Trial By Fire ts-4 Read online

Barnes grunted. “Nice thought. A little late, though.”

  “What are you talking about?” Halverson asked, frowning. “He couldn’t have gotten past me.”

  “He didn’t have to,” Preston told him. “Oxley was already there.”

  “Oxley?”

  “And Valentine,” Preston said. “Remember those Terminator hybrids we were talking about earlier?”

  Halverson’s face went rigid.

  “Oh, God. Did he—is Ginny—?”

  “Ginny’s okay,” Preston hastened to assure him. “It looks like he only got a couple of people before we were able to take him down.” His throat tightened. “The full count will have to wait until later.”

  “Where is she?” Halverson asked. “Ginny. Is she still in town?”

  “No, they’re all heading to the Glaumann place,” Preston said. “You think you can make it that far?”

  “I can make it,” Halverson said. He looked at Barnes. “What about your partner? Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine,” Barnes said, a small part of his mind wondering how he felt about Williams being called his partner. “She’s headed back to the chopper to get us some extra firepower.”

  “Hope’s taking her via the snaky,” Preston added. “With luck that’ll get them past Lajard and Valentine.”

  “Yeah, what’s with Lajard?” Halverson asked. “You didn’t mention him before.”

  “We think he’s pure human,” Preston said. “Possibly the Thetas’ controller and observer. But that still leaves Valentine on the loose.”

  “And Jik,” Barnes said, frowning at the river. “Where the hell is he, anyway?”

  Halverson shook his head. “Last I saw, he was collecting all the T-700 pieces we were supposed to dump in the ravine.”

  “Collecting the pieces?” Preston asked, frowning. “What for?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Halverson snarled. “All I know is that he was picking them up and laying them out like a jigsaw puzzle. I only got the one glimpse.”

  “Maybe he’s trying to scavenge enough parts to put together a working machine,” Barnes said. “How badly damaged were they?”

  “They looked pretty bad,” Preston said. “But now that we know it was all for show, maybe they weren’t as bad off as we thought.”

  “What do you mean, it was all for show?” Halverson asked. “We nailed those damn machines.”

  “Are you blind, or just stupid?” Preston said sourly. “The only reason Skynet let us take them down was to prove Jik’s credentials as the great John Connor. How better to do that than let him help the brave little locals wreck a couple of fearsome Terminators?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Halverson protested. “Why even bother if the damn Thetas were just going to shoot up the town anyway?”

  An unpleasant sensation ran up Barnes’s back. Suddenly, the pieces were starting to fall into place.

  “Because that wasn’t the plan,” he said. “What did Oxley say back there, Preston? That they would have been perfectly happy to keep things going the way they were?”

  “Something like that,” Preston said, frowning at him. “You saying the plan was for them to stay in Baker’s Hollow?”

  “I think so,” Barnes said, his mind racing furiously. “Only they’d be here with Jik joining them as John Connor. Did he ever say whether he had a radio or not? Or access to one?”

  “He said that he had a small one,” Preston said. “I never saw it, but from the size of his backpack it couldn’t have been very big.”

  “Perhaps he left a bigger one out in the woods,” Halverson suggested.

  “Or maybe it’s both,” Barnes said. “He’s got a small transmitter with him, but it’s only sending as far as a bigger version out there in some hidden Skynet base.”

  “Somewhere out in the mountains?” Preston asked, frowning.

  “Somewhere right here in this area,” Barnes growled. “Probably where Jik came from, in fact, Jik and those four T-700s. Maybe even the H-K that attacked us outside the wrecked Skynet base last night.”

  “We heard an H-K last night, too,” Preston said. “It could have been the same one.”

  “Where did it come from?” Barnes asked.

  Preston pointed across the river.

  “Somewhere to the west of here, heading southeast.”

  “If this base had an H-K, it would have to be in a clearing,” Halverson offered. “You can’t land those things just anywhere.”

  Barnes fingered the minigun thoughtfully. Only Williams had said there weren’t any clearings near town on that side of the river. Which meant—

  “It’s been camouflaged,” he told the others. “Probably with camo netting strung between treetops. You two know the area. Where could it be?”

  Preston and Halverson eyed each other.

  “Has to be somewhere with mostly flat ground,” Preston said. “That leaves out the two on Beelee Ridge.”

  “Also has to be some place where we haven’t been hunting lately,” Halverson added.

  “Maybe someplace you have a good reason to avoid?” Barnes suggested.

  Halverson cursed viciously.

  “Klein.”

  “Damn it,” Preston said, just as viciously. “Bear Commons.”

  “Bear Commons?” Barnes asked.

  “A big clearing where one of our hunters, Billy Klein, got mauled to death by a bear about six months ago,” Preston told him. “Or rather, mauled to death by something we assumed was a bear.”

  “We haven’t let any hunting parties go near that area since,” Halverson added.

  Barnes nodded. Six months ago would put it three months before Lajard and the others arrived in Baker’s Hollow. Plenty of time for Skynet to throw something small together out here and run a data cable to it.

  “Sounds like the place,” he said. “How do I get there?”

  “By following me,” Preston said. “You’ll never find it on your own.” He peered back toward town. “Do we go now or wait for Williams to get here with the chopper?”

  “We go now,” Barnes said. “A Terminator support base is usually stocked with extra guns and ammo. We need to get there before Jik finishes putting that T-700 back together and heads back to rearm.”

  “You’ll never get past him,” Halverson warned. “There’s not enough room between the river and the ravine for you to sneak by without him hearing you. You’ll have to go around the southern end of the ravine.”

  “Or we go up the east side of the river and take the rope bridge,” Preston said.

  “The forty-year-old bridge?” Barnes said, doubtfully. “The one put together by a couple of kids?”

  “That’s it,” Preston said. “Unless you’d rather go toe-to-toe with another Theta.”

  For a moment, Barnes was tempted. Thirty minigun rounds ought to be enough to make quick work of the damn Theta.

  But only if he got a clear, clean shot. Given the mass of tangled undergrowth he’d already seen clogging that side of the river, it was a dangerously big if.

  “No, we’ll try the bridge.” He turned to Halverson. “You wait here. When Williams gets here with the chopper, tell her where we’ve gone.”

  “Like hell I’m staying here,” Halverson growled. “With Terminators on the loose and my wife out there with a bunch of useless shirt-makers? Forget it. She needs me.”

  “She needs our Blackhawk and its M240 machineguns a hell of a lot more,” Barnes retorted. “And she needs them in the air, not sitting here with Williams wondering where the hell we went.”

  “Can’t you call and tell her?” Halverson asked. “Even Jik’s got a radio. Don’t you?”

  “Usually, yes,” Barnes said. “But in the last week—” He broke off. “Hell.”

  “What?” Preston asked sharply.

  “Nothing,” Barnes said, cursing his thick-headedness. So that was why Skynet had been jamming all the radios in San Francisco. “No, we don’t have radios. That means you’re stayin
g here. Even if I have to nail you to a tree.”

  Halverson’s face darkened.

  “Look—”

  “What if we told her we aren’t here anymore?” Preston cut in. “Would she be smart enough to come find us?”

  Barnes hesitated. Williams was smart, all right. And she knew the cable ran up that side of the river.

  “How do we do that?”

  “With this,” Preston said, reaching into his shirt and pulling out a whistle. “You might want to cover your ears—it’s pretty piercing.”

  It was piercing, all right. But with the proliferation of whistles in the San Francisco camp these days, it was hardly something Barnes hadn’t heard before. Preston blew a quick succession of short and long bursts, paused, repeated the sequence, then slipped the whistle back into his shirt.

  “That’s the best I can do. Ready?”

  Barnes resettled the minigun on his arm.

  “Ready.”

  “Good luck,” Halverson said.

  “You too,” Preston said. He hesitated, then reached down and took Halverson’s bow and quiver. “Here,” he said, pressing his rifle into the other’s hand. “You can’t use a bow, not with broken ribs. You might be able to use a rifle, though.”

  “Thanks,” Halverson said softly. “I see Lajard or Valentine, you’re damn right I’ll be able to use it.”

  A minute later, with the roar of the river on their left, Preston and Barnes left the open area at the ford and once again plunged into deep undergrowth.

  “What was that about the radios?” Preston asked over his shoulder. “Something you didn’t want Halverson to hear?”

  “No, just something that wasn’t worth wasting time talking about,” Barnes told him. “I just figured out why Skynet’s been jamming our radios in San Francisco. It wasn’t just to annoy us, but to keep us from hearing the fake John Connor broadcasts Jik’s been making.”

  “Because if you heard them, you’d send someone to investigate,” Preston said, nodding. “Lucky for us— well, lucky in the long run—you came anyway.”

  Barnes winced. Except that they wouldn’t have if Williams hadn’t gotten her back up on tracking that cable.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Why do you put up with him?”

  “Who?”

  “Halverson,” Barnes said. “You’re supposed to be in charge. Why do you let him tell your people what to do?”

  Preston’s shoulders hunched in a shrug.

  “That’s just Halverson,” he said. “He was a master hunter out here long before Judgment Day, and he likes to think he knows how to do everything better than any of the rest of us.”

  “And you just stand there and let him think that? Why?”

  “Because he is a master hunter, and we need him,” Preston said. “More than that, we need the rest of the expert hunters who look up to him.”

  “So you just let him walk all over you,” Barnes bit out. “You let him make you look like a fool.”

  “I suppose you could say that,” Preston said calmly. “But letting him play his games is what keeps this town functioning and its citizens alive. I think that’s worth a little wounded pride, don’t you?”

  He gestured. “We’d better be quiet from here on. We don’t want to reach the bridge to find Jik waiting at the other end.”

  The distant whistle call was faint, just barely on the edge of hearing. But the dots and dashes were distinct.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  From the puzzled look on Hope’s face, though, the message itself wasn’t nearly so clear.

  “Well?” Blair asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” Hope murmured back. “That was one of our hunting codes. It means an assigned area has come up dry, and that the hunt team is moving on to the next one. But why would anybody be out hunting now?”

  Blair looked around through the fading light at the densely packed tress and bushes hemming them in from all sides. The snaky, Hope had called this route. Blair would probably have named it ‘the claustrophobic.’

  “You said the hunt team. But you’d normally have more than one out at a time, right?”

  “Right,” Hope said. “Yes, I see—the team leader’s code should have been attached. But there wasn’t one.”

  “So it probably wasn’t talking about a normal hunt team,” Blair said.

  Hope pondered that a moment.

  “You think they’re telling us to give up?”

  “More likely that Barnes and your father are leaving the river ford,” Blair said.

  “To go where?”

  “I don’t know,” Blair said. “Maybe once we’re in the air we’ll be able to figure that out. How much farther?”

  Hope looked around them.

  “Ten minutes,” she said. “Fifteen if we want to be extra quiet.”

  “Let’s make it fifteen.”

  Blair’s best-case scenario was that Lajard wouldn’t have been able to locate the Blackhawk at all. Her next-best hope was that he would locate it, but decide to set up an ambush along the trail from town that Hope’s route through the snaky would circumvent.

  No such luck, on either count. They arrived at the edge of the clearing to find Valentine already in the Blackhawk, sitting straight and tall and motionless in the pilot’s seat.

  The way a Terminator would sit.

  “We’re too late,” Hope whispered, her whole body slumping.

  “Easy,” Blair soothed, frowning. They’d come out on the helo’s portside bow, and between the portside door and the broken windshield she could see into most of the cockpit. Valentine was there, but where was Lajard?

  And then, she heard a soft, metallic click.

  “Try it now,” Lajard’s voice came faintly.

  Valentine stirred, hands moving across the controls.

  “Nothing.”

  There was a muffled curse from the cockpit, and Blair smiled tightly. Lajard wasn’t off somewhere on some dangerous errand. Instead, he was lying on his back under the control panel.

  Trying to figure out how Barnes’s kill switch worked.

  Blair looked up at the sky, her smile fading. Unfortunately, the stalemate wasn’t going to last much longer. The minute the sun was fully down and long-range transmitters began to function, Skynet would probably download every scrap of data it had on Blackhawk piloting and tech into Valentine. At that point, it would be simple for the Theta to sort through Wince’s jury-rigs and patches and figure out where Barnes had diverted the starter circuit.

  And when that happened, the game would be over. Lajard and Valentine would fly out of here, rendezvous with Jik somewhere, and they’d all be off to play the John Connor charade in front of some other trusting and doomed Resistance group.

  There was only one way Blair could think of to stop them. One nasty, bloody way.

  “We can’t let them leave here, Hope,” she murmured. “We have to take them out. Both of them. Do you understand?”

  For a long moment the girl was silent.

  “Yes,” she said at last. Even in a whisper her pain and grief were clearly audible. “What do you want me to do?”

  “I need you to stay right here while I work my way around the tail to the other side,” Blair told her. “Once I’m there, I’ll find a way to get Susan to turn in my direction. Remember that shot you made across the river this afternoon, where you hit the T-700’s motor cortex?”

  Hope’s breath came out in a strangled huff.

  “Oh, no,” she breathed. “Please. I can’t do that.”

  “I know it’ll be hard,” Blair said gently. “But we have no choice. You saw what Oxley did to those people in town. If Susan and Lajard get away, they’ll do the same to other people somewhere else. Maybe hundreds of other people. It has to stop here.”

  Hope didn’t answer. Her face was lowered toward the ground, her eyes squeezed shut.

  “That isn’t Susan Valentine,” Blair said. “Not anymore. It’s a Terminator. But if you can nail its control chip, ab
out an inch above the spot where you shot the T-700, there’s a chance that Susan may be able to come back out.”

  “And then die?”

  Blair sighed. Unfortunately, she was probably right. Shooting the T-700 had disabled the cortex but done little additional damage to the metal skull and processor banks behind it. In Valentine, though, the space inside the metal skull was occupied by a human brain.

  Marcus had managed to disable his chip without doing any further damage. But Hope’s arrow probably wouldn’t be that selective. If it hit a seam in the armor and slipped through, Valentine would almost certainly die.

  But it had to be done.

  Hope knew it, too. The girl took a deep breath and raised her head again.

  “All right,” she said, opening her eyes. “But you should stay here. I’ll go around to the other side.”

  “It’ll be dangerous to move around this close to the helo,” Blair warned.

  “I know this forest,” Hope reminded her. “You don’t. I’ll go.”

  Blair hesitated, then nodded.

  “Okay,” she said. “But once you’re there, stay under cover until I get their attention to me. How long will it take you?”

  “Fifteen minutes,” Hope said. “Maybe twenty. I’ll have to go straight out into the forest, out of sight, then do a big circle around the clearing.”

  Blair looked up at the sky. Twenty minutes, with sundown less than an hour away. It was going to be tight.

  “Take whatever time you need to keep from being seen,” she said. “And be careful.”

  Hope nodded. Holding her bow vertically in front of her where it wouldn’t snag on anything, she slipped silently away into the forest.

  The minutes ticked slowly by. Gazing at the helo, listening to Lajard’s cursing, Blair found herself staring at the motionless Valentine.

  Wondering what was going on behind the Theta’s stolid expression.

  Marcus hadn’t known he was a Theta until the magnetic mine at the Resistance base had blown his body open. Even then, he hadn’t realized he was operating under a secret directive until he reached Skynet Central and Skynet itself revealed the truth to him.

  Did Valentine understand what had happened to her? Had the memory of her transformation been erased from her mind, the way Jik’s entire false John Connor memory had been put into him? Or had she always known who and what she was?