Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

C.31

Blackness.

A tiny cursor began to flash in the upper right corner of Terminator's head-up display. The word restart appeared.

His diagnostic circuits were the first to come on-line. Starting with his core programs his CPU was tested and rebooted, then brought up to speed one step at a time. But at an increasing rate.

Terminator's optical sensors cleared and began to glow. Animation returned to his features by degrees.

He straightened up, took two steps backward, and then made a complete 360 to scan his immediate surroundings for any dangers.

But the flight line was empty of any live humans or robots.

In the distance to the east he detected the heat signature of a helicopter. In his still riot-fully-functional state it took precious seconds to enhance his optics while bringing up a data file.

The machine was a Bell UH-1E/N Iroquois military helicopter. It was a unit primarily used by U.S. Navy and Marine forces. But he had seen this machine parked in the hangar earlier.

John Connor and Katherine Brewster had left in the general's Cessna 180. The only logical explanation for the pursuing helicopter was the T-X.

Terminator walked into the hangar where a much larger troop transport helicopter was parked. This one, according to his data bank, was a Boeing Vertol CH-46.

It was slow, but it would do.

They had been flying for more than twenty minutes and still there was no sign of the installation.

"Maybe we're off course," Connor suggested.

Kate checked her compass and shook her head. "Could be a head wind which would slow us down. I don't know."

"We're running out of time—" Connor said, but then he spotted it, just ahead. There was a long, flat, grassy plateau halfway up a mountain pass. It was protected by what looked like a cyclone fence. A dirt road switching back and forth up the mountain was mostly lost in the trees. "There," he said.

"I see it," Kate said. She pulled the carb heat knob out and backed down on the throttle while keeping the airplane's nose up. Their speed rapidly dropped off and they began to lose altitude as she angled straight toward the end of what at one time might have been a runway.

"Looks deserted," Connor said. He spotted what looked like the entrance to a tunnel bored into the side of the mountain. The dirt road passed through the gates and then straight across to the mouth of the tunnel.

Kate saw it too. "Looks like no one's been here in years."

"That's gotta be it," Connor said. As they got closer they could see that the top of the mountain above the tunnel entrance bristled with camouflaged antennae and satellite dishes. Whatever was buried in the rock was keeping touch with a lot of satellites and other installations. Probably CRS back at Edwards, and most likely Navajo Mountain, the big Air Force underground facility in Colorado.

They were lined up with the runway. Kate pulled up five degrees of flaps, and then ten and dropped the nose. The plane wouldn't respond as crisply as it had before because of the thinner mountain air, but the 180 was a beefy airplane with a lot of power to spare in case something went wrong on the first pass.

Connor instinctively tightened his seat belt. He'd never flown much, and as a result he didn't like air travel. Airplane accidents were usually fatal.

Kate pulled up fifteen and then twenty degrees of flaps, and as they crossed low over the fence, she chopped power and held the nose slightly above the horizon.

Connor caught a brief glimpse of a sign posted on the fence that read DANGER — U.S. GOVT. PROPERTY — NO TRESPASSING.

"Hang on, this may be a little rough," Kate warned at the last minute.

Connor braced himself as they set down on what turned out to be an overgrown concrete runway. But Kate's touch on the controls was light, and there was only a slight jolt when the wheels hit. She released all the flaps at once, canceling the last of the plane's lift, and they trundled down the uneven runway.

Connor grabbed the heavy knapsack and even before they had come to a full stop and Kate flipped off the master switch, he was out of his seat belt and had the door unlatched and open.

Kate wheeled the plane into the wind with the last of its forward motion, set the brake, and she too yanked off her seat belt and opened the door.

Connor was right there to help her down, and together they raced across the runway, down a grassy swale, and up the other side to the tunnel entrance.

There were no buildings anywhere within the compound, only the runway, grassy areas, and a lot of boulders and pine trees.

Now that they were on the ground, and seeing the place up close, Connor got the even stronger impression that no one had been here in a very long time.

No human, that is.

Just within the overhanging rock lip, the tunnel was closed off by a large, aircraft-hangar-type door with windows above it.

The door was not locked, but its latching mechanism was heavily rusted. It took every ounce of Connor's strength to pull it up and slide it free so that he could open one of the doors on its long neglected hinges.

The floor of the tunnel was concrete with a flood gutter covered by steel grating down the middle. Overhead, the rock was faced with big steel beams that formed curved walls and ceiling much like the inside of a very large Quonset hut.

Lined up in long rows, like so many soldiers ready for an inspection that had never come, were military vehicles — jeeps, trucks, a bulldozer: all painted olive drab, and all old-fashioned, covered with dust and debris that had filtered down from the high ceiling for years.

There was a definite air of neglect and abandonment here. No one had been to this place for a long time.

Connor stopped in his tracks for just a moment. It had been twenty-five years since the first terminator had come back programmed to assassinate his mother so that she would never conceive and bear a son who would one day lead the human resistance.

It was possible that this place had been built as early as that time by the military in anticipation of a coming global thermonuclear conflict.

They were getting ready for Skynet or something like it as long as a quarter century ago.

That would explain the age and neglect that they were seeing here. The place was built for a Judgment Day that had not come. Yet.

He motioned for Kate to hold up. "Skynet," he said. There might be more of them."

He pulled out his pistol and fired into the darkness. The shots were shockingly loud here, the bullets ricocheting in the distance like angry bees.

But there was no answering fire. No T-ls coming out of the darkness. No H-Ks hovering just outside the doors.

Connor took the lead into the tunnel, Kate right on his heels, feeling their way around the parked jeeps and trucks when it got too dark to see.

He had no sense that the walls were narrowing, or that the ceiling was getting any lower as they penetrated farther into the mountain. But the air seemed danker, more stagnant. It smelled of rock dust, leaking motor oil, disintegrating rubber tires, and something else. Some distant odor that might have been electrical.

Maybe he was smelling electronic equipment that had been suddenly switched on after lying dormant for many years. It was not a comforting thought.

As best he could estimate they had gone at least one hundred yards into the tunnel when they came to a dead end. A wall made of steel with deep vertical grooves blocked their way.

Connor moved to the right, reaching the edge of the steel wall in five or ten feet, and feeling what he thought was a concrete lip, or edge.

"I think it's some kind of a blast door," he told Kate. He dug in his jacket pocket and found a book of matches. He lit them all at once.

In the sudden glow he could see that he was right. It was a steel blast door set into the concrete, and meant to be raised or lowered into place with powerful electrical motors.

Large air vents, covered by steel bars, opened in the tunnel walls beside the blast doors.

But the entry looked impregnable.

"No way we can blow this open," Connor said, his spirits sinking.

"Maybe we don't have to," Kate said. She'd found what looked like an old-fashioned security station and card reader.

The matches died as Kate slid open a panel that covered a small keypad. A dim light came on that provided just enough illumination for them to see what they were doing.

Connor looked over her shoulder. A small LED screen above the keypad flashed with the single word: standby. After a moment that word was replaced by the letters and numbers: blue 478.

"Now what?" Kate asked. She was just as conscious as he that they were running out of time.

"It's a code prompt," Connor said. He pulled out the red envelope they'd taken from General Brewster's safe back at CRS, and hurriedly flipped through the code cards. He found one tinted in blue, which contained one word and three numbers. "Here. Type in DAKOTA, seven-seven-five."

Kate entered the code and the LED screen flashed: | power on.

Lights came to life above the door and in the tunnel ceiling.

The keypad beeped and the LED screen lit up with the next prompt.

"We're almost in," Connor said excitedly.

They could see now that they were in front of a massive blast door. A notice posted to the right warned that this was a secure area. To the left the notice warned personnel to stand clear.

Connor was about to look for the proper code card when they both heard the distinctive thump of an approaching helicopter. But close. Behind them at the tunnel entrance.

They turned toward the sound. Now that the lights were on they could see all the way to the end.

A helicopter suddenly crashed through the hangar-type door with a tremendous racket, bursting into the tunnel on a trail of sparks and shooting flames. Pieces of the rotors and the tail section and landing skids flew off in all directions as the machine came to a halt, nose over, in front of a pickup truck.

The pilot's door opened and a woman dressed in a rust-colored outfit climbed out of the machine.

Kate took a step backward, her complexion turning instantly pale. "It's her—"