Probably dying somewhere before it was all over.
Possibly while saving some flygirl’s butt.
The hangar was just ahead, a broken remnant of an old air-space museum whose roof had caved in so far that it was obviously no longer able to conceal anything bigger than a Piper Cub. Barnes lifted up a closed fist in warning as they approached, trotting to a crouching halt beside a mangled sign just outside the grounds.
Blair crouched down beside him, adjusting her grip on her Desert Eagle as she studied the open space that lay between them and the hangar. A handgun, even one this powerful, wouldn’t do much against T-600s except slow them down, and would be of even less use against a T-l, unless she got in a lucky shot. However, there were also human gangs still roaming the streets, scavenging for buried supplies or stealing from the people who’d gotten there first, and the Eagle’s .44 magnum rounds were more than adequate for opening their guts to the cool night air.
But either it was past the gangs’ bedtimes or else the ruckus a few blocks away had scared them back under their rocks. Nothing was moving out there, human or otherwise.
“Looks clear,” Barnes murmured. “You want me to walk you in?”
“You just stay here,” Blair murmured back. Did the man deliberately go out of his way to tick her off? Probably. “I’ll send the crew out to you.”
Barnes grunted. “Make it snappy.”
Blair took a deep breath, and headed toward the hangar, taking the open ground in as fast a sprint as she could without risking a broken ankle. She spun halfway around as she reached the building, landing her back against the wall beside the door as she gave the area one last quick look.
Still nothing.
Panting a little, she slipped inside and pulled the door closed behind her.
And jerked back as a bright light exploded in her face.
She had just enough time to slam her eyelids shut before the light disappeared.
“Sorry,” Yoshi’s voice came from behind the purple blob floating in front of her eyes. A hand reached out and took her arm. “Come on.”
“Where’s Wince?” Blair asked as she let Yoshi guide her across the broken floor.
“He and Inji are prepping your plane,” Yoshi said. “I’m assuming Connor wants us to blow this popsicle stand?”
“Yeah, that’s kind of a given,” Blair said. “Why, were you thinking of staying?”
“Not if everyone else goes,” Yoshi said, an odd wistfulness in his voice. “I just hate to see the place go, that’s all.”
Blair looked around. Actually, so did she. The purple blob was fading now, and behind it the familiar cramped area beneath the hangar’s crushed roof was coming into view.
Or rather, now that the false floor had been rolled aside, the uncramped area of the basement storage room, a sublevel that Skynet’s initial surveillance had missed. By removing the floor and installing a winch-equipped ramp, Connor’s people had turned an expanse of otherwise useless space into a very cozy spot for stashing the team’s two A-10 “Warthog” attack jets.
Blair ran a quick eye over her plane as she and Yoshi headed down the ramp. It was as banged-up as everything else in Connor’s meager arsenal, though the wild flying-shark paint job she’d adorned it with hid a lot of the damage. But to her, the nicks and bullet holes were nothing to be ashamed of. They were marks of honor, wounds suffered in the cause of humanity’s war for survival.
And scarred or otherwise, the plane was no more ready to give up the fight than Blair herself was. A pair of Sidewinder air-to-air missiles hung from two of the A-10’s four remaining under-wing pylons, while the seven-barrel GAU-8 Avenger Gatling gun nestled beneath its nose promised a hornets’ nest of 30mm explosive and armor-piercing rounds to any HK or T-l foolish enough to get in her way.
Her remaining two pylons, she noted, were sporting equipment nacelles, undoubtedly loaded with everything Wince and Inji could pry up and pack inside. That was going to play hell with the A-10’s balance and maneuverability, but Blair would just have to deal with it. It wasn’t like the two men could lug everything out on their backs. Not even with Barnes to help.
“Is everyone okay?” Wince’s disembodied voice drifted out from somewhere behind the two planes. “It sounded pretty nasty there for awhile.”
“It was,” Blair said, deciding there was no point in burdening him with the news of Piccerno’s death. He’d find out about that soon enough. “We need to get moving, too. If Skynet follows its usual post-raid pattern, the T-600s could be knocking on the door anytime now. We don’t want to be here when they do.”
“No argument there,” Wince agreed, coming into sight around the rear of the plane, his white hair glistening in the starlight that filtered through the cracks in the roof. “You probably saw the cargo pods we strapped on. You going to be okay with that?”
“I’ll be fine,” Blair assured him. “Barnes is waiting outside by the west sign. You and Inji grab whatever you’re carrying, and get going.”
“We’ll get the door first,” Wince said, looking around. “Inji?”
And then, abruptly, the cracks in the hangar roof blazed with light.
“Cover!” Blair snapped at Wince as she sprinted toward her plane. Damn the HKs, anyway.
“And get clear of the door!”
The words were barely out of her mouth when the silence of the night was shattered by the thunder of automatic weapons fire.
But not the drawn-out stutter of an HK’s miniguns. It was the slower, higher-pitched sound of a Galil assault rifle.
Like the one Barnes had been carrying over his shoulder.
Blair swore under her breath. Leave it to him to pick a one-man fight with a flying weapons platform.
“Forget the winch!” she shouted to Yoshi as she bounded up the ladder and dropped into her cockpit. “Blast and burn.”
“Right,” Yoshi called over the gunfire as he headed for his own plane. “You or me?”
“Me,” Blair shouted, punching for engine ignition. “Go as soon as it’s clear.” There was no time for her to do a proper flight checklist. She would just have to hope Wince and Inji had done the prep right.
They had. Even as she pulled the canopy closed she could feel the vibration of the twin GE
turbofans behind her coming to life. Flipping up the safety bar on her stick, she raised the muzzle of her GAU-8 to point at the center of the hangar door and squeezed the trigger.
A normal door would have simply disintegrated at the center of fire, leaving the bulk of it still sitting there, blocking the way. But this particular door had been carefully warped most of the way out of its guide rails and fasteners, and its center had been heavily reinforced with large pieces of superhard alloy, scavenged from wrecked HKs and T-4 tanks. The result was exactly as planned: even as the door’s center began to shred in the face of Blair’s onslaught, the sheer impact of two-pound shells striking it at a thousand meters per second blew the whole door out of its housing and hurled it in a twisting arc across the open area outside. Blair caught a glimpse of an HK swooping down toward the spot where she’d left Barnes—.
And with a teeth-tingling screech of metal against metal, the flying door slammed into the HK’s tail.
The HK nearly lost it right there and then, as the impact threw it violently to the side. Its left tail fin hit the ground and dug in, spinning the whole aircraft a quarter turn around the pivot point.
But the computer controlling the craft was faster than any human pilot. Before the HK’s nose could slam into the tarmac, it managed to pull up and out of its spin, its engines revving madly as it tried to regain its equilibrium.