Terminator: Trial By Fire Read online

  Blair felt her cheeks warm. She had indeed been flying with her brain on autopilot, running them in a lazy circle around the western periphery of the remains.

  “I was trying to find a spot that wasn’t actually still on fire,” she countered, hoping the excuse didn’t sound as pathetic to him as it did to her. The big pit in the ground where the team had rappelled down to the lab... okay, there it was. Connor had told them Barnes’s brother Caleb had been on the western side when Skynet blew the lab.

  She frowned as something caught her eye. It was a small, slender hump in the ground, like a tree root that had been forced aboveground by some obstruction beneath it.

  Only there weren’t any trees nearby. Not for miles around.

  “There,” Barnes said sharply, pointing toward the edge of the pit. “I see some bodies. Take us down.”

  “Okay,” Blair said, feeling a shiver run through her. This was not going to be pleasant.

  It wasn’t. The bodies were in bad shape, burned and mangled by the massive explosion that had taken out the lab. What was left had had two weeks’ to begin decaying, though the dry desert air had alleviated the effects somewhat. The human remains were scattered amid tangled debris from the antenna array and the metal skulls, torsos, and limbs of the Terminators that had been defending it.

  There were a lot of those pieces, too, along with plenty of T-600 miniguns and the big G11 caseless-round submachineguns that Skynet was arming its T-700s with these days. A lot of the weapons were useless, though a few of the miniguns looked in decent shape and some even had ammo belts still attached. Clearly, Skynet had thrown a huge number of resources into this battle, and Blair found herself wondering how much of a role that desperate-looking defense had played in persuading Command that they were genuinely onto something.

  Slowly, methodically, Blair and Barnes continued their grisly task. Each face had to be looked at closely, with the body often first having to be turned over. Here and there Blair spotted someone she recognized, either one of the people from Connor’s original team or someone she’d gotten to know in the months since they’d been pulled out of Los Angeles and put under General Olsen’s overall command. Each time, she felt a tug at her heart, and a small diminishing of herself. Some poet, she remembered vaguely, had once written about such things.

  Caleb wasn’t in the first group she and Barnes checked out. Nor was he in the second, or the third, or the fourth. Midway through the fifth Blair’s aching heart and churning stomach finally got the better of her, and she had to move away for a few minutes to settle both of them.

  Barnes, predictably, didn’t seem to notice her distress. He certainly didn’t say anything as Blair stood a dozen paces away, breathing shallowly through her mouth. He continued on, as emotionless and machinelike as any Terminator, checking each broken body before moving on to the next.

  He was so silent and straightforwardly determined in his quest, in fact, that he had unhooked his entrenching tool from his pack and started digging before Blair even realized that he’d found his brother.

  Gingerly, feeling like she was setting off across a minefield, she walked over to him.

  “May I help?” she asked.

  “No,” he said flatly, not looking at her.

  For a minute Blair watched him jabbing the tool into the loose sand and throwing it to the side, wondering if she should just take him at his word and go wait in the Blackhawk. Then, moving a few feet away from him, she started to dig.

  She half expected him to order her away. But he didn’t. Maybe he realized that she’d been Caleb’s friend, too, and deserved the chance to help him to his final rest.

  Maybe he just didn’t consider her worth the trouble of yelling at.

  The sun was dipping close to the western mountains by the time they finished the grave. Again, Blair expected Barnes to order her away as he picked up his brother’s body and laid it gently in the hole. But again, he simply ignored her as she stood quietly by. He spoke over the grave for a few minutes, his voice too low for Blair to catch more than a few words of the farewell. Then, straightening up, he threw his brother a final salute. Blair did the same, holding the salute for probably half a minute until Barnes finally lowered his arm to his side and again picked up his entrenching tool.

  Ten minutes later, it was done. While Blair waited by the grave, Barnes constructed a cross out of his brother’s rifle and a slightly warped Terminator leg strut. He dug the cross into the sand, and for another minute stood gazing at the grave and the marker. He took a deep breath, and for the first time in probably an hour he looked at Blair.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  “All right,” Blair said, her mind flicking to the hundreds of bodies still lying out beneath the open sky. But there was no way she and Barnes could deal with so many. All she could do was put them out of her mind as best she could. “Before we go, I’d like to check out something I spotted on our way in.”

  He eyed her suspiciously. “What was it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t worry, it won’t take long.”

  He glowered, but gave a reluctant nod. “Where?”

  Blair turned around, mentally superimposing the image from the sky on top of the landscape stretched out in front of her.

  “About a hundred meters that way,” she said, pointing northwest. “You want me to go and get the helo?”

  With a snort, he strode past her and headed off in the direction she’d indicated.

  Blair grimaced. Easy for him to say. He hadn’t gotten shot during her attempt to free Marcus from the prison Connor had put him in.

  Fortunately, the wound hadn’t been as serious as she’d first thought. It had probably been a ricochet, and though it had hurt like hell at the time and half paralyzed her leg, it had done a good job of healing in the week and a half since then.

  It still wasn’t completely well, though, and too much exertion was bad for it. Barnes probably knew that.

  And he obviously didn’t care.

  With a sigh, Blair hurried to catch up to him.

  The mysterious hump Blair had seen had been reasonably visible from the air. From the ground, with the western sun exaggerating every shadow, it was even more obvious.

  It wasn’t a root that had been forced up out of the ground. Instead, it was a root-sized cable.

  “Coaxial type,” she commented, pointing to the central core and surrounding shielding where Barnes had sliced through it with his trench knife. “Outer shielding pretty sturdy.”

  “Okay,” Barnes said, restlessly turning his knife over and over in his hand. “So?”

  “So it was obviously designed to be at least semipermanent,” Blair said, trying to think it through. “And yet it was buried barely thirty centimeters under the sand.”

  “Okay,” Barnes said again. “So?”

  “So I’m guessing it was an add-on,” Blair concluded, squinting northwest across the glare of the sunlight reflecting off the sand. “Something Skynet laid down after the main lab was set up.” She gestured down. “And the fact that this is a data cable and not a power cable tells us it was sending information.”

  “Maybe it was going over the mountains to San Francisco,” Barnes said. “Can we get out of here now?”

  “That’s an awfully long way to string a cable,” Blair pointed out, the annoyance she’d been sitting on ever since leaving Connor’s camp starting to bubble up into anger. Was Barnes really too stupid to see what that could mean? Or was he playing dumb just to irritate her? “Especially when they had a dish array right here that could probably punch a signal anywhere on the planet.”

  “Fine,” Barnes growled. “You’re the smart one. What do you think it was?”

  “Well, let’s see,” she said, for once making no effort to suppress her sarcasm. “You think maybe Skynet might have set up an outlying satellite base out in the mountains? A backup facility in case—oh, I don’t know—we managed to take out this one?”

 
; “If there’s something out there, what’s it been doing since then?” Barnes shot back. “Didn’t make a peep while we were blowing up San Francisco.” He pointed toward the mountains. “Or maybe there’s a whole bunch of H-Ks heading toward us from the place right now. You see a bunch of H-Ks heading toward us?”

  Blair ground her teeth. “Of course not,” she said. “But I still think it’s worth checking out.”

  “So write it up,” Barnes growled. “Connor loves getting stuff like that.”

  “Or we could just check it out ourselves,” Blair said. “See if there really is something out there before we bother him with it.”

  For another moment Barnes glowered at her. Then, reluctantly, he shifted his glower toward the mountains. Whatever the man thought about Blair, he was hound-dog loyal to Connor, and even in his current grouchy state of mind he couldn’t help but see the logic of not burdening his commander with extra stuff during the man’s recovery. Especially if, as he obviously thought, there turned out to be nothing out there at all. “Fine,” he agreed at last. “A quick check, and then we go.”

  “Thanks.” Blair braced herself. “But we’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  Barnes twisted his head back around to look at her.

  “Tomorrow?”

  “We need to be able to see the loops where the explosion forced the cable to the surface,” Blair explained hurriedly. “I know there are more of them—I saw at least three on our way in. But we’ll need the shadows from an early-morning sun to see them. At night, we’ll lose the trail completely.”

  Barnes snorted. “This is ridiculous. It probably just connects to one of the perimeter sensors.”

  “Maybe,” Blair conceded. “But we won’t know unless we check it out.” She waved a hand. “Look, it isn’t that big a deal. We take off as soon as the sun is up, follow the cable, turn the Blackhawk’s machineguns loose on whatever’s at the other end, and go home.” She cocked her head slightly. “Caleb would have wanted to make sure.”

  The instant the words were out of her mouth she knew she’d crossed the line. But it was too late. Barnes’s expression went rigid, and for that first frozen second Blair felt she was staring death squarely in the face.

  “Don’t do that,” he said, the utter lack of emotion in his voice more terrifying than any scream or curse he could have snarled at her. “Don’t ever use my brother’s name that way again. Ever.”

  “You’re right,” Blair said, her mouth suddenly dry. “I’m sorry.”

  For another moment she faced into the bitter iciness of Barnes’s gaze. Then, he exhaled quietly, and the moment had passed.

  “I’ll be sleeping on the right-hand side of the chopper,” he said gruffly. “Shoot anything that comes near that isn’t me.” Turning, he stalked back toward the distant Blackhawk.

  “Right,” Blair called a bit timidly after him. “I’ll take the first watch, then?”

  Barnes didn’t bother to reply.

  Blair gave the new grave a final look. Then she set off after him.

  She had the first watch, all right. And given that it would be her job to wake him up for his turn, chances were very good that she was going to have the only watch.

  She sighed. It was shaping up to be a long, lonely, chilly night.

  Jik had just settled for the night into his chosen tree when he heard the faint whining sound in the distance.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  He froze, his ears straining, his eyes trying to pierce the canopy of branches and leaves above him to the glimpses of starry night sky beyond. The sound was growing louder, and for a minute he wondered if it might be a Resistance jet or helo heading across the mountains on some mission.

  But no. As the noise grew louder, it resolved itself into the distinctive hum of Hunter-Killer turbofans.

  He bared his teeth in a scowl, his hands pressed against the rough tree bark. During the long walk from Los Angeles he’d spent his nights off the ground whenever he could, both as a defense against predators and also because he hated the sensation of ants and other ground insects crawling over him.

  But he was only safe from ground-based dangers like wolves and coyotes. Against flying threats like H-Ks, setting himself above the bushes and other ground cover was not only useless but decidedly counterproductive.

  He peered beneath him, trying to recall the details of the terrain. There was a large section of dead log about ten meters away, he remembered, surrounded by a group of thorn bushes. If the log was hollow, he might be able to squeeze himself inside. Surely the infrared signature of a man inside a log would be significantly different from that of a human out in the open?

  But did he dare risk the movement required to climb down the tree? And once he was down, what about the coyotes and wolves he’d heard prowling around earlier?

  The H-K was getting closer. Abruptly, Jik made up his mind. The leaf canopy was no defense if the H-K was hunting humans tonight, and wolves he would at least have a fighting chance against. Better to go with the log.

  He was adjusting his grip on the branches around him, preparing to swing out of his perch, when a new sound came to him across the breeze. Like the H-K’s engines, this one was instantly recognizable: the heavy, steady cadence of large metallic feet.

  The H-K wasn’t alone. It had brought some Terminators with it.

  Jik froze, the bitter irony of it drying his throat. All the way from Los Angeles... and now, with Baker’s Hollow practically in sight, the Terminators had finally caught up with him.

  And pinned between earth and sky, with nowhere to go and no time to get there anyway, Jik literally had no other option but to trust in luck to get him through the next few minutes. Tucking his arms against his chest, he pressed up against the tree bole and tried to look as much like a bear as he could.

  The footsteps swishing through the leaves and thudding against the ground grew louder, and a minute later he caught a glimpse of glowing red eyes through the vegetation to the south, heading northeastward more or less parallel to Jik’s own route. A glint of starlight on dark metal showed that it was a T-700, not one of the rubber-skinned T-600s. A few meters behind it was a second T-700, which was followed by a third and then a fourth. All of them walking in the same path, Jik noted, probably to disguise their numbers should anyone happen across their trail.

  He tensed, waiting for the moment when they spotted him and turned to the kill. But they didn’t. They continued on their stolid, mechanical way, their footsteps fading away into the night. As the normal forest sounds began to reassert themselves, Jik heard the distant hum of the H-K’s turbofans also fade away.

  The Terminators had been hunting him, all right. But his luck had held.

  Or had it?

  He looked around again, this time with new eyes. His estimate when he’d first settled down for the night had been that he was about ten miles from Slate River, with just another half a mile until he reached Baker’s Hollow itself. Slate River was only about fifteen feet wide, but it was relatively deep and as fast and rock-filled as any other mountain stream. Back when he’d spent summers here, he’d been warned repeatedly not to go anywhere near it.

  But warnings like that never stopped ten-year-old boys. He and one of the local kids, Danny Preston, had routinely crossed the river at the spot everyone else used, a somewhat wider section where the slightly slower current had built up a mass of stones that made the water shallow enough to safely wade through. That ford was the spot Jik was currently heading for, and up until now he’d assumed he was more or less on course.

  Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. If Skynet was still trying to nail him—and the presence of T-700s in the middle of the forest was pretty good evidence that it was—its best strategy at this point would be to try to pin him against the river. If one of the machines could reach and hold the ford ahead of him, the others could then sweep in from the west, north, and south, beating the bushes until they ran him down. Simple, straightforward, and an almost guaranteed suc
cess.

  He smiled tightly into the darkness. Or maybe not so guaranteed... because what Skynet didn’t know was that forty years ago Jik and Danny had built themselves a private bridge about a mile north of the ford. If it was still there, he might be able to get across the river and to the relative safety of Baker’s Hollow before Skynet even knew the fish had slipped the net.

  His smile turned into a grimace. If the bridge was still there, and that was a mighty big if. He and Danny had built the thing pretty solidly, but forty years was a long time to expect something made of rope and wooden planks to survive mountain winters. Even if Danny still lived in Baker’s Hollow, he must surely have found better things to do with his time than maintain an old childhood plaything.

  But with the next nearest practical crossing over twenty miles downstream, Jik had no choice but to try it.

  Luck hadn’t failed him yet. He could only hope it would stay with him a little while longer.

  Slipping off his branch, he slid down the tree as quietly as he could. There was a cabin of sorts, he remembered, just a little ways this side of the bridge. No more than a shack, really, but if it was still there it might provide him with a place where he would at least be out of direct sight.

  And being out of direct sight suddenly seemed like a good thing to strive for.

  For a moment he stood at the foot of the tree, straining his ears. But the first line of Terminators had long since passed, and if there was another line coming up behind them they weren’t close enough to be audible.

  It was now or never.

  Taking a deep breath, he headed off into the night.

  The figure standing among the trees on the far side of the river was so silent and still that most people would never notice it in the dim starlight. Even if someone did, he would most likely dismiss it as a trick of the light on some misshapen tree bole.

  But Daniel Preston wasn’t most people. He’d lived in Baker’s Hollow all his life, and he knew every tree and bush for ten miles around. The thing standing across the river was no trick of tired or nervous eyes.