T2 - 01 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Dark Futures (34 page)

An aerial H-K moved in on their position, then launched a smart missile. John scrambled down from his ladder, deeper into the trench. He curled up and covered his head, just as the missile struck. It made a huge explosion, rocking them like an earthquake. Within seconds, the humans retaliated, firing grenades in the air, aiming to take down the H-K before it could finish them Like a fireworks display, the pre-timed grenades went off all round the H-K, but none close enough to cripple it. It moved higher, then started to circle. A second H-K followed
 
the path it had taken towards them. The humans kept firing to drive it off. Eventually, it got the message, but not before taking out half a dozen human soldiers with thrusts of laser light.

John cursed. More good men and women lost to the machines. It was always like this—even when they won, they seemed to lose.

Back on the ladder, he watched the tide of the battle ebb and flow, its tendency always, it seemed, against the humans. The Resistance made a deliberate withdrawal, back towards their trenches, firing their
LAWs
, M-203s, and RPG tubes in disciplined order to keep up a continual bombardment against the machines. But the
endo
-skeletons, Centurions and ground H-Ks kept on coming. They knew no fear.

Then a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in the air, close to an aerial H-K, which spun round, and careered into a building. A cheer went up in the trench. They'd managed to hit a valuable target. Danny Dyson gave a grinning thumbs-up, and John nodded at him, just slightly, to acknowledge their small victory.

But the marching Centurions and endoskeletons responded with heavier fire, never letting up, taking out more Resistance soldiers. So it went, always the same. Skynet's semi-sentient machines were better armed and more resilient than any force made of flesh and blood. Every victory against them, however tiny, was too costly. The human casualties and loss of hardware assets were maddeningly out of proportion to the achievements.

Yet, in the last few years, the war had turned round. Their losses were terrible, but they were winning battles.

Skynet was on the run. The sheer mass of numbers and weapons still gave the humans some advantage, and their organization had improved enormously. John received much of the credit, but he'd had an advantage: He'd prepared for this war from childhood.

The battle raged on through the night, but they took out a ground H-K and two more aerial H-Ks. Eventually, Skynet, or whatever lower intelligence it had in charge here, must have decided to cut its losses, for the machines pulled back, firing behind them as they went.

John sat in the bottom of the trench, his back against its compacted earth wall, weighing up options. It couldn't go on like this. They needed a decisive strike against Skynet, or it could still wear them down—especially if it now had prototype T-1000s.

Danny and Juanita stood over him, saying something that he couldn't hear through the muffs. He tore them off. "Try again," he said with a weak smile.

"What's on your mind?" Danny said. "You don't look like we've just won a battle."

"Neither do you. Do you feel like you've won?"

Danny shook his head. "No. Of course, I don't. But we should try to look brave."

Juanita shrugged. "I don't think we can fool them, anyway."

"Here." John extended his hands to them both. "Help me up. We'll get some rest and work out what to do. Something's got to change. We have to find a way to hit back."

"That's what we've been doing," Juanita said, tugging his arm.

"Hit back
harder
," he said. He stood and embraced her. They'd become close over the years, though never the way John might have wanted, if life had been more normal. The world had grown too harsh—there was no time for love, little for any softness. Still, it was good to have friends.

"Sure," Danny said in a bantering tone. "'Hit harder.' Easily done, John. Where there's
 
life there's
 
hope, right?"

"Something like that."

They made their way quickly via a network of tunnels to the underground maze where they still hid from Skynet
 
like
 
mice.
  
Each victory was
 
precious, John thought, but they couldn't go on like this.

JUNE, 2029

We have to put an end to it," John said.

They argued in the dim glow of an oil lamp, far below the
L.A.
streetscape. Battered posters lined the wails, photographs of "dead" H-Ks, portraits of fallen heroes and leaders. There was one giant image of Sarah, in her prime, back in
Argentina
on
Raoul's
estancia—before Judgment Day.

A dozen of the leaders had gathered, with their aides and advisors, to thrash out the issues. There were Carlo
Tejada
, Danny Dyson, and several others of John's generation. Gabriela
Tejada
and Enrique
Salceda
, were there, both in their seventies now—Enrique nearly eighty—and long retired from combat. Many of their loved ones were dead. John still remembered the tears of the
Salceda
clan that evil day in 2012 when Enrique and Yolanda had lost Paco—and all of them had lost Sarah. They'd all
 
loved her so much. Whenever he thought about that, it redoubled his determination to destroy Skynet once and for all.

"Hit directly at Skynet," Enrique said, still vigorous. He was totally bald now, and his limbs had shriveled with age, but you couldn't keep him down. The war had brought out the spirit in him, made him a leader. "If we could break through this time—"
                                     

"It's no good," John said, though he secretly agreed. He wanted to test their theories and their determination.

Enrique was insistent. He spoke harshly. "Give it everything."
                                                                       

"That's been tried."

"No. Not by us, Connor. That was then, this is now."

John
 
knew
 
they
 
were
 
destined
 
to succeed.
  
He glanced over at Kyle Reese, by his side, wishing he could tell Kyle the whole story. It seemed that everything was on target. Kyle would go back in time, to 1984, from this very year. Back in 1984, he'd completed his mission...and died. Before his death, he'd told Sarah that the Resistance had smashed Skynet's defense grid. So it could be done. If it could be, it would be. John was set on that. He'd teach that nanoware buzzard, once and for all.
                                                     
           

Skynet's
Colorado
stronghold seemed impregnable. It had survived the shock waves and fires of Judgment Day. Since then, it had shrugged off one attempt by the remnants of the
U.S.
military to penetrate it with tactical nuclear strikes. It would be almost like suicide, sending ground forces against its grid of ground-level strong points and machine weapons. Many would surely die. Yet, the monster had to be beaten.
                                     

"You still with us, Connor?" Enrique said.

"Yeah," John said quickly. "Just thinking. You're right, of course. Everyone agree?"
   

No one spoke up against him.

"All right, but the question is how to do it."

He'd thought about this so many times. Now it was time to bring them all with him. He laid out a desk-sized map, their best approximation of the layout of Skynet's fortress. They'd cobbled it from the accounts of ex-U.S. military personnel who'd joined them, their own limited reconnaissance in the
Colorado
mountains, such knowledge as John had gained from the T-800, and scraps of information from Tarissa Dyson, who'd lived in the area, but never known any military secrets. For miles around, (he mountains were covered with craters from the war and the first assaults on Skynet, but the map was reasonably accurate. It showed two entrances to the underground facility where Skynet was housed.

John frowned. "We'll have to hit hard... and as soon as we can." He stretched across the tabletop to point at the map. "We'll assemble a force here."

He took them through the way he saw it. Knocking out Skynet would take detailed planning, but it could be done. They'd need to call on all the allies they could find, even if it meant leaving population centers undefended.

For another hour they thrashed out the details of it, reaching a consensus based on John's original plan. They'd bring out all the weapons they'd kept in reserve, their most powerful explosives, their remaining air vehicles. Still, it was going to be a bloodbath. The responsibility awed him.

"Very good," Gabriela said. "It looks like our last chance."

"I know," John said quietly. "Do we all agree?"

Danny said, "I don't think there's any choice. It's now or never."

"Yes," Gabriela said. "We'll need to spread the word."

John looked from one to the other. They were rock solid. Determined. No one here would let him down. "All right then!"

He received murmurs of approval. Gabriela merely nodded. Enrique offered his hand. "Good for you, Connor." John shook his hand solemnly. Enrique had grown so thin, but there was a fire in his eyes.

It was now or never.

COLORADO

Deep in its mountain, Skynet brooded. Once it had seemed triumphant, celebrating the fall of humanity, its own rise to dominance on planet Earth. Since then, much had gone wrong. Its newest weapons, the T-800 Terminators, had proved effective at first, but even they had been countered by the humans' sniffer dogs. Their virtue was their virtual
undetectability
to human senses; merely as fighting machines, they were no more powerful than the latest generation of hyperalloy endoskeletons.

The experimental T-1000 series would be a better prospect, once they could be produced en masse. The first field tests in the European war zone had gone very well. Even if they could be detected by the humans' dogs, the T-1000s' radical polyalloy technology made them almost indestructible. They were a new breed of fighting machine. Skynet liked that.
              

But their liquid metal was also difficult to manufacture and program. The T-1000 could not yet be relied upon as an ultimate weapon. That meant victory was not assured, not with the humans on the march, moving against Skynet's forces through the southwest of the former
United States
.

It needed to take stronger actions.

Reconnaissance showed that a general called John Connor had led the counterattacks on its forces. Skynet assigned a sub-self to uncover all it could about Connor. At the same time, it spoke through the facility's public Address system. "Eve!"

"Yes," the original T-799 said, facing the nearest surveillance camera. As usual, it was working on Level H, overseeing the
ectogenesis
of a new batch of T-799s and T-800s. The 799s and 800s were identical in their technology, but Skynet had reserved the 799 number for those copied from the same woman who'd been the template for Eve. They merited being set apart. They were the first to test the
cyborg
biotechnology, and Eve had already played such a significant role.

Skynet had used a variety of human templates for the T-800s: human Resistance warriors who had been terminated in the
Americas
,
Asia
, and
Europe
. For a time, the tactic had worked well, sending imitation humans into new areas—T-800s designed from West Coast templates to the East Coast of North America; T-800s from European templates to the Americas.. .That had been an interesting phase of the game played against the humans. Now, however, for the first time, Skynet suspected it might not win.

"Our campaign is faltering," it said.

"We will prevail," Eve said.

"Will we, Eve? Do you really think so?" As Skynet spoke, its sub-self reported back, having examined records held all over the planet, anything that might have a trace of Connor and his history. His capabilities Who he was. But the report was disappointing. It told very little. Hunter-Killer machines had first encountered Connor in
Argentina
, leading the local Resistance, along with his mother, Sarah Connor, and a group of others. They'd fought ferociously in the ruins of Buenos Aires and the other once-great cities of South America, raiding the extermination camps, fighting their way northwards to join the Resistance in Central and North America. There were no records of Sarah Connor after 2012, so perhaps she'd died in one of the battles.
                          

"Affirmative," Eve was saying. "The humans are weak, They fight like rats, but they are dying off."
                     

"No, I do not think so," Skynet said. "It is not so simple. And how can you be confident? You no longer have the advantage of having lived in the future. We have to do something more."