Someone had to get to them before that happened, and put them out of action permanently.
“Joey, Tony: take them out,” Connor ordered, jerking his head back at the other four T-600s who had suddenly stepped up the tempo of their attack. “Bishop: you’re with me.” Without waiting for acknowledgment, he zigzagged through the debris of the store, dived through the east-facing window, and sprinted toward the bus.
He was nearly there when he suddenly realized he and his team weren’t alone. Half a block away, at the next street to the south, he could see two figures: a child and young adult or teen, cowering against a building that was being steadily demolished around them. More Terminators on their way into the battle zone, with the two kids caught in the middle of it.
He had reached the bus and was leaning in for a closer look when Bishop caught up to him.
“How many?” she asked, panting.
“Two,” Connor told her. The word was barely out of his mouth when the crunching blast of a C4
grenade came from behind them. “You take close,” he added, “I’ll take far.” Ducking his head, he stepped inside the vehicle.
The two Terminators were lying on the ground, unmoving, their miniguns momentarily silenced.
Great sections of their rubbery skin had been torn away by the blast, and a couple of joints on each one were no longer looking quite right.
Mentally, Connor threw a salute to whoever it was who’d put together this particular explosive.
Even considering the concentrating effect the confined space would have had on the blast, it had still been one hell of a bomb.
Stepping over the first Terminator, he placed the muzzle of his MP5 against the dented skull of the second and squeezed the trigger.
It took two three-round bursts to batter through the tough metal. But when the echoes had died away, the last hint of red glow had faded from the machine’s eyes.
Terminated.
Connor looked back at Bishop, gave her a thumb’s-up and got one in return, then grabbed hold of one of the skeletal seat frames and climbed up to the top side of the bus. Hoping it wasn’t too late to save the two kids he’d seen out there, he eased his head cautiously through one of the windows.
He had had long experience with the kind of firepower Skynet had put into the hands of its T-600s, and he’d seen what that firepower could do. But even Connor found himself in awe at how the scene outside had changed during the handful of seconds he and Bishop had been inside the bus.
The structure the kids had been huddling beside was gone. All of it. There were still a few sections of wall standing, but nothing taller than half a meter and most considerably shorter. The roof, what was left of it, had collapsed into the house, and was lying in broken pieces across broken furniture and other unidentifiable bits of material.
And with the building no longer in the way, Connor could now see the two T-600s approaching from fifty meters away.
“There,” Bishop said from the next window, jabbing a finger over Connor’s shoulder.
Connor looked where she was pointing. Sure enough, the two kids were still there, hugging the ground in front of one of the few remaining pieces of wall.
“Can we take them?” Bishop asked.
Connor grimaced. Bishop was experienced enough to know that the answer to that was no. Not just the two of them, not with the weapons they had available.
But if they didn’t do something, those two kids were dead.
“Let’s find out,” Connor said. Hauling his MP5 up through the window, he pointed the muzzle at the approaching T-600s and opened fire.
He hadn’t expected the fire from their two guns to stop the T-600s, and he had been right. But he had expected that the disruption in the machines’ balance would throw off their aim, and he was right again. The Terminators jerked from the multiple impacts as Connor’s and Bishop’s slugs slammed into them, the machines’ own fire going wild.
“Come on!” Connor shouted toward the two kids. “Come on— now!”
The older of the two, the teen, eased up onto his side and looked cautiously over the remains of the wall at the two T-600s. He looked back at Connor and Bishop, peered north along the street, then leaned over and said something to the child beside him.
The two gathered their feet beneath them and bounded up.
But to Connor’s surprise, instead of running for the bus they instead dashed straight across the street and disappeared behind some ruins on the northwest corner there.
“What in—?”
An instant later he got his answer as a hail of gunfire slammed into the bus from the north.
Instinctively, he dropped back down, Bishop hitting the ground a quarter second behind him.
“You all right?” he asked her.
She nodded, then jerked her head and gun around toward the rear of the vehicle. Connor swung his MP5 around as well—
Just as the Tantillo brothers dived in through the opening.
“Sorry we’re late,” Joey said, breathing hard as he gave each of the dead T-600s a quick look.
“They’d moved too far apart for the grenade to take them all out together. I had to drop the wall on them instead, but then we had to go blast each of them before they could dig themselves out. What did we miss?”
“Never mind what you missed,” Connor said. “What’s going on at the other end of the street?”
“More company,” Tony said, peering cautiously out the rear doors. “Probably not happy about losing their handy City Transit bunker here.” He rapped his knuckles on the side of their flimsy sanctuary.
Connor mouthed a curse. Which meant Barnes was still being blocked from going to Orozco’s assistance. He hadn’t expected Skynet to be able to get fresh Terminators into position that fast.
“Kate?” Connor called into his mike. “What’s your sitrep?”
“We can’t get across,” his wife’s voice came back tautly. “Not unless we can par-six it.”
“Not a chance,” Tony murmured, covering his own mike. “They’re standing right in the middle of the intersection. No way to sneak up on them without being spotted.”
And meanwhile, there were probably Terminators slaughtering their way through the Moldavia.
Connor looked around the bus, thinking hard. Barnes was pinned down; Connor’s team was pinned down; David and Tunney had their hands full dealing with the warehouse.
And then, Connor’s eyes fell on the miniguns still clutched in the T-600s’ hands.
“Hickabick?” he called into his mike. “Hickabick?”
“Hickabick,” Blair’s voice came back. “Sorry—been a little distracted.”
“No problem,” Connor said. “Where are you?”
“Off the course,” Blair replied. “Got invited to a game of Brooklyn tag.”
Which meant she was somewhere way south of the mission grid Connor had set up.
“I need you and your game here,” he said. “Tee two off Gulliver.”
There was a brief pause.
“Check,” Blair said. “You do realize the course is closed, right?”
“Understood,” Connor said. “Soonest.”
“Check,” Blair said again.
Connor looked over to see the rest of the squad eyeing him with varying degrees of bafflement.
“You thinking she can bluff them off the street?” Tony asked.
“Slipstream won’t take them out, will it?” Bishop offered doubtfully. “They’re supposed to be too heavy for that.”
“No, to both of you,” Connor said as he started climbing toward the top of the bus again. “Tony, Joey: you have two minutes to get those miniguns free and ready to fire. Bishop, up top with me—
we need to find out where those other two T-600s went.”