The HKs didn’t change position as Blair drove in on them, but continued to hover over the battle zone, dark and silent, like a pair of overconfident street toughs inviting her to take her best shot.
But she wasn’t fooled. There was no bravado in Skynet’s programming—only cold, hard calculation. It knew Blair’s GAU-8 was down to its last few rounds, and it was deliberately holding its HKs steady, probably hoping they could shoot her down into the neighborhood that she and the others were trying so hard to save.
She held her vector steady, once again playing chicken with the HKs. Unlike the last time they’d done this, though, Skynet apparently decided there was no point in sacrificing any of its killing machines by attempting to ram. She had barely reached the edge of their range when both HKs opened up with their Gatling guns, filling the air around her with lead.
Blair maintained her vector, wincing with the thud that came each time one of the rounds found its target. The single impacts became pairs and then triads as Blair closed the distance and the HKs fine-tuned their aim.
And as the triads became quads and suddenly blossomed into a hailstorm of impacts, Blair twisted the stick hard to the right, curving out of their line of fire and heading east.
“I’m hit!” she shouted into her mike. “I can’t stay with you.”
“Get clear, Hickabick,” a voice came promptly in her headset. “You can’t do any more back there.”
Blair frowned. It was indeed the correct coded response to her coded fake distress announcement.
But that had been Connor giving the reply, not Barnes. Connor, who was supposed to be maintaining radio silence, lest Skynet figure out there was trouble lurking in its private little paradise. Could he have launched the warehouse attack already?
It seemed way too early for that. But then, the ground operation wasn’t Blair’s concern. Her concern was clearing out the sky over Connor’s head.
She was still in the middle of her evasive turn when one of the two HKs broke formation, revved its turbofans to full power, and turned onto an intercept vector.
Blair smiled grimly. Skynet had taken the bait.
Time to make it regret that decision.
It was one of those times, and there had been many in their life together, when John had done something Kate wasn’t sure whether to be proud of, stunned at, or furious over.
“Hole four probable; forward bad lobster fifty; clear lobster duo,” John’s situation report ran through her earphone, the field jargon nearly as opaque to her as it hopefully was to Skynet.
“Check,” Barnes replied crisply. “Tee two; Gulliver hole three; dogleg tee nine.”
“Check,” John said. “Clear lobster duo.”
“Check.”
The radio went silent again, and Barnes looked at Kate.
“You get all that?” he asked.
“Most of it,” Kate told him, still struggling through the translation amid her swirling emotions.
“I know he’s left his position to come help us, or he wouldn’t have used the radio.”
“Yeah, but it’s not just for us,” Barnes said. “Lobster means five to ten T-600s coming in on a pincer.”
“From the west,” Kate added, visualizing the holes of the imaginary golf course that John had created for their position reports.
“Probably along that north cross street,” Barnes said. “With T-600s north of us, and the damned busload to the south pinning us down—”
“That was the Gulliver reference,” Pavlova put in helpfully.
“Yes, I got that,” Kate told her.
“—the only retreat we had was out the back of the building,” Barnes continued, throwing a brief scowl at Pavlova. “So now Skynet’s trying to close that one off, too.”
“Which then puts it into position to hit us from three sides,” Kate said, her annoyance fading. As long as he’s concerned for the whole squad’s safety, and not just mine.
“Right,” Barnes said. “But what Skynet doesn’t know is that Connor’s squad is coming up behind this new bunch. When they get within range, a couple of us’ll pop open the back door and hit them from the front while Connor hits them from the back.”
“Movement,” Simmons called from the north-facing wall, his eye pressed to one of the holes the Terminators’ last attack had opened up in the brick and stone. “Five T-600s, middle of the street, moving in.”
Barnes barked a laugh.
“Yeah, right. Middle of the street. That must be the ones who’re out of ammo, or just about.
Simmons, wait’ll they get into Orozco’s line of fire before you take them. Might as well cross-fire
’em. Pavlova, Dozer; you’re out the back door with me.”
There was a brief shuffling of weapons and feet, and then the three of them were gone.
“Where do you want me?” Kate asked, crossing to Simmons’ side.
“Thanks, but I can handle these,” Simmons told her. “You just stay with Reynolds.”
“There’s nothing more I can do to help him,” Kate said. “Tell me what I can do to help you.”
Simmons’ lip twitched. “I guess you could go back there and keep an eye on the bus,” he said, gesturing behind him at the south wall.
“You know, I can shoot,” she pointed out.
“I know,” Simmons said, just a little too quickly. “But Barnes is right—this bunch is probably out of ammo, which means they’re coming in mostly to distract us. We don’t want the ones in the bus blindsiding us while we’re potshotting clay pigeons.”
“Fine,” she fumed, and retreated across the room to the position Simmons had indicated. The assignment made sense—it really did. And if she wasn’t here to handle that job, Dozer or Pavlova, one of the more experienced fighters, would have had to take it.
But logical or not, it still felt like Simmons was babying her. And she hated being babied.
She squeezed her rifle hard. Stop it, she ordered herself. What was with her these days, anyway?
Anger at perfectly legitimate orders, her strange mood swings, this near-obsession she’d suddenly developed for the Moldavia’s children, when people were dying all around her? Maybe she was just grouchy because she seemed to start every morning these days feeling nauseated…
She froze. Oh, no. No. Not now.
“You okay?”
She looked back at Simmons. He was eyeing her oddly. “I’m fine,” Kate assured him as calmly as she could, fighting the sudden impulse to run somewhere safe and hide.
There wasn’t anywhere that was safe. Not here in the middle of a fire zone.
Besides, she had a job to do.
She searched for a moment until she found a spot where she could watch the Terminators in the bus and also keep an eye on the wide archway leading into the Moldavia. If she was going to protect her squad from a sneak attack from the south, she might as well do the same for Orozco and his people, too.
Wiping the sweat from her hands, trying to settle the sudden horrible fluttering in her stomach, she got a firm grip on her rifle and settled in to watch.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Blair had dodged and jinked and run and been as panic-stricken as she could possibly manage, taking fire on her beloved A-10’s tail the whole way.
But all the crap had been worth it…because she’d finally succeeded in drawing the pursuing HK
away from Connor and over a completely uninhabited part of the city.
Payback time.
She pulled back on her stick, guiding her fighter up and over into yet another of the Immelmann turns that Skynet probably had memorized by now. But that was fine, because she knew that the quickest and most straightforward way for the pursuing HK to counter the maneuver would be to simply lift straight up, wait for Blair to turn toward it, and then pour point-blank fire down her throat.
Sure enough, as she finished her roll and leveled off, she found the HK hovering a hundred meters directly in front of her.
And as its Gatlings opened up, Blair squeezed her GAU-8’s trigger.
The HK had no chance to even try to dodge away from the utterly unexpected attack. It disintegrated into a huge fireball right where it was, sending pieces of itself flying in all directions.
Blair twisted her stick again, guiding the A-10 around the worst of the explosion.
“Hickabick: one down,” she called into her radio as she curved back toward the main combat zone. “Number two in my sights.”
Or maybe not, she amended to herself. In the distance ahead, the last HK suddenly poured power into its turbo-fans and headed south. Trying to get to the relative safety of the Skynet forces at Capistrano, or else hoping Blair would chase it within range of those forces.
Which was pretty much what Blair had expected Skynet’s response to be. It was willing enough to send one of its two remaining HKs to take her down when it thought she was out of ammo and an easy target. But now that it realized it had no idea what her weapons status really was, it wasn’t willing to risk losing its last eye in the sky. Especially in the midst of a battle that was obviously not going the way Skynet had expected it to.
But whether or not that last HK survived was no longer Skynet’s decision. If Blair put on a burst of speed, she ought to be able to get to the fleeing aircraft before it got anywhere near safety.
“Ready or not, here I come,” she said softly into her radio.
“Hickabick, I need a Tonto,” Connor’s voice came.
Blair swore under her breath. She had been looking forward to sending that last HK into the dirt.
But business before pleasure.
“Hickabick: check,” she said, veering reluctantly away from her pursuit.
Blair found some of Connor’s code-talk to be obscure in the extreme. But this particular one was something for which she at least had a vague memory: Tonto, wingman to the Lone Ranger, who always got sent on ahead to scout the territory.
But he did it carefully and subtly, she reminded herself. She wasn’t sure what was happening on the ground, but if Skynet still didn’t know that they’d spotted its staging area, it wasn’t going to be Blair who gave the show away. She swung her A-10 around, tracking out a wide circle that would take her back toward the combat area and only coincidentally bring her within sight of the warehouse.
That single glimpse was enough to show that Connor had been right to send her in for a look.
Four T-600s had left the warehouse and were in the process of climbing the south edge of the ring of rubble.
“Location?” she called.
“Tee four,” Connor’s voice came back, barely audible over the noise of intense automatic weapons fire.
Most likely the weapons fire Blair could see lighting up one of the streets ahead. Adjusting her vector again, she headed over for a closer look.
It was Connor, all right, hunkered down about two blocks west of the Moldavia. His team was currently in the process of blowing the stuffing out of three T-600s, who were fighting back from among the blackened pieces of at least two more of the machines. Another line of fire was coming from the building across from the Moldavia, trapping the T-600s in a crossfire.
Blair frowned. Given their basically hopeless situation, why hadn’t the surviving Terminators tried to make a run for it? Skynet was usually reluctant to simply waste its machines these days, and it could send the T-600s in practically any direction right now without exposing them to more fire than they already were receiving.
Unless Skynet wanted them there for a reason.
She swung the A-10 around again, ostensibly for another look at the battle, in fact for a second look at the four T-600s that had just Left the warehouse.
That second look was all she needed. She’d been right: the three Terminators in the crossfire weren’t just standing around waiting to be demolished. They were standing around waiting for the four newcomers to sneak up behind Connor and catch him in a crossfire of their own.
“Hole four: crab,” she called urgently into her mike.