He licked his thumb and said, "I think I made just enough. Which is to say enough for six." Ferri grinned, hoisted his bottle in a toast to von Rossbach and took a long swig. " Where did you find this?" he asked. "I've looked everywhere.
I asked them to order it for me at the PX, but I knew when I did it they'd never be able to score the stuff."
"I have my ways," Dieter said mysteriously. He took a sip from his own bottle.
Ferri snorted and drank from his own.
"Actually, there's this place in L.A. that stocks it. It's called Ron's Imported Beers on East Alameda. They're in the book. Unfortunately they don't deliver."
Ralph grinned, already looking a little bleary.
"Even if they did I'm probably outside their delivery zone," he said.
They talked and ate for a minute more, then, without warning, Ferri's head hit the table. Dieter wince'd, then moved the dish of chicken out from under his friend's face. He leaned over to make sure the Major could still breathe, then headed for Ferri's bedroom.
In a minute he was dressed in the Major's fatigues and was headed out the door in the direction of Cyberdyne. I wonder how far Sarah got, he thought. He shouldn't be worried, he knew. Sarah Connor was very professional. But he was emotionally involved, whether he liked it or not. So he worried.
What if they have John there? he wondered. He knew Sarah thought that if her son wasn't dead he was a prisoner of Cyberdyne. So, did she get right to work, or did she search for him? Most mothers you wouldn't even have to ask that question, but Sarah Connor wasn't most mothers.
He couldn't help but be concerned. She had been absolutely cold since they'd taken John. So withdrawn she might have been living in another time and place—
visible, able to interact, yet untouchable.
Dieter didn't think John was dead, because the man who had ordered the Terminators to chase them hadn't come after them. If the boy had been dead, he would have followed them and tried to help with the capture.
Sarah didn't buy it. She resisted the urge to hope, believing it a fool's game. You
could almost see John falling—the blood, the boneless landing—in her eyes.
She'd told him that if the first shot didn't kill him, then they would do it at their leisure, but that they would kill him. If they have him, he's dead, she'd said to him in a voice and manner that brooked no argument.
And so he approached Cyberdyne looking determined but feeling discouraged.
From what Sarah had told him, if John was dead, then humanity's only hope was the total destruction of Cyberdyne. And that looks damn near hopeless. The place was like a Hydra; cut off one head and two more pop out.
FT. LAUREL BASE HOSPITAL: THE PRESENT
"No. I'll go out first, then you. I can steady you, and catch you if you fall. You don't want to risk that shoulder."
John frowned at Jordan's suggestion. Not because it was a bad idea, but because it was so obviously a good one. He felt strange, distant and distracted, which he supposed was due to drugs and loss of blood. But this was a bad time to be slow as an ox.
"Good thinking," he said aloud. "You go first."
Jordan slipped over the narrow metal windowsill without comment. The drop from the boy's room was about four feet. Not bad, but still enough to be bothersome if one arm was out of action. John followed him immediately, barely giving Jordan a chance to step back. Dyson put his hands on the boy's slim waist and eased him down. Then he looked around. The coast was still clear.
John was wearing his own jeans and sneakers, but Jordan had found a green
surgical shirt to replace the bloodied and torn T-shirt he'd been wearing. Dyson looked down at his own rumpled and bloodstained suit.
We couldn't be more obvious on an army base if we were wearing rubber noses and orange wigs, he thought. Dyson looked around. It was just getting dark, things were getting hard to see, and the camp lights wouldn't be going on for a couple of minutes yet. There was no "good" time to do this, but right now was better than some. They started off.
By the time they reached Cyberdyne, it was full dark. There were pockets of shadow here and there around the building, looking all the darker for the arc lights surrounding them. They headed for a well of shadow at the back of the building.
John stumbled and nearly went down, but Jordan caught him—awkwardly because he was trying to avoid the wounded shoulder. To a passerby it would have looked like they were struggling.
In fact, to Dieter it did. He moved up silently behind Jordan, and clasping his big hands together, brought them down on the back of Dyson's neck. Jordan moved slightly at the last minute, reducing some of the force of the blow, but he went down in a heap, and John dropped with him.
"Ow!" John said, looking up into Dieter's grave face.
Jordan rolled over onto his back, his eyes wandered for a moment, then focused.
"What the hell did you do that for?" he whispered.
"Dieter, NO!" John barked as Dieter brought his arm back for the coup de grace.
"He's on our side!"
Dieter relaxed, looking down at Dyson.
Looking up, Jordan could discern no expression in his attacker's face or eyes and he was ready to believe that this man was even more dangerous than the resume Serena had given him said he was. Assuming this was von Rossbach.
Then Dieter looked at John and smiled.
"Your mother is going to be relieved to see you," he said fervently. He offered his hand to help John up. "Let's roll."
John's eyes widened. "Terminal Mission Override XY74!" he snapped.
Dieter spun around and gasped in surprise. He was face-to-face with a Terminator, a thing with his face. He fumbled at his belt for the taser.
The Terminator was frozen by the dissonance of an imperative command phrase uttered at the wrong time, by the wrong person, for the wrong purpose. Its processor worked furiously to reroute its command tree. For a second or two it stood helpless, so much inanimate metal and plastic.
Triggering the taser, von Rossbach stepped to the side, placing himself in front of the boy. Then they all scrambled back as sparks burst from the Terminator's eyes and mouth, its arms flopping wildly and legs stamping in place. Finally it stopped—frozen—with one foot in the air; then slowly, with the majesty of a sequoia, it fell, face forward, at their feet.
John looked around, then picked up a white-painted rock, and moving over to the Terminator, began calmly slamming it 6n the thing's head.
"Thanks," Dieter gasped.
" De nada," Connor responded, never letting up the rhythm of his pounding. "I got the phrase out of the CPU of that Terminator we decapitated. I wasn't sure it was genuine, but looks like."
Shaken, but not to be outdone in cool, Jordan said, "We'd better get moving.
Those fireworks might have attracted unwelcome attention."
Christ, it's real! He felt himself going into shock, and hauled back from the precipice with a gasping effort of sheer willpower. I'll have the nervous breakdown later.
"Can you really kill one of those things with a rock?" Dieter asked.
"No, but you can expose the access plate… here we go." John peeled back an arc of scalp, opened the plate, poised the pointed end of the rock, and struck twice.
"Sort of ironic—man's earliest tool killing his last." The big man looked at him, and John went on with a grin: "So I'm old beyond my years; so sue me."
John watched the red light of one eye flicker and fade, then dropped the rock.
"Yeah," he agreed. "We'd better get Bolts, here, out of sight before we go, though."