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  Trial By Fire

  ( Terminator Salvation - 4 )

  Timothy Zahn

  Trapped underground, Kyle Reese struggles to stay alive and prevent the ultimate Skynet infiltration. Amidst the ruins of the VLA lab, Resistance fighters Barnes and Blair sift through the remains of their fallen comrades, searching for the body of Barnes’s brother. On the forested slopes of the mountains, a man battles through the trees relentlessly pursued by a Terminator.

  ____________

  Following the dramatic events of Terminator Salvation, a recovering John Connor grants Barnes permission to return to the destroyed VLA lab and bury his brother, killed in the explosive opening of the movie. At the ruins Barnes and Blair Williams hunt through the debris for the remains of their comrade but instead uncover a mysterious cable leading up into the mountains. The two Resistance fighters head into the wilderness to investigate.

  What the pair discovers is an entire village that appears largely untouched by Judgment Day and its aftermath. Suspicious of the villagers, Barnes and Blair decide to dig deeper....

  An official novel exploring the post-Judgment Day world of the hit movie Terminator Salvation.

  Also available from Titan Books:

  TERMINATOR

  SALVATION

  From the Ashes

  By Timothy Zahn

  TERMINATOR

  SALVATION

  The official movie novel

  By Alan Dean Foster

  TERMINATOR

  SALVATION

  Cold War

  By Greg Cox

  TERMINATOR

  SALVATION

  TRIAL BY FIRE

  TIMOTHY ZAHN

  Terminator: Trial by Fire

  For James Middleton,

  who brought me into the Resistance and guided

  those first tentative steps.

  CHAPTER ONE

  His name was Jik.

  That wasn’t the name his mother had given him, back in those quiet, peaceful times before the horror of Judgment Day. But it was the name everyone had always called him, ever since his first week in school. It was what his classmates had called him, and his teachers, his friends, and eventually even his college professors. Everyone called him Jik.

  Even the thing that was stalking him through the tangled woods of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains called him Jik.

  The thing that was trying to kill him.

  “Jik?” the gruff voice called through the fading light of evening. “Jik? Come on, friend, this is ridiculous. I’m not going to rob you—I promise. All I want is to talk.”

  You’re not my friend! Jik wanted to shout back. But he knew better. Making any noise, giving any hint of where he was, would be suicide. Besides, his throat still hurt from that branch he’d run into two days ago. Pressing his back a little harder into the thick bole of the tree behind him, he tried to think.

  There really wasn’t much thinking left for him to do. There were just the two of them out here in the forest. The thing back there wanted to kill Jik. Jik didn’t want to die. All very simple, all very cut and dried.

  Jik swallowed hard around his sore throat as he resettled his grip around the big handgun that was all that stood between him and death. This particular section of mountains hadn’t suffered much from the missiles of Judgment Day, and the trees and shrubs were thick enough to give him plenty of cover.

  Unfortunately, plenty of cover for him also meant plenty of cover for his stalker.

  “Jik?”

  Jik hunched his shoulders, wondering for the thousandth time what the hell kind of Terminator that was back there. It wasn’t a T-600—that much he was sure of. The rubber-skinned T-600s barely had faces, let alone voices. It wasn’t a T-700, either, the nightmarish dark-metal skeletons that Skynet used these days as their basic ground troops. This was something new.

  “Jik?”

  Jik peered up through the canopy of matted tree branches above him. The cloud cover was a mottled gray-white, and had gotten visibly darker over the past half-hour as the sun continued its slide behind the mountains toward the distant Pacific Ocean. In other circumstances, darkness would be a friend, giving him a chance to slip away.

  But darkness wouldn’t help against a Terminator. Darkness would just be one more enemy.

  Which meant Jik had to have this out right now.

  He lowered his eyes, focusing once more on the gun pointed toward the sky in front of him. It was a Smith & Wesson Model 29, an eight-inch barrel wrapped around a .44 magnum cartridge. More like a small cannon than a regular gun, really, a copy of the weapon Clint Eastwood had carried in Dirty Harry and which had been the pride of his father’s collection. A single round could probably take down a small buffalo, if there were any buffalo nearby that needed taking down. Hopefully, a single round could also take down a Terminator.

  If it couldn’t, he was in trouble, because he only had three rounds left.

  “Jik?”

  Jik grimaced. From the direction of the voice, it sounded like the Terminator had moved to the base of the small defile that Jik himself had climbed earlier, a deep crease in the earth’s surface that led up to the tree Jik was currently hiding behind. On both sides of the gap were trees and thick stands of bushes, impossible to get through without making a lot of noise. If the Terminator back there was smart—and so far it definitely seemed smarter than the T-600s Jik had tangled with back in Los Angeles—it would probably move up the pass instead of trying to climb the bank.

  But not until it was sure Jik was up there.

  “Jik?”

  Taking a deep breath, keeping as quiet as he could, Jik worked his way back up from his crouch into a standing position. Getting to the next large tree should make enough noise to attract the Terminator’s attention, while still leaving Jik able to cover the top of the defile. He stepped away from the tree.

  And suddenly a figure burst into view, charging up the defile toward him, its feet scattering dirt and rock. Spinning around, Jik squeezed the trigger.

  The blast hammered across his ears, the recoil of the gun jamming his arm back into his shoulder. The Terminator’s charge stopped in mid step with the impact as the big bullet slammed into its chest.

  It was as Jik fired his second round that his eyes caught up with his brain, and he saw that his pursuer wasn’t a Terminator at all.

  It was just a simple, normal man.

  But the horrifying realization had come an eternity too late. The slug slammed into the wide-eyed human, boring through the hole the first round had blown in his chest and pitching him backward down the defile. He slid halfway down and then ground to a halt, the tips of his scuffed shoes still visible.

  Jik stared at the man’s unmoving feet, his breath coming in little gasps of relief and bitter shame. His knees fluttered and gave way, and he dropped into a crouch amid the soft matting of dirt and pine needles, his stomach churning and wanting to be sick.

  He’d just killed a man.

  Minutes passed. Jik never knew afterward how many. Enough that his knees hurt when he finally straightened up again.

  He’d killed a man. Not deliberately, really. Certainly in the belief that he was acting in self-defense. But the fact was that a human being was now dead, and Jik had done it, and there was nothing he could do to change that.

  All he could do now was give the man a decent burial. That was what made men different, a Resistance fighter in LA had once told him. Terminators left their fallen on the streets. Human beings buried theirs.

  Sliding the .44 back into its holster, he walked tiredly over to the dead man. The human had landed flat on his back, his arms flung over his head as if he was trying to surrender. His chest was soaked with blood, and Jik could see the ends of a
couple of broken ribs sticking out.

  If the man’s chest was a nightmare, his face was even more so. There was a long jagged scar trailing out from beneath his right eye, and the entire left side of his face was a splotchy, sickly white, as if he’d been burned by acid.

  Maybe he’d absorbed a massive dose of radiation during the hell of Judgment Day, though how he could be walking around after a jolt like that was a mystery. Still, radiation poisoning might explain the insanity of his trying to chase down and kill a perfect stranger.

  And then, Jik spotted a glint of metal protruding from the gaping wound.

  He leaned closer, his heart suddenly starting to pound again. He hadn’t imagined it: the broken rib ends weren’t made of bone. They were made of metal.

  What the hell?

  He snatched out the Smith & Wesson again, pointing it at the body as he knelt beside it. Gingerly, he pulled back the layer of skin and peered into the wound.

  There was a heart in there, all right, or at least there had been before the .44 slug had torn through it. He could see a pair of lungs, part of a stomach, and what seemed to be a somewhat truncated circulatory system. There were blood vessels going upward from the heart, which implied there was a human brain tucked into the skull behind those staring eyes.

  Or maybe not. The T-600s got along just fine with computer chips for brains, and there was no reason he knew of why this thing couldn’t do so as well. The skin seemed real, too.

  But between the skin and the organs, everything else was metal. Metal ribs, metal plating behind the ribs, metal spine, metal shoulder blades.

  Jik had been right the first time. The thing chasing him through the mountains had indeed been a Terminator. Some chilling hybrid of man and machine, straight from the back porch of hell.

  He looked up at the darkening sky. He was still a couple of days out from the little mountainside town of Baker’s Hollow that was his goal, the town where his uncle had once lived and where Jik had spent a couple of weeks each summer when he was a boy. If the town still existed—if Skynet hadn’t already found it and destroyed it—maybe someone would remember him and let him stay.

  He looked at his watch, then slid off his backpack and pulled out the precious radio he’d lugged all the way from Los Angeles. It was nearly time for John Connor’s nightly broadcast to the world, and there was no way that Jik was going to miss that.

  The message tonight was brief.

  “This is John Connor, speaking for the Resistance. We’ve won a major battle, struck a vital blow for humanity against the machines. I can report now that Skynet Central, the enemy’s big San Francisco hub, has been utterly destroyed, as have large numbers of Terminators.

  “But this victory has come at a horrendous cost. Now, more than ever, we need you. Come to us—look for our symbol—and join us. Humanity will win. I promise you that. All of you who are listening to my voice, you are part of us. You are the Resistance. Stay safe, keep fighting, and survive.

  “This is John Connor, for the Resistance, signing off.”

  Jik waited a moment, then shut off the radio and stowed it away in his pack, his eyes drifting once again to the abomination lying in the leaves and twigs beside him. The difference between humanity and the Terminators, the words whispered through his mind, is that humans bury their dead.

  Ten minutes later he was on the move again, picking his way through the growing darkness, hoping to find someplace hidden or at least a little more defensible where he could spend the night. The body he left covered by a thin layer of dirt, stones, and leaves.

  Maybe the saying was right. But the dead man back there wasn’t one of theirs.

  Not anymore.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The T-600 was in bad shape.

  Really bad shape. One leg was completely gone, the other had been twisted and then mashed flat, and the minigun still gripped in its hand was long since empty and useless. Its eyes still glowed their malevolent red, but there was nothing to speak of behind the glow, not since the Skynet Central command structure that had once controlled it had been reduced to slag. The T-600 was more pitiful now than actually dangerous.

  Barnes shot it anyway.

  He watched with grim satisfaction as the light in the machine’s eyes faded to darkness.

  “For my brother,” he muttered.

  Not that the T-600 cared. Or would have even if it had been functional.

  We bury our dead, the old defiant Resistance claim ran accusingly through Barnes’s mind. We bury our dead.

  There was a burst of gunfire to his left, and Barnes looked up from the empty Terminator eyes. Kyle Reese was over there, and even at this distance Barnes could see the grim set to the kid’s jaw as he blew away another of the crippled Terminators. As Barnes watched, Reese stepped over to another twitching machine and fired a half-dozen rounds into it.

  Shaking his head, Barnes swung the barrel of his SIG 542 assault rifle up onto his shoulder. Glancing around at the rest of the clean-up team scattered across the half-slagged debris field, he headed toward Reese.

  The kid had just unloaded another third of a magazine when Barnes reached him.

  “Hey! Reese!” he called.

  Reese paused in his work. “Yes?”

  Barnes gestured down at the twisted mass of metal at the kid’s feet.

  “You think that’s the one who got Connor?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Or that one?” Barnes asked, pointing back at the last Terminator Reese had blown apart. “Or that one over there?”

  “No, of course not,” Reese said, a wave of anger and pain flickering across his face.

  “Then stop taking this personally,” Barnes said firmly. “Stop taking them personally. They’re machines, nothing more. Skynet’s your enemy the way a thunderstorm or earthquake is your enemy. It isn’t taking this personally. You can’t, either.”

  For a moment Reese just glared up at him. Then, reluctantly, he lowered his eyes.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Then act like it,” Barnes growled. He pointed again at the Terminator at Reese’s feet. “One or two rounds into the skull is all you need. More than that and you’re just wasting ammo.”

  Reese nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Barnes said, feeling a small tugging at his heart as he gazed at the kid’s solemn face. How many times, he wondered, had he had to hear that same speech from Connor? Enough times, obviously, that he now had the whole thing memorized.

  Distantly, he wondered how many times his brother Caleb had had to hear it.

  “Just go easy,” he told Reese. “You’ll get the hang of it.” He pointed to the gun in the kid’s hands. “Just remember that if it takes three or four rounds to do the job, go ahead and spend those three or four rounds. Saving ammo is just as stupid as wasting it if saving it gets someone killed. Especially if that someone is you.”

  For a second he saw something else flick across Reese’s face, and waited for the obvious retort: that maybe Reese’s own life wasn’t worth saving anymore. That maybe it would be better for everyone if he did just let himself get killed. God knew Barnes felt that way himself a couple of times a month.

  But to his surprise the kid didn’t go that direction.

  “Okay,” he said instead. “Sorry. This whole thing is still...” He trailed off.

  “Kind of new,” Barnes finished for him, impressed in spite of himself. Maybe Reese was actually smart enough not to base his ideas and future plans on how his emotions were churning at the moment. Barnes had known plenty of people who’d never learned that lesson.

  Or maybe it was just that the kid didn’t have the guts to say something that self-pitying to someone who’d lived through more of Skynet’s indifferent savagery than he had.

  “But you’ve got lots of good teachers here,” Barnes went on, waving around at the other men and women moving across the field and blowing away damaged Terminators. “Listen and learn.”r />
  Behind them a high-pitched whistle sounded, the noise cutting cleanly through the scattered gunfire. Barnes turned to see a Chinook transport chopper settling to the ground.

  “Shift change,” he grumbled to Reese, promising himself once again that he was going to find whoever had come up with this stupid whistle code and kick his butt. “Come on—a little food and sleep and you’ll feel better.”

  “Okay,” the kid said, his voice neutral.

  Barnes grimaced as he headed toward the chopper and the squad spreading out from it, come to continue the clean-up work. That last had been a lie, and he and Reese both knew it. All the food and sleep in the world wouldn’t ease the kid’s pain. Not yet. Only time would soften the loss of his friend Marcus Wright, and his memories of how that hybrid Terminator had risked his life for Reese and his young friend Star, and then had sacrificed himself to save John Connor.

  Just as only time would help Barnes’s own memories of his brother. The memories of Caleb’s last encouraging smile as he climbed aboard the chopper with Connor and the others for that ill-fated mission to Skynet’s big desert lab.

  But maybe there was a way to help that process along a little.

  The main camp was a fifteen-minute chopper ride away. Barnes waited until his team had turned over their heavy weapons to the armorers for inspection and cleaning, then sent them over to the mess tent for a meal.

  And once they were settled, he headed to the medical recovery tent to talk to John Connor.

  “Barnes,” Connor said in greeting when Barnes was finally allowed through by the door guards and entered the intensive-care recovery room. As usual, Connor’s wife Kate was sitting at his side, a clipboard full of reports and logistics requests propped up on the edge of the bed between them. “How’s the clean-up going?”

  “It’s going okay,” Barnes said, wincing a little as he eyed the bewildering collection of tubes and monitor wires sprouting from Connor’s arms and chest. Barnes had seen plenty of people die, most of them violently, but there was something about medical stuff that still made him a little squeamish. Probably the feeling that all patients who looked like this were dying by degrees, the way it had happened to his and Caleb’s own mother.