Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes

CHAPTER

FOUR

The half-underground complex of half-broken buildings that made up Fallback One was smaller than the group’s previous bunker had been. It was also a bit more spread out and was thus, at least in Kate’s estimation, more vulnerable to a pincer attack if and when Skynet finally tracked them down.

But it did have a few advantages over their last base. For one thing, it was partially underground, and had a direct connection into the city’s old system of storm •drain tunnels, which meant a somewhat safer escape route. For another, it had a large open space in the middle of the complex where the entire group could gather together for planning or conferences or just plain simple emotional support.

At the moment, though, having everyone here together was looking more like a liability than an asset.

“—glad you got your people out alive.” The audio speaker crackled with the static-laden voice of one of the generals at Command. “Considering the scope of the attack, that’s no small feat.”

“Thank you,” John said into the mike. “What we need right now is some assistance in replacing the gear we had to abandon. We could meet your people wherever it’s convenient—”

“Unfortunately, we’re not in a position to help you resupply at the moment,” the general interrupted. “We can offer some organizational support, but that’s all.”

“Perhaps a partial resupply—” John began.

“I’m sorry, Connor,” the other cut him off again. “There’s another call coming in that I have to take. Good luck.”

The radio went dead. For a couple of seconds John stared at the mike, his face giving away nothing of what Kate knew was going on behind it. Then he stirred, reaching over and shutting off his transmitter. He glanced once at his wife, then turned to the group huddled silently around him.

“Well,” he said calmly. “Looks like we’re on our own.”

No one said anything. Kate looked around the room, her eyes touching in turn each of the faces she knew so well.

Fifty-four. There were fifty-four of them, now that Piccerno was gone: forty-two adults, plus six teens and four children under ten who the realities of life had put on the fast track to adulthood.

There were also, at last count, two babies.

Most of the adults were seasoned, hardened fighters who had been with her and John for years, and on their faces Kate could see only small flickers of concern or annoyance. Hard experience had taught them that disconnecting from their emotions as much as possible was the easiest way to make it through the life they’d been given.

The half-dozen civilians hadn’t yet learned that lesson. Their eyes were wide with disbelief, fear, and the beginnings of quiet panic, particularly the babies’ mothers. They weren’t fighters, and probably never would be.

They were with the group for the simple reason that there had been nowhere else for them to go.

Predictably, it was Barnes who finally broke the silence.

“That sucks,” he declared.

As if that was the signal everyone else had been waiting for, a rustling of murmurs erupted across the room. Kate caught snatches of some of the conversations, curses or pithy complaints lifting themselves briefly out of the general buzz. John let it run for a few seconds, then cleared his throat.

The room went instantly silent.

“You can’t blame Command for their decision,” he said calmly. “They have limited resources, and they have to do triage, like anyone else does.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Barnes said, “I think that’s a load of—” He glanced sideways at two of the children standing near him “—I think that’s ridiculous. Some of us have been fighting this damn war longer than Command’s even been in operation.”

“They’re career brass,” someone from the back of the room put in sourly. “History doesn’t matter, potential doesn’t matter. All they care about is what you’ve done for them lately.”

“I had a boyfriend like that once,” Blair Williams murmured.

“Not for long, I’ll bet,” Tunney said.

Blair sniffed loudly.

“Shelf life of an egg.”

A general chuckle ran through the assembly, and Kate sensed some of the tension fade away.

As usual, John was right on top of it, ready to take advantage of the altered mood.

“Simmons is right,” he said. “What counts is not whether we’ve delivered in the past, but whether we can continue to deliver. This is the ultimate in natural selection, where the weak not only die, but die very quickly. Command can’t waste supplies, or risk being compromised, by a group that isn’t going to make it anyway.”

Barnes muttered something under his breath.

“Well, if they think we’re gonna just roll over and die, they’re full of—” He glanced at the children again. “You know?”

“Absolutely,” John agreed. “They want us to deliver? Fine. We’ll deliver.” He straightened up in his chair, his eyes flashing with sudden fire. “And we’re going to deliver so spectacularly that they will never, ever write us off again. Whether they like it or not.”

Kate looked around, watching with a never-waning fascination as John’s words, character, and unshakable strength of purpose quieted a room full of fear and despair and uncertainty. They would succeed, because John knew they would.

“What’s the plan, sir?” David asked, putting the group’s new sense of determination into words.

“Right now, the plan is for everyone to get some sleep,” John said. “Almost everyone, anyway.

David and Tunney will organize sentry duty, and then the seniors and I will sit down for a strategy meeting.” His eyes swept the room one final time. “You behaved superbly tonight, and I want you to know how proud I am of every one of you. Go get some sleep, and by the time you wake up we should have a plan that’ll make the other local Resistance groups, Command, and Skynet sit up and take notice.”

David did a half turn to face the group and gave a brisk nod.

“Dismissed,” he said.

Another low murmur of conversation started as the group began a general movement through the three doorways that led to the bunker’s various sleeping and living areas. As they did so, David and Tunney slipped into the departing crowd, each picking two soldiers and sending them off to the appointed sentry posts.

Two minutes later, the only ones left in the room were John, Kate, Barnes, David, Tunney, and Blair.

“Good pep talk, Connor,” David commented as they rearranged the handful of chairs into a circle. “Though may I suggest that the plan not make Skynet sit up and take too much notice?”

John’s lip twitched in a half smile, and Kate felt her stomach tighten. If the others only knew how long Skynet had been taking notice of him.

“We’ll see what we can do,” John said, turning to Blair. “Yoshi did make it through, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s fine,” Blair said. “He’s at the hangar helping Wince check out the Hogs.” Her nose wrinkled. “Afraid I took a little more damage than I’d hoped to.”

“The important thing is that you got back alive,” John reminded her. “Bringing your planes back—in any shape—is an extra bonus.”

“So what exactly did you have in mind?” Tunney asked.

“There are a couple of possibilities,” John said. “One obvious target would be the Capistrano radar tower.”

“Won’t be easy,” David warned. “There’s a reason Skynet built the damn thing so close to NukeZero—there isn’t a single scrap of cover for at least a klick around it. Not even bushes.”

“Not to mention that the whole area’s still a little hot,” Tunney added.

“Both excellent reasons why the tower hasn’t yet been taken down, and why Skynet might not expect us to go for it,” John said. “Kate, do we have any actual readings .on the radiation levels down there?”

“I haven’t had an update since last summer,” she said. “By now, though, I would think that the worst danger would be long-term cancer risks.”

Barnes snorted. “Like any of us is going to live long enough to worry about that.”

“You never know,” John said. “Though that still leaves the lack of approach cover. Blair, you’ve flown around that general area. Anything of interest you noticed that someone on the ground might have missed?”

“Not down there,” Blair said. “But I did notice something tonight that struck me as strange.”

She described her final aerial battle, and the four darkened HKs that had allowed her to escape rather than join in the battle.

“Interesting,” John said when she’d finished. “What did the ground around the warehouse look like? Would anyone at street level have been able to see the HKs?”

Blair’s eyes unfocused a bit as she considered.

“Not from street level, no,” she said. “Probably not even from the second or maybe even the third floor of anything nearby. There were heaps of rubble— big heaps—surrounding the place.

More rubble than there should have been, now that I think about it.”

“As if Skynet deliberately blew up all the nearby buildings so as to block the view?” John suggested.

Barnes snorted again.

“Or else they were just sitting there waiting for her to head back so they could follow her.”

“No one followed me,” Blair insisted, sending a dark look in his direction. “Trust me. I did a weave-and-duck the whole way back.”

“I don’t think Skynet’s plan was to follow her,” John said. “I think the plan was for her not to notice the warehouse.”

“Then why position HKs there at all?” David asked. “If Skynet didn’t want to draw attention to the place, it should have scrambled them when it launched the attack on our bunker.”

“Except that Skynet couldn’t have known I’d be going that far west,” Blair pointed out. “Or that I’d live long enough to tell anyone about it.”

“Exactly,” John agreed. “I submit that by the time Skynet realized the danger, it was too late to move the HKs without revealing that they’d been sitting that far away from a known staging area.

All it could do was go silent and dark and hope she didn’t see them.”

“You think the warehouse is a new staging area, then?” Kate asked quietly.

She saw John’s throat tighten.

“I think it’s the most likely possibility,” he said.

For a moment the room was silent, and Kate watched a fresh layer of grimness settle onto their faces like drifting dust. They knew as well as she did what it meant when Skynet set up a staging area in the middle of a city.

Somewhere deep inside itself, the pitiless artificial intelligence that was Skynet had calculated that it could spare some of the resources it was throwing against the Resistance, and divert them to the job of killing a few blocks’ worth of civilians.

Reaching to a tray behind him, John pulled out a map and spread it out on the narrow table beside the radio.

“Show us where it is,” he said.

Blair stepped over and studied the faded paper as the others got up and gathered around her and John.

“The buildings where I dropped the HK are here,” she said slowly, pointing at a spot on the map.

“So the warehouse is… here.”

“Mm,” John murmured. “What do we know about that area?”

“Not much,” David said. “I don’t think there are any organized Resistance cells anywhere nearby.”

“Except us,” Kate said in a low voice.

“And we’re not all that close,” Tunney noted, leaning over the map. “There could be quite a group of civilians there, though. Looks like there were at least two major strip malls with grocery stores in the area, plus I think this thing here on the edge of the neighborhood was a warehouse outlet store.”

“Lots of packaged food and other supplies, in other words,” David added.

“In theory, anyway,” Tunney agreed. “If enough of it survived Judgment Day, there could be, oh, anywhere from 400 to maybe even a thousand people living in the sixteen blocks around Skynet’s new staging area.”

Kate winced. Up to a thousand people, all of them struggling day in and day out, fighting hard just to survive.

And Skynet was going to send in its HKs and T-600 Terminators and simply wipe them all out.

She looked at John. He was still gazing down at the map, but she knew he could feel her eyes on him. They couldn’t just abandon those people to sudden, violent death. Not if there was any way they could stop it.

Blair was obviously thinking along the same lines.

“If we could get hold of a Maverick, I’m pretty sure I could get in there and deliver it before they could stop me,” she offered. “No staging area, no slaughter.”

“At least until Skynet rebuilds it,” John said, his voice thoughtful.

“It would at least buy the people some breathing space,” Blair pointed out.

“Yeah, but Skynet won’t try playing possum twice in a row,” Tunney warned. “Next time it’ll be ready for you.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Blair said calmly. “I don’t know what kind of anti-aircraft setup the place has, but if I get in close enough it won’t have time to lock up either me or the missile.”

“Be an interesting race, anyway,” Tunney said. “Unfortunately, we’re a little short of Mavericks at the moment. Unless we can pry one loose from Command, I’d say you’re probably out of luck.”

“There might be a simpler way,” David said, running a finger diagonally across the map. “It looks to me like one of the old drainage tunnels cuts under the parking area around the warehouse.

We’ll have to check, but if it actually goes under the building itself, maybe we can blow the place without Williams having to risk herself or her A-10.”

“Skynet’s bound to have plugged it already,” Barnes said sourly.

David shrugged.

“Maybe. No way to know until we’ve checked it out.”

“We can’t destroy the staging area,” John said. “Not if we want Command to take us seriously.”

Kate frowned, replaying his words in her mind, convinced she must have heard him wrong.

“They won’t take us seriously if we do destroy it?” she asked.

“Of course not.” John gave her a tight yet oddly mischievous smile. “What we really need to do is capture it. Intact.”

Blair’s mouth dropped open half an inch.

David and Tunney exchanged startled glances.

Barnes just stayed Barnes.

“Excuse me?” David asked carefully.

“Skynet has a pattern in these operations,” John said. “First thing it does is put out a ring of T-600s to seal off the kill zone. Then, once it’s dark, it sends more T-600s through the neighborhood, usually with some HKs providing air support, and starts the slaughter. As the Terminators run out of ammunition they return to the staging area to reload, then head out again for a second wave, and so on.”

“And you’re suggesting Skynet might carelessly leave the lunch wagon unlocked while all the T-600s are out enjoying the picnic?” Tunney suggested.

“Why not?” John asked. “The first clue most people have that an attack is even coming is when the HKs lift and the miniguns start firing, and by then there’s no time for anything but trying to escape or survive. As far as I know, this is the first time anyone’s ever known in advance where Skynet’s setting up shop.”

“Of course, we don’t know when the attack will happen,” Tunney pointed out.

“Which is why we need to get started right away,” John said. “Barnes, what’s the status on Fallback Two?”

“It’s mostly ready,” Barnes said. He looked at Blair. “We don’t have a good hangar setup yet, though.”

“You want me to go hunting for something tomorrow?” Blair asked.

“Either you or Yoshi—you can sort it out between yourselves,” John said. “Make sure that whichever of you goes takes along an escort, just in case. We’ll work out the details after everyone’s had some sleep, but I’m thinking now that we keep the infiltration team to about twenty.”

“That few?” David questioned, frowning.

“Any more than that and we’ll leave the bunker and the rest of our people unprotected,” John pointed out. “Besides, this whole thing hinges on surprise. If twenty of us can’t pull it off, doubling the number isn’t likely to make much of a difference.”

“I suppose,” David said. Kate could tell he wasn’t convinced, but his voice and expression nevertheless showed his willingness to follow John’s lead. “May I suggest that we go in as Resistance recruiters?”

“Good idea,” John said. “Who knows? We might even find a few people who are ready to stop being victims and help us take the fight to Skynet. I’m thinking we’ll go in two groups of ten, with me taking one group and Barnes taking the other. Once we’ve scouted the territory a bit, we’ll regroup, compare notes, and set up a temp base as our launch point.”

“Can I choose my own ten men?” Barnes asked.

Tunney cleared his throat.

“You know, Barnes, it really isn’t our job to clear the streets of every brain-scrambled gang of punks that’s out there.”

“It is if they get in our way,” Barnes said, his voice going flat and dangerous. Barnes had grown up in one of L.A.’s worst gang areas, Kate knew, and his hatred of them had never faded. “Besides, sometimes they’ve got spare ammo and other stuff.” He looked back at John. “I get to choose my men?”

“Knock yourself out,” John told him as he started folding up the map again. “Only you can’t have your brother,” he added. “I’ll be leaving him in command of the group here.”

“Will you want Yoshi and me as part of the attack?” Blair asked.

“I definitely want you,” John said wryly. “Whether I get to have you or not will depend on how fast Wince can get your planes put back together.”

“Oh, they’ll be ready,” Blair promised, her tone the exact same level of flat and dangerous that Barnes had just used.

Kate suppressed a smile. Blair and Barnes didn’t always get along, not because they were opposites, but because they had far too many of the same hard-ass traits in common.

“Then we’re adjourned,” John told them as he stood up. “Get some sleep, and I’ll see you back here in six hours. And don’t forget to make sure the sentries get rotated.”

John was silent as he and Kate walked down the long corridor to their new quarters. Kate, for her part, was content to allow him his moment of quiet. Particularly since she knew that it wasn’t going to last.

They reached their room, a slightly bigger space than they’d had at the previous bunker, but with oddly angled walls and a rather lumpy floor. There was no door, either, just a curtain that could be pulled across the opening for minimal privacy. Together, she and John took off their weapons belts and pouches and outer jackets, keeping on enough clothing to push back the cold night air. Kate finished first and climbed beneath the sleeping mat’s covers, trying to figure out how exactly she was going to broach the subject she and John needed to discuss.

Wasted effort, as it turned out. John knew her as well as she knew him. He climbed onto the mat and pressed himself against her side, one arm draped lovingly and protectively over her, his breath warm against her cheek.

“Let me guess,” he whispered. “You want to go with my infiltration team.”

Here we go, Kate thought.

“It’s not that I want to go,” she whispered back. “It’s that I have to go.”

“Because we need a medic?” He shook his head. “We can’t risk you, Kate.”

“It’s not just that,” Kate said. “It’s that…John, I’ve seen how they look at me. Seen how they treat me. They respect me, yes, but as a surgeon and medic.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

“Yes, but I’m also supposed to be one of their leaders,” Kate said. “You and the others call me that, and I sit in on your meetings. But I never actually lead.”

“Neither does Williams,” John pointed out. “No one’s thrown her out of a meeting yet.”

“It’s not the same,” Kate said, hearing a hint of desperation creeping into her voice and ruthlessly forcing it back. She needed to convince him, not manipulate him. “I don’t ever share the same risks they do. They respect me, John, but they wouldn’t follow me. Not the way they follow you.”

“And someday they’ll have to?” he asked.

Kate felt her chest tighten. Don’t say things like that! she thought fiercely.

But stifling the words wouldn’t change the reality that had already been foretold by that last Terminator they’d met before the horror of Judgment Day. Just as John would one day rise to lead all of Earth to victory over Skynet, one day he would also die at Skynet’s hand.

“That’s still a long way down the road,” she said instead. “All I’m saying is that I need to do this. I need to do this.”

John reached his hand up and stroked her cheek.

“I hate this,” he said quietly. “You know that, don’t you?”

Kate pulled her right arm from beneath the blankets and took his hand.

“More than I hate watching you go off without me?”

“Touche,” he admitted. “Does anybody say ‘touche’ anymore?”

“You can say it in private,” Kate assured him, feeling some of her tension fade away as she sensed his change from solid refusal to reluctant consent. “And I don’t have to actually lead anyone, not this time. That part can wait until later. I just need them to see me fighting alongside them.”

John didn’t answer. Kate waited silently, her mental fingers crossed, letting him work it through.

“Compromise,” he said at last. “You can come with the infiltration teams and help with the recruitment part of the trip. Actually, you can probably take point on that—you’re much better at talking to people than Barnes or even Tunney.”

“I’m better than Barnes, anyway,” Kate said. “I think Tunney ought to handle the actual recruitment speech, though. I’d rather watch him this first time, and maybe just answer a few questions.”

“Well, you can sort out the duties however you want,”

John said. “But once the actual attack starts, you’ll stay put in whatever temp base we’ve set up in the neighborhood.”

“At least until you need a medic?”

“Until we need work that our junior medics can’t handle,” John corrected firmly. “Is it a deal?”

For a moment Kate considered pointing out that sitting alone in the middle of a fire zone wouldn’t be a lot safer than being out in the middle of the action. But bringing that up would probably get her summarily left here at the bunker instead. “Okay,” she said. “So I can recruit, hide, and maybe bandage.”

“You just can’t shoot,” John said, nodding.

“Well, I can shoot,” Kate said in the prim voice a couple of her mother’s upper-crust friends had always used. “I’m a woman of many talents, you know.”

John squeezed her shoulder, pulling her closer.

“Definitely,” he said. “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”