Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

C.25

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

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

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

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

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

"Jones spotted you—"

"Who else knows?" T-X asked.

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

T-X grabbed him by the throat and lifted him off his feet. Opening the door to the T-l Storage Bay she shook him like a rag doll, breaking the vertebrae in his neck. She took his sidearm and tossed him in a corner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate nodded. "Yes." She nodded toward the elevators across the lobby from them. "But they won't let us go up there—"

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

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

"What… are you crazy?" Kate shouted.

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

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

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

All their terminals were locked out.

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

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

One of the techs who had been trying to get through to a friend on the other side of Edwards looked up and shook his head. "Cell phones are all down too, sir."

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

But at what cost?

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

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

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

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

But not now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Get away from it!"

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

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

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

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

Kate was coming across the room toward Brewster,

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kate screamed.

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

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

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

With the last grenade T-X was pushed back into the broad louvers over the main ventilation shaft that shattered from her weight She disappeared through the opening.

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

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

"Katie, thank God. I thought—"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Us," Connor said with bitter finality.

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

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

Kate looked up. "Oh, God—"

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

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

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

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

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