"One time you're fleeing the man with my face, the next he's your accomplice.
And then when you first saw me you bolted, and that was real fear I saw on your face. I don't understand, how could that be? And who is he anyway?"
Sarah and John glanced at each other, then Sarah looked at von Rossbach, her expression weary. "You won't believe me," she said.
"I have an open mind," Dieter said.
John snorted. "Hey, I didn't believe her until the Terminator showed up."
"The man with my face," Dieter said.
"It wasn't a man," Sarah said. "It was an 'it.' A machine. And there were two of them. The first one was programmed to kill me, the other to help John."
Dieter nodded. He'd get back to that later.
"When he— it got you out of the asylum, why didn't you just run for the border then? Why go to Cyberdyne and kill Miles Dyson?"
"I didn't kill Miles Dyson," Sarah's eyes bored into his. "I couldn't. And in the end I didn't want to. He was a good man, and a brave one. The police killed him
—or at least they shot him enough times to kill him." She winced, her eyes on her coffee. "I'd like to believe that, because it would make me less guilty.
Otherwise the explosion did it. But it was never my intention that he should die."
Dieter nodded, then glanced at John, who was looking down at the pup, sound asleep on his foot. "But why go to Cyberdyne at all? You could have gotten away clean. All of you, but you risked it all, even your son, to destroy a computer company. I don't understand."
Sarah smiled to herself, she let her eyes roam her comfortable living room. This was so civilized, a nice chat about chaos over coffee and cake.
"If you know anything about this," she said, returning her gaze to Dieter, "then
you must have heard about Judgment Day."
He nodded. "Yes. I read about it in your medical records."
Her brows went up. ,
"You've read my medical records?" He nodded. Sarah grinned at his uncomfortable expression. "Boy, I'd love to read them myself."
"They're very interesting."
"I'll bet they are," John muttered. "A first-class piece of fiction writing. Science fiction."
"Horror, if you want to specify the genre," Sarah said and smiled at him. Then she turned back to Dieter.
"I was never delusional," she said. "Everything I said was true, the Terminators, Skynet, Judgment Day, all of it. It's true."
"You gave the date of the world's end as—" Dieter stopped speaking when Sarah held up her hand.
"We destroyed Cyberdyne because, according to the Terminator, Cyberdyne was going to create Skynet and Skynet was going to start a nuclear war. By eliminating all of their records as well as the two items they harvested from the first Terminator, we eliminated their ability to continue the project."
She settled herself more comfortably into her chair. "Which ended the threat."
Sarah took a sip of her coffee.
Dieter shook his head.
"What?" John snapped, sitting forward in his chair, frowning.
The pup lifted its head sleepily at his tone, with a muffled wrufff? of protest as its warm communion with a friendly human was interrupted.
Von Rossbach continued to look at Sarah, who was staring at him, frozen-faced.
"Tell us," she said. Her scalp felt too tight suddenly and the hand gripping her saucer turned white at the knuckles.
"They've started up operations again on an army base. An underground installation this time. I've also been told that they have recovered some item you were supposed to have stolen during your raid." Dieter watched the color slowly drain from both their faces.
"That's impossible," Sarah said quietly. "We destroyed those things, threw them into a vat of molten metal." She shook her head. "There's no way they could have survived."
"The arm," John said, sounding strangely far away. "When he came up the conveyer belt with the grenade launcher he had only one arm left." He looked at his mother. "There were all these wires and shit hanging out of his other sleeve!"
Sarah flashed to her feet, spilling the cup and saucer onto the floor, and looked around her as though there were a fire but she didn't know where. "Oh no," she said, pressing her hands to her head. "No! Dammit!" She dropped her hands,
clenched them into fists. "How? How could they start up again? We destroyed everything, everything! Even Miles's personal papers. He said that everything was there—his work, his team's work, all of it." She dropped into her chair again and stared at Dieter. "How?" she asked.
"They secretly backed up everything they had," Dieter told her. "It's common procedure. They just didn't tell their employees that they were doing it. That way the backup records would be safe. You can't even torture someone into telling you things they don't know."
Sarah got up and began to pace slowly. She felt as though he'd just told her a loved one had died. Tears pricked at her eyelids and her throat grew tight. Get over it, she told herself fiercely. You have to move on. What are you going to do?
Think!
John sat in shock. He felt as though someone had punched him in the stomach, knocking all the air out of him. He watched his mother pace as though she were in another dimension, smaller somehow and far away.
Then, as one, they turned to Dieter, the same expression on their faces. Dieter had felt it on his own face more than once and seen it on colleagues' when they were faced with a job they loathed. But a job they would do with a determination even greater than their hatred for it.
BETWEEN ASUNCION AND VILLA HAYES, PARAGUAY: THE
PRESENT
Marco kept glancing at the Terminator until it asked him, "Why are you staring at me?"
"It's just… you look… do you know von Rossbach?" he asked.
"Yes. He's my cousin." It continued to look straight forward, its sunglasses remaining in place even as the sun set.
"Because you look just like him," Marco said.
"Like twins," the Terminator agreed. "Except for our eyes. Those are different."
Certainly its eyes were. They were glass, the very best available, but still noticeable eventually to even the most unobservant human. Hence the dark glasses.
"Oh," Cassetti said. Well, that explains a lot. This must be some family matter, he supposed. Dieter was probably getting into things they were afraid might disgrace the family. If he was freely consorting with gunrunners and terrorists they had reason to be fearful.
"How much longer?" the Terminator asked.
"About thirty minutes," Marco said. "It will be dark when we get there." There was no answer from his passenger, so Cassetti mentally supplied one.
Good.
About twenty silent minutes later Marco pulled the car off the main road and onto a narrow, but drivable track.
"If we go any further on the road," he explained, "they'll see us coming. There's a bit of a walk to the house, but I didn't think you wanted to be seen."
"No." The Terminator sat unmoving, the case in its lap.
That stillness was working on Cassetti, making him very uneasy. So were the bugs and the sounds and the indecipherable rustles and clicks. This wasn't how the world was supposed to smell, or feel, or sound.
If the guy didn't speak occasionally and breathe, he'd have begun to fear he was dead. He'd read that ninjitsu taught its adherents how to be still, but this, this was something he imagined would make even them look fidgety by comparison.