Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

C.28

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 porcelain, 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, killing 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.