Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was thirty days ago.

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

Lieutenant Joel Benson, 1st Resistance Rangers Special Incursion Unit Red One, pulled himself the last few meters to the top of the rocky ridgeline. It had snowed last night, and he and his four operators were damn cold. They had nothing like this in Los Angeles. Not even in the mountains. Not on a first of July.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

H-Ks, or Hunter-Killers, were helicopterlike machines that had been designed by CRS in California for one purpose and one purpose alone: to detect and kill human beings, whenever and wherever. They were fully automatic and damned difficult to bring down. Everyone gave them a great deal of respect Toni relayed the information to Home Plate, the resistance's headquarters deep underground of what had been Beverly Hills. She had lost her husband and one child in the San Bernadino battle and like Benson, she was having trouble regaining her capacity to love again, but also like Benson she had thrown herself into her work.

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

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

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

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

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

Benson had to smile. It wasn't exactly religion, not in this day and age, but it was as close as many of them could get.

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

"Everything's covered?" Benson asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like here, John thought He brushed back a strand of graying hair. It was an unconscious gesture he'd had since he was a kid. Of medium height and build, he was an unremarkable-looking man, who'd never once considered himself the savior of mankind, and certainly not a hero. You just did what you had to do. His mother had taught him that lesson.

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

They had no other choice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What about the mission?" Taggert asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"We don't have anything better."

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

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

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

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