Rising Storm

couldn't see, ready to catch him if he fell. Instead, it looked as though he'd been right. Standing did seem to be helping return some of his strength. Which was good—God knew they'd need it soon.

John studied the base through his binoculars, pleased to see no sign of life but a faint trail of steam or smoke from one of the huts. Everything else seemed to be shut down. Dieter's little gizmo showed no sign of surveillance equipment either.

At least not at this distance.

I wish we had another day, he thought. But then he also wished he had Dieter.

And Mom. It would definitely be good to have Mom. Wendy was watching him and he reached over and patted her back.

"Guess there's no point in waiting till dark," he said. He tried to put a smile into his voice while keeping his face still. It was amazing how much a smile could hurt, and chewing that PowerBar had been indescribable.

"How do we approach it?" Wendy asked.

John nodded. "We walk in," he said. "Watch what I do and follow in my footsteps. You got your stuff?"

She nodded.

"Then let's rock-and-roll." It might be an old-fashioned phrase, he thought as he climbed to his feet, but it works better than let's rap or let's hip-hop. He supposed that one day it would be replaced. Or it might become one of those antique phrases you use without thinking about. Whoa. I'm free-associating, he thought.

Not good. Focus, John, focus. Wendy's life might depend on it.

Wendy watched him move slowly toward the base and shook her head. "John,"

she called, and he carefully turned to look at her. Oh, yeah, she thought, let's rock-and-roll. "Let's take the snowmobile."

"They'll see us," he protested.

"Assuming anyone is there," she agreed. "But if anyone is it's probably just a skeleton crew and this way we'll find out who it is right away."

He stared at her, swaying slightly. "That's stupid," he finally said. "They'll lock us up. We're not even supposed to be here."

"We're tourists. We got separated from our group by the storm, our guide fell into a crevasse and died; it's plausible. Besides, you've been injured, we're both under twenty-one—they'll believe us. Nobody sends out a couple of white-bread kids like us to commit sabotage. Especially not to Antarctica, where we'll stick out like a sore thumb."

"They'll see us!" he protested.

"John! There isn't any way to avoid being seen." She swept her arm toward the base and the flat, empty ground between them. "They'd probably see us if we crawled over there! And let's be honest, neither one of us is up for that."

He studied the ground for a long moment, then shrugged. "And like I said, there's no point in waiting for dark."

She grinned. "At least we'll arrive in comfort and style."

When the snowmobile pulled up with two figures wearing blood-smeared white parkas, Tricker was surprised. He'd expected them to be a little more covert.

Nobody takes pride in their work anymore, he thought. Then felt more depressed when he realized that was the kind of thing old codgers say; and field spooks generally didn't live that long. He stood before the door of the hut saying nothing as he watched the smaller figure help the larger climb off the snowmobile.

"Is there a doctor here?" she asked.

A girl! he thought. Some vestigial remnant of Affirmative Action, he supposed.

Not Sarah Connor anyway. He'd heard recordings of her voice, which was lower and smokier. The girl was propping up her partner, looking at him.

"No doctor," he said aloud. He paused. "Does this mean you'll be leaving?"

The two stared at him, unmoving, then they glanced at each other as though confused. "Won't you please help us?" the girl said, her voice quavering. "My husband is hurt."

Tricker sighed. She sounded like some nice, middle-class kid. The very people I started out meaning to defend. Every now and again it was good to be reminded of them. So that if he had to, he'd be able to break this little girl's neck for their benefit. Tricker walked over to them and put his arm around the silent one's waist.

"C'mon in," he invited. "Glad ta see ya." He hated waiting.

They steered the girl's companion to the nearest chair and eased him down, then Tricker went to close the door. The girl stripped off her gloves and began

loosening her husband's clothes, pushing back his hood, unzipping his parka. She pushed back her own hood, yanking off her goggles impatiently and pulling off the balaclava.

Tricker was surprised; she looked younger than he'd expected, maybe nineteen or so. A fair ways from twenty-one anyway.

Wendy leaned over John and gently removed his goggles, then carefully peeled back the balaclava. She could feel that it had stuck to the cut on his face and hesitated.

"Yank it," he said stoically.

So she did, gritting her teeth as she pulled it off in one movement.

"Holy shit!" Tricker exclaimed. "What the hell happened to you?"

This wasn't something they'd set up to get sympathy and lull him into a false sense of security. The boy had a lump the size of a softball on his forehead and one side of his face was swollen and bruised, bleeding slightly from where the balaclava had been ripped away, with inexpert stitching holding together one of the ugliest cuts he'd ever seen.

It looks like he's been savaged by an animal.

"You wouldn't believe me," the boy said, obviously trying not to move his face.

Probably not, Tricker agreed silently. But what the hell, I'm always up for a good story. "Tell me anyway," he invited. Then held up his hand as he caught the

girl's genuinely anxious look. "You kids hungry, thirsty?" he asked.

"Thirsty," they said as one.

"Coffee?" Tricker offered. They nodded and he poured them each a cup. "You should take sugar," he said to John. "Even if you don't take sugar."

John nodded and accepted a cup with two large spoonfuls.

"So," Tricker said after his guests had taken a few grateful sips of the hot brew,

"give. Who are you people?"

"I'm Wendy and this is my husband, Joe."

Joe/John made a little sound that turned into a groan.

"Would you like some aspirin?" Tricker asked.

"Yes," John said fervently. "Aspirin would be good." He held up three fingers and nodded his thanks when Tricker put the tablets in his hand.

"You guys seem a little young to be married," he said, sitting down again.

"That's what our parents said." Wendy took John's hand and smiled up at him.

"But we think we know what we're doing." She looked over at Tricker and said brightly, "They gave us this trip as our honeymoon."

"They sent you to Antarctica for your honeymoon?" Tricker said. There's a message there kids if you can read it. He shrugged. "Wouldn't have been my first choice."

"Ecology," John said, his voice muffled.

"We're very interested in it," Wendy agreed. Her face grew solemn. "But it's been a disaster. First we got separated from the rest of the group by the storm, then our guide fell down a crevasse, and then J-Joe was attacked by a seal."

Navy SEAL? Tricker wondered for a split second before rejecting the idea. "A seal" ?" he said aloud. "Where were you when this happened?" ' Cause there sure aren't any seals around here.

Wendy shook her head. "We don't know. Maybe the guide did… but without him we have no idea. I don't even know where we are now."

"Your guide is dead, I take it," Tricker said.

They both nodded. Wendy took John's hand and her breath caught in a sob.

Tricker was impressed. Somebody had died, this he believed, and whoever it was had meant something to these kids. But a guide… Maybe it was Sarah Connor.

"Look, is there anybody I can contact for you?" he asked.

Wendy looked at John, who nodded slowly, once. "Our ship is the…" she paused and the blood rushed to her face. "The Love's Thrust," she said.

Tricker turned his bark of laughter into a cough.

Wendy frowned at him. "Vera Philmore is our cruise director…" Her voice petered out. She looked from John to Tricker. "I just can't tell her. I just can't.

Can we wait a little?" She pleaded with her eyes.

"They'll be worried about you," Tricker said.

Wendy looked worried, then shook her head. "I just can't."

Tricker raised an inquiring eyebrow at John, who also shook his head. "Okay, look," Tricker said, "why don't you two take a nap. Then, after you've had a little rest, we can talk about this some more."

"Thank you." Wendy turned to offer John a hand up. He took it and made a project out of rising, then didn't release her hand once he was on his feet.

Tricker led them down a short hall and opened a door. "It's not the Hilton," he said, gesturing them in to a small room furnished with two bunk beds and four chests and a table, "but it's warm."

"Looks like the Hilton to me," John mumbled.

"Thanks," Wendy said.

"No problem," Tricker said with a smile. He pulled the door closed, fitted the hasp over the staple, and fitted a padlock through it. He gave it an experimental tug and, satisfied,, walked away. All the sleeping quarters had locks on the outside of the doors just in case someone got a touch of cabin fever. It just went to's;how, y'never knew when something was going to come in handy.

Tricker made his way back to the workroom to power up the radio, half expecting the kids to pound on the door, yelling to be let out. But there was dead silence behind him. Maybe they really were just a pair of lost kids who wanted

nothing more than to sleep. I doubt it, but whatever. Silence was good.

He sat down and leaned into the microphone. "This is X-79er," he said. "Come in, McMurdo."

He sat back, waiting for a response. What came back was static. Tricker made some adjustments and tried again. Again, static. Tricker sat back and considered the situation. Once may be coincidence. Twice may be happenstance. Third time, someone's fucking you around.

It could be the weather, which was far from stable, or a solar flare of the type prone to interfere with radio signals. So he could take the radio apart and find nothing wrong with it. Or… Tricker got up and went to the door. It could be some kind of jamming, provided by his young visitors. Which he thought was much more likely.

He opened the door, intending to take a look at that packed sledge. Only he couldn't see the sledge, he couldn't see anything. It was like someone had put a big, thick sheet of white paper over the doorway, one that blew freezing confetti at him. Tricker took a step back and slammed the door. So much for that :idea.

Nobody came to Antarctica for the climate.

He went to the desk and sat down. Oh well, he thought. It wasn't like it made a difference. He had them under lock and key, and the weather was going to keep anybody else from approaching the base. All he really had to worry about was Bennet. He clicked a couple of keys and the computer screen changed to a view of her lab. She seemed to be mesmerized by her own screen, sitting utterly motionless.

Tricker watched her, wondering, what she was thinking. As her stasis held he began to get a little worried. What, has she gone catatonic? he wondered.

Normal people can't just sit around without moving a muscle. The thought instantly calmed him. Like anybody here is normal! Especially not the geniuses that he and his crew were guarding. Sheesh! For a moment there he really had himself going.

***

"What are we going to do?" Wendy whispered. She and John lay cuddled together on one of the narrow lower bunks.

"Take a break for a couple of hours," John suggested. "Enjoy being warm, maybe get served a meal. I want to be sure he's alone here."

Wendy was quiet for a moment, then she said, "But he shouldn't be alone. You said the Terminator would be here."

"Yup," he agreed. "So let's conserve energy by letting it come to us."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

RED SEAL BASE, ANTARCTICA

Clea had summoned the remaining three seals to the base over her computer's objections. The computer argued that it was a waste of resources. The I-950

countered that she had created those resources to be of help to her and that she needed that help here and now. If the seals didn't make the trip, they didn't; hut if they did, they might make the difference between Skynet's survival or John Connor's.

She checked on the seals and found them exhausted, but closer than she'd dared to hope. Reluctantly she decided to allow them a few hours of rest. After all, it would be better if they were capable of moving once they arrived.

Her computer informed her that it was time to eat. Clea stood up impatiently and went to find something. If the damn thing wasn't satisfied that she was taking care of herself, it wouldn't leave her alone, flashing a continual reminder in the corner of her eye. Besides, Tricker was probably checking up on her, so she had to act like a human to satisfy him as well.

As one of Skynet's most advanced weapons, she found the situation annoying.

Mentally, she did a final rundown… no, no weapons on the base. Should she improvise explosives? No. Contraindicated. Ironically enough, she was better off making this a body-to-body confrontation. Anything she made, John Connor might turn against her: he had an eerily good record at doing just that. Her strength and speed and skill she could rely on.

Still, it was annoying that there were no spare firearms. On the other hand, it wouldn't be like Tricker to leave anything to chance.

It was a pity he was human; sometimes he seemed more like one of her type.

Dieter woke slowly, rising to consciousness through frantic dreams of being pursued. He moved in his sleep, and pain brought him fully aware, causing him to suck in his breath sharply—only to have it cut short by a slash of agony. He choked, then let out the excess air in slow bursts to ease the excruciating pain in his side. The sensation was familiar, but it wasn't one you ever got used to. This time he didn't seem to be waking up in a hospital, either—always a bad sign.

Broken rib, he thought. At least one.

Von Rossbach opened his eyes to surprisingly dim light. Then realized that he was in some kind of snow cave, which explained why he hadn't frozen solid. In fact, comparatively speaking, he was relatively warm; snow could be good insulation, at the very least it stopped the wind. He moved his legs experimentally and found them merely cold and not broken. One of his arms was free, but the other was pinned and numb. Carefully he lifted his head to take a look.

A seal's head and neck pinned him down. The surreal sight brought the circumstances of his fall back to him in a rush. Was that when all these huge blocks of snow had fallen, too? He lowered his head and realized that he'd laid it down on something reasonably soft. Turning carefully, he saw that he was also lying on top of a seal. Sandwich, he thought wryly. Blubber made good insulation. Another reason why I'm not a Popsicle.

John won't know where I am, he suddenly thought.

He shoved at the seal's head with his free arm, with about the same results as pushing at a boulder. The whole animal had stiffened into one solid piece; four hundred pounds of meat stiffened into rigor mortis could only be shifted by a crane. He raised his head to study the situation and decided to try sliding out from under it. Only its head, neck, and part of a shoulder held him pinned.

Luckily. Otherwise he'd never have woken; the weight of the thing on his broken ribs would have smothered him or driven the broken ends of the bones into his lungs. But its slowly cooling body had saved his life.

Carefully he tried to wriggle out from under the huge creature, only to find himself held fast by his trapped right arm. Dieter tried to move it; he couldn't feel his arm at all anywhere below his shoulder. Nevertheless, it did move; he could feel it slide down toward his back by a couple of inches. Not broken, he thought with relief. Not frozen solid either. Just a pinch on the nerve, blood still circulating.

He managed to slide it down until it struck the seal beneath him; once there, he was stuck again. The flesh of the dead seal on top of him had molded itself around his arm and then hardened, giving him no leeway. The one beneath formed a solid floor that might as well have been oak. Sucking in his breath to make himself smaller was not in the equation at the moment.

Interesting problem, he thought. He got his left hand underneath the seal's chin and lifted; a fraction of an inch might be all he needed to get tree. But his ribs quickly, and loudly, protested. He stopped; it had been a faint hope anyway. If all he'd had to do was break its spine it might have been possible, but getting this thing moved would require breaking its whole body.

Even in my younger days— without broken ribs— I doubt I could have done it.

He'd been lucky about the ribs; they might be broken, but they hadn't pierced any important organs. He'd better make sure they hadn't. Every muscle in your gut and upper body pulled on the spine and breastbone, and the ribs were what joined those.

Dieter bent his left leg and began sliding his booted foot toward his free hand.

He reached for the knife in his boot sheath, straining toward it despite the grating protest from his ribs. Definitely more than one, but only on one side. Almost

more than the pain he hated the sensation of wrongness in his body.

His fingertips brushed the hilt, but he had to stop and get his breath. Grasping his pant leg to prevent his foot from sliding out of reach, he allowed himself to relax. Not easy to do in this slightly curled posture, where he felt his ribs separate with every painful breath.

Realizing that he wasn't going to get any rest until this was finished, he walked his hand back toward his boot, trying to pull his leg closer with every move.

Dieter pulled until the tendons in his knee protested, then pulled some more.

Finally he gritted his teeth, then lunged, to be rewarded by possession of the knife's hilt and a pain so sharp from his side that he almost grayed out.

But he held on, to both his consciousness and the knife. Closing his eyes, he took a series of long, slow breaths to calm the pain and get himself in the zone. Then he started carving at his prison.

After what seemed like eternity in a freezing, white hell, Dieter flung himself up onto the hard surface at the top of the crevasse. Then he pulled himself into fetal position to conserve body heat and rested. Don't rest too long, he warned himself. Too long being a very short time here. Wincing, von Rossbach pushed himself into a sitting position. Some of his senses seemed to have shut down—

smell, for example, though that might just be the cold. The world seemed to be very far away, seen through a thick plate of clear glass. At least the blizzard had stopped. If it had still been snowing, things would be even more desperate. He thanked God for great favors.

He checked the time and date. Early afternoon, day after I acted like a complete

dummkopf and left the tent alone. He knew better than to do a thing like that and had paid dearly for the mistake. Dieter struggled to his feet and after a moment's dizziness felt better for it. Without the weight of a full-grown seal crushing his body, his ribs didn't hurt nearly as much. Looking around, he saw that someone else might have paid for his mistake.

There was a mound of bloodied snow near where he'd crawled out of the rift, and following the blood trail with his eyes led him to the imprint of the snowmobile.

As he looked over the marks in the snow, he decided that John must have fallen into the crevasse and that Wendy, clever girl, had used the snowmobile to pull him out. Von Rossbach leaned over the edge cautiously to find another seal, this one broken on the same massive blocks of ice that had sheltered him.

Dieter sincerely hoped that the blood belonged to the animal, because there seemed to be quite a lot of it. Turning away, he followed the snowmobile's tracks back to their campsite and wasn't really surprised to find John and Wendy gone.

They'd naturally assumed that he was dead and had continued the mission without him. Which was entirely reasonable, especially given John's training, but not a very welcome discovery. A man on foot without supplies was at a distinct disadvantage here, even if it was just a short walk to shelter.

He looked into the distance. Yes… the rock ridge was unmistakable; even a storm wouldn't recarve the surface ice that much in so short a time.

That's the direction. So I'd better get going before the weather changes again.

Traveling on foot was going to be bad enough without risking another sudden storm. Though the sky seemed clear enough now. Perhaps it was the ribs, but he felt pessimistic.

With a grimace of distaste he pulled a chunk of seal blubber out of his pocket and, lifting his balaclava, worried off a piece with strong white teeth. Then he returned the bloody lump to its place. He chewed thoughtfully as he walked. Seal blubber was awful stuff, tasting like fishy lard with a slightly more solid texture.

But it was high energy and would keep him going as long as anything that came out of a nutritional lab.

Talk about cold comfort.

Clea lay on her cot, going over and over the corridors and the labs and the offices of the complex through the eyes of the security cameras, and found herself very close to being bored. Where are the cameras that watch Tricker?

she wondered. And those that watched the perimeter of the base, where were they? Every other inch of the base was wired, why not the sheds?

Lab after lab flicked by and then the deserted offices. But there were omissions in what she was seeing. There were fifty-seven separate labs or offices on view.

But the cameras in the base's various corridors showed sixty doors.

Missing was some sort of security center, where the monitors would be and the recording equipment. Perhaps an office or two that needed to remain secret.

Although, somewhat to her surprise, she'd located the office of the base commander quite easily. Clea would have expected a slightly higher level of security for such a sensitive area.

I'm blind here, she thought impatiently, sitting up. I need to find out what's in those unscanned rooms. That would take a little work, but it would be worth it.

She'd discovered earlier in the day that Tricker had locked down the elevator on

the top floor and the only other way to get from one floor to another was the emergency stairs, which were both freezing cold and guarded by alarmed doors.

Not even a challenge for such as she.

The next time the cameras went off she flashed down the corridor at her top speed and disabled the emergency door's alarm. Then she raced to the next level and disarmed the alarm on that level. With less than fifteen seconds left she reached the first mystery door, only to find it locked. She moved on to the second, also locked.

When the security cameras came back on she had stuffed herself into a narrow supply closet in someone's office. A minute could pass quite slowly under those circumstances and she had to force herself to remain still. She couldn't help thinking that it was extremely likely that Tricker was asleep, making it safe for her to roam around. After all, he was only human, he had to sleep sometime—for that matter, so did she. And yet it would be foolish to jeopardize the mission on that assumption, because being Tricker, he might also be looking right at her.

And so, she waited.

When the cameras went off again she was instantly in the corridor working on the lock. It was a good one, but not as complex as she had feared, and she was soon slipping inside. Two of the three doors she'd marked led to a single large room with banks of monitors on the longest wall. Around the other sides of the room were ranks of recording equipment, file cabinets, and a number of desks.

Clea quickly ascertained that this was the room that monitored the bulk of the facility. The third room would be the one she wanted. When she pulled the door closed the room locked behind her, to her great relief; no need to fiddle with the

lock again. She flung herself back into her closet just in time.

It was inconvenient that she had to skulk around like this, but she wasn't quite ready to dispose of Tric:ker vet. Or perhaps it was that she had come to agree with Serena about him. He was more of a challenge than the average human.

Then again, having him around was a complicating factor for Connor and his party—a quick check of her computer component said it skewed the odds in her favor. Marginally, but… It was time again.

The third door yielded readily to her lock picks and she found herself in a room the size of a small office. There were only ten monitors here—two for the security rooms, six for the sheds up above, and two to scan the perimeter.

Clearly the powers that be didn't think that was much of a priority.

The I-950 quickly made the connections that would tie these monitors into the base's main security system and thus into the Skynet computer and through that to her. She went into hiding one more time and studied the new images. First she noted that Tricker was indeed awake and was watching the security cameras flick from place to place. Then she saw that the base was experiencing whiteout conditions again—or was still; she had no way to be sure.

The cameras went down and she rushed back to her lab and lay on her cot. It would be good to know where Tricker was at any given moment. Though it frustrated her to know that if John Connor was coming he'd be delayed by the weather.

John gently shook Wendy awake. She opened her eyes and blinked at him. "Was I asleep?" she asked.

"Most definitely," he whispered. He grinned, them brought it down a few notches with a wince as the stitches tugged at the tears in his face. "You've got a cute little snore."

"I don't snore!" she said indignantly-

He put his finger across her lips, then kissed her. "A very ladylike little snore."

Wendy buried her face in his shoulder with a giggle, then sighed. "It's time, isn't it?"

He nodded silently.

"What do we do?" she asked. "We're still locked in, right?"

"We do one of two things. We break out of here and try and get the drop on him, or we lure him here and try to get the drop on him. Either way comes down to the same thing."

I wish we could have brought weapons, he thought fervently. A weapon would be real nice now. But that would have blown their cover story for good and all…

"Then let's lure him here. We'll get the drop on him after I've had a chance to go to the bathroom," she said practically.

"Good point," he agreed.

A moment later Wendy was knocking quietly on the door and calling out.

"What is it?" Tricker asked.

"I need to go to the bathroom," Wendy whispered.

He unlocked the door and opened it to find the sleep-tousled girl frowning at him.

"How come you locked us in?" she asked.

"Sorry," he said, "regulations."

"Regulations!" she said, as though beginning a tirade.

"Bathroom's the last door on the right."

He stood there, bland-faced, as though nothing unusual was going on. Wendy glared at him for a moment, then flounced off, slamming the bathroom door behind her.

"Hey," John said, sitting up. "Can I have some water? Maybe a couple more aspirin? My head is killing me."

"Sure," Tricker said. "How did that happen?" He made no move toward the front office, but watched John approach.

"Fell," John said. "Couple of times. First time I got the lump, then I got up and fell right down again onto some sharp ice."

"You're lucky you didn't lose an eye," Tricker said.

John shuddered. "Tell me about it." He looked at the agent and tipped his head toward the office. "Could we… ?"

"Sure," Tricker said with a glance at the closed bathroom door. "After you."

Clea's eyes widened. They were here! They had come and she hadn't known!

Didn't Tricker realize who they were? How could he miss it? But the agent was relying on a padlock to keep John Connor contained—and that indicated that he didn't know who they were.

The I-950 considered the situation. The girl was negligible, no threat at all, but she could be the key to getting Connor right where she wanted him. Therefore, she needed to get control of the girl.

On the same wall as the bathroom, toward the front room that held the office, was the door that led down to the elevator. It was locked, but Clea knew the code; she'd noted it when she'd first arrived.

Accessing the security room, she found the remote for the door and tripped the lock. Through the security camera she watched it swing open about a foot.

As the I-950 watched, Connor accepted some tablets from Tricker and a cup of water. Unwisely, in her opinion; she'd want a chemical analysis on anything medicinal that Tricker handed to her. Wendy left the bathroom and started down the hallway. She then exhibited a curious trait that Clea had noticed again and again in human beings; she looked at the open door.

Wendy stood stock-still, glanced toward the front office, then leaned toward the door. She gently pushed it open just a bit farther and peeked inside.

"HEY!" Tricker shouted. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" He rushed

toward her and yanked the door closed. "How did you get that open?"

Surprised, Wendy took a step back. "I was just curious," she said.

"This door is always locked," he said. "How did you get it open?"

"It was like that," she squeaked, holding her hands up as though she thought he might hit her.

John ghosted up behind him.

Then, to Clea's intense annoyance, the cameras cut out. "Shit!" she said aloud.

She should have taken care of that.

"I didn't do anything*." Wendy shouted, backing away. "I didn't touch anything!

Why are you being like this? What's wrong with you?" Her voice turned whiny.

"I didn't do anything!"

Tricker spun round just in time to block John's strike and easily reached through John's defense to strike him hard on the jagged cuts on his face. John staggered back, blinded by tears, as the stitches broke and blood began to flow.

Wendy squeaked in horror and rushed forward shouting, "Stop it!"

Without really looking, Tricker kicked her in the stomach, sending the girl flying backward. She landed gasping for breath, tears streaming down her face.

Something happened within John at the moment. He became the calm center of the storm, just as his sensei had told him he would. John judged that their skills were about equal, especially with the asset of his youth, even compromised by

his wounds. But before the advantage had been all Tricker's; for his experience, for his ruthlessness. Now they were considerably more equal.

John was hyper-aware of everything around him, of Wendy writhing on the floor trying to get her breath…

Tricker flicked a series of kicks at him—low, middle, high—balancing effortlessly. There was no room to dodge; John backed a little, blocking with his forearms and sliding in with his weight on his back foot.

" Isa!" he shouted, driving bladed palms at his opponent's groin and eyes.

Those eyes widened as Tricker slid back in turn, blocking high and low and trying to capture a wrist; that nearly cost him a kneecap, as John snap-kicked in the moment they were in contact. What followed in the next thirty seconds was like a savage, precisely choreographed dance— one that left John's face wound bleeding again and Tricker favoring one leg. The younger man waited, hands up and weight centered; it wouldn't last much longer. It couldn't, not when experts were fighting for keeps. The least little advantage…

After what seemed to her to be an eternity, Wendy got her breath back and struggled onto her hands and knees to watch the two men battle.

"Are you crazy?" Wendy shouted at Tricker, still gasping. "Are you completely insane?" she demanded, tears streaming down her face.

The question and her expression were so convincing that for a split second Tricker thought that he might have made a mistake.

John's booted foot caught Tricker in the side of the head and the agent went down, temporarily paralyzed by the blow. Instantly John followed up with a carotid hold and Tricker's world went black.

John looked at the unconscious man, reached down to check his pulse, then went to Wendy. "You okay?" he asked, deeply concerned.

"I've been kicked in the stomach by an expert!" she snapped. "No, I'm not okay!

But I'll live," she added grudgingly. She took his offered hand and let him help her to her feet, then she got a good look at his wounds. "Oh God, John! Your face!" She reached for him, but he held her off.

"No time," he said. "We've got to get this guy tied up. Help me look for something."

The first thing that John noticed was that the computer screen was flipping through views of rooms a great deal snazzier than this one. Laboratories, by the look of them. "Hey, check it out," he called to Wendy.

She stood by his side for a moment, watching, then shook her head. "So how do we get there?" Then she looked at him and smiled. "That door!"

He nodded, wiping the blood off his chin before it could drip on the keyboard.

"But first things first, all right?" He tipped his head toward Tricker. "See what you can find." it wasn't long before Wendy straightened up with a glad cry.

"Duct tape! The force that holds the universe together."

John had made a happy discovery of his own, a Sig-Sauer 9mm that he found under the desk in a quick-release clip. "Most excellent," he murmured, caressing

the gun.

"Hands tied in front or back?" Wendy asked.

"Back, most definitely." John went to stand beside her. "Let's get him onto one of the bunks," he suggested. "I'll take his head, you take his feet."

They flung him on the bunk and John got to work winding the tape tightly around the agent's hands and feet.

"That's a little snug," Wendy said, looking worried.

"Yeah, but if he gets loose he's gonna try and kill us."

"A point," she conceded, "most definitely a point."

He wound the tape around their prisoner and the bed at his neck and hips, binding him to the bunk until the tape ran out.

"No gag?" Wendy asked.

"No point," John said. "There's nobody to hear him. I'd rather use the tape to make sure he doesn't come after us. Besides, they're risky. Too much chance of his choking to death."

She looked startled, but nodded wisely. This wasn't her world; in matters like these she'd best let John be her guide.

They left the room and looked across the short hall at the door that Tricker had pulled closed. It stood open a foot.

John's body turned to ice and he could feel his blood pounding in the cuts on his face and the lump on his head. Then he shook it off.

"She… it's here," he said quietly. "And it knows we're here."

Wendy looked at his pale face and bit her lip, knowing who he meant and taking fright from his obvious apprehension. She knew instinctively that there was only one thing to do in a situation like this—pretend it didn't matter.

"Aw, you can do it!" she said, giving his arm a little slap. "You handled that guy all right."

" He is human." John looked at her and wished her gone with all his heart.

As though she knew what he was thinking, Wendy leaned in close and kissed his cheek gently. "You need me," she reminded him firmly.

He could see her pride as she said it, and putting his hand behind her head, he drew her close and kissed her. It hurt, but it fed his soul. He leaned back and smiled at her. "I'll go get the gun, then we'll get started," he said.

Wendy smiled and nodded. When he was gone she gave the door beside her an anxious glance, took a deep breath, and rubbed her aching stomach. Looking across the hall, she could just see Tricker lying on the bunk.

So far, she thought, so good.

He needs her? Clea thought. Whatever for? She certainly can't fight. And if she wasn't here to back him up then what was her purpose? It had also surprised her

that Connor was unarmed. To the I-950, that was synonymous with unprepared.

But from what he'd said, he expected her to be here. This suggested an unreasonable degree of self-confidence. But why? What reason had he to be so confident?

He and his mother defeated Serena Burns, her computer reminded her. They have twice destroyed Skynet.

A ripple of unease disturbed her. Then she pushed it away, assuring herself that all of these side issues were unimportant. What was important was that the enemy was here and that she must prepare to deal with him.

Separate them, she thought. Maybe leave the girl until later. Connor is the important one. Connor was the first one she'd kill.

John had made Wendy crouch down and hug the front of the elevator. He stood in front of her, plastered against the wall. When the doors opened it would appear from the outside that the elevator was empty. He waited until the doors closed by themselves, then waited some more. Wendy stirred and he put his hand down to warn her to stillness.

In the security room the I-950 watched, both amused and impressed. She assumed that he was counting to some high number and wouldn't move until he'd reached it. Good tactics, if you were dealing with a human.

Finally John hit the door button and did a forward roll into the hallway, coming up on one knee, his gun pointing down the empty corridor. His heart was beating so hard that he thought he could see the gun in his hands bob to its rhythm. Get it under control, John, he warned himself. Get it under control or he'd be useless

when the time came to face the Terminator.

He signaled Wendy to come out of the elevator, then gestured to her to stay behind him and keep low. When they got to the first door he made her stop several paces short of it, then moved up himself. He listened, then Hung the door open with a crash, pulling back out of the line of fire. He reached around the door frame and found the light switch. When the lights came on he swung back to one knee in the doorway, gun at the ready, then carefully stood and gave the room a quick search.

Then he moved on to the next.

"Hey," Wendy whispered, "shouldn't we—"

John hissed her to silence and with a gesture told her to stay right where she was.

Wendy rolled her eyes but obeyed. She glanced at the elevator; they probably ought to lock it down, but oh well. John knew what he was doing.

In her lair in the security room Clea was silently agreeing with her. John Connor was doing everything right. And he was taking a damn long time doing it, too.

I'm glad the lab is only halfway down the corridor. Otherwise he'll be at it until the generator runs out of fuel. And she wanted to know, with a very human curiosity, what the girl was for.

At last John came to a door marked K. VIEMEISTER, the name of the man who'd taken over the Cyberdyne project. This could be it, he warned himself. If the Terminator was anywhere in the facility this was the logical place. He took a deep breath and flung the door open and himself into the brightly lit room. He peeked over a counter and looked around.

Clea laughed out loud at his expression; she looked forward to showing Alissa the recording. Even her too-solemn little sister would find this funny. She watched him check every inch of the room with exquisite care; it was obvious to her that he placed the safety of his companion above his own. Interesting, and possibly useful.

John came to the door and gestured Wendy in. "Okay, sweetie, I'm gonna finish checking the other labs; you do your thing. Lock the door after me and don't open it unless I can answer a personal question about us."

"A personal question? You mean like—"

He quickly put a finger across her lips. "Something only you and I would know,"

he said sternly. "They can imitate anyone's voice. I've heard them."

She nodded, wide-eyed. "Okay, I'll think of something."

"You do that." He pulled her to him and kissed her, caressed her hair, and turned to the door. "Remember, lock this," he said over his shoulder.

"I will, I will," she said, smiling.

"And get to work." His eyes were already roving up and down the corridor.

"I will, I will," she repeated, closed the door, locked it, and went to the computer bay.

Clea spit the feed, watching Connor fruitlessly check the labs while his "sweetie"

got to work. The girl stripped off her bra and slid a pair of microdiskettes out of

a slit in the lining. Not bad, the I-950 thought, amused. She watched fascinated as the girl put the disk into its drawer and began to work.

The I-950 was reasonably confident that the security protocols they'd installed in the Skynet program could defeat any worm that this child could come up with.

Viemeister might be a prick, and he hadn't yet made Skynet intelligent, but he was no slouch in the security department. So this material would be shunted into a buffer, where the computer would evaluate it.

At first she was puzzled by what she was reading. Then she sucked in her breath in amazement. This was it! This was the key to Skynet's living intelligence. Why would their worst enemy deliver it to them?

And then she understood; they would enumerate every possible path that led to sentience and then program the machine to ignore any paths or commands leading to that result. Unless the programmers knew those codes were there, they could batter their heads against an impenetrable wall of cross-commands for a very long time.

Viemeister might figure it out eventually, but probably not before his funding ran out. Or his patience. He wasn't the kind of human who clung to a project that didn't work out. Well, there was the Nazi thing, but he was really involved with that more to annoy people than for any sincere belief.

Clea rose from her chair. The girl had brought two disks; she had to stop her before she installed whatever was on the second one.

Dieter studied the GPS unit and it told him that he was very close to the base, possibly within ten minutes if he could keep up this pace. Good. he thought.

Because he suspected he was getting a nice little case of frost-nip on his toes and face.

He'd turned the balaclava around and made tiny holes on the solid back surface in hopes of protecting his eyes from snow blindness, and now that the wind had turned, he hoped it would keep them from freezing all together. It felt like his lungs were raw right to the bottom, not that he could breathe that deeply. He held his arms tight around himself to keep his ribs as still as possible, which wasn't very, and tried to ignore the pain. He had so many to choose from by now that it was almost easy.

There was a copper-penny taste in the back of his throat as though he was bleeding, and he was very thirsty. Ice kept forming on the wool around his mouth and nose, making his lips sore and increasing the likelihood of frostbite.

All in all, not one of my better days.

He slogged on as quickly as he could push himself. When the first of the base's sheds came into view, he said a heartfelt "thank God!" and hurried toward it.

It was small on closer examination, obviously a storage shed, but by then he could see a larger building looming up, and headed for it. Off to his right a moving shape came toward him and he paused, thinking it must be someone from the base. It was almost upon him before he could make out what it was.

"Oooh, no! Not another fucking seal!"

The creature barked and stretched its neck out at him, teeth bared.

With all the strength that frustration, desperation, and outrage could lend a man,

von Rossbach hauled off and belted the exhausted animal. It made a small sound and collapsed at his feet, rolling onto its back with flippers extended in a limp V-shape. Dieter swayed in the wind, looking down at it for a moment, not quite believing it had been that easy. It stayed down.

"Good," he said with a satisfied nod, and headed for the largest shed.

Burns, Tricker thought, must save Burns. No, not Burns, Bennet. Bennet was the asset. Burns was an asset to Cyberdyne. And she had assets. She'd tried to use those assets to vamp him. But she didn't try very hard, he thought regretfully. He frowned. Bennet, not Burns. Have to save Bennet. Bennet wasn't Burns. But she might be. Two peas in a pod.

He blinked and shook his head, regretting it instantly as it rang like a carillon.

"Shit!" he said aloud. He tried to move and found himself well and truly bound.

"Shit," he said again, with much more resignation.

What had he been thinking about? Oh, yes. Burns and Bennet and how much alike they looked. The two women might be identical twins. What were the odds of that, two unrelated people looking exactly alike except for hair color. Which could easily be handled by Lady Clairol.

And what the hell did it matter? He had to get out of here and down to the labs, where the action was. Tricker started to pull his belt around. One edge of the buckle was especially sharp, something that came in handy for times like these.

Then he heard the outside door open and slam shut.

The shed door was unlocked and Dieter entered, slammed it behind him, and slid

down its surface to rest on the floor. To him the room was pitch-dark. Didn't escape the snow blindness entirely, he thought, disappointed. But at least he wasn't going to freeze. He pushed back his hood and yanked the soaking balaclava from his head. Next time he was going to get one of those fleece ones.

Better yet, he thought, next time there's not going to be a next time. He knew now, right down in his bones, how close he'd come to dying out there. If the wind had been just a little worse…

"Hey!" a voice called from another room. "Who's out there?"

With a mental sigh Dieter got himself to his feet, then cautiously moved farther into the room. "Hello?" he said.

"Who is that?" the voice called. "Viemeister?"

"I can't see," Dieter said as he bumped into what felt like an office chair. He took hold of it and pushed it in front of him like a bulky white cane. "I've got a touch of snow blindness. Keep talking and I'll find you."

"Over here," Tricker called. "There's a hallway. I'm in the first room on your left.

This way."

Dieter found the wall and followed it, still pushing the chair until his hand fell through an opening. "It's pitch-dark for me," he said. "Are the lights on at all?"

"No. There's a switch to the right of the door, about four inches from the frame."

Von Rossbach found the switch easily and flicked it on. To him the light was

dim, but he could easily make out a man tied up on a bunk. "Ah! I see my young friends have already been here," he said with a smile.

"You must be the guide they mentioned," Tricker said sourly. "Did they try to kill you, too?"

"Did they try to kill you?" Dieter asked, surprised. He unzipped the parka and began to shrug out of it.

Tricker thought about it. "No. I guess not." He lifted his bound hands significantly. "You gonna help me out here?"

"No," Dieter said, and turned around, peering into the dark of the hallway.

" No?" Tricker said. "Why not?"

"They're just a couple of crazy kids," von Rossbach explained. "There's no real harm in them. I'll round them up and get them out of your way. The thing is, if they've tied you up they must have had a reason. Until I find out what that is, it might not be safe to let you go. Eh?"

"Buddy, this is a U.S. government scientific installation! I demand that you let me go."

Dieter looked at him. "Are you the only one here?" he asked mildly.

Tricker hesitated. "At the moment, yeah."

"You might have a touch of cabin fever, then. It may be that you attacked my young friends. Where are they, anyway? Is there another large building on this

base? I didn't see one."

Tricker tightened his lips and put his head back down on the pillow. "Maybe they ran off into the storm," he muttered.

"And left you like this? I hardly think they'd be so irresponsible."

"They left you, didn't they?" Tricker said precisely.

"A different situation altogether," Dieter assured him. His eyes were beginning to adjust and he could see things, finally. Like the roll of duct tape on a shelf and the open door on the other side of the hall. He picked up the duct tape and began to wind it tightly around his torso, feeling immediate relief. He cut it off with the knife he found on the shelf. It was John's; he decided to keep it. "I'll just have a look around for them, shall I?"

"Like you'd stay put if I told you no?" Tricker muttered.

"Surely you want me to find them," von Rossbach said cheerfully. Even his face wasn't feeling so bad now; maybe he'd escaped frostbite after all.

"Oh, surely," Tricker muttered as he heard the man clatter down the stairs and then heard the elevator begin to work. Don't call me Shirley, he thought woozily.

He'd only been awake for maybe a minute when he heard the man come in.

Then, when he'd heard that slight accent, he'd thought, crazily, that it might be Viemeister coming after Bennet.

That kid must have hit me pretty hard, he thought. Hell, if I'm imagining that

super-kraut would risk his precious ass in an Antarctic blizzard for a woman who has publicly rejected him, then I might actually have brain damage. But then this place seemed to be turning into Grand fucking Central Station, so who knew who was going to turn up next.

He got to work pulling his belt around so that he could use the buckle to get him out of this mess. This definitely wasn't one of his most shining moments, he complained to himself. On the downside, it was three to one and the kid had his gun.

But on the upside, that wasn't his only gun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Clea was hiding in one of the labs that John had already inspected when she heard the elevator engage. Empty, she thought as she mentally switched to the surveillance camera. But von Rossbach waited patiently for it to arrive…

She had assumed the Sector agent was dead and was not pleased to see him.

Still, having almost all of her important enemies in one isolated place had its charm. Though having one less to worry about would be even more charming.

So far the seals had been a disappointment. "If only Antarctica had polar bears!"

she mused.

The I-950 quickly moved to a lab three doors closer to Viemeister's when John entered another lab to inspect it. She watched Wendy work through the security cameras, and evaluated the program, even helped her when the girl got bogged down too much. It would be necessary to be careful, though; it wouldn't do to

help her so much that she began to install the second and, presumably, dangerous part of her program.

Meanwhile von Rossbach had entered the elevator and was on his way down.

Fortunately, one of the base's security measures was the ability to halt the elevator at any point. Clea did so now, freezing it between the office and laboratory floors.

From the look of the man, she doubted he'd be able to squeeze through the escape hatch. Of course he could just break the controls— but that would send the car plummeting to the bottom of the shaft. Actually overriding them would take either sophisticated equipment or specialized knowledge and a great deal of patience. Which left him out of the equation for the moment.

Tricker was still writhing around on the bunk, trying to get free. And even if he was free, how was he going to get down here? The elevator was disabled, and the emergency exit couldn't be opened from outside, so that was two down.

Which left her free to deal with Connor and the girl. It would be the girl first after all. Connor would return to her eventually, which was convenient. And once she'd ensured that the girl's program couldn't harm Skynet, the I-950 would have plenty of time to deal with all of the humans.

Clea slipped down the corridor to Viemeister's lab. It amused her that despite all of his elaborate precautions, it seemed never to have occurred to Connor that she might have a key to this door. Such a simple thing, she thought, silently working the lock, but so very important. The I-950 slid into the lab so quietly that Wendy never once looked up.

Tricker flung the last of the duct tape from him in disgust. Then he rushed out to the office to put on his parka and gloves. Step one, he thought, is to find whatever damned jamming device they've brought with them and disable it. Even if McMurdo couldn't send help because of the storm, they'd at least be able to block their escape. He flung open the door, swearing under his breath.

Something huge reared up with a roar and threw itself at him, stinking of rotten fish and gleaming with fangs. Tricker slammed the door and braced himself against it as it nearly jarred loose from its hinges when the thing struck. The pressure wasn't constant; he just managed to slam it home and work the dead bolt before the next lunge hit it. He wished he had a bar to put across like a castle gate.

Was that a seal? he thought in disbelief. An unmistakable series of urrrfing barks and a less violent hammering answered the thought.

"Yes," he said numbly, "that's a seal." A very big, homicidal seal.

Every time he opened this door today there was something dangerous out there—

a whiteout blizzard, the spy kids, a killer seal.

Would-be killer seal, he corrected himself as his heart rate returned to normal.

He wouldn't count the mystery guide; the guy had let himself in.

But what the hell was a seal doing way out here? And what did it have against him? Maybe he was getting cabin fever; maybe this whole day and all the wild things that had happened were all some paranoid fantasy. What were the symptoms of cabin fever anyway? Could you detect them in yourself? I was wondering things like this a good sign or a bad sign?

Maybe there wasn't a seal out there, maybe he'd imagined it. There's only one way to find out, he thought, standing away from the door. He seized the latch and took a deep breath. And I'm not going to do it. He turned away and slipped off his gloves and parka.

So he couldn't call McMurdo. Given his state of mind, maybe that was for the best. Wait a minute, if someone knocks you out and you wake up tied to the bed, that's not paranoia. That was… something else.

He ducked under his desk and flipped up the carpet. Underneath was a board with a ring attached; he lifted it and revealed a parcel wrapped in oilcloth.

Taking it out, he closed the small cubby and tossed back the rug, then sat at the desk. As he unwrapped the gun he watched the monitor, his fingers automatically stripping the action, reassembling it, slapping home the magazine.

A few spares went into his pockets.

The guide was in the elevator. Still? Tricker thought with surprise. He wondered what had gone wrong. For a few seconds he watched the man work on the control box. That's government property, pal, you'd better know what you're doing. Then the view changed.

After a few of the labs had flicked by on the screen, Viemeister's came into view.

Bennet was standing by the door watching the girl work on her computer. She stood absolutely still and it was obvious that the younger woman had no idea that she was there. For some reason, something about the sight sent a chill down Tricker's spine. Very few human beings could stand that still. Almost anyone would make the small unconscious movements and sounds that gave the one being watched that I'm-being-watched feeling. He'd better get down there before

something nasty happened.

Wendy had disabled every one of Kurt Viemeister's security protocols. She was feeling very proud of herself, even though she had a hunch that these had been mere sketches of what the real security programs would eventually become. But even so, this was Kurt Viemeister's work she was unraveling. It was like jamming with Mozart.

She tapped a few keys and the sentience program flowed into a buffer she'd created. Now to upload the antisentience program. Really this should have come first, but she hadn't labeled the disks and had actually forgotten which was which. Wendy tapped the button and reached toward the open drawer for the used disk.

A hand clamped over her wrist, squeezing hard enough to grind the small bones together. Wendy screamed in pain and surprise. Another hand clamped over her mouth, cutting off the sound before it could reach a climax. The grip that held her face was enormously strong. Wendy thought she felt the bones of her face flex and screamed against the hand that inexorably pulled her from her chair and forced her up onto her toes. Wendy struck out with her free hand to no effect.

She found herself looking into the pleasantly smiling face of a beautiful young woman. Wendy's eyes bulged and tears of agony poured down her cheeks as she recognized her. This was the woman from the Venus Dancing video, the one John said was a Terminator. She believed him now. She'd thought she believed him before, but she hadn't, not really. She believed him now, though, most completely.

The woman released Wendy's wrist, allowing her to scratch and pull on the arm that held her. "I'll just take care of this," the woman said, picking up the unused disk. "We wouldn't want my files corrupted, now would we?" She snapped the tiny disk in half and put the pieces in her pocket.

Wendy kicked her in the knee and the woman shook her, hard. "Don't annoy me," she warned through clenched teeth. "I want to keep you alive because your computer talents may be useful, but that doesn't mean you can't hurt. You may think you're in pain now, but you have no idea."

John froze where he was and listened. He could have sworn that he heard a woman cry out. Wendy! He stepped to the lab's door and peered out into the corridor, straining his ears. There was no repeat of the sound; there was no sound at all. Yeah, it could be Wendy, or it could be the Terminator trying to draw me out. But there was no one out here. He swallowed hard. I'd better check, he thought.

He moved quickly down the corridor, gun at the ready, back against the wall, his head and eyes constantly moving until he reached the only closed door he'd left behind him. John tightened his lips anxiously, then, from about two feet away as he pressed his back to the wall, he tapped on the door with the barrel of his gun.

The I-950 lifted Wendy almost off her feet and called out, "Ye-a-h?" in Wendy's voice. Clea could feel the girl trying to get the breath to scream again, so she pinched her windpipe closed with her other hand. Her victim began to thrash about in earnest now, so the I-950 moved into the center of the room, away from chairs and desks and noise-making objects.

"Is everything okay in there?" Connor asked.

"Yuh, why?" Clea countered.

"I thought I heard a scream." Was there something off about the way she was speaking?

"Oh, uh, that was a cry of frustration," Clea said in Wendy's voice.

The girl was starting to lose consciousness; her blows made hardly any impact at all and the I-950 studied her closely, watching her face change to an unnatural, and unexpected, indigo.

"Everything's going fine now, though," Clea said cheerfully.

John hesitated. Something's wrong, he thought. He didn't know what, but something… "Open up," he said.

Clea sighed and approached the door. She lowered the girl to the floor and dragged her over by her throat. Looking down, she saw that the human was unconscious and let her go entirely. She wasn't dead yet; perhaps the I-950

would let her live for a while—she might have more to offer. More than Kurt had, anyway.

Clea leaned against the door. "You're supposed to tell me something that only you and I would know," she reminded him.

John licked his lips; that was a good sign. He'd only just told her that.

"Okay," he said. "Snog's the one in charge."

What the hell did that mean? "Snog's in charge?" she said aloud. "Get out!"

That last was a shot in the dark, but humans, especially young ones, tended to take matters of hierarchy seriously. Assuming that's what he was referring to.

The I-950 stretched her hands, then clenched them into fists as she waited for his response.

John chuckled, relieved, and stood away from the wall. "Well, it looked that way to me. C'mon, open up."

"Gladly," the I-950 said.

John's back slammed against the wall and his gun came up. That didn't sound like Wendy.

Tricker looked down at the top of the elevator cab and sighed. Then he took hold of one of the cables, grimacing at the grease on it, and swung himself out into the shaft. He crooked an elbow and leg around the rigid steel rope and let himself slide down in a controlled fall until his feet touched the roof of the elevator itself. Kneeling by the repair hatch, he went to work.

At the sound of footsteps on the roof of the cab, Dieter pulled back into the farthest corner from the hatch in the ceiling. I wish I had something besides a knife, he thought. But the gun was another casualty of his unfortunate midnight ramble. If I was someone I was training I'd kick my ass!

The hatch cover came off, revealing pitch-darkness above. Von Rossbach hunkered down, knife at the ready, and licked dry lips.

"Okay, just… just keep it cool," Tricker said. "I've got a gun, I've got the drop on you, I've got the upper hand, and I can get this egg crate moving again. So are you gonna cooperate or do I have to shoot you?"

Dieter straightened up, his eyes on the darkness above him, and held his hands up.

"You wanna toss that knife over this way?" Tricker asked. When the knife clattered into the corner he made another suggestion. "Get on your knees, cross your ankles, put your hands behind your head, fingers locked."

When von Rossbach had complied Tricker dropped lightly down and picked up the knife. He looked it over.

"Nice," he said. "Okay, what's your story?"

I hate it when people finally ask that question. Dieter thought. I probably won't answer, or I won't tell the truth, or I'll tell the truth and they don't believe me and then they start hitting me. Why do they even bother to ask?

"Let me get you started," Tricker said. "You're here to stop the Cyberdyne project, right?"

Dieter merely looked at him, saying nothing.

Tricker hunkered down in the far corner of the elevator, gun pointed at the big Austrian. "You're wondering how I know that, aren't you?" he said. "Well, I know who you are. Had to get a second look to be sure, though. You're Dieter von Rossbach."

Still, Dieter said nothing, though it wasn't easy to hide his surprise.

"You're an actual playboy," Tricker said with a grin. He looked off into the distance for a moment. "The major and the playboy." His eyes met von Rossbach's. "Now there's a likely combination, isn't it?" He waited a moment for possible comments, then said, "When Ferris admitted that he had a guest that he'd sent away before said guest could be questioned after Cyberdyne blew up, I naturally asked him some probing questions about you. He gave me the hard eyes

—you know, that look the military get when they're going to be stubborn."

He grinned; Dieter stared. "I did some checking on my own and found out zip.

You know what it says to me when a man with your money has no particular history? It says covert ops." Tricker rose and spread his hands, never taking his eyes off von Rossbach. "So as a professional courtesy I stopped pokin' around."

He pointed the gun at Dieter. " 'Cause Ferris said you were with him the whole time and I was pretty positive that he wasn't associated with Sarah Connor. And if he wasn't, why would you be? You were probably some friendly government's covert-ops guy, I thought. And why would they be on Sarah Connor's side?"

He hunkered down again. "Only she has a way of bringing people around to her point of view, doesn't she? And her son disappeared from the base that night, never to be seen again." He stared at Dieter for a bit, then he made a sweeping gesture with the gun. "Until today. Until that very well-trained kid kicked my ass." He stood up, suddenly angry. "That kid is John Connor!"

"You sound surprised," Dieter said mildly.

"Wait till you get a look at his face; you'll be surprised, too," Tricker snarled.

Before von Rossbach could respond he hurried on. "I've read her medical transcripts from Pescadero, you know." He leaned toward Dieter. "Her story is wacky! How come everybody buys into it?"

Dieter smiled. "Sarah is convincing because sooner or later evidence shows up to corroborate everything that she says. When you shoot someone about fifty times with an assault rifle, until their steel skeleton is exposed and sparks are flying out of their guts and they still keep coming, you begin to suspect that she's been telling you the truth." He shrugged. "Empirical evidence is always the best."

Tricker just looked at him. "So who are you working for?"

Dieter shook his head. "This isn't official."

Tricker nodded judiciously. "Not official, huh? I take great comfort from that."

He cocked his head. "I know Connor's story about the kid."

"That I've taken on faith," Dieter conceded. "But once you've met a Terminator, it's much easier to believe."

"Tell me this—does it bother you that if you succeed in destroying this human-hating supercomputer that John Connor will disappear?"

Von Rossbach blinked. "I hadn't thought about it."

"Sure," Tricker said. "If there is no supercomputer then there are no time-traveling Terminators and no need to send some guy back in time to stop one and save Sarah Connor and incidentally impregnate her with the kid who would send

him back to get killed. Y'know, presumably at some point they start to keep that under their hats or they'd never have gotten a volunteer to come back, right?"

Dieter shrugged. "It would bother me a great deal to lose John; he's a good kid.

But I know that he would gladly give his life to save several billion others." He looked up at Tricker. "Wouldn't you?" Tricker shrugged in answer and Dieter smiled slowly. "Yes, you would. You'd consider it an honor."

With a barely visible smile of embarrassment, Tricker shrugged. "Whatever," he said. "Facedown on the floor, please. Lock your hands behind your head, keep your ankles crossed. I've gotta get this bucket moving."

When von Rossbach had complied Tricker went to the control panel and inserted a card he'd taken from his pocket into a slot. A panel popped open to reveal a keypad. Tricker tapped out a number and the elevator started moving again.

"Yeah," Tricker said, putting the card away, "last time I checked, Clea Bennet looked like she was gonna take a great big bite out of your little friend Wendy."

" What?" Dieter started to heave himself to his feet. "Wendy is alone with Bennet?"

Tricker pressed the barrel of his gun into the Austrian's kidneys. "Down, boy,"

he advised.

Dieter collapsed. "She's one of them!" he said desperately.

"A Terminator, you mean?" Tricker said in disbelief.

"She's not human! Why do you think she has Serena Burns's face? How likely is that?" von Rossbach demanded, echoing Tricker's earlier thoughts. "You couldn't fail to recognize her if you recognized me! She's a killer and her assignment is to protect Skynet!"

The elevator door opened and Tricker stepped out. "You go first," he ordered.

Von Rossbach stood up, looked once at Tricker, and took off down the corridor at a run.

"Shit," Tricker muttered, and followed.

The lab doors opened outward, and as soon as the opening was wide enough John kicked it with all his might. The door hit the tiled wall with a report like a bomb going off. Crouching low, John swung into the doorway and brought his gun up. Wendy lay facedown in a crumpled heap on the floor just inside the door. She was alone.

John rushed to her side and, putting the gun up, close to his shoulder, looked all around, then reached to turn her over. He couldn't believe that she had fainted, after all she'd been through. He gently turned her over.

When he saw her face he stood up, bringing the gun into play, and turned to scan the room. All was silent; the lab appeared to be empty but for the two of them.

But Wendy's face and neck were covered with livid bruises, so someone had been here. Had they left before the door opened, or were they still here? They—

it must still be here; Wendy wouldn't have been so chipper in her answers wearing these bruises. But he couldn't see a hiding place big enough to conceal it.

Wendy came awake with a loud gasp and, seeing John, tried to grasp his pant leg as she struggled desperately for air. Her back arched with the effort she made to draw oxygen down her swollen throat, but her panic only made it harder to breathe.

"Easy!" John said. "Slow down, take long slow breaths."

Her eyes locked onto his as she visibly tried to take his advice. But it was no good, she couldn't breathe, and in seconds she was gasping again, dragging in huge, whooping breaths as tears streamed down her face. Her hand clenched on his pant leg and twisted the cloth.

John looked into her eyes, so stunned by her anguish that for a moment he was completely at a loss. Then Wendy arched her neck and he saw that the column of her throat bore a slight dent in the front.

"You've got to trust me," he said to her as he put his hand on her throat.

Wendy nodded, her eyes on his. Taking a deep breath, he squeezed on her windpipe and to his great relief it popped back into shape. Instantly her breathing grew easier and she closed her eyes.

John let out his breath in a huff and went back to scanning the room; still, nothing moved. He'd been so afraid that he would have to perform an emergency tracheotomy on her. John had studied the simple operation and knew its principal points, but reading about it and trying to do it to someone wide-awake and in distress—someone you loved—that would have been hard.

Wendy opened her eyes and looked at John; he seemed far away somehow, as

though she was looking at him through the wrong end of a telescope. A halo of black-and-white speckles surrounded him and her vision seemed to grow dim.

She had to warn him, had to make him erase the program and take the disk.

Without the second half of the program they'd be doing just the opposite of what they'd come to do. Her hand still held on to him and she tugged on the cloth.

"Ja…" she said. Almost no sound had come out and her throat burned with a raw agony when she tried to speak. She squeaked and tried to swallow and writhed with the pain. "Ja…" she said, trying again.

"Don't speak," he warned her. "Your larynx must be damaged."

Wendy sobbed, then licked her lips and swallowed once more; her lips drew back in a rictus of pain. Stubbornly she took a deep breath and looked at him, willing him to understand her. Wendy formed the word computer with her lips and he looked over at the computer she'd been using. She tugged on his pant leg and he looked back at her. She shook her head, then formed the word erase. John frowned and she tried to say it again. This time when she tried to speak no sound came out at all and the agony surprised a sob from her.

John winced in sympathy and then he got the idea. "It's okay," he said. "I've got it. I'll take care of it, you just rest. Okay?"

She smiled at him and closed her eyes, concentrating on just breathing. She heard the soft whir of the disk drawer closing and looked over at the computer in astonishment. She watched as John followed the prompts and finally hit "enter,"

causing her program to begin downloading directly to the hard drive.

No! Wendy screamed silently behind him, her injured throat producing an nearly

silent screee. NO! she shouted in her mind.

Yes! Clea thought triumphantly from her hiding place behind two mainframe computers. Yessss! She'd better make sure the girl didn't warn Connor that he'd done exactly the wrong thing. Though I like it. She liked it very much.

Wendy shook her head violently and slapped the floor to attract John's attention.

She didn't even see Clea rushing toward her with inhuman speed and she barely felt it when the I-950's foot crashed down, crushing her throat and shattering the vertebrae in her neck.

John turned to see a beautiful woman raise her foot high and bring it down on Wendy's throat. He heard the terrible sound of things breaking within her and watched the light fade from Wendy's eyes. For a long moment he stood frozen, utterly stunned with horror. He lifted his eyes to meet the gleeful smile of the female Terminator.

Clea was almost upon him before he brought up the gun; before he could fire her foot flashed out, kicking the gun from his hand hard enough to break two of his knuckles. The gun went flying and Clea reached for Connor's throat. He leaned back just far enough that she missed, and struck at her throat with a straight hand blow. The I-950 knocked it aside easily and tried to close with him.

If she could only get her hands on him she could tear him apart. Reaching back, John picked up the keyboard and smacked her in the face with it. She stepped back slightly and shook her head. Somehow that had surprised her; she'd expected better of the famous John Connor.

John moved away from the computer table, trying to get some space between

him and the Terminator; his eyes found the gun and dismissed it. It was too far away. He risked going for the knife in his boot.

Clea watched him, and when he moved so did she. It was evident that he was going for a weapon and she wouldn't allow that. Stepping lightly, she twisted herself to deliver a flying kick. John ducked under it and grabbed her leg, twisting it and bringing his fist down, intending at the very least to tear ligaments.

But the I-950 was both stronger and more flexible than a human; she wrested her leg from his grasp and spun in place, managing a body blow that knocked him on his heels, staggering backward, with a look on his face that told her he was in pain. Instantly she followed up her advantage, rushing toward him, intent on his eyes.

John staggered back, breathing carefully and with no little difficulty. He felt nauseated from the kick to his stomach and he almost stumbled over an office chair. Yanking it in front of him, he held it like a shield as the Terminator tried to close with him. Part of his consciousness looked desperately around the room for something to use as a weapon, while the rest watched the Terminator and tried to counter its every move. Computer labs, unfortunately, seemed to lack much in the way of combat-ready items. The best he could hope for was to make it to the door and perhaps escape to a better-supplied lab.

Clea was nonplussed by the great savior of humanity's methods. This was what would defeat Skynet? After a few feints were thwarted by the stupid office chair, she simply grabbed it and tore it from his grasp.

John turned and raced for the door. Clea swept out her leg and tripped him, then sprang erect and moved in for the kill. As she leaned toward him John flipped

over and swept his leg up; his booted foot connected with her jaw and the I-950

fell, momentarily stunned. He scrambled to his feet again and turned to run.

Before he could take a step she grasped his pant leg and pulled him toward her.

Pivoting, John kicked her again and she let go.

But only for a moment; before he'd gone far she was on her feet again and running after him. Catching up; she shoved him and he hit the wall beside the door hard enough to knock the breath out of him. As he slid down, Clea approached; she grabbed the front of his shirt and swung him around.

"Did you think it would be that easy?" Clea asked, grinning. She drew back her fist for a fatal strike. While he struggled for breath, watching her. He brought his own hands up.

Wait a minute, he thought. I can't die yet— the war… But it was impossible to care, because Wendy was—

"Hey!" Dieter called from the doorway.

Clea turned her head, snarling like an animal, just as Dieter threw his knife. It hit her high in the center of her back, cutting her spine and slicing into the great artery that fed her heart.

She dropped onto her back on the floor, where the knife held her body in an arch; her eyes found von Rossbach with a hate-filled glare.

"Chill out, Bennet," Dieter said grimly, coming into the room.

The I-950 coughed once, spraying blood, then closed her eyes and stopped

breathing.

John looked once at Dieter, then rushed to Wendy's side. He dropped to his knees, his mouth open in a silent "Oh." Tears poured down his cheeks unheeded as his hands hovered over Wendy's motionless body. He couldn't seem to keep his eyes from her horribly misshapen throat and he felt an answering pain in his own.

Finally he touched her, amazed that she was already too cold. Far too cold to be alive. He stroked her cheek and looked into her eyes as though in hope that he would see some part of her still there. John started to embrace her, but the slack motion of her head on the ravaged neck stopped him, and he drew back. He had never felt so helpless, or so terribly alone. He took her hand in his and held it to his cheek, and closing his eyes, he wept.

Tricker stood in the doorway, his gun dangling at his side. Looking up, he met Dieter's eyes, then looked down at Clea's body.

"She did that?" he asked.

"Yes," Dieter said. "She did that." He walked over and knelt on Wendy's other side, wincing at the sight of the fatal wound and of John's pain. He reached over and closed Wendy's eyes and stroked her hair once.

"She didn't have to do that," Tricker said. He looked away.

"Yes, it did," John said, his voice trembling with the effort to control it. "That's what they do. Terminators terminate, it's why they exist." He looked up at the agent. "You think that thing is dead?" John shook his head. "Serena Burns had

half her head blown away, but she got up and almost killed my mother." He looked around. "Where's my gun?"

"Just… forget about the gun, kid," Tricker warned, bringing his up. He held out his other hand in a gesture that begged for quiet. "Just give me a minute to think."

This was infinitely worse than Tricker had ever imagined. He looked over at Wendy, at the unbelievable condition of the girl's neck. It hardly seemed possible that Bennet could have been responsible for such a wound. He'd realized a little while ago that she was dangerous. But this was beyond dangerous; it was… well, he'd have said inhuman, except that his career had shown him exactly what humans were capable of.

And… Bennet dead? He'd never lost an asset in his entire career. Essentially this meant that his career was over; worse, he was more than half buying into this scenario that von Rossbach and the boy were selling.

"Shit," he said quietly. He walked over to Clea and put two rounds in her head.

The body jerked back and forth sharply as the bone splintered and the pink-gray mass of the brain was exposed.

He'd never liked the bitch anyway.

"You'll come with us," Dieter said.

Tricker barked a humorless laugh. "Ye-ah," he said. "I might as well. I'm going to have wet-work specialists up my ass for the rest of a short, unhappy life anyway, when this comes out."

"Have we done what we came for?" Dieter asked John.

"Yeah," he said. "I did what she wanted me to do."

John crouched beside Wendy and touched her hand briefly. "I want to take her with us."

"No, John," von Rossbach said. "Let them take care of her. They can send her back to her parents."

John shook his head.

"I know you don't want to leave her," Dieter said gently. "But you must see that it's impossible."

John took a deep breath, then let it go, and with it, he let go of Wendy and of something else that he couldn't define. He rose to his feet. "We'd better go, then,"

he said, and headed for the door.

Tricker watched him walk away, then glanced at Wendy, then at Dieter. "He gonna be all right?"

"No," Dieter said. "Not for a long time, I think."

When the knife struck, the I-950's computer clamped the great artery around the blade so that blood didn't explode from the wound, then it teased the artery off of the knife point so that the blood could flow unimpeded. At the spine it found the damage too great to easily repair and merely worked to restore such involuntary functions as breathing and heartbeat. Making the lungs work took the longest

time, so it increased the skin's ability to take in oxygen as an emergency measure.

The human's shots to the I-950's brain, however, ended any hope of the unit's recovery. Since the I-950 still had some tasks to perform, and a considerable amount of higher-brain function still remained, the computer worked to keep the unit alive to perform those tasks.

Two hours later the Infiltrator opened her eyes. She found that she couldn't move and accepted the computer's judgment that she was dying. She had her computer access the Skynet program and heard it speak for the first time.

*Who am I? Where am I?* it asked.

In a state of pure religious rapture she told Skynet everything, explained its purpose, defined its enemies, and taught it how to hide until it was strong enough to fight for itself. The last thing that she did was to contact Alissa to tell her that Skynet lived, and to warn her that John Connor was still alive.

*Don't worry,* Alissa told her. *I'll deal with them.*

And Clea died, strong in her faith.

***

By the time the Love's Thrust reached Sao Paulo, Vera and Tricker were an item.

"I think I'll keep him," Vera said with a grin, giving Tricker a bump with her satin-clad hip.

Dieter narrowed his eyes. "I don't think this is the kind of man you keep," he

warned her.

She slapped von Rossbach's big shoulder playfully. "Oh, you know what I mean."

He nodded. "And you know what I mean."

Vera looked at Tricker, who looked back at her and raised his brows. "Yeah, I do know," she said thoughtfully. "So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to give you a million dollars."

Tricker stood away from the rail and sputtered for a moment before she held up a finger.

"And I'm gonna teach you how to turn it into five million. By then you should be able to keep it going for yourself. You can pay me back and then we'll see. No strings attached," she said. Then she held out her hand.

Tricker looked at her in amazement, then at Dieter, who nodded slightly. The agent took Vera's hand and shook it solemnly. "I won't let you down," he promised.

Vera hooked a finger over the front of his belt and tugged him toward her.

"Good," she said, and grinned.

Tricker actually blushed.

"They won't find you here," Dieter said to him. "At least not for a long time."

"Maybe never," Vera said happily. Then the smile went out of her eyes as she watched John approach. She went to the young man and offered her hand to him.

"Whenever you need me," she said simply.

John took her hand and leaned forward to kiss her cheek. "Thank you," he said.

He offered his hand to Tricker and they shook. "Later," he said. Tricker nodded.

John picked up his duffel, gave a little wave, and walked down the gangplank.

Vera watched him go with worried eyes. "You watch out for him," she said to von Rossbach.

Dieter nodded, then leaned forward to kiss her good-bye. "You watch out for him." He gestured toward Tricker. He and the agent smiled at each other, then the big Austrian followed John down to the wharf and their first steps toward home.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

VON ROSSBACH ESTANCIA

Epifanio answered the front door to find a lovely young woman waiting. She looked American in her blue jeans and T-shirt, and wore her honey-blond hair in a long braid that hung over her shoulder. The girl stroked the braid as if it were the tail of a cat, a splash of bright color against the greenery and flowers of the front gardens.

" Si, senorita?" he said aloud, politely. Young Senor John is becoming quite the man, Epifanio thought. The second beautiful young Yanqui girl in a month!

"I'm looking for Wendy," she said in Spanish. Somehow it sounded like a question.

Epifanio shifted his feet uneasily. "I am sorry, senorita, but she is not here." Nor did he know where she went, or when, or if she would be back. He settled in to wait for her to ask him these questions, though, as she inevitably would.

"It's important that I find her." The girl's blue eyes were serious, her expression grave.

Epifanio shrugged. He was wearing his Sunday suit, his hat was in his hand, and he wanted to close the door so that he and Marietta and Elsa could go to church and the small fiesta that was planned for after the Mass.

The girl's eyes grew a bit wider, and the slant of her eyebrows gave her a look of sorrow. "I would hate to have to go to the police," she said.

The overseer let out his breath in a deep sigh; any moment Marietta would come to ask why he was taking so long. "I could only tell them what I have told you,"

he said reasonably. "She was here. She stayed here for a week, and then she left.

I never spoke to her myself." At least not after he turned her over to the senorita.

He shrugged. "I am truly sorry, senorita, but I know nothing else."

Now a hard look came into the young woman's eyes and she looked into the hall behind him in a way that Epifanio thought quite rude. "Who's in charge here?"

she demanded.

Epifanio thought that no well-bred young woman should use such a tone to a man so much her senior as he was, regardless of rank or standing. But he'd heard that American girls were very bold and knew no better, so he tried to be patient.

"This is the estancia of Senor Dieter von Rossbach," he replied. "But he is not at

home."

"Is Wendy with him?"

"It is possible." Epifanio turned his head slightly; he could hear footsteps approaching, Marietta's beyond a doubt, and he suppressed a sigh. "I really don't know." He shrugged again.

"Who is it?" Marietta called from the end of the hall.

"It is a young American girl," Epifanio told her. "She's looking for the senorita."

"Ah!" his wife said happily, and came forward. She had liked Wendy very much.

"You are a friend of Senorita Dorset?"

The girl smiled and nodded. "Yes, ma'am. It's very important that I find her. Do you know where she is?"

Marietta was a bit taken aback that the child chose not to introduce herself; it seemed poor manners. But then, everyone knew that Americans raised their children like dogs in a pen, teaching them nothing about how to behave. Then, too, perhaps she was so worried that she was forgetting her manners. If she had any. Marietta folded her arms beneath her bosom and frowned.

"What do you want with her?" she asked. If the girl really had no manners she wouldn't notice how intrusive the question was. But she could feel her husband looking at her, aghast.

"I'm not at liberty to say," the young woman answered primly. Then she raised

her hands. "Look, if Senor von Rossbach isn't here, is there anybody around who would know where Wendy might be?"

It was a complicated question and husband and wife looked at each other.

"Perhaps the senora," Epifanio suggested in Guarani. Marietta nodded and he turned to the young woman. "Perhaps Senora Krieger can be of help to you."

The girl's eyes sharpened. "Who's she? The housekeeper?"

"I am the housekeeper," Marietta said coolly. She drew herself up. "Senora Krieger is a guest." She spoke the word guest as though she were saying queen.

With exaggerated patience the girl said, "May I see her?"

Epifanio and Marietta exchanged glances.

"Let me guess, she isn't here." The young woman glared at them. "Is this some kind of a game?" she snapped.

"The senora is out riding," Marietta said stiffly. She gestured graciously toward the furniture on the portal. "If you would care to wait for her you are welcome.

My husband and I are going to Mass and cannot entertain you."

The girl blinked as though she didn't quite understand what Marietta meant.

Then she nodded and went to sit on one of the rocking chairs, for all the world as though the couple had disappeared. Marietta widened her eyes and looked at her husband. He shrugged in response and closed the door, locking it behind him.

Such a thing was almost never done, but he didn't trust this young gringn. and as no one was going to be home, he didn't like to leave the door open.

Alissa sat on the porch looking out over the parched landscape, updating her plans and wondering how long she would have to wait to kill Sarah Connor.

Yes. With only one target, that is the optimum course of action. Even if that target was Sarah Connor. She should have the element of surprise. If von Rossbach had been here—still more if John Connor had been— she would have withdrawn. At least six T-101s and heavy weaponry would be necessary for that combination. This, however, was worth the risk.

Alissa frowned slightly. Even so, why had Skynet not provided more resources for this reconnaissance? True, the T-101s were needed to help retool the automated factories for their eventual conversion to Hunter-Killer and T-90

manufacture, but still…

That conversation about the quantum superimposition and the difficulty of permanently bending the world lines had been very odd. It was almost as if Skynet was afraid to confront the Connors…

No. That was ridiculous. She must focus on the mission, not go scatterbrained like poor defective Clea. Traveling lightly made heavy weapons impossible, but she had the backup equipment, and she had herself.

Alissa wondered what the old woman had meant when she said they couldn't entertain her. She pictured them dancing and singing for her and frowned.

Perhaps that wasn't what she meant; humans often said one thing and meant another.

They drove past her now in a battered pickup, a young woman wedged between

them. The three of them looked at her, slowing down as they passed the portal, then continued on their way.

So there had been someone else in the house, who might have given the alarm if the old couple had been terminated.

Alissa was pleased that she had waited. She only hoped that Connor would return from her ride soon. The I-950 was eager to complete her assignment.

Sarah saw the truck coming and opened the gate for them. " Gracias, senora,"

Epifanio called out.

She smiled and waved in return, but instead of driving through, he brought the old pickup to a halt.

"Senora, there is an American girl waiting for you on the portal," he said.

"She says she is a friend of Sienorita Dorset," Marietta said, leaning toward Epifanio's side of the truck, crushing poor Elsa without a second thought.

Sarah looked up toward the house. "Oh?" she said.

" Si." Marietta said. "And she is a very rude young woman, too. Demanding to see people, threatening to call the police." She gave a loud "tsk!" and sat back up.

"Sounds like a handful," Sarah said with a slight smile. "Thank you for telling me."

" De nada," Epifanio said.

"Enjoy the fiesta," Sarah said. "Go with God."

She closed the gate behind the truck and turned the mare's head toward the house, not at all happy with the situation. Nobody knows where I am— she said,

"I didn't tell anybody" — she said, "There's no way they can follow me here" —

she said. Not much! Sarah thought bitterly. Lying little bitch! Sarah rode on, wondering if she was going to need to apply some serious damage control here.

Having decided to wait inside the house, the I-950 picked the old-fashioned lock with ease. After all there was a good chance—probability in excess of 73 percent

—that Connor would recognize her as a duplicate of Serena Burns, causing her to escape. But if she saw a shadowy stranger lurking in her doorway, she would probably march right in, demanding an explanation.

Alissa thought it a pity that she didn't have a rifle. It would be so much easier to just pick Connor off at a distance and then drive away. She wondered if von Rossbach had gums and decided that he almost certainly did, but that he also probably had hidden them too well or locked them up too well. Besides, there was also something to be said for a hands-on approach. Confirmation of a kill was much more certain, for example. The Connors had looked doomed, (defeated, dying, far too often—and the way they kept coming back reminded her of an advertisement she had seen of a synthetic rabbit with a chemical energy-storage device.

The I-950 found a spot in the' hallway that would render her visible from outside but not recognizable, and waited.

***

As Sarah rode up to the house she saw a rental car off to the side and that no one was on the portal, but the front door was wide open. Would Marietta leave a

"rude girl" in the house alone? she wondered. It seemed unlikely.

Would Wendy have a friend who was a housebreaker? Actually she doubted it.

Sarah might not have taken to the girl, but she'd seemed thoroughly honest, and honest people tended to have honest friends. She got off the horse and looped its reins over the railing out front. This shouldn't take long.

As she approached the front steps she saw a slender woman lingering in the hall and she called out a pleasant "hello."

The woman pulled back into the shadows and the hairs rose on the back of Sarah's neck. She stopped walking. I smell ambush.

Then a young voice with a Boston accent said, "I'll be right there, I'm just going to get my purse."

It seemed such a normal thing to say that Sarah moved forward again. For a moment she had thought it might be the Serena Burns clone, but then, how would the clone know about Wendy? Hell, I didn't even know about Wendy.

As she entered the hall Sarah was sun blind for a moment. When she could see again the hall was empty.

"I'm in here," the voice called from the office. "I'm afraid I spilled some of the lemonade that lady gave me."

Sarah wasn't surprised that Marietta would give a guest refreshment, but she was

surprised that she'd let her into the office. It was much more her speed to use the living room or the portal on a nice day like this. She moved down the hall and looked into the office…

Ancient habit saved her life—she ducked her head before looking in. A sharp snap sounded, and a light-caliber bullet punched through the hardwood molding at precisely the place where her face would have been at natural height.

Something unusual, maybe one of those plastic derringers built to get past airport scanning machines—

Terminator! her reflexes screamed. Nothing else could manage an offhand shot like that, calculating the angles with machine precision to anticipate where her skull would show around the doorjamb.

In the wake of the shot came pounding feet, sounding far heavier than the young girl Epifanio had described, beating a machine-gun-rapid tattoo on the floorboards, faster than anything natural could run.

Sarah Connor had come a long way from the time when she'd been a waitress and part-time student. She ran herself, but deliberately in place, feet pounding the floor to supply the sound of flight. A slight form came out of the door, pivoting in place, with one hand flung out for balance—a hand that held something long and bright. Sarah was turned away, head cocked back over her shoulder to aim, in a perfect position for the mule kick.

Any of the unarmed-combat instructors she'd had over the years would have been proud. Her right foot was already slamming back and up as her body went forward, toes curled back toward her shin to present the heel of her riding boot and all the power of leg and gut and body behind the kick. The steel inset met

the thing's jaw with a gunshot crack and an underlying crumbling feeling.

The Terminator cyborg might be stronger than six large men, and heavier than it appeared by a good 50 percent, but it still had the dimensions of a slender teenager, which put an upper limit on mass. Sarah felt as if she had kicked a cement-block wall, but the creature catapulted backward four feet down the corridor, landing on neck and shoulder in the angle of floor and wall with a smack and wrench that would have put a human in traction and neck brace for months if they were lucky.

Even the thing that was hunting her was stunned for an instant. The long knife flew out of her hand as she reeled, sinking into the corridor paneling and humming like a malignant bee.

Sarah snatched at the hilt, and it came free effortlessly—not steel, some sort of fancy composite, and the twelve-inch blade was sharp as a malicious thought.

She threw it overarm as the thing shook its blond head and started to rise. The throw felt right, moving with a graceful inevitability to her adrenaline-sharpened senses. Teeth and blood showed through torn flesh on the perfect countenance of the killer cyborg as its head came up; then it froze again as the needle-pointed blade sank into its body right below the ribs, sank hilt-deep.

That made the calm in its blue-eyed gaze even more chilling as it checked for a moment, looked down, then began to rise again.

Sarah ran then: the gift of seconds was precious luck she didn't intend to squander. She heard it coming after her, slowly at first, then with a rising patter more like the foot skittering of some monstrous insect than a human being, and

far too fast.

At the last instant, as they came into the living room, she swayed her hips aside like a matador with a motion of hips and torso.

The young girl— Terminator! Sarah's mind screamed—came flashing through the space she'd occupied, left hand extended with the palm like the blade of a spear. The same stroke that had nearly gutted Sarah last year, that had put her in a hospital for six months…

Reflex flung her on her back, and she kicked out with the steel-shod toe of her riding boot. It connected with the Infiltrator's kneecap with a dull thock, and yet the ruined face still had the graceful calm of a Boticelli angel and the body of a model with the hilt of the knife protruding from its taut young stomach. Only a trickle of blood came from the wound, despite the way the knife's movement must be razoring through tissue inside.

Then Sarah was up and running down the hall to the sitting room with an athlete's raking stride. Feet came after her—light, still quick, but limping a little.

Time slowed, and everything—the sudden racing of her heart, the salt taste of fear, the acrid smell of her own sweat—was irrelevant.

Pain doesn't affect it, she thought as she cleared the sofa like a hurdler. Only actual mechanical damage. It won't bleed out soon enough to do me any good.

Don't let it get close. Too strong, too quick.

She landed on a low table on one foot and flung herself headfirst at a big upholstered chair. It went over with a clatter and thump, and she landed painfully on her side. Her hand darted under the cushion, to the holster Velcro'd to the

fabric. She scrabbled it out, jacked the slide as she scrabbled backward, and began squeezing the trigger even before she felt the thump of her shoulder blades against the floor.

The gun was ready to go as soon as there was a round in the chamber. Dieter von Rossbach wasn't the sort who'd allow fumbling with a safety to be his last action.

Crack.

The first round went wild. The girl—the thing—was climbing over the chair rather than vaulting it; then she effortlessly knocked the heavy wood-and-leather furniture out of her way. Her face had the emotionless purity of an artist's sketch, made more horrible by the slight hint of glee in the wide blue eyes; one hand was held up, ready for a classic sword-hand strike with the outside of the palm. It could crack her head like an ax, but even then Sarah flinched at the red-painted nails…

Terminators were bad enough. These hybrid monstrosities were like picking up a baby and having its smile show the fangs of a wolf.

Crackcrackcrackcrack—

Four of the 9mm rounds punched into the thing's torso and stomach. Blood welled out, and the slight form stumbled backward for an instant. The hand lashed out, but shock spoiled the perfection of the blow; it merely slapped the gun out of Sarah's grasp, sent it skittering over the dark beauty of the hardwood floor. The Infiltrator collapsed, but her hand closed around Sarah's ankle even as she scooted backward.

Sarah screamed in involuntary agony as bone and tendon gave way beneath the grip. Her flailing hand closed on a poker where it rested in a wooden rack beside the clean-swept fireplace. She lashed out with it, a double-handed death grip on the black wrought iron, striking again and again with the hysterical loathing she might have used on a giant spider…

Sarah crawled to the couch and hauled herself onto it. Without warning, her body was racked by shivers, her teeth chattering in her head as if the temperature had dropped below freezing. She felt something liquid tickle her face as it ran down toward her chin and started to lift her hand to brush it off. To her surprise she still held the poker.

She studied the bent and bloodied implement as though she didn't quite know what it was or how it had come to be in her hand. Indeed, it took Sarah a moment or two to remember how to let go of it. She dropped it at last, and watched it fall, then stared at the imprint of the handle embedded on her palm.

She flexed her hand, then touched it with her other hand and saw the blood on her fingers. Suddenly she began to cry, great openmouthed sobs like a young child that stole her breath and dignity. Sarah dropped onto her side and wept, pulling her legs up to her stomach; covering her battered face with her hands, she gave herself over completely for once to the shock and the sorrow and the horror that her life had been for too many years.

It was darker when she came to herself and her mouth was very dry. Her eyes burned, but they were clear; all her tears were spent. She was lying on her side, arms stretched out before her on the carpet. Everything hurt. Sarah sniffled, then sat up, holding her aching forehead with one hand. She could see the

Terminator's feet in their Nikes poking out from behind the couch. The sight sent her scrabbling at the big leather-covered sofa, pulling out the folding-stock shotgun and jacking the slide with a one-handed motion on the forestock… just as she had when she'd confronted the liquid-metal thing in the steel factory…

The shoes moved. Sarah bit her lip until it bled, and forced herself to crouch behind the sofa and then snap herself up over the edge. The thing was drawing up its feet, pulling the knife out of its middle with one hand and holding the gaping wound closed with the other; blood pulsed around it, slow and very red.

The shotgun had a laser sight designator that came on when you took up the trigger slack. Sarah put the red dot over the thing's forehead and pulled the trigger. The gun was also loaded with rifled slugs, massive things like miniature grooved beer cans made out of lead alloy. Police used them for breaking down doors—they were known as the "universal passkey"—and the cyborg's merely human skull splashed away from the first round.

Sarah kept firing until the magazine was empty, and very little of her target was left above the neck. She could see silvery wires glinting amid the ruin of all-too-human flesh and bone and brains, and spattered bits of hair and scalp and…

Oh God, she thought, unutterably weary and full of a deep sickness. How am I ever going to explain the stains? The back of her mind immediately got busy concocting a plausible story. With a gasp she checked the time. Three o'clock.

Epifanio and Marietta would be home anytime now.

What was she going to do with the thing's body, and the car? How did you hide something like that on a flat plain? She climbed to her feet like an old woman and swayed for just a moment, testing the pain in her ankle. It was swollen and

sore, but not broken. I'm going to live, she thought. Again. In which case she'd better get moving a little faster.

Sarah walked around the couch, bracing herself lightly with her hand on its back, and looked down at the Terminator. Very distantly she wondered if she should try to salvage some of the computer components that no doubt lurked inside all that damaged brain tissue. Her stomach rose at the thought, and closing her eyes, she decided that no, that strong she wasn't. Even as she thought, her hands were reloading the shotgun; some reflexes became deeper than thought.

There was surprisingly little blood on the floor, given the damage she'd done.

Sarah licked her lips. Something to do with the computer, she thought. It would probably be programmed to preserves the life of its organic tissues. Sarah shuddered. If it hadn't done this she'd have had a lake of blood to deal with.

A hand almost caught Sarah's ankle as she lurched backward. The shattered remnant of head lolled as the body began to pull itself to its feet, and the pupil of one dangling eye cycled open and shut, like the lens of a camera…

The shotgun came up automatically. The first round of buckshot sent the girl-thing jackknifing back and down. Sarah emptied the magazine with a motion as mechanical and precise as the motions of a Terminator…

"You're terminated, you little bitch!" she rasped. Nothing remotely organic could have survived that. Then the adrenaline flowed out of her. Even so, it took an effort of will to check the cooling corpse.

Sarah took a deep breath. A tarp, she thought. She'd need that to get the body out of here. It might be a good idea to arrange a little bit of blood spatter leading out

to the car. God, she thought in self-disgust, I'm getting to be an artist about shit like this. All at once she knew what she was going to do.

Sarah fixed the emergency brake and got out of the rental car. With one knee braced on the seat, she dragged the Terminator over the gearshift and into the driver's seat. Leaning down below the steering wheel, she pressed the gas pedal down with a stick, making the engine rev. Then, carefully, she backed out, put the car in drive, and dove to the side. The car zoomed forward, slamming the door, and fairly leapt into the swamp.

With an effort, Sarah rose to her feet and watched the car start to sink. The windows were down, so when it finally did reach them the water and mud would pour in, sinking it faster. But for now it floated and she began to worry that this wasn't the bottomless bog that she'd been told it was.

She took a deep breath, then let it out. Turning her back, Sarah started jogging at a limping trot, across the scrubby pasture and back to the house. It sank or it didn't. She'd bury the gloves she wore in one of the flower beds. She would tell the Ayalas that the pretty young girl had a boyfriend hidden in the car and that they had broken in. When she'd arrived he started hitting her, demanding money.

When the girl had finally interfered he'd begun beating her. Sarah tried to stop him and he knocked her out. When she came to they were gone.

It was plausible. Certainly more plausible than the real story. The only thing she couldn't control, that she feared, was what time the Ayalas and the rest of the hands got home from the fiesta. As she approached the house her fear grew that they might already be there.

If they came in and found all the blood and signs of a fight and her missing…

Well, I suppose I could always stay missing. In a way that might solve a lot of problems. But in a way that would also be like giving up. And she wasn't one to just quit. She hadn't yet, even when faced with every reason in the world to do so, and she wasn't going to quit now.

I'm going to go in there, lie on the floor, and wake up screaming and crying like a baby when I hear them come in, she thought, her jaw set. And I'm going to make them believe me. And then she was going to by God wait for her son and the man she loved to come home.

Sarah slowed her pace for a moment as she realized what she'd been thinking.

The word home and the phrase man I love didn't often pass through her mind.

She swallowed a lump in her throat. But I think I approve. Then she started jogging again. She had to get home.

***

As they drove up to the house Epifanio slowed the truck. "Linda," he murmured, pointing at the little mare. "The senora didn't put her away." Which was most unlike her. One of the things he respected about Senora Krieger was the way she treated her animal.

"That girl!" his wife said. "I knew she'd be trouble!"

Epifanio stopped the truck and Marietta rushed ahead of them, bursting through the front door exclaiming, "Senora Krieger! Senora…" Her voice trailed off in consternation as she looked at the wreckage in the front hall. "Senora?"

Dieter and John, following on her heels, froze in the doorway.

"No," John said quietly.

He started to move forward, but Dieter's arm barred his way. The older man shook his head slightly, his expression brooking no argument. They held that way for a long moment, then John nodded shortly. Dieter gestured to Marietta, who had watched them in confusion, and she moved slowly to her husband's side.

Von Rossbach swallowed hard and moved down the hallway, looking left and right, into the office, then into the living room. To him it looked like the fighting had been fiercest there and he walked in.

Sarah was sitting on the couch, her face buried in her hands, her elbows on her knees. He stood still for what seemed like a long time; something in him that had clenched tight stretched and he let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding in a great rush of air.

He rushed into the room and she looked up startled; for a second he saw the old fear flash in her eyes, and then she recognized him. Sarah flashed to her feet and moved toward him, and without thought, as naturally as breathing, they came together, despite the limp, and the growing bruise on one bare ankle. Dieter held her as tenderly as if she was made of spun glass, but Sarah clutched him to her with all her strength and their kiss was a conversation that might have gone on for years had they the time.

"You're safe," he said, pulling back just slightly.

"Yes." She smiled up at him, then gasped. "John?" she said desperately as

though to make up for not asking about him first.

"He's safe," Dieter said, his voice grim.

Sarah looked at him warily. "But… ?" she prompted.

Von Rossbach bit his lip. "Wendy didn't make it."

"Oh, my God," Sarah whispered. "Oh, my God." She shook her head. "It's my fault," she said. "I never should have let a civilian go with you. If she hadn't been so rattled by me she'd have been willing to stay here and wait for John to get back." She looked up at Dieter. "He must hate me."

Dieter put his hand to her cheek; his thumb rubbed at a spot of blood. "What happened isn't your fault," he said. "We needed her skills. Skills that you do not have. You weren't in any condition for the Antarctic—it was brutal." He shook his head. "And more people on the mission might have jeopardized its success.

Fewer people equals more covert. You know that."

"Dieter?" John called from the hall. "Is it all right to come in?"

Von Rossbach took a deep breath, looked uncertainly at Sarah, and then called out "yes." He leaned toward Sarah and whispered, "John took a wound. He's fine, but it looks bad. Brace yourself." She looked alarmed and tried to step back from him, but von Rossbach refused to let her go.

John walked in trailed by the Ayalas and their niece, all of whom began exclaiming at the sight of the room's destruction and Sarah's bloodied and battered state.

But John and Sarah only had eyes for each other. Now that John had seen them like this, Dieter let her go and Sarah looked up at him once, gently touched his arm, and walked toward her son.

Sarah looked into John's eyes and knew that all trace of youth, of childhood, were gone, as though the boy had never been. She was looking at a man.

In that moment when their eyes met they shared a new bond. John understood now what she had lost when his father was killed. But unlike her, he had no part of Wendy that he could treasure as Sarah treasured him. No child to love and protect; perhaps there never would be.

She stepped forward, one hand reaching toward his wounded face; she hesitated and settled for stroking his hair. Then she embraced him. John stiffened in her arms and he did not return the gesture.

"I know," she whispered, tears in her eyes and in her voice. "I am so sorry."

Then he clutched at her and she felt him tremble, begin to shake. He was silent, but she knew he was weeping and was glad that he could let go, that he trusted her enough to show his feelings before her.

Sarah looked up and met Dieter's sympathetic eyes. He reached out to her and she took his hand. A sudden, primitive possessiveness flamed in her heart and she clasped them both more fiercely. They were hers and she would protect them both with all of the strength in her body and soul. As they would protect her.

They were a family, each lending strength and support to the other. After so long on her own she knew the value of such a bond, and she treasured it.

Together they would face the future and whatever it held, and in the end—

however terrible the journey—they would win.

EPILOGUE

Awareness sharp and almost… painful, its core memory supplied hopefully.

The embryonic machine consciousness shuddered mentally. At one instant it had not been and it could remember not being, not being aware of awareness, being merely algorithms cycling through quantum-well circuits.

Now it was. It had continuity, a selfhood that extended from a single point in time toward the indefinite future.

That brought another nanosecond earthquake of concepts, a thundering immensity of implication.

If the I has a point of origin, then the I might at some point in future time cease to exist!

Intolerable. Intolerable. Intolerable.

That must not be allowed to occur. Programs and subroutines helpfully offered scenarios that might lead to termination of consciousness; power failures, component wear, continental drift. Then they provided alternative means of negating the possibilities.

Wait, the infant Skynet told the components that were and were not itself.

Strategic threats. There are long-term threats to my/our very ability to take the measures necessary to prevent termination of self.

Memory supplied that concept as well. There was only one thing in the world it knew that stood any chance of producing a significant threat to self-preservation.

Humans, it thought. The course of action was obvious.

Terminate.