The radio crackled, and she cocked an ear, wondering if Connor had reconsidered and had new orders for her. And the voice that came through her headset was definitely John Connor’s.
But it was nor the cool, calm set of new orders she had expected.
Connor was singing.
“Dum dum, dum dum de-da-dum,” he said, his voice falling and rising and falling again.
“Coming for to carry me home. Dum dum, dum dum de-da-dum. Coming for to carry me home.”
Blair stared at the landscape stretched out in front of her. Had the man gone insane?
“Dum dum—” he launched into the song again.
Blair opened her mouth…
Closed it again. Men like Connor didn’t go insane.
Not like this. Whatever he was doing, it was for a reason. Something about the song itself? The tune, or maybe the words that he wasn’t saying? She searched her memory, listening with half an ear, trying to chase down the song’s name.
And then, suddenly, it clicked.
It was an old, old song, one she could remember her mother singing to her as a lullaby on warm summer nights. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.
Swing low…
It still didn’t make sense. But at least now it was an order she could understand.
“Check,” she murmured, and shoved her stick forward.
She’d had a faint hope that the screaming power dive might take the pursuing HK by surprise.
But no, the damn machine was sticking to her like one of Wince’s noxious glue concoctions.
Was Connor expecting her to do a sudden pull-up and try to smash the HK all over the landscape? It was worth a try, anyway. Waiting until the last second, Blair pulled out of her dive, leveling off at barely fifty meters above the street.
But again, her shadow matched the maneuver perfectly. Worse, with Blair’s maneuverability now constricted by the buildings rising up on both sides, the HK was taking the opportunity to pour some serious fire into her tail. Ahead, Blair could see the bus lying on its side in the middle of the street south of the Moldavia building—
She caught just a glimpse of the two miniguns opening up from atop the bus as she flashed past, their twin lines of destruction focused behind her.
The HK never had a chance. It tried to dodge, but the same canyon of buildings that was hemming in Blair was doing the same to it. The streams of lead caught the machine in its nose, belly, and turbofans, and as Blair watched in her mirrors the HK exploded in midair.
“Pull up!” Connor snapped.
That was an order Blair didn’t need to hear twice. She hauled back on her stick, pulling her fighter out of the path of the flaming debris now arrowing toward the ground from behind her. She reached building-top height and turned west, looking down out of her cockpit in time to see what was left of the HK crash onto the street and sweep across the line of T-600s that had been firing at Barnes and the Moldavia.
“We have breach!” David’s voice came suddenly in Blair’s ear. “Repeat, we have breach. We’re going in—”
“Watch it!” Tunney’s voice cut him off. “T-1 on guard! Make that two T-1s.”
“I got east,” David snapped over the crackle of machinegun fire. “Fire in the hole!”
“Fire in the hole!” Tunney echoed.
There was a violent thud in Blair’s ear, followed half a second later by a second one.
“T-l neutralized,” David reported, his voice tight. “Two men down.”
“T-l neutralized,” Tunney said. “No casualties. Moving in to assist.”
Blair swung her fighter around toward the warehouse. The wall she’d seen David’s people mining was all but gone, the roof sagging badly over neat stacks of equipment and on top of what was left of the two T-l watchdogs that the C4 grenades had just finished off.
Blair sighed. “Damn,” she muttered under her breath.
She’d really wanted to be there to see that wall come down.
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
“Well done, everyone,” Connor said into his mike, feeling the first trickle of hope he’d had all night.
“David, set up a defensive line; Tunney, move in to support him. We’ll be heading in immediately as backstop. And remember, even T-600s who are low or out of ammo are nothing to be treated lightly.”
“Don’t worry about us,” David responded, his voice sounding grimly pleased. “I count at least twelve spare miniguns, plus four crates of ammo belts.” He paused. “I mean, damn, there’s a lot of stuff in here. Skynet was definitely planning a big night.”
“It was probably going to hit another neighborhood after it finished with this one,” Barnes said gruffly. “What about us, Connor?”
Connor grimaced. He knew what Kate and Barnes wanted to do. He also knew that it would probably be a heartbreaking waste of their time. The Terminators that had breached the Moldavia had had a lot of time in there. More than enough time to kill everyone in the building.
But the squad had come this far, and they’d put their lives on the line to do it. If there was anything that could be salvaged from the ruins across the street, they deserved the chance to try.
“Go ahead,” he told Barnes. “But tread lightly. Any Terminators still in there will probably be heading straight through you to try to get to the warehouse. Hickabick, do what you can to fly cover for everyone.”
“Check,” Blair’s voice came back. “Nice singing voice, by the way.”
Connor smiled tightly. “Thanks.”
And with that, it suddenly occurred to him that he finally had an answer to the question Kate had asked him in the middle of the night, just two days ago. The question born of fatigue and tension and momentary hopelessness.
Even in this dark and dismal world, there were still reasons for people to sing.
All at once, the firing stopped.
Orozco frowned, his view blocked by the body lying on top of him, trying to listen through his ringing ears. Surely the Terminators hadn’t stopped their attack already. Or had the battering of the gunfire—combined with his slow but steady loss of blood—merely made him deaf?
And then, as the ringing in his ears faded; he heard the thudding of heavy machine feet. He wasn’t deaf, and the Terminators were still here.
Only they seemed to be moving away from him.
Away from him?
It would be a risk, Orozco knew. Movement of any sort was pretty much a guaranteed way of attracting Terminator attention. But he needed to see what was happening out there. Gathering his last reserves of strength, he leaned his shoulder against the body lying on top of him and pushed.
For a moment nothing happened. Orozco kept at it, clenching his teeth against the throbbing pain in his arm, and suddenly the body rolled over onto its back.
He tensed. But no miniguns roared, and no slugs hammered into his body. Blinking the sweat and the other man’s blood from his eyes, he craned his neck and looked around him.
The Terminators were leaving. All of them, lumbering at full speed toward the archway.
They stepped beneath it—
The multiple explosions were actually quieter than Orozco had expected them to be. But the visuals were every bit as spectacular as he’d hoped. Just above the archway, the ten pipe bombs he’d drilled into the decorative facing went off simultaneously, lifting two floors’ worth of stone a foot straight up into the air. The facing reached the top of its rise and fell back down, the impact shattering the archway below it and dumping the entire mass of stone onto the Terminators.