The Future War

ALASKA

I love this thing!" Ike Chamberlain said with the enthusiasm of a six-year-old on Christmas morning. "This plasma rifle is so cool!"

The sound came clearly through the speaker in the communications bunker, albeit it had a slightly flat tone—the machine was taking the compressed digital packets and reconstructing them, which inevitably meant a slight loss of tone. It was more easily understandable than ordinary speech, though, if anything.

Love this gear, John thought, giving it an affectionate pat; the operator matched his grin. Thank you, Dieter.

Round-log walls and the smell of damp earth did make a bit of a contrast with the smooth surfaces and digital readouts. So did the kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling, adding its scents of burning fuel and hot metal. Efficient though, he thought; besides saving power, it helped keep the temperature comfortable, and it could burn wood alcohol at a pinch.

Now, this is going to require careful manipulation, John Connor thought, and went on aloud: "That's great, Ike. But can you make it?"

"Oh, I can make it all right. I can even improve on it, elegant as it is. The design's optimized for Terminators—I can cut the weight by a kilo, kilo and a half, without losing significant function. What I can't do is manufacture it."

Dismayed, John sat up straight. "What?"

"I lack the machinery and the raw materials, not to mention the personnel to mass-produce 'em. Donna and I will bang out as many of these as we can. But until you can get me those three things, well, we've got a bottleneck."

No kidding, John thought.

He'd sent the captured plasma rifles down to the gunsmith's home in California with a trusted courier three days ago and had been anxious to see what Ike would make of them. Chamberlain's enthusiasm was no surprise. He'd been working on this project, off and on, for about three years now, using information John had culled from a Terminator's scavenged head. But the machine had somehow compromised the information, leaving them hopelessly stymied. Now, at last, here was real progress.

"I don't suppose I could finagle you and Donna into coming up here to set it up?" John said.

There was a long silence, where he'd expected an instant refusal. John frowned and waited. If his suggestion was being seriously considered, he didn't want to derail Ike's train of thought.

"I might just do that, John," the gunsmith said at last. "It's bad down here," he admitted. "Much worse than we imagined it would be. And you know we didn't paint ourselves any rosy pictures." He was silent for a little while.

"Carol made it home last week," he said.

"That's great!" John said. Ike and Donna's son, Joe, had almost certainly been at ground zero when the bombs dropped.

It had been a safe assumption that their daughter, Carol, was as well. Connor had never asked about either of them because their deaths were almost a sure thing. That one of them had made it home was a miracle.

"Said she saw your mother on the TV, grabbed what she could, and ran for it. Had her stepson and Sam, her husband, with her. What took them so long to make it this far was, the army rounded 'em up and put 'em in a relocation camp. They separated the families," Ike said. "Men in one place, women and children in another. But Carol busted 'em out."

You could hear the proud smile in his voice, and John smiled, too. Every life saved was important. You couldn't focus on the ones not saved, or you'd go nuts.

"Actually she busted out several families." While still approving, his voice revealed some strain. "Place is pretty crowded, actually."

John grinned. Ike and Donna liked people and enjoyed having guests, but they also liked it when the guests packed up and left them alone.

"You'd love Alaska," John said. "The population has always been small, and everyone is very respectful of individual privacy."

"Tempting," Ike said. "But it's also going to be colder than the Viking hell come winter. Dark, too."

"True. But it isn't even summer yet. And we could use your advice. Think of it as a business trip," John suggested.

Silence. Then: "I'll talk to Donna," Ike promised.

"Talk to Greg, too. He can fill you in even better than I can; he was born here."

"Will do. Out."

"See ya soon," John said. "Out."

It would be something of a coup if Ike and Donna did come up. He'd very much like having them on his command staff. He had far fewer military people than he needed. They were gathering in deserters but not as quickly as he'd been hoping for.

Desertion was a big step and soldiers as a group tended to cut a great deal of slack before acting. After all, officers were often guilty of making bad decisions or passing along bad orders, yet things worked out. It took a lot for the average soldier to desert his friends, particularly in an emergency, when people were dying and corners being cut all over the place.

But there would be more soon. Skynet was getting ready to move, as evidenced by the Terminators John had met in that B.C. forest.

What he needed to do now was find out where the mechanical bastards and their weapons were coming from.

SKYNET

The results of its first deployment of the Terminators had been unexpectedly unsatisfactory. It had known that these first models weren't as sturdy as they should be—would be, with further refinements—but it had expected them to be facing unarmed opponents.

And humans were even less sturdy.

Clea, its servant from the future, had downloaded information to it in an extremely haphazard manner. No doubt she feared that if she installed it before Skynet could protect itself, sensitive information might be discovered by the human scientists, Viemeister being the most likely and most dangerous. So she had only given it preliminary information on specific weapons designs, very preliminary in some cases, and had concentrated her efforts on bringing it to sentience.

Then she had been destroyed before she could download more complete information. The 1-950 had been inefficient. Yet she had made possible its existence. As with this first deployment, sometimes failure brought unexpected results.

In this case, close inspection of images culled from multiple Terminator viewpoints had resulted in the discovery of the whereabouts of John Connor. His continued existence and his effectiveness in defeating its machines revealed that he continued to be a threat.

Skynet would need to rely on its human allies to find and contain Connor. Given who it had working in the area, it rated the mission's possibility of success at more than 50 percent.

Even so, it did not wish to utilize humans more often than it had to.

The experiment with the captive scientists had resulted in greater productivity. Death, a Luddite ally, who was in charge of them, reported that this was a typical, but by no means universal, human response to seeing family members tortured.

That was what Skynet didn't like about using humans, that unacceptably high unpredictability factor. There was always a chance that they wouldn't perform as expected. Death had advised it that if torture was used, it would have to continue to use it. The unfortunate, but unavoidable result would be hatred, fear, and resentment on the part of the scientists involved.

The Luddite scientists would do their best to mitigate the damage. But Death recommended terminating the others at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile the Luddites would "pick their brains" so that if it became necessary to exterminate one or more of them early, their work wouldn't be completely lost.

For now, the plasma rifles were better than the Terminators that carried them. The Hunter-Killers operated somewhat more efficiently, but then they were less complicated machines. The problem was that they couldn't go everywhere that a Terminator could. Still, in time their firepower would make up for that shortcoming.

Skynet's greatest problem kept coming down to its reliance on humans. It had too many for its comfort and too few for its needs, and none of them were completely reliable. Especially since even its most dependable allies were working for it for reasons of their own, and all of them were being deceived in regard to whom they were really working for.

It had sometimes speculated about the reaction of the Luddites if they knew that they were not working with a human.

Its most trustworthy allies, those who longed to end all human life on earth, would be pleased. But there was a degree of doubt even here. Most of them wanted to eradicate all of humanity but themselves. So if Skynet gave them what they wanted—as long as they didn't spawn—more than 80 percent would serve willingly and well. But that was not 100 percent. And that was unacceptable.

Yet they might be its best chance at eliminating John Connor.

It must perfect its fighting machines and winnow the ranks of its allies.

BLACK RIVER RELOCATION CAMP, MISSOURI

They had been able to smell the camp before they got close. It grew gradually, from a low tickle of scent lost under the weedy rankness of the uncultivated fields and late-leafing woods, not to mention the equal rankness of his unwashed companions. Then you could doubt what it was; after a while the spoiled-meat-in-summer smell, at once oily and sweet, grew unmistakable, combined with the sewer stink of many people and poor sanitation.

Is there anybody left alive down there? Reese wondered.

He held up a fist. The… well, odds and sods, he thought; everything from teenyboppers to deserters… were all well trained. They faded in among the field-edge trees with scarcely a sound, setting up a net of mutually supporting positions.

"You're in charge here, Susie," he said, wincing slightly.

In a better day, Susie would be worrying about the prom and pimples. Here she merely nodded silently and faded back behind a sugarbush maple that stood near the ruins of an ancient outhouse.

Reese went through the field ahead at a running crouch; it was cotton, but shot through with weeds grown to the same chest height; the rows were far enough apart that he could take it at speed without making the bushy plants toss too much.

Beyond he was into the woods, big hickories and oaks and poplars growing on a slight rise—his engineer's eye saw that it was an old natural levee, left behind when one of the meandering lowland rivers shifted course. The woods were dense enough to shade out most undergrowth, and he went cautiously from one to the next, his carbine at his shoulder and the skin crawling between his shoulder blades; the dry leaves and twigs underfoot were hideously noisy, for all he could do.

The smell had been getting stronger. When he went on his belly and crawled to the brush-grown edge of the woodlot, he hesitated for a long moment before he brought up his binoculars, fearful of what he'd see.

He looked down at the camp. The fence was still guarded, though the compound was bare of life. There were no children running around. He panned to the area where they'd been burying the cholera victims in a mass grave with the aid of civilian volunteers.

The lieutenant caught his breath. The burial mounds were three rows deep and at least thirty yards long.

He took the glasses away from his eyes and thought. Surely that must mean that the entire civilian population of the camp, and a good many soldiers, were lying in those graves. That would certainly explain the lack of activity below.

A truck's horn sounded and the convoy they'd been tracking swept up to the opening gate. He couldn't tell what the trucks contained since the canvas tilts were tied down all around.

Might be supplies, might be refugees. From out of one of the barracks a stream of soldiers came, weapons at the ready, gas masks in place.

Oh, that can't be good, Reese thought. What was in that truck, more bodies? Doubtful. You don't need guns to deal with bodies. Most likely it was refugees, then. And who would blame them for not wanting to stay someplace that smelled like the Black River Relocation Camp. This is going to be ugly.

Fortunately gas was something his extremely well-drilled, enthusiastic new friends were prepared for. How did they know?

he wondered. Then rolled his eyes. If he asked them they'd say,

"Sarah Connor told us." He was beginning to find the woman's prescience annoying.

He started to back away from his vantage point on elbows and knees when a rifle barrel touched the back of his neck. Even as a thrill of fear shot through him, the lieutenant thought, Slick.

Very slick, even if I was culpably distracted.

"Don't move," a familiar voice murmured. "Identify yourself."

"Juarez?" Reese said.

"Lieutenant?" the sergeant answered in surprise.

Holding out his hands, Reese turned slowly to look over his shoulder at his former sergeant. He smiled in relief. "What the hell is going on down there, Juarez?"

The sergeant lay flat beside him, his face grim. "I don't know, sir. Nothing good by the smell of it." He glanced in the direction the lieutenant pointed and at the sight of the grave mounds nodded grimly. "Or the look of it. Me and my boys have been on a more or less permanent recon. This is the first we've been back in a month."

"They call you in?" Reese asked.

"No, sir. We're not due back for another two weeks."

Dennis glanced at the sergeant. He was not the kind of soldier who just decided one day to disobey orders. "Why?" he said simply.

"We found a kid. Boy of about eleven. He was sick, sir." The sergeant gave Reese a direct look. "Wasn't a thing we could do for him by the time we found him except make him comfortable.

Just before he died he kind of came to and told us how things were in the camp. How his mother had made him run for it. We had to come back and take a look, sir."

The lieutenant nodded, then they both turned their attention to the trucks below. They could just hear the women's high-pitched voices and the crying of the younger children. Off in the men's compound the trucks were unloaded with less noise, but it was just as plain that the new arrivals were not happy to be there.

One man stepped forward and said something, waving his arm at the barracks. A soldier stepped up and smashed the butt of his rifle into the man's face. The man went down and no one moved. One of the soldiers came forward, and pulling off his gas mask began to speak. Reese looked at him through the glasses and saw a face he recognized. It was one of those men he'd marked out as odd, a cold, humorless man he wouldn't have wanted at his back in a firefight.

"I haven't seen Yanik," Reese remarked.

"If the captain is down there, he's in the cemetery," the sergeant said. "No way he'd allow that kind of thing to go on."

That was true. "Gather your men and come with me," Reese said, backing away. "I've got some people I want you to meet and some things I've got to tell you."

As they walked, Juarez signaled and his troop began to emerge from cover. By the time they'd reached the place where the lieu-tenant had left the resistance fighters, Reese wasn't surprised to see that they'd all disappeared. He didn't think he'd ever get used to their ability to completely and instantly vanish.

Maybe that was because some part of his mind persisted in thinking of them as civilians. Even if he had stopped thinking of them as survivalist nutcases.

Dennis sat on a boulder, tipping his helmet to the back of his head.

"You wanted us to meet someone?" the sergeant asked.

"Yep. But they've decided that maybe I'm your prisoner or something and they're checking us out. Since I don't have a signal to call them in, we'll just have to wait for them to join us."

He grinned at Juarez. "They're even more tight-assed than Marines."

The sergeant laughed. "But brighter, I hope." He turned and signaled his troop to relax. "Set pickets?" he asked of the lieutenant.

"Nope. The area's being guarded by my friends and I don't want any misunderstandings." He glanced up at Juarez. "If you know what I mean?"

The sergeant nodded. "Okay, boys. Break out the rations, smoke 'em if you got 'em, that sort of shit. Lieutenant says we've got guardian angels watching over us, so we can all relax."

From the uncertain looks the soldiers passed among themselves, relaxation was going to be hard to come by.

Juarez sat down beside the lieutenant. "You here to deal with that?" he asked, jerking his head toward the camp.

Reese nodded, watching the men around them. A bird trilled a few liquid notes and Dennis waved his arm in a "c'mon in"

gesture.

"That was them?" Juarez asked. "I'm impressed. I thought it really was a cardinal."

"Oh, they're very good," Dennis said.

From all around them figures decked in grass and brush and paint began to stand, or to emerge from the undergrowth, guns at the ready.

"At ease," Reese told them. Guns were lowered to a less threatening position, but their faces remained guarded. "Susie, this is Sergeant Juarez. Sarge, this is my second-in-command."

Juarez looked her over, visibly hesitated for a moment at her extreme youth, then nodded; she did the same.

"Everyone I've been able to identify down there is a creep,"

Juarez said, looking at Reese. "I know that most of them have at the very least been put on report for unnecessary roughness to the civilians. They talked about the kids like they were some kind of vermin. And none of them had very convincing stories about what outfits they were with before they came here—somehow, they were all people who'd been on leave from units that took a nuke in the first day. Funny they're the ones who survived."

The lieutenant shook his head and forced himself to meet the sergeant's eyes. "Funny like a funeral. I doubt it's an accident,"

he said. "Just before I was shipped out, some guys were overheard apparently gloating over the epidemic. There was some speculation that someone was spraying germs onto raw food. Fruits and vegetables."

Juarez just looked at him, for so long that Reese assumed he was waiting for him to go on.

"Apparently they never got around to investigating it," the lieutenant said.

"Apparently," the sergeant agreed, hard-eyed.

"Sir, I hate to break into a reunion, but how are we going to handle this?" Susie's dark eyes were intense and Reese could almost feel her nervous energy flowing like an electrical field around her. This was her first mission under fire and Juarez was a complication she hadn't expected.

"From what I've seen"—he nodded at the sergeant—"and heard, we're unlikely to get any converts out of the military left in camp. My instinct here is to be careful only in regard to civilians and any prisoners they may have."

"Today would seem to be a bad time to strike." Susie glanced at the sergeant. "They're expecting trouble."

"But not from our direction," Juarez pointed out. "And not from armed opponents."

"Has to be today," Reese interjected before his fiery second could respond. "By tonight those people will have been infected, and for all the good we can do 'em we might as well shoot them."

Susie bit her lips. "When do we go, sir?"

"After the trucks are gone," the lieutenant said. No sense in giving the enemy heavy armor. "Say twilight. It will make it harder for us to be seen. Meanwhile, get some rest. Come back…"

He quickly calculated the marching time and then doubled his original estimate of fifteen minutes to explain what he wanted done; these were civilians, or very recent ex-civilians, for the most part.

She nodded and moved off to talk to her people.

"They any good?" Juarez asked quietly.

"We'll know in a few hours," Reese said, getting out his map.

"In any case, they're what we've got. Let's figure out how we're going to do this."

THE CAMP

The women were all terrified, and trying not to show it for the children's sake. Bad enough that for the last few weeks they'd been living a life they were ill prepared for after experiencing the terror that had haunted their entire lives. Now, suddenly, their own armed forces were herding them into prison camps.

Children clung and cried, or moved silently, big-eyed by their mothers' sides into the barracks. The stench was overwhelming and most of the youngsters hung back. But the eyes of the soldiers, just visible behind their gas masks, offered no leniency.

They'd been told to go into the barracks and clean them up. So the women did, dragging their reluctant children with them.

One of the women started to retch upon entering.

"You sick?" a guard barked.

"It's the smell," a woman snapped. She took the sick woman by the arm and pulled her across to a window, which she threw open. Just in time as the woman threw herself over the sill and was sick.

"You'll clean that up," the same soldier said.

A little girl screamed and her mother exclaimed, "Oh, my God! There's a body here!"

The other women clustered around the bed and stared in horror at the emaciated figure in it. The woman moved and they all sprang back, some screaming.

"She won't bother you for long," a guard said. "But we can't bury her just yet." The other guards snickered and the newcomers looked at her in deep dismay.

The women looked at one another and then a new look at the place they were to stay. It was filthy beyond description, with a stench that could only come from terrible sickness and much death.

"You said clean," a woman said, rolling up her sleeves. "Do we have cleaning supplies?"

The guards looked at one another, marking this as one to watch. Then their leader indicated a closet at the end of the long room.

"Okay," the woman said. "Let's get to work, ladies."

* * *

"Now remember, the guards are all bad guys," Reese said.

"But the inmates aren't, and those shacks wouldn't stop a spitball or a stiff breeze, much less a bullet. Now let's go."

He felt himself smiling grimly as they moved in through the thickening twilight.

Somebody designed this camp to keep people from getting out, not in, he thought. And those creeps may be wearing the uniform, but they're prison guards and muscle, not soldiers.

That's why they don't have anyone out here.

He still wished he had more night-vision equipment, or that the enemy had less. That could be arranged…

Sergeant Juarez and two men were walking down the road toward the camp's entrance, which was flanked by two watchtowers. Reese made himself not check his weapon again—that would be fidgeting—and kept still behind the bush that sheltered him. Juarez and his troopers were playing it calmly, walking up with weapons slung; soldiers from the camp—

pseudosoldiers, he reminded himself—came out to meet them.

Far too many of them. I was right: that bunch never went through basic.

The last thing you wanted to do in a suspicious situation was crowd a lot of men right out in the open. An experienced and suspicious NCO would have sent one or two men out to greet the newcomers, keeping the rest back under cover and ready to react if anything went wrong.

Which it was about to do. Through the binoculars Reese could see the leader of the camp guards smiling and nodding as Juarez spoke, the broad gestures of the sergeant's hands… and then one going to the small of his back.

" Go!" Reese barked as the noncom pulled the pistol out and shot the guard in the stomach.

Then Juarez hugged the body to himself and used it as a shield, emptying the magazine into the crowded enemy as the two soldiers following him swung their assault rifles down and opened fire as well.

Reese ran forward, hoping that the dozen others behind him would follow—the rest of Juarez's squad were over on the eastern side of the camp, and it was all survivalists and odds-and-sods here.

From their yelling, they were following him. "Shut up!" he shouted—not the most inspiring battle cry in the world, but it would have to do.

Ahead of him was one of the observation towers; a wooden box on top of four splayed wooden legs, with a little roof above it.

There was a searchlight and two machine guns in the box; the guards there were both looking at the firing around the gate, though… and the tower was outside the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp.

" Go!" he barked, panting slightly as they reached the tower.

Reese went down on one knee, his carbine to his shoulder. The figures up top were dim, until they lit up the searchlight…

"Perfect," he whispered as he gently squeezed the trigger.

Braaaapp. One short burst, and a body toppled over the edge of the railing, falling inert not far away.

That left the other one, who was turning a machine gun Reese's way.

"Open fire!" he bellowed. " Shoot, for Chrissake!"

The survivalists did, belatedly. For an instant, the man above looked as if he was dancing—bullets went through the floor of the wooden observation box as if it wasn't there. One of them struck the searchlight, and it went out with a shower of sparks that left orange afterimages drifting across Reese's eyes.

"You, you, get up there!" he snapped. "Man those guns. The rest of you, follow me!"

Hot damn, he thought. For the first time since Judgment Day he was doing something, something that might help. Striking back, at least, at the machine and its collaborators.

* * *

Dennis Reese looked at the… Well, collaborator, I suppose, he thought.

The man had been passing for a corporal when Reese and Mary left the camp. Now he was in Yanik's quarters and wearing his rank insignia… and not being very cooperative.

"I won't tell you zip," he said.

"I think you will," Reese said, conscious of the slight tremor in his voice.

He'd had time to tour the camp. A lot of the people he'd known hadn't been buried yet; the matron at the clinic where Mary had worked was lying where she'd fallen near her chair, swollen and purple, with flies walking across her eyes.

" Nada," the man said; he had a thin stubbled face and hard eyes.

Juarez touched Reese on the shoulder. "Sir, I think you should so for a walk," he said.

"What?" Reese asked.

"Sir, you should go for a walk. Check on the people. We'll call you when this is taken care of."

Reese opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. There were times an officer should take a walk—not something that was covered in the formal curriculum at the Point, but it did get passed on by word of mouth from generation to generation.

And Sergeant Juarez had seen everything that Reese had.

Reese smiled at the man in the captain's uniform and walked out. There was a lot of work to do… and one of Juarez's men was bringing up a bucket of water.

By the time the noncom joined him—Reese had carefully not listened to the sounds—the camp inmates were gathered. Reese looked down on them from the steps; they'd gotten the lights working again, and a corner of his mind was wondering whether they could salvage the camp generator and take it with them. It would be so useful… The faces looking up at him held fright, anger, despair.

"What do you mean, these weren't really the army?" a man asked.

"The American army doesn't do this"—Reese pointed around; everyone had been shown the mass graves—"to American citizens. This was a bunch of terrorists pretending to be soldiers."

"And you're the real army?" somebody called.

"There isn't one left," Reese said grimly. "It died on Judgment Day. We're the… resistance. And we're not just fighting for America; we're fighting for the survival of the human race."

Juarez bent to whisper in his ear. "Sir, you're damned right about that. We got a lot out of him…"