelids fluttering.

The carnage on the tarmac was nearly complete. Only a few humans were left alive, and the T-l units were on them the moment they emerged from the building. Bodies littered the ramp.

"We need to get to a plane," Connor said. But he knew that there was no way they could make it across to the hangars in the open. He stuffed the red envelope into his knapsack

They needed another route. Some way out of the main building and across to where the planes were parked without crossing the ramp.

Connor went to the general's desk and searched for something, anything that might help them. A map, a building plan, anything.

His eyes lit on a book marked edwards air force base locator. He opened it to a foldout diagram of the CRS facility that showed the main R&D building plus the power station, air-conditioning plant, hangars, tower, and all the interconnecting corridors on each level.

"Okay," Connor said, racing through the diagram. "This looks like a passageway." It was marked on the third sublevel.

Terminator was at his shoulder. "The particle accelerator."

"It runs under the airfield," Connor said, trying to

make sense of what he was looking at. "There's an emergency exit here," he said, stabbing a blunt finger at a spot on the diagram. "Right by this hangar. We can follow it out."

The general took a last quiet breath and his heart stopped. Kate grabbed his uniform blouse and tried to shake him awake. But he was dead, and she knew that there was nothing she could do to bring him back. It was too late.

A Hunter-Killer aerial weapons system suddenly appeared outside the window, its rocket pods trained directly at them.

Terminator raised his AK-47. "Get down," he ordered, and opened fire.

At that moment an air-to-air missile shot from the H-K's rail, trailing a long sharp tail of fire as it came directly at the broken-out window.

c,27

CRS

Connor pulled Kate behind the general's massive desk and shoved her to the floor, shielding her body with his.

The missile exploded like an atomic bomb as it hit the window shards, instantly filling the room with blinding white light, a tremendous crash, and an intense stab of heat that singed the hair on the back of Connor's neck.

It was as if a gigantic vacuum cleaner came right behind the initial explosion, sucking up nearly everything in the room and spewing it out the window that was now a huge, gaping hole in the side of the building.

Glass and debris flew everywhere. Connor kept his head down, his arms wrapped around Kate, his body tight against hers.

But then it was over and he slowly raised himself up off her, his ears ringing from the concussion. It didn't feel as if he were injured, and as far as he could tell Kate wasn't hurt either.

Terminator had taken the brunt of the blast with his torso. He'd been shoved backward off his feet. He picked himself up, his jacket smoking, more of the artificial flesh

on his face and neck burned away, exposing even larger sections of his cranial case and optical sensor sockets.

Kate suddenly pushed Connor away and half scrambled, half crawled over to where her father lay tangled in a mass of debris. His eyes were open but sightless.

"No!" Kate cried. It wasn't supposed to end like this for him. Not destroyed by some mindless machine. There had been time. She could have given him CPR. Something. Anything.

She looked up at the hole blasted in the wall. The H-K was gone.

She gathered her father in her arms and held him, her body wracked with sobs. Not like this, she kept repeating to herself.

Connor came over to her. He could see now that she had been hurt in the explosion. Her leg had been cut just above the knee, and she was bleeding. But as far as he could see it was nothing major. Blood was seeping from the wound, not spurting as it would, had an artery or major blood vessel been severed.

He disengaged her grip on her father's body, took her by the shoulders, and tried to pull her away. Gently. The H-Ks would be back. He was sure of it. "There's nothing you can do now," he told her, his tone compassionate. He could write a book on what it felt like to lose someone. "Come on."

"I can't," she said. She looked up at him, pleading, and shook her head. "I can't."

"Yes, you can," Connor insisted.

She tried to turn away, but he pulled her back and

looked into her eyes. Willing her to understand what had to be done. She was covered in blood now, her own and her father's. She was on the verge of collapse.

"Kate, listen to me. He wanted you to come with me. To get to Skynet and shut it down."

She kept shaking her head, as if she could blot out the death and destruction around her. But she allowed Connor to help her to her feet.

She almost collapsed, suddenly feeling the sharp pain in her leg. Connor helped her catch her balance.

She nodded after a moment.

Connor pulled his AK-47 and knapsack from the debris behind the desk. "How much time do we have?"

Terminator was at the door, looking toward the corridor. "Fifty-one minutes," he said.

"We better hurry," Connor told him.

He and Kate followed Terminator through the general's outer office and into the broad corridor as the T-X turned the corner and came directly at them.

Terminator stepped between them and the charging T-X. "Run," he said, and he stepped forward into her charge.

Connor grabbed Kate by the arm, hauled her around the opposite corner, and they headed down the corridor in a dead run.

At the last instant T-X leaped into the air and kicked Terminator in his face with the heel of her boot, putting

all of her considerable power into the blow.

It was a force even stronger than the H-K's missile, sending Terminator smashing into the wall.

T-X came down light-footed as a cat, and without a glance at Terminator started after Connor and Kate.

Terminator's CPU was unable to register surprise, or at least not the human variety, but he was able to register a reevaluation of new data that his processor instantly used to overwrite an old subroutine. The T-X model was stronger, much stronger and even more agile than he had been programmed to expect

He would not make the same error twice. Before the T-X managed to take three steps, Terminator came off the wall like a prizefighter off the ropes and went after her.

As she reached the corner he caught up, clamping his arms around her upper body, and swung her to the left She went with the direction of the force, then dug her shoulder into his chest and slammed him completely through a steel-reinforced concrete wall into the executive staff men's room.

Terminator no longer held confidence that he could win this fight. At the beginning he'd evaluated his chances of disabling the T-X at 18.773 percent His estimate based on the new data was now at 4.331 percent, with a ¹4 percent margin of error.

But his program allowed for no options other than the preservation of John Connor's and Katherine Brew-

ster's lives.

A sink flew off the wall, shattered porcelain peppering

the stall doors like machine-gun fire. Water gushed from a broken pipe, and a section of the tile flooring cracked and sagged under the pressure of their combined weights landing with such sudden force.

T-X had broken free, and she turned to step back into the corridor, but Terminator grabbed the broken sink by its drain pipe and swung it with all his strength at her head.

Her cranial case nodded under the force of the blow, otherwise she seemed undamaged.

She turned back to Terminator, grabbed him between the legs, lifted his bulk off the floor, and tossed him like a piece of trash across the men's room into the stalls that crumpled like tissue paper.

Even if he had been human, Terminator would have felt little or no pain. As a human his adrenaline would have been coursing through his body. As a cyborg a series of action circuits were firing, providing the electronic equivalent.

He was pumped, as Connor would say.

T-X turned and headed for the door, her sensors reaching out for indications from the T-ls roaming at will through the complex for signs of her primary targets.

Terminator rose easily from the tangled mass of stall doors and partitions and in three quick strides reached the T-X.

He grabbed her shoulders and working with her forward momentum drove her cranial case, face first, into a mirror above a sink, smashing the glass and cracking the wall.

He pulled her head back and smashed it into the reinforced concrete wall again. And again. And again.

Connor and Kate held up at the ground-floor landing in the executive wing emergency stairwell.

They could still hear gunfire somewhere above, but the screams had diminished, as had most of the returning gunfire from the Air Force security people.

The machines were winning as they had been designed to do. The only two questions in Connor's mind were how Terminator was doing against the T-X, and how they were going to get out of here without him.

He looked through the mesh-reinforced glass window in the door. Offices, workshops, and labs opened off the long corridor. The place was all shot up. The T-ls had already been here.

There were bodies on the floor, and all the rooms, especially the labs and workshops, were in shambles. But there was no sign of the robots. Connor glanced back the way they had come, half wondering if they shouldn't go back to try to help Terminator.

"What?" Kate asked.

"We can't get out of here without him," Connor said. Kate had followed his gaze. She knew what he was thinking. "Yes, we can," she told him. "I have a pilot's license."

Connor's left eyebrow rose. He nodded, impressed. "Good to have you around," he said, and he meant it. He was starting to appreciate her strength and resilience. She was good to have at his side.

"It should be the next wing from here," he told her. They stepped out into the corridor and raced to the end, . where they came to another emergency door with a reinforced window.

The situation here was the same as in the wing they'd just come through. Offices and labs opening off the main central corridor were in shambles. Bodies lay everywhere, and small fires burned here and there, the haze of smoke thick in the air.

But there were no warrior robots.

The entrance down to the particle accelerator complex was somewhere off this last corridor. Connor and Kate stepped through the door and pulled up short. The stench of shredded human bodies hit their noses at the same time, and they gagged.

Pictures and diagrams and artists' renderings of T-ls and H-Ks and other futuristic weapons systems were framed and hung on the walls in some of the offices and work areas.

"God, it's actually beginning," Connor said. This was the future his mother had worried about. The future she had fought so hard to prevent

They started down the corridor, passing a big, smoke-filled work area. There were a lot of bodies here, where the fighting and destruction seemed to have been more

intense than in other parts of the building. A pool of some flammable liquid had collected in the center of the room and was burning.

Connor took Kate's arm again and had started around the tire when they heard the distinctive whirr of a T-l moving their way.

Kate pulled back, but Connor bodily hauled her to the floor and scrambled as close to the fire as he could stand without being too badly burned.

The T-l, its hunched back and shoulders nearly reaching the ceiling, came around the corner, its treads crunching over debris and bodies.

It stopped short. A red laser targeting beam swept the room, avoiding the heat source of the fire.

The machine was searching for the heat signatures of still living humans. This unit was evidently part of a mop-up squad. Either that or the T-X had sent it ahead to search for them.

Either way the T-l presented a deadly menace. Connor eased closer to the fire, dragging Kate with

him.

"No," she whispered urgently in his ear. "It's too hot!" "The heat will blind it," he explained. "Don't move."

c.28

CRS

Smoke started to rise from the sleeve of Connor's jacket.

The heat was nearly impossible to bear, but he willed himself not to move a muscle as the T-l continued its methodical sweep of the room.

The machine sensed that someone was here; it may have heard them coming through the door. But it was unable to detect their heat signatures because they were so close to the open flames.

Its laser targeting beam swept over their bodies, came back, lingered above their heads for a second, and then began to angle directly at them.

The red targeting beam reflected in Kate's eyes, inches from Connor's. She was frightened, but she seemed resolute now. Something had changed inside of her. He could see it in her eyes, in the way she looked at him, in the way she clung to him, her will to survive fully as strong now as his.

He had the sudden urge to lean forward, just an inch, a half inch, and kiss her mouth. Her lips were slightly

parted, and her breath, after all they'd gone through, was still sweet on his face.

The beam played across their heads, then moved away to the left, sweeping up and down like a television raster, painting an infrared picture of the contents of the room,

line by line.

The rubber wheels of a small equipment cart had caught fire. Black smoke rose from the hubs. One of the wheels suddenly collapsed, sending the unbalanced table with its test instruments crashing to the floor.

The T-l swiveled with lightning speed, homing in on the noise and motion, and opened fire with its chainguns, completely destroying the cart

When it stopped firing the sudden lack of noise was

deafening.

The T-l swiveled again, its targeting beam sweeping the room for further movements or heat sources.

This time it ignored Connor and Kate as already classified nontargets, and after a minute turned away and trundled through the door back toward the R&D wing.

As soon as the robot was gone, Connor rolled away from the fire, and heedless of his burns helped Kate to her feet.

"Okay?" he asked. She nodded. "You?"

"I'll live," he said, and they skirted the fire and raced down the corridor in the direction of the entrance to the accelerator.

Terminator knew he had a double handicap: his model had lesser abilities than the newer T-Xs, and he had only a single remaining hydrogen power cell.

Already he was starting to feel the effects his efforts were having on his power circuits. If he ran down completely it could take an hour or more to regenerate sufficient power to operate. During that time he would be helpless.

The primary cause for concern, however, was his steadily diminishing abilities that were only offset by the double imperatives deeply imprinted in his CPU.

The T-X batted him aside again, but before she could step away, he leaped on her back, wrapping his powerful titanium alloy arms around her neck.

The tile floor and concrete slab beneath them finally gave way, and together they crashed through the crawl space and ceiling of the physical plant equipment room below in a hail of broken tile, shards of glass and porce-lain, and showers of water.

The sounds of running machinery, refrigeration units, water pumps, emergency generators, and servo motors for dozens of emergency controls such as fire suppression systems, fire doors, sirens, and lights, were very loud.

A row of boilers stood like sentinels down one side of the long room, while a dozen power distribution buses contained in large steel boxes were attached to the opposite wall.

Mazes of pipes and cable runs and microwave guides

crisscrossed the ceiling, an entire section just below the men's room bent out of place or destroyed.

The two cyborgs landed on their feet in the middle of the long corridor between the two rows of machinery. Terminator tightened his hold as he tried to force her cranial case off its mounts.

The lower half of the T-X's face peeled back, liquid metal retreating to expose steel jaws and alloy teeth that were harder than industrial diamonds. Her jaws opened, then clamped onto Terminator's left arm, just above the wrist, the teeth cutting and grinding and crushing their way through his leather jacket, his infiltration duraplast skin, and into his hydraulic and electromechanical systems.

Terminator tightened his grip around her neck, pulling up reserves of power as his action circuits kicked in the last of their electronic adrenaline.

The lower half of the T-X's body swiveled 180 degrees at the hips and she hopped up, clamping her legs around Terminator's torso. Her thighs began to squeeze together with the pressure of a hydraulic press.

The T-X released her grip on Terminator's arm, and spun her head 180 degrees so that her optical sensors were locked in to his.

Terminator staggered a couple of steps backward under her weight. His torso support cage and shielding began to shriek and groan under the relentlessly increasing

pressure.

Still Terminator refused to relinquish his steel grip on

her neck, or stop his efforts to wrench her cranial case off its support struts.

The T-X rotated her torso so that her entire body was wrapped around Terminator's in an almost sexual embrace, though neither machine had the slightest capability of considering such a thought.

She lifted her right arm, the skin peeling back from her hand and wrist to expose the plasma transmission head that she had jury-rigged after the fight outside the cemetery.

Terminator released his grip on her neck, grabbed her wrist, and started to bend it away when her plasma weapon fired point-blank at his face.

A large section of his duraplast skin immediately seared away under the intense heat, exposing almost the entire side of his cranial case, which was now pitted and scarred.

The blue glow immediately began to build at the weapon's tip as it rapidly repowered.

One section of Terminator's CPU was refiguring his odds of prevailing, lowering his estimate to less than two percent His double-imperative program spurred him into throwing the T-X that clung to him to the left, crashing into one of the high-voltage power distribution boxes on the wall.

The T-X did not release the pressure on Terminator's torso, and her plasma weapon continued to charge.

Terminator swung her against the power box a second time, the steel crumpling under the tremendous blows.

He swung her again and again, and on the fourth time

the metal box shorted across the 2200-volt copper bus bar in a shower of white-hot sparks.

Both cyborgs stiffened, their servos going into overload, delicate control circuits shunting to protected areas as the high voltage slammed into their metal skeletons and coursed through their electrical systems.

Terminator leaned against the T-X's body, pressing her against the high-voltage bus, forcing the issue that could, if allowed to continue for a sufficient time, result in the destruction of both their central processors.

Suddenly the T-X broke free, head-butting Terminator under the chin, sending him sprawling backward.

He took two steps, and then fell onto a steel mesh platform that extended over a sump trench beneath the

boilers.

Before he could raise up, the T-X was on him, slamming her foot into his cranial case that hung over the edge of the steel platform.

Something snapped in his neck.

The T-X smashed her foot into his head again, dislocating the second and third cranial case support struts.

Terminator was no longer able to raise his head, and many of his servo circuits providing power to his lower extremities were damaged or destroyed. His left arm jerked spasmodically.

T-X studied him for several long seconds, then she bent over his body, her right index finger morphing into a long drill bit, a blue glow surrounding the data transfer probe.

The "radiation danger" symbol was attached to the steel door at the end of the long corridor.

"That's it," Connor shouted. It was the entrance to the particle accelerator. "We can follow it out to the runway!"

They had one shot now, just one chance to get out of here, and Connor wasn't going to hang around to make sure that it was the right decision.

At this moment, with or without Terminator, it was their only decision.

A window in a row of windows along the corridor suddenly burst inward under the hail of machine-gun fire.

Connor and Kate looked over their shoulders to see an H-K hovering just outside.

They had been detected!

The H-K banked sharply to the left and tracked them up the corridor.

An air-to-ground missile dropped from the H-K's rail and ignited.

Connor dragged Kate to the floor as the missile rocketed through the window, shrieked a few feet over their heads, and blew out the steel security door that led to the particle accelerator.

The H-K spun tightly on its long axis, intending to line up on them again for a second missile shot.

Kate jumped up with a cry, grabbed the AK-47 from Connor, jacked a round into the firing chamber, flipped the safety catch off as she'd watched Terminator do, and opened fire on the approaching Hunter-Killer.

She was completely lost in her rage. Her fiance had probably been murdered by some remorseless machine.

Her father had been cut down by a machine. And still the monsters came on and on, seemingly without end. Heartless. Soulless. Emotionless.

She kept her finger depressed on the trigger, the heavy buck of the assault rifle shoving her backward almost off her feet.

And then the rifle was out of ammunition, and the H-K seemed to hover in midair for a second, before it exploded in an intense ball of flame, scattering wreckage in every direction, some of the pieces crashing through the windows and clattering down the corridor to land at her feet

Connor stared openmouthed at her. He'd not seen anything like that since his mother.

She turned to him, her eyes wild, her chest heaving as she tried to catch her breath. She was covered with grease and oil from the floor near the fire, with black smudges of blowback from the AK-47, and with blood. "What?" she demanded, still hyper. "Nothing," Connor said, spreading his hands. "You just reminded me of my mom."

He looked beyond her out the windows, but the sky was clear for the moment, as was the corridor behind them. It wouldn't last It couldn't last.

"Let's go," he said. He took the AK-47 from her, and as they headed for the blasted accelerator entrance door he ejected the spent magazine and dapped in a fresh one from his knapsack. It was his last

They flew down two flights of stairs to the second subbasement, where they entered the particle accelerator control room. The space was no larger than the living

room in an average house, but was crammed with electronic monitoring and control equipment and a dozen computer monitors and keyboards.

A door was open to the accelerator tunnel, through which they could see a blue metal tube, about six feet in diameter, surrounded by mazes of wires and conduits and pipes, gigantic electromagnets every ten or fifteen feet, warning and ID tags everywhere, curving away into the distance.

A large placard was posted over the door.

warning: intense magnetic field.

Connor rushed over to one of the control positions, where he laid his rifle on the desk and hurriedly studied the display. He might never have been taught English grammar or history, but some of the weirdos his mother had associated with had been computer geeks. They'd taught him some things.

After a minute he started flipping switches and entering commands into the computer, following the prompts he brought up.

Kate turned her gaze from the stairwell they'd just come down to what Connor was up to. "What are you doing?" she demanded. She wanted to get out of there right now.

"Powering up," Connor replied distractedly. He keyed several more commands and then hit enter.

Kate noticed a bank of closed-circuit television monitors on which were displayed several locations within the CRS complex.

T-ls were hunting down the last of the humans, kill-

ing them indiscriminately. On other screens there was no movement, only bodies.

But on still another screen the T-X was moving very fast down a corridor. Kate backed up a step.

"Oh, God," she said.

The T-X passed the wreckage of the H-K that Kate had shot down. She was in the corridor just above them.

Connor looked up at the last minute and saw what Kate was seeing. He entered one more command on the computer keyboard, grabbed his gun, and headed for the accelerator tunnel entrance, Kate right behind him.

The big machinery was powering up with a tremendous noise. Super-cooled magnets were being hit with liquid nitrogen, power circuits were coming up, and powerful vacuum pumps were eliminating the air from the accelerator tube itself. It was like being inside someone's insane idea of a factory gone mad.

Over that noise they could hear the T-X in the tunnel behind them.

Connor turned in time to see her less than thirty feet away, her outstretched right hand surrounded in a blue plasma glow.

There was no way that they could outrun her.

No way. He was sure of it.

CRS

Connor and Kate ducked behind one of the outcropping electromagnets as the T-X's plasma weapon fired, the intense blue beam missing them by inches.

The noise in the tunnel was increasing in volume and pitch as the coils around each of the toroidal magnets were cooled by liquid nitrogen. The closer to absolute zero the wiring got, the more electric current it could pass and the stronger the magnetic field became. It was building exponentially now.

Red warning lights began to flash as Connor charged his AK-47 and stepped around the magnet to fire at the oncoming T-X.

A klaxon began to blare, blotting out even the powerful noise of the vacuum pumps and the hum of the magnets.

The T-X was less than twenty feet away. The blue glow at the transmission head of her plasma weapon was so bright it was almost impossible to look at with the naked

Connor lined up on her head and started to pull off

a round when the AK-47 was ripped from his hands. It smashed into one of the electromagnets with a resounding metallic clang and held fast.

Connor looked from the T-X to his weapon. He stepped back a pace. "It's working," he shouted to Kate.

The T-X raised her weapon arm directly at Connor, but it was jerked violently to the left, dragging her to one of the magnets.

She looked at Connor, and then tried to pull her arm free, the metal shell around the accelerator tube distorting under the pressure she was putting on it

But she was caught fast, and as the magnetic field intensified her entire body was drawn to the tube, stretched out as if she were on some medieval torture

rack.

Even the T-X's tremendous power was not sufficient to free her, and as the field continued to build, her features began to distort, her mouth and eyes sliding to impossible angles, her entire body flowing toward the core of the magnet.

Her endoskeleton began to vibrate like a horribly stretched violin string, shrieking and squealing, as the artificial liquid steel that was used to lubricate her mechanical joints was slowly forced through her body and into the center of the magnetic field.

Still, the T-X continued to fight with every gram of her strength, her programming forcing her to continue up to the very point of her own destruction. She had no

other option.

'

Her mouth opened, and as if she were a human being

in pain and anguish at being burned to death at the stake, she emitted a powerful scream.

Kate stepped out from behind the magnet, and stood behind Connor, watching what was happening to the monster.

"Just die," she screeched, not able to take any more. "You bitch!"

Connor lingered for just a moment longer, fascinated by what was happening to the T-X, but then he turned and with Kate raced down the tunnel in search of the way up to the flight line in front of the hangars.

Most of what could be thought of as Terminator's artificial intelligence, his main CPU circuits, were intact As were ninety-five percent of his subroutines.

But the rest of his functions, mental as well as physical, operated as if he were in a fog. As if he were a human trying to wake up after a particularly deep sleep, or an alcoholic whose functions were impaired.

His motivational programs had been especially affected. Much like a schizophrenic who realizes that what he is experiencing is not real, and yet can do nothing about his fantasies, Terminator understood that he had been altered by the T-X.

But there was nothing he could do about it

Terminator slowly raised his hands to his cranial case, which he lifted into place on the three support strut ball joints, and snapped them back into place.

Able to sit up now and hold his head upright, he got to his feet where he remained for several moments, his head cocked to one side as if he were trying to figure out where he was, what had happened to him, and what he was supposed to do next.

He didn't feel as if he were under the direct control of the T-X, but he couldn't be certain.

A small hole had been drilled into the temple of his cranial case, and it crackled with blue plasma energy, but he could feel no pain in the human sense, only the dull fog obscuring a portion of his motivational programming.

He headed to the nearest emergency exit, his movements jerky at first but smoothing out as if he was learning all over again how to move and function.

limeter by millimeter the blade edged against the wall of the accelerator tube.

At first nothing seemed to happen as the saw made contact, but then a long streak of sparks shot away, and

seconds later all the air in the tunnel seemed to be focused in a hurricane-strength gale past T-X's saw hand, and into the breach of the accelerator tube's vacuum chamber.

An impossibly loud whistle rose from the widening gap, and the powerful hum of the electromagnets immediately began to wind down as the entire system went into its automatic shutdown mode.

T-X slid down from the tube, her features beginning to coalesce into their normal shapes, her strength and ability to function returning as the magnetic field rapidly died off.

T-X was fully cognizant of all her neural paths. Her body was bound to the electromagnet by a force that by sheer dint of strength she could not break. But she was not unconscious, in the machine sense of being on standby, nor was she without her reasoning powers and her still considerable abilities.

Slowly she was able to morph her plasma weapon back into its containment field, and just as slowly morph the diamond-tipped cutting saw into place.

Her mental acuity was up to speed, but her electromechanical functions were sluggish.

The saw came to life with an angry whine, and mil-

Something had gone wrong. The accelerator was turning itself off. Somehow the T-X had managed to wreck something.

The placard at the base of the shaft read emergency

EXIT—WARNING AN ALARM WILL SOUND.

Connor pulled down the access ladder, slung the musette bag of explosives and fuses over his shoulder, and started up first A siren suddenly began blaring in his ears.

There was no telling what they would find when they got to the surface. The diagram he'd studied in General Brewster's office showed that this shaft opened behind one

of the hangars across from the west wing of the main R&D building.

They'd seen what the T-l robots and the H-Ks had done, and it was more than likely that they were still up there searching for live humans to exterminate. He didn't want Kate poking her head up into a maelstrom.

Steel rungs rose up the inside of the shaft. At the top was a steel hatch, with a locking lever.

Connor looked back to make sure Kate was okay. She gave him a reassuring nod, and he slid the latch to the left, freeing the hatch.

Girding himself, he eased the hatch open just enough so that he could see outside. There were wrecked cars and trucks on fire. A couple of helicopters and a military transport were also damaged, and bodies were scattered everywhere.

But nothing moved so far as he could see.

He eased the hatch all the way open, climbed out, and keeping low, scurried the ten feet across to the rear wall of the hangar.

His sudden appearance drew no response. The T-ls and H-Ks were nowhere in sight for the moment

Kate poked her head up out of the escape shaft and he motioned for her to come ahead. She climbed the rest of the way out and ran over to him.

When they had driven in through the main gate, he thought he remembered seeing several small aircraft and helicopters parked inside this hangar.

"This way," he told Kate. Together they raced along

the back of the hangar to one of the small service doors that Connor eased open.

There were several aircraft inside, light planes and a couple of bigger helicopters. They seemed to be intact, and there were no robots here. From this angle he could better see the burning transport across the flight line and more bodies. The scene looked like a war zone.

Kate lit up. "My dad's plane," she said. "I trained on it."

She led Connor across the hangar to a single engine Cessna 180 with a blue stripe and wheel pants. The civilian registration painted on its fuselage was N3035C.

She checked in the window to make sure the key was in the ignition, and she and Connor pulled the chocks away from the wheels.

Connor looked up as Terminator entered the hangar, and all of a sudden he felt as if they had been delivered. The fight wasn't over, but with Terminator back it was less of a lost cause.

"Yes," Connor said. "He made it." He started over, but something wasn't right. Terminator's movements were stiff and jerky, like a puppet's.

"Get away from me," Terminator said. There was something wrong with his voice too. It was distorted.

Connor stepped back, closer to Kate. Whatever shit was going down now was definitely not right.

"Leave," Terminator warned. "Now!" It seemed as if he were fighting something inside of himself. "Let's go, John," Kate said.

Connor nodded, but he kept his eye on Terminator as he climbed into the right-hand seat, and Kate got in on the pilot's side. Without thinking they locked their doors.

Kate frantically threw switches, the gyro compass, the radio, VOR and DME, and set the altimeter to what she remembered was the field elevation.

"Come on, come on," Connor urged her to hurry. He pulled the knapsack off and tossed it in the backseat.

Kate turned the key to engage the starter but nothing happened. Nothing was working. She had missed the master switch. "Shit, I forgot to—"

Terminator was at Connor's door. He pulled it open, popping the flimsy lock, and yanked Connor out of the plane, tossing him on the concrete floor.

Connor tried to scramble away from Terminator who was right on top of him. "You can't do this."

"I have no choice," Terminator said, his voice still badly distorted. "The T-X has corrupted my system."

The Cessna's engine came to life suddenly, revved up, and then settled back to a few hundred rpms.

"No! You can't kill a human being," Connor argued, still scrambling backward, trying to get out of Terminator's reach. "You said it yourself."

Kate leaped out of the airplane, ran directly at Terminator, and jumped on his back, tearing at his optical sensors.

"Let him go!" she screeched. "That's an order!"

Terminator threw her aside as easily as batting a fly

off his shoulder, sending her sprawling against a big, rolling tool chest.

He stopped for a moment and looked at his raised hands, almost as if he knew that he had done something bad.

"You can fight it," Connor shouted. "You're fighting it now."

"My CPU is intact. But I cannot control my other functions." Terminator advanced another step toward Connor who continued to back up.

"You don't have to do this. You don't want to do this." "Desire is irrelevant," Terminator said, still advancing. "I am a machine."

"That's not true! You're more than that!" Terminator grabbed Connor by the jacket and tossed him onto the hood of a Humvee parked just outside the hangar's main doors.

Before Connor could move, Terminator was on him again, grabbing his neck with one hand and drawing the other back into a fist that could crush a man's skull like an eggshell.

"What's your mission?" Connor shouted in desperation.

Terminator's head jerked as if he had received a jolt "To ensure the survival of John Connor and Katherine Brewster."

"You're about to fail in that mission!"

Terminator's entire body began to tremble. As if fighting a tidal wave force inside of himself, he cocked his fist farther back and drove it down, with every kilo of his force.

c30

CRS

Until this moment Connor never believed that Terminator could hurt him. It was like a child's faith in its father.

He raised a hand to ward off the blow.

At the last moment Terminator diverted his fist to smash the Humvee's hood inches from Connor's head.

"I... I cannot," Terminator struggled with the words.

"You know what you have to do," Connor told him. "You know my destiny."

Terminator's entire body shuddered again. His optical sensors glowed with an incredible brightness, blood red, as if they were heading for overload.

It was clear that he was no longer in control of his functions. He was fighting some colossal internal battle. Something had to give way in his system.

"I have to live," Connor said.

Terminator seemed to focus on Connor for a moment, then grabbed him by the jacket and tossed him aside.

Terminator brought his fist down on the hood of the Humvee, caving in the heavy gauge metal like tinfoil.

He threw his head back and uttered a guttural, plaintive otherworldly scream, then stopped, jerked upright, looked at something in the distance, and shut down.

The light in his optical sensors winked out, and Terminator remained frozen in place, unmoving, unblinking, apparently unaware of his surroundings.

Connor got to his feet, a great sadness and weariness coming over him as he stared at the closest thing to a father he had ever known.

Terminator was dead.

There was nothing Connor could do except make sure that he and Kate lived into the future. They owed him and the human resistance that much.

He turned on his heel and sprinted back into the hangar where Kate was struggling to her feet She was dazed from hitting her head on the tool cart.

"Are you okay?"

Kate looked at him, and then out at the flight line at the motionless Terminator. "What happened?"

"He couldn't do it," Connor told her. "He shut himself down." He gave Kate a critical look. "Can you fly?"

She nodded, and he helped her back to the plane where he handed her up into the pilot's seat, then hurried around to the passenger side and climbed in.

They buckled their seat belts, and Kate checked to make sure that the controls moved freely, that no locks were in place. She eased the big throttle knob forward, the engine responded, and they taxied out onto the ramp.

She had to maneuver around Terminator and the destroyed Humvee as well as burning vehicles and the bod-

ies. Everywhere there seemed to be bodies, civilians as well as Air Force officers and security troops.

The humans hadn't had a chance. LAW rockets might have helped, and perhaps if there'd been time to get the Army National Guard out with a couple of tanks, the fight might have been less one-sided.

But even then Connor doubted if the outcome would have been much different

Kate turned onto the taxiway that led to the main east-west runway. She automatically dialed up the tower frequency that was posted on the control panel, and reached for the microphone when she realized that there would be no response.

In the distance they could see the control tower was badly damaged, all its observation windows shot out, smoke curling from inside, and no signs of life.

The fight would already be spreading out now in preparation for the nuclear war. A war that no one in their right mind wanted, and a war no one ever expected would be fought this way.

"Are we okay on gas?" Connor asked, to distract her. She was starting to drift because of the unreality of what was happening around them.

She gave a start and glanced at him, and then at the fuel gauge that showed more than three-quarters full. She nodded. "Plenty."

"Then let's get out of here before another one of those flying robots shows up," Connor said.

Kate pulled up at the intersection with the runway, and turned toward the east, into the wind. She checked

her controls again, and then holding the brakes ran the engine up to 1850 rpm, held it there for a few moments, then switched to magneto one. The engine dropped about 25 rpm, and came back up when she switched to both. It dropped again, this time almost 50 rpm when she switched to magneto two, and came back when she returned to both.

"Ready?" she asked.

"Anytime," Connor answered.

Kate firewalled the throttle, released the brakes, and the Cessna gathered speed down the runway. At sixty miles per hour, Kate pulled off the carburetor heat and the engine picked up another 150 rpm. At seventy-five she eased back the wheel and they lifted off, building speed for the best rate of climb and then accelerating as she slowly bled off the flaps.

T-X emerged from the particle accelerator emergency shaft and went around to the front of the hangar. In the distance to the east she spotted what looked like a small plane gathering speed and altitude off the end of the runway.

She enhanced her optical circuits, focusing on the light plane. It showed up in her database as a Cessna 180, registration N3035C belonging to Brewster, Robert.

She watched for a full minute longer while the Cessna turned and apparently settled on a heading just east of north.

Her processors brought several options to her head-up display, but Crystal Peak indicated the highest confidence at about ninety-five percent

If they had acquired the necessary data from General Brewster, there was a chance that the humans, John Connor and Katherine Brewster, could have a major negative impact on Skynet if they were allowed to reach the control center core. This could not be allowed to happen.

T-X strode purposefully into the hangar, passing the inert Terminator without so much as a glance, and headed directly for a Bell Iroquois helicopter parked by itself in the open.

It was not quite as fast as the Cessna 180, but it could take off and land anywhere. It did not have to taxi out to the runway and the time saved would be enough.

Into the Sierra Nevada Mountains

From the air, Connor could see fierce fighting going on over at the main side of Edwards. The carnage was spreading even faster than he had feared it would.

They were running out of time to stop Skynet. Any delay, no matter how slight, would put them over the limit. They would be late, the war would begin, and there would be no turning back from the fight to the death between the machines and the human race.

The future, as Terminator had painted it for them, was a bleak one.

"Okay," Kate said. "Zero-one-five degrees. Fifty-two

miles, our maximum airspeed is about one-sixty."

Connor glanced at his watch. They would touch down at Crystal Peak, if they didn't get lost, in about twenty minutes. Just time enough. "Thirty-two minutes left," he said. He looked at Kate. "It's just you and me now."

She nodded but didn't say anything. After losing her fiance and her rather within the space of one day it was a miracle she wasn't a complete basket case.

Connor got the knapsack from the back, and started arming the one-kilo bricks of C-4 with fuses.

Kate watched him work. "John, what if we can't..."

"There's enough C-4 here to take out ten supercomputers," he told her. "We're going to make it, Kate." He looked up into her eyes. She was frightened. He offered her a small smile. "The future is up to us."

She nodded and turned away to watch out the windshield. The Sierra Nevada Mountains rose in front of them, even more bleak and forbidding than the desert beneath them.

"I saw the future," she said.

Connor looked up, startled. "What?"

"I had a vision. A waking nightmare," she said. "There were robots, and explosions and fires." She shivered, and then looked at Connor, wanting him to believe her. "Bodies too. Hundreds, maybe thousands of human bodies, and skeletons and skulls in big piles."

Connor nodded. "I've had the same dream for the last twelve years. Welcome to the club."

"It's true?"

"Not if we can stop it," Connor said. "The future is up to us."

She nodded with a new determination, her lips compressed. "Then let's do it right," she said.

c.31

CRS

Blackness.

A tiny cursor began to flash in the upper right corner of Terminator's head-up display. The word restart appeared.

His diagnostic circuits were the first to come on-line. Starting with his core programs his CPU was tested and rebooted, then brought up to speed one step at a time. But at an increasing rate.

Terminator's optical sensors cleared and began to glow. Animation returned to his features by degrees.

He straightened up, took two steps backward, and then made a complete 360 to scan his immediate surroundings for any dangers.

But the flight line was empty of any live humans or robots.

In the distance to the east he detected the heat signature of a helicopter. In his still riot-fully-functional state it took precious seconds to enhance his optics while bringing up a data file.

The machine was a Bell UH-1E/N Iroquois military

helicopter. It was a unit primarily used by U.S. Navy and Marine forces. But he had seen this machine parked in the hangar earlier.

John Connor and Katherine Brewster had left in the general's Cessna 180. The only logical explanation for the pursuing helicopter was the T-X.

Terminator walked into the hangar where a much larger troop transport helicopter was parked. This one, according to his data bank, was a Boeing Vertol CH-46.

It was slow, but it would do.

Crystal Peak

They had been flying for more than twenty minutes and still there was no sign of the installation.

"Maybe we're off course," Connor suggested.

Kate checked her compass and shook her head. "Could be a head wind which would slow us down. I don't know."

"We're running out of time—" Connor said, but then he spotted it, just ahead. There was a long, flat, grassy plateau halfway up a mountain pass. It was protected by what looked like a cyclone fence. A dirt road switching back and forth up the mountain was mostly lost in the trees. "There," he said.

"I see it," Kate said. She pulled the carb heat knob out and backed down on the throttle while keeping the airplane's nose up. Their speed rapidly dropped off and they began to lose altitude as she angled straight toward

the end of what at one time might have been a runway.

"Looks deserted," Connor said. He spotted what looked like the entrance to a tunnel bored into the side of the mountain. The dirt road passed through the gates and then straight across to the mouth of the tunnel.

Kate saw it too. "Looks like no one's been here in years."

"That's gotta be it," Connor said. As they got closer they could see that the top of the mountain above the tunnel entrance bristled with camouflaged antennae and satellite dishes. Whatever was buried in the rock was keeping touch with a lot of satellites and other installations. Probably CRS back at Edwards, and most likely Navajo Mountain, the big Air Force underground facility in Colorado.

They were lined up with the runway. Kate pulled up five degrees of flaps, and then ten and dropped the nose. The plane wouldn't respond as crisply as it had before because of the thinner mountain air, but the 180 was a beefy airplane with a lot of power to spare in case something went wrong on the first pass.

Connor instinctively tightened his seat belt. He'd never flown much, and as a result he didn't like air travel. Airplane accidents were usually fatal.

Kate pulled up fifteen and then twenty degrees of flaps, and as they crossed low over the fence, she chopped power and held the nose slightly above the horizon.

Connor caught a brief glimpse of a sign posted on the fence that read danger—u.s. govt. property—no

TRESPASSING.

"Hang on, this may be a little rough," Kate warned at the last minute.

Connor braced himself as they set down on what turned out to be an overgrown concrete runway. But Kate's touch on the controls was light, and there was only a slight jolt when the wheels hit. She released all the flaps at once, canceling the last of the plane's lift, and they trundled down the uneven runway.

Connor grabbed the heavy knapsack and even before they had come to a full stop and Kate flipped off the master switch, he was out of his seat belt and had the door unlatched and open. .

Kate wheeled the plane into the wind with the last of its forward motion, set the brake, and she too yanked off her seat belt and opened the door.

Connor was right there to help her down, and together they raced across the runway, down a grassy swale, and up the other side to the tunnel entrance.

There were no buildings anywhere within the compound, only the runway, grassy areas, and a lot of boulders and pine trees.

Now that they were on the ground, and seeing the place up close, Connor got the even stronger impression that no one had been here in a very long time.

No human, that is.

Just within the overhanging rock lip, the tunnel was closed off by a large, aircraft-hangar-type door with windows above it.

The door was not locked, but its latching mechanism was heavily rusted. It took every ounce of Connor's

strength to pull it up and slide it free so that he could open one of the doors on its long neglected hinges.

The floor of the tunnel was concrete with a flood gutter covered by steel grating down the middle. Overhead, the rock was faced with big steel beams that formed curved walls and ceiling much like the inside of a very large Quonset hut

Lined up in long rows, like so many soldiers ready for an inspection that had never come, were military vehicles—jeeps, trucks, a bulldozer: all painted olive drab, and all old-fashioned, covered with dust and debris that had filtered down from the high ceiling for years.

There was a definite air of neglect and abandonment here. No one had been to this place for a long time.

Connor stopped in his tracks for just a moment. It had been twenty-five years since the first terminator had come back programmed to assassinate his mother so that she would never conceive and bear a son who would one day lead the human resistance.

It was possible that this place had been built as early as that time by the military in anticipation of a coming global thermonuclear conflict.

They were getting ready for Skynet or something like it as long as a quarter century ago.

That would explain the age and neglect that they were seeing here. The place was built for a Judgment Day that had not come. Yet.

He motioned for Kate to hold up. "Skynet," he said. There might be more of them."

He pulled out his pistol and fired into the darkness. The shots were shockingly loud here, the bullets ricocheting in the distance like angry bees.

But there was no answering fire. No T-ls coming out of the darkness. No H-Ks hovering just outside the doors.

Connor took the lead into the tunnel, Kate right on his heels, feeling their way around the parked jeeps and trucks when it got too dark to see.

He had no sense that the walls were narrowing, or that the ceiling was getting any lower as they penetrated farther into the mountain. But the air seemed danker, more stagnant. It smelled of rock dust, leaking motor oil, disintegrating rubber tires, and something else. Some distant odor that might have been electrical.

Maybe he was smelling electronic equipment that had been suddenly switched on after lying dormant for many years. It was not a comforting thought.

As best he could estimate they had gone at least one hundred yards into the tunnel when they came to a dead end. A wall made of steel with deep vertical grooves blocked their way.

Connor moved to the right, reaching the edge of the steel wall in five or ten feet, and feeling what he thought was a concrete lip, or edge.

"I think it's some kind of a blast door," he told Kate. He dug in his jacket pocket and found a book of matches. He lit them all at once. .

In the sudden glow he could see that he was right. It was a steel blast door set into the concrete, and meant to

j: Kise ot me Machines 297

be raised or lowered into place with powerful electrical motors.

Large air vents, covered by steel bars, opened in the tunnel walls beside the blast doors.

But the entry looked impregnable.

"No way we can blow this open," Connor said, his spirits sinking.

"Maybe we don't have to," Kate said. She'd found what looked like an old-fashioned security station and card reader.

The matches died as Kate slid open a panel that covered a small keypad. A dim light came on that provided just enough illumination for them to see what they were doing.

Connor looked over her shoulder. A small LED screen above the keypad flashed with the single word: standby. After a moment that word was replaced by the letters and numbers: blue 478.

"Now what?" Kate asked. She was just as conscious as he that they were running out of time.

"It's a code prompt," Connor said. He pulled out the red envelope they'd taken from General Brewster's safe back at CRS, and hurriedly flipped through the code cards. He found one tinted in blue, which contained one word and three numbers. "Here. Type in DAKOTA, seven-seven-five."

Kate entered the code and the LED screen flashed: | power on.

Lights came to life above the door and in the tunnel ceiling.

The keypad beeped and the LED screen lit up with the next prompt.

"We're almost in," Connor said excitedly.

They could see now that they were in front of a massive blast door. A notice posted to the right warned that this was a secure area. To the left the notice warned personnel to stand clear.

Connor was about to look for the proper code card when they both heard the distinctive thump of an approaching helicopter. But close. Behind them at the tunnel entrance.

They turned toward the sound. Now that the lights were on they could see all the way to the end.

A helicopter suddenly crashed through the hangar-type door with a tremendous racket, bursting into the tunnel on a trail of sparks and shooting flames. Pieces of the rotors and the tail section and landing skids flew off in all directions as the machine came to a halt, nose over, in front of a pickup truck.

The pilot's door opened and a woman dressed in a rust-colored outfit climbed out of the machine.

Kate took a step backward, her complexion turning instantly pale. "It's her—"

c.32

Crystal Peak

The T-X showing up here was the one thing Connor knew that he should have counted on, but had not.

Kate was losing it. The T-X had become her worst nightmare.

"Come on, come on, the next prompt," Connor shouted at her.

She looked at him. Her mouth worked, but no sounds came out. She remained frozen, but then she blinked as if she were waking from a trance, and turned back to the security screen.

"RED, one-seven-six," she replied.

Connor flipped through the cards, his hands shaking. He dropped them and had to scramble on his hands and knees to pick them up. He found the correct card. "AV-ALON, four-one-two."

Kate punched in the new code. The reader beeped twice, the prompt disappeared from the screen, and was replaced by a single word: authorized.

An alarm came to life, and red warning lights began d rotate as a powerful metallic bang reverberated in the

thick steel door. It began to rise on the hum of powerful motors.

But it was slow, ungreased metal on metal squealing in protest, a deep rumbling vibration spreading through the tunnel. Small rocks skittered down the walls and dust drifted down from the ceiling.

The T-X was halfway up the tunnel and moving fast. Too fast, Connor gauged. They would never make it through to the other side and get the blast doors closed and locked before she was on them.

They were so damned close.

Connor pushed Kate aside and reached into his knapsack for a brick of C-4 and a fuse. He might be able to buy them some time by setting off a charge as far down the tunnel as he could toss it. If the timing was right he might be able to bring down a section of roof on top of the T-X's head.

If he was off, he could bring the roof down on him and Kate.

A tremendous noise filled the tunnel. It was even louder than the rising blast door. It took Connor just a moment to identify what he was hearing. It was another helicopter, this one much larger than the one the T-X had crashed into the tunneL

He stepped back another pace.

T-X heard the same deep-throated thump of large rotor blades lifting a heavy machine, and she stopped and turned just as a large troop transport chopper crashed through the already breached tunnel entrance.

This one moved much faster than hers, its rotors

sheared off immediately on the tunnel walls and the fuselage dropped to the concrete floor.

Its weight and momentum carried it over and through the parked trucks, jeeps, and even the bulldozer, all of which exploded like firecrackers on a string.

Still it came, shearing past the Iroquois helicopter and careening down the tunnel like an express train on tracks of fire and sparks.

T-X spun on her heel and headed in a dead run down the tunnel toward where Connor and Kate stood momentarily stunned, rooted in place. The helicopter was right on her back.

Connor came alive first. He grabbed Kate by the arm and propelled her across the tunnel to a maintenance trench in the concrete floor. They leaped into it, and Connor shoved her below the edge, shielding her body with his.

The transport helicopter and vehicles it had picked up smashed into the T-X, engulfing the cyborg in twisted metal and flames. The chopper finally ground to a halt, pieces of burning wreckage flying down the tunnel and hammering off the blast door.

A different siren started to blare, and another set of red and yellow warning lights began to strobe.

Connor and Kate lifted up from the edge of the trench in time to see Terminator emerge from the twisted wreckage of the helicopter.

Half his skin and much of his clothing had been sheared away and burned off in the intense heat of the

aviation-gas-fed flames. His metallic endoskeleton was exposed, and even some of his hydraulics and electromechanical mechanisms were open to the air.

But he moved like his old self, with a smooth determination. And though much of his duraplast skin was gone or shredded they could recognize his usual sardonic expression.

Connor had never been so glad to see anyone in his life.

Terminator stopped in front of the trench and looked down at them. "I'm back," he said.

The blast door had only opened a couple feet, and then stopped.

Connor and Kate jumped out of the trench as the security keypad and LED screen began beeping. The screen was flashing a new message: abort—emergency closure.

The blast door started to close with a tremendous squeal. The fire had triggered some emergency circuit. Connor had a feeling that there would be no way to override it.

Terminator brushed past Connor, got down on his hands and knees, and pulled himself under the closing blast door, catching the bottom part of it with his powerful shoulder.

The motors lowering the door hummed in overload, sparks flew from around the edges of the mechanism, and groaning gears stripped with loud cracks as Terminator put his back into the effort to not only hold the massive

steel blast door from closing, but to raise it one millimeter at a time.

Behind them, within the twisted, burning wreckage of the transport helicopter, T-X managed to shove an engine block off her chest. She raised her head and torso above the flames, her optical sensors locked on the bottom of the blast door.

Her infiltration covering was completely gone now, leaving only her battle chassis that itself was scarred and dented from the tremendous heat and forces it had endured over the past twenty-four hours.

But T-X's imperatives were still intact, her programs were still up and running, and her prime directive was still driving her actions.

She had been sent to eliminate twenty-two targets. John Connor and Katherine Brewster were at the top of the list.

They were here.

She would kill them.

Terminator's internal mechanisms were strained to their limits, exceeding even their built-in safety and redundancy engineering.

He knew that he would not be able to hold out much longer.

He was also aware that the T-X was struggling to free itself from the wreckage. There was no time left. "Go!" he told Connor and Kate. "Now!"

The fire and smoke were getting thick in the tunnel, making it difficult to see, let alone breathe.

Connor tossed the heavy knapsack filled with C-4 under the blast door, sliding it all the way through to the other side.

He helped Kate crawl under the door. She paused long enough to give Terminator a grateful look, and then scrambled the rest of the way through.

Connor got down on his stomach and pulled himself under the massive blast door that vibrated like a live beast just above his head.

Terminator's body trembled with exertion. Connor could hear overloaded hydraulics and servo motors, and smell the stench of burnt electronic circuitry. A joint in Terminator's shoulder failed with a loud pop, and hydraulic fluid began to spurt from beneath the mechanism.

"Thank you," Connor said. He had lost this friend once before. It was very hard to go through it again. So much had happened, so much had gone on.

"We'll meet again," Terminator said with as much emotion as was possible for a cyborg.

Connor scrambled the rest of the way under the door, which, at the base, was nearly two meters thick.

Kate was there. She reached down for him when

something clamped over his left ankle, tearing into his flesh.

The pain was impossible to bear, and he screamed.

The T-X, her legs sheared off in the wreckage, held on to Connor's ankle with her right hand and began to inexorably draw him back under the blast door.

Terminator grabbed her wrist with one hand and her throat with the other in an effort to drag her away from Connor.

In the effort his shoulder turned away from the blast door that then inched downward, pinning him and the T-X like a hydraulic press.

The buzz saw morphed from the T-X's left hand, and she drove it into Terminator's chest, just above his one remaining power cell.

Terminator tightened his grip on her wrist, bending hydraulic joints out of position, causing her finally to lose her grip on Connor's ankle.

The door was pinning their torsos even more tightly now. Nevertheless the T-X managed to bring the saw up from Terminator's chest, into his neck, and then into his chin and cranial case.

Circuits shorted out and massive dumps of random data no longer under the control of subroutines cascaded like shivers through his CPU and servos.

Still he did not release his grip, although with what little RAM was left in his cognitive circuits he finally reduced his chances of success to zero percent.

His body, broader at the shoulders and in the chest than the T-X's, was being crushed by the lowering blast door.

He could feel all of his systems going off-line, one by one. And there was nothing he could do to stop his own destruction.

He brought up John Connor's image, now and in the future, superimposed over the images of Katherine Brew-ster now and then. They were not machines. They were humans, creatures his original programmers had meant for him to eliminate.

But a montage of pictures of interactions with Connor and with Katherine Brewster rippled across his dying memory circuits.

One final course of action was left open to him. The only logical choice.

He released his grip on the T-X, and for a second their optical sensors locked together.

The T-X withdrew the saw and started to crawl the rest of the way under the blast door.

Terminator pulled aside the armor plating in his chest to expose his last hydrogen fuel cell. Without hesitation he yanked the cell out of his chest, trailing wires and mechanical parts, sparks and fluids flying in all directions.

With his free hand he grabbed the T-X by a piece of tubing protruding from her hip and dragged her back.

She turned and fixed him with a baleful gaze.

"You are terminated," he told her.

Terminator crushed the fuel cell to rupture it, and thrust it into the T-X's mouth, driving it deep into her throat

"Eat me," Terminator said, and the fuel cell erupted with a tremendous explosion.

c.33

The Refuge

Kate had to help Connor hobble down an unfinished concrete corridor to a short set of stairs. They had just started down when a wall of flame shot out from under the steel blast door.

They managed to get to the bottom of the stairs and race down the lower corridor when the shock wave hit them with a blast of incredibly hot air, sending them reeling and stumbling forward as if propelled by unseen hands.

The blast door settled on its track with a tremendous metallic bang that instantly cut off the flames and shock wave.

Connor and Kate pulled up short and turned to look back. Connor half hoped to see Terminator appear at the head of the stairs. But he knew in his heart of hearts that would not happen.

He and Kate exchanged a glance and then headed the rest of the way down the tunnel that was lit at intervals by caged lights.

Dust lay everywhere. No one had come this way for

a very long time. A quarter century, Connor supposed.

The corridor ended at an elevator cage. Functional. Industrial. Meant to move people and machines to and from a subterranean control center.

Or was that right?

Connor looked back again for a moment. All the vehicles in the tunnel were very old. Coated with dust. Everything was disintegrating with time. This place was dead. Unused.

According to his watch, they had eight minutes before Judgment Day began.

They boarded the elevator and started down.

Connor opened the knapsack and inserted a detonator into a brick of soft plastic explosive. He was out of breath and operating on his last reserves. The wound in his leg throbbed, and the pain in his half-crushed ankle was excruciating. He couldn't remember when he'd had a decent meal and a good night's sleep. In a bed. Between clean sheets.

He looked at Kate, who watched him with a dubious expression on her smudged face.

"I'll set this for five minutes," he told her. "That should give us enough time to make it back up here."

She nodded. Left unsaid was what would become of them afterward. It was possible that the blast door would never open and they would be trapped down here.

Connor crimped the fuse to start the acid timer and looked at his watch. The countdown started now.

Moments later, the elevator reached the bottom,

which Connor estimated had to be at least one hundred meters beneath the tunnel.

It was dark down here. The only sounds were the noise of the elevator machinery and a distant hum somewhere.

Connor pulled the door open, and he and Kate stepped out, not knowing what to expect.

Lights began to flicker on as old, automatic circuitry activated with their arrival. Classical music, low and soothing, began to play. And they could feel the gentle rush of clean air from ventilators.

Connor stopped short as he began to see where they had come out. They were in a very large, lavishly appointed space, perhaps the lobby of a luxury hotel of twenty or thirty years ago. But brand new. Never been used.

Comfortable looking, overstuffed chairs, long plush couches, and massive coffee tables and end tables were grouped here and there. A fully stocked bar ran along one wall, shelves of books on others.

The ceiling was very high. Parts of the room had been partitioned by frosted glass dividers and doors. Sections of raw rock were exposed as if the designer had used the natural look of a cave hollowed out of a mountain rather than completely disguise it

But there were no supercomputers here. No command and control center. No sign of Skynet.

"What is this?" Connor muttered, half under his breath.

He limped across the lobby to a large door, which he threw open. Inside was an enormous pantry filled with row upon row of metal shelving stacked with bottled water, freeze-dried foods, canned goods, cooking oils and spices, paper towels and napkins.

At one end of the storage area, racks of grow lights were mounted over rows of hydroponic trays meant to cultivate vegetables and herbs and other plants.

Kate opened another door, which led into a dormitory. Rows of bunk beds and lockers, enough to accommodate at least fifty people, were ready for use.

They were running out of time. The detonator fuse continued its countdown.

Connor hurried past Kate to a third door that revealed a different kind of facility entirely.

This was Crystal Peak's Control and Command Center, and yet it was all wrong. What looked like a waiting area furnished with chairs and couches faced a glass-enclosed computer center raised a couple of steps above the main floor.

The great seal of the United States of America was mounted high on one wall, and across from it, what appeared to be a small television studio had been set up in a corner. Lights hung from a massive, circular concrete slab suspended from the ceiling brightly illuminated a podium that was flanked by the U.S. flag and a blue flag that Connor didn't recognize. Television cameras were trained on the podium behind which was a blue curtain for a backdrop.

Connor and Kate took a couple of steps closer. At the

center of the backdrop, directly behind the podium, was the seal of the President of the United States.

The president was meant to be here. To broadcast his message to a nation that was at war.

Global thermonuclear war.

It was becoming clear to Connor, finally. He sprinted across to the computer center, which consisted of several rows of monitor stations above which were clocks showing the local times at various capitals around the world. But the equipment was old. Twenty years or more out of date.

"These are just ordinary computers," Connor said with growing understanding.

He looked around, frantically searching for something, anything to prove him wrong.

"This isn't Skynet," he said. "There's nothing here. It's just a fallout shelter for VIPs. Only they never got the warning."

He swept a computer monitor off the desk and it smashed onto the floor, its old fashioned CRT tube imploding.

"Goddammit, there's nothing here!" He looked at Kate and nodded beyond her to the lobby and the elevator that had brought them down from the tunnel. "Why did he send us down here to—?"

"To live," Kate said softly. "It was his mission."

Connor shook his head and lowered his eyes. He was spent. It was all over. "There was never any stopping it," he said. The detonator fuse was counting down. Less than one minute to go.

Kate was looking at him, her eyes filling with tears. She had lost everything that she ever valued in her life. "John," she started. "We could just—" But she couldn't say it. Couldn't suggest that they do nothing, remain right here until the C-4 exploded.

One of the communications consoles suddenly came to life, red lights flashing, the overhead speakers crackling with static. Voices, dozens maybe even hundreds of them, jammed the one channel. It was hard to make out at first; there were so many of them. Some of them spoke foreign languages, some heavily accented English. But all of them were frantic; that much was clear.

"Hello, hello. This is Montana Civil Defense. Somebody please come in—"

"Can you read me? This is U.S. STRATCOM. We're at a hardened facility, under attack. Repeat, we are under attack."

"—rumors about launch sequences, command and control have broken down out here—"

It was over. Judgment Day had arrived. Connor looked at Kate, and he could see that she understood that they were too late. That they'd never had a chance.

"Is there anybody there?" a distant voice pleaded. "Is there anybody there?"

Connor pulled the detonator from the brick of C-4 and tossed it aside. Two seconds later, the fuse sizzled momentarily and then popped.

Connor went over to the communications console, studied the controls for a few seconds, and then flipped

a switch and picked up the microphone. "This is John Connor at Crystal Peak."

"Connor, what the hell is happening? Who's in charge there?"

He hesitated. "I guess I am," Connor said after a beat.

Kate came to his side and took his hand in hers. He turned to look into her pretty face, into her eyes, into her soul.

Maybe some things have to happen, he thought.

He knew what was happening now on the surface. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of missile contrails would be crisscrossing the evening sky.

By the time Skynet became self-aware, it had spread into millions of computer servers across the planet. It could not be shut down.

Thermonuclear explosions would be erupting all over the world. City busters, the multi-megaton weapons were called. Designed to kill millions of people with one searing blast.

The attack began at six-eighteen p.m. Just as he said it would. Judgment Day.

From the viewpoint of satellites in orbit, this was the time when the earth had no night darkness.

The day the human race was nearly destroyed by the weapons they'd built to protect themselves.

To the west toward Los Angeles and the California coast, bomb after bomb detonated, sending massive nuclear shock waves across the mountains, toppling trees and setting them alight as if they were matchsticks.

I should have realized. The Terminator knew. He tried to tell us. But I didn't want to hear it. Our destiny was never to stop Judgment Day. It was merely to survive it—together.

Above, in the tunnel, a wind began to howl, fanning the dying flames from the wreckage of the helicopters, sending desert sand under the blast doors to scour the burnt remains of the two terminators.

There are others like us. We will find them. And join together. Take back our world.

Terminator's skull was crushed almost beyond recognition. Wires and hydraulics and processor chips were exposed.

But there was still a faint red glow in one eye.

Maybe the future has been written. I don't know. All I know is what the Terminator taught me. Never stop fighting. And I never will.

A tiny electric circuit in Terminator's skull shorted out.

The battle has just begun, Connor thought

The wind in the tunnel was very strong now and radioactive with early fallout. But Terminator was no longer aware of anything. The feint glow in its eye died.