But nothing moved so far as he could see.
He eased the hatch all the way open, climbed out, and keeping low, scurried the ten feet across to the rear wall of the hangar.
His sudden appearance drew no response. The T-ls and H-Ks were nowhere in sight for the moment
Kate poked her head up out of the escape shaft and he motioned for her to come ahead. She climbed the rest of the way out and ran over to him.
When they had driven in through the main gate, he thought he remembered seeing several small aircraft and helicopters parked inside this hangar.
"This way," he told Kate. Together they raced along
the back of the hangar to one of the small service doors that Connor eased open.
There were several aircraft inside, light planes and a couple of bigger helicopters. They seemed to be intact, and there were no robots here. From this angle he could better see the burning transport across the flight line and more bodies. The scene looked like a war zone.
Kate lit up. "My dad's plane," she said. "I trained on it."
She led Connor across the hangar to a single engine Cessna 180 with a blue stripe and wheel pants. The civilian registration painted on its fuselage was N3035C.
She checked in the window to make sure the key was in the ignition, and she and Connor pulled the chocks away from the wheels.
Connor looked up as Terminator entered the hangar, and all of a sudden he felt as if they had been delivered. The fight wasn't over, but with Terminator back it was less of a lost cause.
"Yes," Connor said. "He made it." He started over, but something wasn't right. Terminator's movements were stiff and jerky, like a puppet's.
"Get away from me," Terminator said. There was something wrong with his voice too. It was distorted.
Connor stepped back, closer to Kate. Whatever shit was going down now was definitely not right.
"Leave," Terminator warned. "Now!" It seemed as if he were fighting something inside of himself. "Let's go, John," Kate said.
Connor nodded, but he kept his eye on Terminator as he climbed into the right-hand seat, and Kate got in on the pilot's side. Without thinking they locked their doors.
Kate frantically threw switches, the gyro compass, the radio, VOR and DME, and set the altimeter to what she remembered was the field elevation.
"Come on, come on," Connor urged her to hurry. He pulled the knapsack off and tossed it in the backseat.
Kate turned the key to engage the starter but nothing happened. Nothing was working. She had missed the master switch. "Shit, I forgot to"
Terminator was at Connor's door. He pulled it open, popping the flimsy lock, and yanked Connor out of the plane, tossing him on the concrete floor.
Connor tried to scramble away from Terminator who was right on top of him. "You can't do this."
"I have no choice," Terminator said, his voice still badly distorted. "The T-X has corrupted my system."
The Cessna's engine came to life suddenly, revved up, and then settled back to a few hundred rpms.
"No! You can't kill a human being," Connor argued, still scrambling backward, trying to get out of Terminator's reach. "You said it yourself."
Kate leaped out of the airplane, ran directly at Terminator, and jumped on his back, tearing at his optical sensors.
"Let him go!" she screeched. "That's an order!"
Terminator threw her aside as easily as batting a fly
off his shoulder, sending her sprawling against a big, rolling tool chest.
He stopped for a moment and looked at his raised hands, almost as if he knew that he had done something bad.
"You can fight it," Connor shouted. "You're fighting it now."
"My CPU is intact. But I cannot control my other functions." Terminator advanced another step toward Connor who continued to back up.
"You don't have to do this. You don't want to do this." "Desire is irrelevant," Terminator said, still advancing. "I am a machine."
"That's not true! You're more than that!" Terminator grabbed Connor by the jacket and tossed him onto the hood of a Humvee parked just outside the hangar's main doors.
Before Connor could move, Terminator was on him again, grabbing his neck with one hand and drawing the other back into a fist that could crush a man's skull like an eggshell.
"What's your mission?" Connor shouted in desperation.
Terminator's head jerked as if he had received a jolt "To ensure the survival of John Connor and Katherine Brewster."
"You're about to fail in that mission!"
Terminator's entire body began to tremble. As if fighting a tidal wave force inside of himself, he cocked his fist farther back and drove it down, with every kilo of his force.
c30
CRS
Until this moment Connor never believed that Terminator could hurt him. It was like a child's faith in its father.
He raised a hand to ward off the blow.
At the last moment Terminator diverted his fist to smash the Humvee's hood inches from Connor's head.
"I... I cannot," Terminator struggled with the words.
"You know what you have to do," Connor told him. "You know my destiny."
Terminator's entire body shuddered again. His optical sensors glowed with an incredible brightness, blood red, as if they were heading for overload.
It was clear that he was no longer in control of his functions. He was fighting some colossal internal battle. Something had to give way in his system.
"I have to live," Connor said.
Terminator seemed to focus on Connor for a moment, then grabbed him by the jacket and tossed him aside.
Terminator brought his fist down on the hood of the Humvee, caving in the heavy gauge metal like tinfoil.
He threw his head back and uttered a guttural, plaintive otherworldly scream, then stopped, jerked upright, looked at something in the distance, and shut down.
The light in his optical sensors winked out, and Terminator remained frozen in place, unmoving, unblinking, apparently unaware of his surroundings.
Connor got to his feet, a great sadness and weariness coming over him as he stared at the closest thing to a father he had ever known.
Terminator was dead.
There was nothing Connor could do except make sure that he and Kate lived into the future. They owed him and the human resistance that much.
He turned on his heel and sprinted back into the hangar where Kate was struggling to her feet She was dazed from hitting her head on the tool cart.
"Are you okay?"
Kate looked at him, and then out at the flight line at the motionless Terminator. "What happened?"
"He couldn't do it," Connor told her. "He shut himself down." He gave Kate a critical look. "Can you fly?"
She nodded, and he helped her back to the plane where he handed her up into the pilot's seat, then hurried around to the passenger side and climbed in.
They buckled their seat belts, and Kate checked to make sure that the controls moved freely, that no locks were in place. She eased the big throttle knob forward, the engine responded, and they taxied out onto the ramp.
She had to maneuver around Terminator and the destroyed Humvee as well as burning vehicles and the bod-
ies. Everywhere there seemed to be bodies, civilians as well as Air Force officers and security troops.
The humans hadn't had a chance. LAW rockets might have helped, and perhaps if there'd been time to get the Army National Guard out with a couple of tanks, the fight might have been less one-sided.
But even then Connor doubted if the outcome would have been much different
Kate turned onto the taxiway that led to the main east-west runway. She automatically dialed up the tower frequency that was posted on the control panel, and reached for the microphone when she realized that there would be no response.
In the distance they could see the control tower was badly damaged, all its observation windows shot out, smoke curling from inside, and no signs of life.