Terminator - T3 01 - Rise of the Machines (26 page)

Connor got to his feet, a great sadness and weariness coming over him as he stared at the closest thing to a father he had ever known.

Terminator was dead.

There was nothing Connor could do except make sure that he and Kate lived into the future. They owed him and the human resistance that much.

He turned on his heel and sprinted back into the hangar where Kate was struggling to her feet She was dazed from hitting her head on the tool cart.

"Are you okay?"

Kate looked at him, and then out at the flight line at the motionless Terminator. "What happened?"

"He couldn't do it," Connor told her. "He shut himself down." He gave Kate a critical look. "Can you fly?"

She nodded, and he helped her back to the plane where he handed her up into the pilot's seat, then hurried around to the passenger side and climbed in.

They buckled their seat belts, and Kate checked to make sure that the controls moved freely, that no locks were in place. She eased the big throttle knob forward, the engine responded, and they taxied out onto the ramp.

She had to maneuver around Terminator and the destroyed Humvee as well as burning vehicles and the bod-

ies. Everywhere there seemed to be bodies, civilians as well as Air Force officers and security troops.

The humans hadn't had a chance. LAW rockets might have helped, and perhaps if there'd been time to get the Army National Guard out with a couple of tanks, the fight might have been less one-sided.

But even then Connor doubted if the outcome would have been much different

Kate turned onto the taxiway that led to the main east-west runway. She automatically dialed up the tower frequency that was posted on the control panel, and reached for the microphone when she realized that there would be no response.

In the distance they could see the control tower was badly damaged, all its observation windows shot out, smoke curling from inside, and no signs of life.

The fight would already be spreading out now in preparation for the nuclear war. A war that no one in their right mind wanted, and a war no one ever expected would be fought this way.

"Are we okay on gas?" Connor asked, to distract her. She was starting to drift because of the unreality of what was happening around them.

She gave a start and glanced at him, and then at the fuel gauge that showed more than three-quarters full. She nodded. "Plenty."

"Then let's get out of here before another one of those flying robots shows up," Connor said.

Kate pulled up at the intersection with the runway, and turned toward the east, into the wind. She checked

her controls again, and then holding the brakes ran the engine up to 1850 rpm, held it there for a few moments, then switched to magneto one. The engine dropped about 25 rpm, and came back up when she switched to both. It dropped again, this time almost 50 rpm when she switched to magneto two, and came back when she returned to both.

"Ready?" she asked.

"Anytime," Connor answered.

Kate firewalled the throttle, released the brakes, and the Cessna gathered speed down the runway. At sixty miles per hour, Kate pulled off the carburetor heat and the engine picked up another 150 rpm. At seventy-five she eased back the wheel and they lifted off, building speed for the best rate of climb and then accelerating as she slowly bled off the flaps.

T-X emerged from the particle accelerator emergency shaft and went around to the front of the hangar. In the distance to the east she spotted what looked like a small plane gathering speed and altitude off the end of the runway.

She enhanced her optical circuits, focusing on the light plane. It showed up in her database as a Cessna 180, registration N3035C belonging to Brewster, Robert.

She watched for a full minute longer while the Cessna turned and apparently settled on a heading just east of north.

Her processors brought several options to her head-up display, but Crystal Peak indicated the highest confidence at about ninety-five percent

If they had acquired the necessary data from General Brewster, there was a chance that the humans, John Connor and Katherine Brewster, could have a major negative impact on Skynet if they were allowed to reach the control center core. This could not be allowed to happen.

T-X strode purposefully into the hangar, passing the inert Terminator without so much as a glance, and headed directly for a Bell Iroquois helicopter parked by itself in the open.

It was not quite as fast as the Cessna 180, but it could take off and land anywhere. It did not have to taxi out to the runway and the time saved would be enough.

Into the Sierra Nevada Mountains

From the air, Connor could see fierce fighting going on over at the main side of Edwards. The carnage was spreading even faster than he had feared it would.

They were running out of time to stop Skynet. Any delay, no matter how slight, would put them over the limit. They would be late, the war would begin, and there would be no turning back from the fight to the death between the machines and the human race.

The future, as Terminator had painted it for them, was a bleak one.

"Okay," Kate said. "Zero-one-five degrees. Fifty-two

miles, our maximum airspeed is about one-sixty."

Connor glanced at his watch. They would touch down at Crystal Peak, if they didn't get lost, in about twenty minutes. Just time enough. "Thirty-two minutes left," he said. He looked at Kate. "It's just you and me now."

She nodded but didn't say anything. After losing her fiance and her rather within the space of one day it was a miracle she wasn't a complete basket case.

Connor got the knapsack from the back, and started arming the one-kilo bricks of C-4 with fuses.

Kate watched him work. "John, what if we can't..."

"There's enough C-4 here to take out ten supercomputers," he told her. "We're going to make it, Kate." He looked up into her eyes. She was frightened. He offered her a small smile. "The future is up to us."

She nodded and turned away to watch out the windshield. The Sierra Nevada Mountains rose in front of them, even more bleak and forbidding than the desert beneath them.

"I saw the future," she said.

Connor looked up, startled. "What?"

"I had a vision. A waking nightmare," she said. "There were robots, and explosions and fires." She shivered, and then looked at Connor, wanting him to believe her. "Bodies too. Hundreds, maybe thousands of human bodies, and skeletons and skulls in big piles."

Connor nodded. "I've had the same dream for the last twelve years. Welcome to the club."

"It's true?"

"Not if we can stop it," Connor said. "The future is up to us."

She nodded with a new determination, her lips compressed. "Then let's do it right," she said.

c.31

CRS

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.

Crystal Peak

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.