Instead of simply blasting them out of the air, like H-Ks usually did, the damn thing was trying to force them down.
Twisting the stick, Blair tried jinking to the left. But at these speeds the Blackhawk wasn’t nearly as responsive as an A-10 would have been, and the H-K easily matched the maneuver. She jinked the other direction, dropping her nose a few degrees to give herself some extra speed. Once again, the H-K stayed right there with her.
“Barnes!” she shouted.
“I see it,” he called back, and out of the corner of her eye Blair saw him pop his restraint harness. “Drop and dust.”
Blair made a face. Drop and dust—put the Blackhawk on the ground, or close to it, and immediately head up again. A standard enough tactic, but in this case it might prove fatal. If the H-K matched the move, she would end up virtually pinned to the ground, with nowhere to go and no maneuvering room at all.
But continuing to play Skynet’s game would be to lose by default.
“On three,” she called. “One, two, three.”
Slamming the stick forward, she dropped the Blackhawk to the ground. The wheels hit hard, bounced her a meter back up—
And as Barnes dropped out the starboard side door she angled the helo as far as she could to port and clawed for altitude.
She nearly made it. But at the last second the H-K managed to sidle back into place above her, once again trapping her between earth and metal. With her last bit of maneuvering room she turned the Blackhawk in a tight circle, bringing the pair of them back toward where she had dropped Barnes.
She could feel the buffeting as her rotors’ airflow bounced off the ground and up into the Blackhawk’s belly when Barnes finally opened up with his minigun.
The H-K’s nose took the full brunt of the blast, the smooth metal shattering into scrap. Instantly, it swerved away, abandoning its attack on Blair as it tried to get clear of the deadly stream of lead.
But Barnes was clearly expecting that. Without letting up on the trigger, he shifted his attack from the H-K’s nose to its starboard turbofan. Blair skidded the Blackhawk sideways as she heard the turbofan disintegrating, managing to get completely out from under the H-K as its starboard wing suddenly drooped nearly to the ground.
Once again it tried to dodge away.
Once again Barnes shifted his attack, this time back to the machine’s nose and the Gatling guns nestled there.
Blair was circling back toward the battle when the H-K was rocked by a massive explosion as the minigun’s rounds ignited the machine’s ammo supply. Floundering like a beached fish, the H-K swiveled around, making one final attempt to escape.
It had gone fifty meters when Blair brought the Blackhawk’s wheels down on top of its spine, forcing the crippled aircraft into a sand-billowing impact with the ground.
“See?” she muttered toward it under her breath. “I can do that, too.”
The H-K was bucking weakly, trying to throw off six thousand kilos of dead weight, as Blair crossed to the portside M240, flipped the selector to full auto, and fired a long burst into the remaining turbofan.
The bucking had stopped, and Blair was back in her seat, when Barnes reappeared.
“Dead?” he grunted as he heaved the minigun in through the door and clambered in behind it.
“Close enough,” Blair said, frowning as she eyed the weapon. Surely Barnes must have emptied the thing in the past two minutes. “Bringing home souvenirs?”
“‘Course not—this is a new one,” he said, pulling the rest of the new minigun’s ammo belt inside and taking hold of the harness. “We getting out of here, or what?”
Glowering, Blair turned back and fed power to the engines. Seconds later, they were far above the crawling Terminators and burning their way through the night sky.
“Any preferences as to where we go?” she asked, squinting through the cold wind hammering against her face as Barnes dropped into the copilot’s seat.
“Yeah. Somewhere else.”
Blair nodded, and settled in to the task of flying.
Ten minutes later, she set the helo back onto the ground.
“What are we stopping for?” Barnes asked as she ran the engines back down.
“You wanted to go somewhere else,” she reminded him. “This is it.”
“Funny,” he muttered, leaning forward and giving the area around them a careful look.
“More specifically, we’re a long ways from anything that might still be moving back at the lab,” Blair continued. “Too far away for anything to get here before daybreak, but not so far that we waste fuel. We may need that tomorrow.”
“Or we could just head back to San Francisco right now,” Barnes said.
“And give up on that cable we saw?” Blair asked. “After all that?”
“After all what?” he retorted. “So they tried to kill us. They’re Terminators. That’s what they do. Doesn’t mean there’s anything out there worth looking at.”
“Then why did that H-K try to force me down instead of just destroying us?” Blair demanded. “And why didn’t the T-700s attack until nightfall, which was after we’d talked about following the cable to the other end? If they’d just wanted to kill us, they should have tried it during the afternoon, when we wouldn’t have had a hope of getting back to the Blackhawk.”
Barnes glared out at the desert landscape.
“Yeah, I suppose that’s a little strange,” he conceded.
“More than just a little,” Blair persisted. “Look at the timing. The machines didn’t move until after sundown, which is when shortwave transmissions open up again and they can communicate with the eastern hubs. Skynet finds out we’re interested in the buried cable, and suddenly all the machines have orders to take us out.”
“Yeah,” Barnes said. “Maybe.”
“Maybe, like hell,” Blair growled. “Something’s going on here, Barnes. We need to find out what. And it’s going to take both of us to do that.”
He eyed her suspiciously. “Yeah. Convenient, huh?”
Blair frowned. “Meaning?”
“Meaning this looks a lot like one of Connor’s little trial by fire learning experiences,” he said. “You two set this up together?
Blair shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Sure you don’t,” Barnes said scornfully. “Connor says we need to clear the air between us, and suddenly here we are in the middle of a firefight. Which he also says is the way you forge good combat teams.”
Blair stared at him. “Are you suggesting Connor knew all those Terminators were going to come back to life and try to kill us?” she asked. “Hoping that if we lived through it we’d be good friends afterward?”
“Why not?” Barnes asked pointedly. “That’s how it worked with you and Marcus Wright, isn’t it?”
A jolt of jagged-edge pain stabbed into Blair’s gut.
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” Barnes countered. “It sure as hell wasn’t the guy’s native charm.”
“No, it was his humanity and his loyalty,” Blair bit out. “Sorry if those qualities are too old-fashioned for you.”
“Hey, I’m not the one with the team loyalty problem,” Barnes retorted. “You want to see that, go look in a mirror.”
Blair stared at him, her anger and pain abruptly vanishing. Suddenly, a crack had opened in the barrier he had kept between them ever since San Francisco.
“What do you mean?” she asked carefully.
Apparently not carefully enough. Even as Barnes turned away, she could sense the barrier slamming shut again.