Trial By Fire ts-4 Page 7

  “You don’t like me?” Halverson challenged, just as quietly. “Replace me. Until you do, I’ve got a right to speak up the same as anyone else.”

  He leveled a finger at Preston.

  “But we’re not talking about quotas or crop shares this time. We’re talking about survival. There’s a Terminator sitting on our doorstep, and we damn well have to do something about it.”

  “What do you think we’ve just been talking about?”

  “What you’ve been talking about is giving up,” Halverson said. “Giving up and running away.”

  “Only temporarily.”

  “Yeah, and isn’t it funny how easy temporary turns into permanent,” Halverson said with a sniff. “And I’m serious. If we have to give up this town and these buildings, there’s no reason for Ginny and me to stay with the group. I can hunt enough just fine for the two of us. And have enough spare time left over to make my own arrows.”

  “And if you go, you’ll take Chris and Ned and Trounce with you?”

  “Hey, we’re all free citizens,” Halverson said with a shrug. “I don’t speak for anyone except myself.”

  But whether he spoke for them or not, Preston knew, most of the town’s best hunters looked up to Halverson. Many of them would follow the same logic he’d just laid out, and desert Baker’s Hollow right alongside him.

  Without the hunters, the town was doomed. And when the town died, so would any chance for even a modest degree of civilization here in the mountains.

  Preston couldn’t let that happen. No matter what it cost.

  “So what’s your idea?” he asked, the words stinging in his throat.

  “We take the damn thing out,” Halverson said flatly. “Right now.”

  Preston winced. He’d been afraid that was where he was going.

  “We can’t do that,” he said as calmly as he could. “At the moment it’s not coming after us. We attack it, and that’ll change.”

  “Not if we kill it,” Halverson said. “Come on, Preston—I’ve killed full-grown grizzlies. How tough can a Terminator be?”

  “For starters, your bear’s vitals weren’t encased in solid metal,” Preston pointed out, striving to maintain his calmness. Arguing with Halverson was an absolutely guaranteed way to solidify the man’s position. “Even if you found a way through that, Skynet’s not going to just sit back and watch you do it.”

  “Ah,” Halverson said with the self-satisfied air of someone who’s been hoping for precisely that question. “It may in fact do exactly that. I talked with Lajard this morning. He says that with the San Francisco hub gone, the nearest Skynet long-range transmitter is on the east coast. If he’s right, it can only punch a signal through this far at night.”

  “Unless Skynet has some kind of relay system between the east coast and here that it can use,” Preston warned. “Through smaller stations or even H-Ks.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Halverson said. “Lajard says multiple relays are too vulnerable to interception and signal something-or-other—signal degradation, I think it was. Anything big, including large downloads or major changes in mission profile, has to come directly from a Skynet hub.”

  “Interesting theory, anyway,” Preston said. And obviously in Lajard’s exact words, too. Halverson’s vocabulary wasn’t nearly that extensive.

  “It’s more than just a theory,” Halverson growled. “The point is that if this Terminator is at the river to catch someone coming in from the west, and we hit it during the day, Skynet won’t be able to send any new instructions about fighting back. Not until it’s too late.”

  “Of course, that assumes T-700s don’t already come with a built-in set of contingency orders,” Preston pointed out. “Something as simple, say, as killing any human it comes across.”

  “Well, we’ll just have to take our chances, won’t we?” Halverson said impatiently. “That machine has got to go, and we haven’t got time for a long debate. I say we hit it.”

  “And if I say we don’t?” Preston asked, trying one last time.

  “Then you’d better hope your daughter feels up to hunting enough to feed sixty or seventy people a day,” Halverson said. “I’ve got Ned going around collecting and checking all the large-caliber rifles in town. You can come with us, or we can do it by ourselves.”

  Preston shook his head. This was madness. But he was mayor, and if he didn’t show up he might as well hand over the last scraps of his authority right now.

  “Fine,” he said. “I’ll meet you at Ned’s in fifteen minutes.”

  “Good,” the other said with the grim-edged satisfaction he always showed when he got his way. “Bring plenty of ammo.” Striding past Preston, he opened the door and headed back out into the early-morning chill.

  Preston waited until he’d closed the door behind him.

  “You heard?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Hope said, stepping into view from the hallway. Her face was pale. “Dad, you can’t let him do this. You can’t do this.”

  “You feel up to hunting for seventy people?” Preston asked sourly as he headed for the closet where his Ruger 99/44 hunting rifle was stored. “Because unless you do, I don’t see anything we can do but go along with him.”

  “And get everyone in town killed?” Hope countered. “We’d do better to let me take over the hunting.”

  “Which would just be a slower form of death,” Preston said gently. “You’re good, Hope, but not that good.”

  Hope wrinkled her nose in frustration.

  “You still don’t have to go along with him,” she insisted. “Maybe if he fell flat on his face a few times people would stop listening to him.”

  “I’d like nothing better than to watch him eat dirt,” Preston said as he pulled out the rifle and the box of shells. “Unfortunately, in this case, if he fails we end up with a Terminator walking through town. I’ll try one last time to talk them out of it—” he grimaced “—and if I can’t, then we really have no choice but to hit the thing just as hard and as fast as we can.”

  “I suppose,” Hope said, still not sounding convinced. “Let me go get my bow and quiver.”

  “Yes, do that,” Preston said. “But you’ll be heading the opposite direction. I want you and Susan to pick one of the clearings near Crescent Rock and start your hunt.”

  Hope’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you just said we need everyone to hit the Terminator.”

  “Everyone who has a gun,” Preston corrected. “Which you don’t. More importantly, whatever happens with the machine, some of us will still have to eat tonight.”

  “Dad—”

  “It’s not negotiable, Hope,” Preston said quietly. “And I’ve got enough fights on my hands right now. I really can’t handle another one.”

  She sighed, then nodded. “Okay, I just... okay. If that’s what you want.”

  “It is,” Preston assured her, giving her a quick hug. “And don’t come back to town. If things go all right, someone will come and get you. If no one’s there within two hours after the shooting stops, head over to Skink Pond. I’ll catch up with you there.”

  “Okay.” Hope took a deep breath. “I love you, Dad.”

  “Love you, Hope.” Releasing her from the hug, he caught her hand and squeezed it. “I’ll see you soon. Be careful, and don’t worry.”

  * * *

  The sky was lightening to the east when Blair was startled awake by a slap on her shoulder and a gruff order to get moving. By the time the sun appeared over the horizon, she had the Blackhawk fifty meters above the smoldering Skynet lab, ready to follow the mysterious cable.

  At first, it was easy. As she’d already noted, the explosion had sent shock waves through both the ground and the cable, periodically kinking the latter hard enough to shove loops of it to the surface. With the slanting sunlight exaggerating every bump and dip, Blair could usually see five or six of the humps at any given time.

  But as the sun rose, and as the distance from the lab increased,
the humps grew progressively smaller and less obvious. Finally, somewhere around the twenty-kilometer mark, they disappeared completely.

  “Now what?” Barnes asked.

  Blair gazed out the window, squinting against the windstorm beating across her face and wishing for the umpteenth time that the Blackhawk’s storage lockers had included some goggles. The desert had given way to a sort of tentative grassland, with forested foothills and mountains directly ahead.

  “I think we should keep going,” she said. “So far, the cable’s been running pretty straight along this vector. Let’s assume it continues that way, and see what we run into.”

  Barnes grunted. “Not easy to keep a cable running straight through the middle of a forest.”

  “True,” Blair said. “But if anyone could have done it— or have wanted to do it—it would be Skynet.”

  For a moment Barnes was silent. Blair kept her eyes forward, wincing in anticipation of his inevitable outburst.

  She could hardly blame him. He’d kept his side of the bargain she’d forced on him, and had let her drag them out here trying to follow the cable. Now that the trail had petered out, he would be perfectly justified in insisting she drop the whole thing and head back to San Francisco.

  And when he did, she was going to have to argue with him. Because the more they’d traveled along the cable’s path, and the more she’d seen how much effort Skynet had put into it, the more she was convinced it was something they needed to check out.

  But Barnes wouldn’t see it that way. He’d already been saddled with her longer than he’d expected, and way more than he’d wanted. He would insist on heading back, and down deep she knew that trying to pull the pilot’s trump card on him again would be a dangerous thing to do. He might even put a gun to her head, figuring he could argue his way out of trouble with Connor when they got back—

  “We should grab a little more altitude,” he said. “In case the cable takes a turn somewhere. Don’t want to be too low to see that.”

  “Yes—good idea,” Blair said, fighting to keep the surprise out of her voice as she angled the Blackhawk upward. An actual, rational decision from him, uncolored by his current feelings? Was he finally starting to come back to normal?

  She stole a sideways look at him, her small hope fading away. No. He was intrigued by the cable, and smart enough to know how to separate his personal feelings from the job of fighting Skynet. But that single glance was enough to tell her that he still hadn’t forgiven her for her brief relationship with Marcus Wright.

  That relationship had been real, she knew. So had her feelings, and those feelings hadn’t changed with her discovery of the half man, half machine that Skynet had turned him into. She’d done what she’d done, and she had no regrets.

  But if her time with Marcus had permanently cost her Barnes’s friendship and respect, she might someday have to seriously consider whether it had truly been worth it.

  They’d gone another twenty kilometers, and were well up into the mountain forests, when Barnes suddenly pointed ahead and to the left.

  “There!” he snapped. “Smoke.”

  “I see it,” Blair confirmed. There were several slender plumes drifting upward from a clearing just east of the river the Blackhawk was currently following. A town or village, far enough out in the middle of nowhere that Skynet had missed it? “Think it’s worth checking out?”

  “You’re the pilot,” Barnes said. “You’ll just do whatever you want anyway.”

  Blair sighed inwardly. No, he hadn’t forgiven her.

  “Okay,” she said as she swung the Blackhawk to the right. Whoever was in that town, she didn’t want to spook them by landing right in the middle of the place. “Keep an eye out for an open spot where we can set down.”

  There were half a dozen small clearings within a mile of the smoke plumes, all of them to the east and south. Most were too small for a safe landing, but two looked big enough to accommodate the Blackhawk. Blair picked the larger one and headed down.

  The ground was spongy with dead leaves and matted fir needles and a half-buried, decaying log that she almost didn’t see in time. She skidded a couple of meters sideways to avoid it, then set the helo down. Taking a careful survey of the area, she shut down the engines.

  The roar faded away into silence as she slipped off her headphones.

  “You see anything?” she asked Barnes.

  “Lots of forest,” he replied, already out of his seat. He slung his backpack onto his shoulders, then added his SIG 542 assault rifle and his RAI 300 sniper rifle. “Turn off the cockpit fan on your way out, will you?”

  Blair frowned. With the wind whipping freely through the broken windshield, she hadn’t even noticed the fan was on.

  “You had the fan going?” she asked as she thumbed off the switch. “Why?”

  “‘Cause that’s how you start the chopper now,” he said calmly. “I hooked the fan into the starter circuit last night while you were asleep.”

  Blair’s first impulse was to ask what the hell he thought he was doing messing with her helo’s wiring. Her second was that that was actually a pretty good idea.

  “Clever,” she said. “We’ll probably want—” She broke off, feeling her eyes widening as he heaved the minigun up off the deck. “You’re taking that?”

  “I’m sure as hell not leaving it,” he countered with a grunt.

  Blair winced, trying to think of a diplomatic way of saying this.

  “The people in that town over there may already be leery of strangers,” she tried. “If we show up looking like arms dealers—”

  “Then they’ll know not to mess with us, won’t they?” he cut her off. “Grab that shotgun.” Without waiting for a response, he hopped out through the side door, landing with a thud.

  Blair picked up the Mossberg M500 shotgun and ammo pack and slung them over her shoulder. Checking the Blackhawk’s compass one last time to get her bearings, she stepped out into the leaves.

  The smoke plumes had been almost directly northwest of their landing site. Barnes was already ten meters that direction, stomping through the undergrowth and forcing his way through the occasional line of close-set bushes. Blair picked the most distant tree she could see in the right direction and set off after him, splitting her attention between the tree and her footing.

  She’d closed the gap between her and Barnes to a couple of meters, and the Blackhawk had been lost to sight behind them, when Barnes suddenly slowed.

  “Keep going,” he murmured. “Straight on, and don’t look at the bushes.”

  Before Blair could ask what that was supposed to mean he was off again, resuming his brisk pace but with his direction now shifted a few degrees to their left.

  Frowning, Blair continued forward, casually dropping her hand to her holstered Desert Eagle.

  She’d gone another twenty paces when she spotted the glint of metal behind a cluster of bushes to their left. It took her another couple of steps to identify it as an arrowhead, a wide, nasty-looking version that seemed to be made of four angled razor blades. Crouched in the bushes behind the arrow was a shadowy figure holding a compound bow.

  And Barnes was heading directly toward him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  The aircraft suddenly appeared like a roaring predator overhead and Hope’s first frantic thought was that it was going to land right in front of her, in the middle of the clearing she and Susan had staked out. But to her relief, it flew past, giving her a glimpse through the trees of a wide greenish-brown body. She listened closely, and a few seconds later heard the roar of the engines change pitch. Half a minute after that, the sound whined down into silence.

  “What was it?” Susan asked, her voice hoarse, her face white and pinched. “Did you see it?”

  “I saw a little,” Hope said, her own voice sounding a little shaky. “It didn’t sound like an H-K.”

  “Who knows what H-Ks sound like these days?” Susan countered, clutching at Hope’s arm. “Come on, w
e have to get out of here.”

  Hope took a deep breath, sternly ordering the butterflies in her stomach to settle down.

  “We first need to find out who or what it is,” she told the older woman. “It sounded like it landed in Violet Glen, and there’s only one obvious route from there back to town. We’ll find a place along the way to hide and see who shows up.”

  Susan’s jaw dropped.

  “Hope, those could be Terminators back there. Or raiders, or who knows what else.”

  “They could also be the Resistance,” Hope said. “Don’t you remember Connor’s broadcasts? He promised that if we were out here the Resistance would find us. Maybe they finally have.”

  “Or maybe they haven’t,” Susan ground out.

  “I’m going to check it out,” Hope said firmly. “I want you to head back to town and alert my father.”

  Susan’s eyes narrowed.

  “Why? Because I don’t know what I’m doing?”

  Hope reached down and squeezed her hand.

  “Because I don’t want you to get hurt,” she said gently. “You’re important to the town. We need you.”

  “No, you need me, and you need me right here,” Susan said firmly. “And anyway your father must have heard that thing go roaring past.” She gestured. “Show me where you want me.”

  Five minutes later, they were in position. Hope had found a clump of bushes about ten feet back from the barely visible trail that led from Violet Glen to town. Susan was behind a tree and another group of bushes another ten feet back on the opposite side of the trail.

  They were barely in time. Hope had just pulled an arrow from her quiver when she heard someone approaching. Nocking the arrow to the string, she drew about a third back and mentally prepared herself.

  Her dad hadn’t wanted to let her see what happened if she put a broadhead into the back of a Terminator’s head.

  Maybe she was going to find out anyway.

  It was with a sense of relief, though oddly also with a slight sense of disappointment, that she watched a pair of humans stride into sight. The man was big and black, his face dominated by a fringe of beard and a scowl, the rest of his body dominated by a holstered pistol, two shoulder-slung long guns, and an awesomely scary-looking multi-barreled weapon clutched in his arms. The woman behind him was slimmer and less heavily armed, but no less wary and competent looking.