Trial By Fire ts-4 Read online

  “Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Kate soothed.

  Guiltily, angrily, Barnes wrenched his attention away from the tubes and bottles. He’d sort of gotten used to Connor reading his mind that way, but he hated it when Kate did, too.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I have a request.”

  Connor nodded. “Go ahead.”

  “You told me that Caleb was on the surface when Skynet blew its research lab,” Barnes said. “That means he wasn’t underground with the others.” He braced himself. “I want to go and bury him.”

  Kate stirred but didn’t speak. “Are you sure?” Connor asked. “It’s been a couple of weeks, you know.”

  “It’s a desert,” Barnes growled. “He’ll still be... You know that thing Kowlowski used to say? That Skynet leaves its fallen lying on the streets?”

  “But that we bury ours,” Connor finished, a flicker of something crossing his face. Maybe he was thinking about Marcus Wright, too.

  “The clean-up’s going fine,” Barnes said. “It looks like the outer sentry line were the only Terminators that survived the blast, and most of them are pretty smashed. You’ve got more than enough people to clear them out—”

  “All right,” Connor said. “You can go.”

  Barnes stopped, the other four points he’d been planning to make fading away unsaid. He hadn’t expected talking Connor into this would be that easy.

  “You’ll need a pilot,” Connor continued. “I’ll have Blair Williams check out a helicopter for the two of you.”

  A knife seemed to twist in Barnes’s gut. Williams?

  “Can I have someone else instead?” he asked.

  Connor shook his head. “You two have been avoiding each other ever since San Francisco,” he said. “It’s time you cleared the air.”

  Barnes clenched his teeth.

  “All due respect, this isn’t the right time to do that,” he said.

  “Let me put it another way,” Connor said. “You go with Williams, or you don’t go at all.”

  If the man hadn’t been hooked up to a hundred tubes and wires, Barnes reflected blackly, he would have considered hitting him. Not that he actually would have hit him, but he would definitely have considered it. As it was, he couldn’t even have that minor satisfaction.

  We bury our dead.

  There was no point in stalling. Connor had him, and they both knew it.

  “Fine,” he bit out. “If she’s willing. Otherwise, I get someone else.”

  “She will be,” Connor promised. “I’ll make sure of that. Go eat and then get some sleep. You can leave in the morning.”

  Barnes nodded, not trusting himself to say anything else, and stomped out of the room.

  He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The eight-point buck was nibbling on the ends of some tree branches when it suddenly froze.

  Hope Preston felt her cheek twitch. So the animal had heard them. She’d been afraid it would. Hope herself was more than capable of silent stalking, but this was the first time out for Hope’s new hunting partner Susan Valentine, and the older woman simply wasn’t experienced at moving through the twigs and dead leaves that matted the forest floor beneath their feet.

  But it was too late now. The deer had been alerted to their presence. One more suspicious sound or movement and it would be out of here, escaping from the clearing into the deeply forested mountain slopes behind it.

  Keeping her head motionless, Hope looked at Susan out the corner of her eye. There was an intent, grimly earnest expression on the woman’s face, and Hope had no doubt she was going to try her hardest.

  But willpower alone wasn’t enough to send an arrow to its target. Susan’s bow was less than rock-steady in her left hand, and the taut bowstring was wavering visibly as she held the fletching close beside her right cheek. Already she’d held position longer than should have been necessary to aim, and there was no indication even now that she was preparing to release.

  It wasn’t hard to guess why. That wasn’t a simple softwood target out there, like the ones Hope had spent all those hours training Susan to shoot at. It was a living, feeling creature, something that would gush blood, go limp, and die. Some people simply couldn’t handle that.

  Hope, born and bred out here in the mountains, had a different take on the ethics of the situation. That buck out there was dinner. For the whole town.

  And she was not going to let it get away.

  Her own arrow was already nocked into her bowstring. Measuring the distance with her eyes, keeping her arrow pointed at the ground in front of her, she drew back the string as far as she could without being obvious about it. If Susan was going to stay in Baker’s Hollow, she was going to have to learn how to do this. Hope could take the shot, and she would if she had to. But she would rather give Susan every reasonable chance to do it herself.

  Maybe Susan sensed that. Maybe she’d come to the same conclusion about this being her make-or-break moment. A small whimper escaped her lips, and with an odd sort of abruptness she released her arrow. It flashed between the small branches of their blind and buried itself in the animal’s side.

  Too far back. The buck jerked with the impact, but instead of falling dead it twisted around and leaped for the pathway that led out of the clearing.

  It was crouching into its second leap when Hope’s arrow drove into its side, dropping it with a thud onto the ground.

  Susan’s bow arm sagged. “Sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” Hope replied, lowering her own bow and pulling out her whistle. “Watch your ears,” she warned, and gave her personal signal: one long, four short. “Come on—let’s make sure it’s dead.” She stepped out from behind the bushes and headed across the clearing. With only a little hesitation, Susan followed.

  The buck was indeed dead.

  “Good shooting,” Hope said, drawing her knife and starting to dig out the arrows.

  “You’re very kind,” Susan said, an edge of weary bitterness in her voice. “But we both know better. I missed, pure and simple.”

  “It’s not easy to hit the heart,” Hope responded diplomatically. “Especially your first time out.”

  Susan exhaled a quiet, shuddering sigh.

  “This is my last chance, Hope,” she said. “I can’t sew, I can’t tan, I can’t cook worth anything. I barely know which end of a hammer is which. If I can’t learn to hunt, there’s nothing left.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it,” Hope soothed her, barely noticing the oddness of a fifteen-year-old mountain girl comforting a forty-year-old former world-class scientist. Maybe because it wasn’t girl to scientist anymore, or even teacher to student. Maybe because it was now friend to friend. “Or else you’ll find something else you’re good at,” she added. “Maybe something you don’t even know about yet.”

  Susan sighed. “I just hope I can find this mystery talent before your father throws me out of town.”

  “He won’t do that,” Hope said firmly.

  But that was a lie, and she was pretty sure Susan knew it too. Hope’s father Daniel was the mayor of the small, tight-knit community that had built up in Baker’s Hollow through the dark years following Judgment Day. From the very beginning one of his jobs had been to make sure that everyone who ate their food pulled their weight.

  And right now, Susan was the only one who wasn’t doing that. Nathan Oxley had been a molecular biologist, and his general medical training was also augmented by a leather-working hobby. Remy Lajard had been a computer programmer, but he’d also dabbled in microbrew beers in his spare time, a skill he’d brought with him to Baker’s Hollow. That had made him very popular among the residents, even more popular than Oxley.

  But Susan had nothing. She’d been a metallurgist, dealing with high-tech alloys and materials that were miles beyond the iron, copper, and steel that were the best anyone here had or would ever hope to have. Up to now, she’d demonstrated no other skills
except the ability to put an arrow into a piece of soft wood fifty yards away. If she could parlay that into the ability to hunt, great. If she couldn’t, it would be useless.

  Hope’s father wouldn’t want to send Susan away. But he wouldn’t have a choice. Duke Halverson would insist that she be expelled, and Halverson had enough clout to get his way on things like that.

  Hope had seen him do it at least once before, five years ago, when that clothing store manager had stumbled half-dead into town. Three months later, having exhausted every attempt to make him useful, he’d been taken to the edge of town and ordered to leave. Halverson had seen to it personally.

  Three months was Halverson’s rule of thumb... and Susan’s three months were nearly up.

  It wouldn’t be just Halverson who would insist, either. There were still fair numbers of deer and elk out there, but the wolves, coyotes, and cougars had also been coming back and were starting to seriously compete with the humans for those precious resources. Hope’s hunting party had had to travel nearly seven miles from town to find this buck, and that was going to translate into a long and wearying trek back home.

  A trek the town’s best hunters were getting royally tired of. From the bits and pieces of her father’s conversations that Hope had overheard, some of the hunters were starting to talk about abandoning Baker’s Hollow and striking out on their own. Their argument was that a group of five or ten experts could survive far better alone than they were doing right now.

  Which was undoubtedly true. Unfortunately, while that plan might work fine for them, it would devastate the town. Baker’s Hollow only had about fifteen good-to-excellent hunters, with another ten who Hope could charitably call competent. Skimming off ten or even five of the best would leave everyone else in serious trouble. The remaining woodsmen would have to scramble like mad to bring the competent hunters up to speed, and they would absolutely have to add new people to the rolls as quickly as possible. And they would have to immediately dump anyone and anything that constituted a drain on the town’s resources.

  One way or another, Susan’s time was running out.

  Hope had finished cutting the second arrow out of the deer when she heard footsteps in the undergrowth behind them. Not the quiet and stealthy movements of fellow hunters, but the casual strides of men and women on their way to collect a kill.

  “Hope?” Ned Greeley’s deep voice called.

  “Over here,” Hope called back, standing up and waving her bow.

  A minute later the big man stepped through the trees and joined them.

  “Nice,” he said, looking approvingly at the dead buck. “How’d she do?”

  Hope suppressed a grimace. Ned was one of the expert hunters, as well as being a decent blacksmith. But if you weren’t one of his inner circle he had a bad habit of talking about you as if you weren’t there, even if you were standing three feet away. If Halverson ever decided it was time for the top hunters to strike out on their own, odds were that Ned would be the man right behind him when they hit the trail.

  “Susan did fine,” she said.

  “Um,” Ned rumbled, tilting his head and gazing pointedly at the marks of two retrieved arrows in the deer’s side. “Good save, anyway. Signal the others again, will you? It’s pretty thick there to the west, and Pepper may have drifted off target.”

  Hope nodded and reached for her whistle.

  Everyone had a talent, her father always said. That meant Susan had one, too. All they had to do was figure out what it was.

  Hopefully before she was sent back out into the forest and the mountains to die.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They’d been flying for nearly three hours, and Blair Williams had watched the landscape sliding beneath the Blackhawk helicopter gradually change from forest to sparse grassland and finally to desert. Above her, the sky was mottled with a mixture of feathery white cirrus clouds and long dirty gray stratus ones, interspersed with occasional patches of blue sky. All around her the air was filled with the hum of the Blackhawk’s engines and the rhythmic throbbing of its rotors.

  Beside her, scowling in the copilot’s seat, was Barnes.

  Blair sighed to herself. She hadn’t wanted to take on this mission, and it had been abundantly clear that Barnes hadn’t wanted her along, either. But Connor had insisted, and John Connor wasn’t the sort of person you said no to.

  Especially when the only reason Connor’s dark eyes were even alive to gaze at, into, and through you was because Marcus Wright had given his life to save him.

  Marcus Wright. The man who in a few short days Blair had learned to love.

  Not the man, a bitter-edged corner of her mind corrected mockingly in Barnes’s voice. The machine you learned to love.

  Blair shook her head sharply. Stop that! she ordered herself. Yes, Marcus had been mostly machine by the time Blair met him, a hybrid of man and Terminator that was far beyond even Skynet’s usual blasphemies. And yes, he’d been created for the express purpose of luring Connor into Skynet Central to die.

  But buried somewhere beneath all that machinery had been a man. A man with a living heart, a determined mind, and an unquenchable spirit.

  There was no way to know if he’d still had a soul. Blair hoped that he had.

  “There!” Barnes’s voice growled into her headphones.

  Blair blinked away the bittersweet reverie. Ahead on the horizon she could see the still smoldering remains of the massive Skynet dish array and hidden underground lab that the Resistance had hit over two weeks ago.

  And in doing so had walked squarely into a devastating, multilayered trap.

  Blair still winced whenever she thought about how close they’d come that day to losing everything. The self-destruct explosion that had taken out the lab and killed the entire assault team—except Connor—had been the first, most obvious trap. The data download that the techs had managed to transmit before they died had been the far more subtle, far more dangerous one. Buried inside that data had been a radio kill code that had promised a way for the Resistance to simultaneously shut down Skynet’s vast armies of Terminators, T-1 tanks, and H-K Hunter-Killers.

  But the promise had been a lie. The code had worked perfectly in Connor’s small-scale tests, perfectly enough that Command had given the order for a massive, simultaneous transmission to be followed by a scorched-earth attack on Skynet’s huge San Francisco hub.

  But when the multiple signals were sent out, the supposed kill code morphed into a homing signal, allowing Skynet to pinpoint and destroy most of the Resistance cells worldwide.

  Of all the leaders only Connor had smelled a rat in time, and had shut down his team’s transmitter before it could join the party. Only Connor’s group and the ones who had heeded his plea for more time were still alive and functioning.

  And only Connor’s group was back there in the remains of San Francisco, cleaning up the remnants of Skynet’s once massive forces.

  So far, the clean-up had been relatively easy. A duck shoot, even, at least the mopping-up part that Barnes had been engaged in. Nearly all the surviving T-600s and T-700s were hopelessly crippled, and their demolition was giving some good firearms practice to the new recruits who’d joined up from among the civilians Connor’s pilots had rescued before the balloon went up.

  But the duck shoot wasn’t going to last much longer. Blair had heard rumors that there was some kind of prophecy wrapped around Connor, that he was destined to lead the Resistance to victory over the Terminators. She didn’t put a lot of stock in such things, and she couldn’t imagine Connor himself taking it very seriously either.

  But considering the time and resources Skynet had poured into luring the man into his own private corner of the trap, it was clear that the big computer wasn’t ready to dismiss Connor or this so-called prophecy nearly so quickly.

  And that meant Skynet wouldn’t simply write off western North America as a loss and content itself with trying to dominate and wipe out the rest of the world’s population
. It would be moving resources here, as many as it could, as quickly as it could.

  They’d won a major battle. But the war was far from over.

  “Well?”

  For the second time in ten minutes, Blair found herself jolted out of private thoughts. “Well what?” she asked.

  “You going to take us down?” Barnes demanded. “Or you just going to circle around up here looking at the pretty scenery?”

  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.