There were three murmured assents.
“Good,” Yarrow said briskly. “Let’s go.”
“For me, it happened two years after Judgment Day,” Susan said, shifting uncomfortably in one of the plain wooden chairs that Hope had brought in from the kitchen to help accommodate the unexpected crowd currently standing and sitting around their living room. “There were half a dozen of the big walkers, the ones I found out later were T-400s, plus a couple of T-1 tanks that had come along for support. I was living in a sort of group house—it was the only building in our neighborhood that hadn’t fallen down or been scavenged for lumber.”
Hope threw a surreptitious look across the room. Blair was listening closely to Susan’s story, just as she had Oxley’s and Lajard’s, an intense but otherwise neutral expression on her face. Barnes was listening just as closely, but his expression was one of outright suspicion.
And every so often he turned that suspicious look toward Hope and her father.
“At first I thought they were going to kill us,” Susan continued. “I’d heard the rumors that they were doing that in some of the other neighborhoods. But they didn’t. They just walked up to the house, and one of them put a radio up against the door so that I could hear there was someone trying to talk to me.”
“That someone being me,” Lajard put in. “As I said, I’d been with Skynet for a year at that point. We needed a good metallurgist, I’d found Susan in what was left of the university database, and sent a team out to get her.” He looked over at Barnes. “And for the record, the term Terminator originally meant that their job was to terminate the chaos and crime that had become endemic across the world since the war.”
“The war that Skynet started,” Barnes growled.
Lajard shook his head. “I’m not convinced of that.”
“I don’t give a damn whether you are or not,” Barnes said flatly. “I was one of the people the Terminators were hunting. I saw what they did.”
“And I say that all of that happened later, after the gangs ramped up and started terrorizing the rest of the populace,” Lajard countered, just as firmly. “Maybe Skynet just got tired of trigger-happy vigilantes wrecking its machines. Machines that were only trying to protect people.”
“What about the prisoners in Skynet Central?” Barnes countered. “Or the ones in that underground facility, the place you claim you were working in? Connor said they were living in cages while Skynet did experiments on them.”
“I never saw anything like that,” Lajard insisted. “Maybe Connor misinterpreted what he saw. Maybe they were refugees that Skynet had taken in.”
Hope sighed. It was an argument that had been going on ever since the three scientists first arrived in town three months ago. Despite all the stories and rumors that had filtered into Baker’s Hollow over the years, Lajard stubbornly refused to believe that Skynet was actively and deliberately slaughtering the scattered remnants of humanity. He insisted that, even now, Terminator killings were either gang-related, self-defense, or rare and atypical accidents. In his view, all the anti-Skynet bias was propaganda driven by lies from dangerous malcontents like John Connor.
Susan and Oxley weren’t as dogmatic in their support as Lajard was. Susan, in particular, seemed to straddle the line. On one hand, she agreed that she and the other humans working in Skynet’s underground lab had been treated quite well. On the other hand, though, she’d seen the Terminators react instantly and strongly to anything they perceived as a threat. For her, the question seemed to boil down to what exactly Skynet considered a threat these days.
Most of the townspeople, with no direct knowledge either way, generally ignored the question. Whatever was happening in the world beyond Baker’s Hollow seemed distant and academic.
Only it wasn’t. Not anymore.
Hope’s father was clearly thinking along the same lines.
“Whatever Skynet’s original plan might once have been is irrelevant,” he said. “The question is what it’s doing now. More specifically, what it’s doing here in Baker’s Hollow.”
“The Terminators are here to kill,” Barnes growled. “Wherever they go, they’re always there to kill.”
“That’s paranoid nonsense,” Lajard scoffed. “As long as it doesn’t perceive us as a threat, we’ll be fine.”
“What kind of non-threat do you want us to be?” Barnes demanded. “You mean like we just sit back and watch while it tracks down and kills whoever is out there?”
There was an uncomfortable shuffling of feet from the crowd. Hope looked around, studying the various faces, trying to gauge their moods. Those who’d seen the Terminators in action clearly weren’t thrilled at the thought of going up against them again. But they weren’t any happier with the idea of simply abandoning whoever was out there.
“Who says they’re planning to kill him?” Lajard countered. “Maybe it’s a search and rescue operation. You don’t have any proof they’re trying to kill anyone.”
Barnes snorted. “They have guns, right?”
“So did the T-700s who were with us before our accident,” Lajard said. “So do you. So do half the people in town. In case you hadn’t heard, there are big, hungry predators prowling around out here.”
“Sure are,” Barnes said. “And the worst of them are made of metal—”
“Tell us about the accident,” Blair cut in.
“There’s really not much to tell,” Susan said. “We were working at the lab on something called the Theta Project. We’d developed a new type of hip and lower spine system—new materials as well as new stance-maintenance software—and we needed to field-test it. The biggest question was how it would do on steep terrain, so the three of us and the prototype were loaded aboard a transport and flown up into the mountains about twenty miles northwest of here. We’d landed and gotten out, and the T-700s were starting to unload our equipment, when an avalanche came down and buried everything.”
“We escaped most of it,” Oxley added. “But we didn’t have a radio we could use to call for help. Or any food or shelter, either. We hung around the site for a couple of days, but no one came.”
“Eventually, we realized we were going to have to get back on our own,” Susan said. “We started hiking back down the mountains, but it was deep forest, and we didn’t have any maps. We got lost.”
“Seriously lost,” Oxley agreed. “We were on pretty much our last legs when Susan spotted some smoke rising from a mountainside in the distance. We changed course and headed that direction.”
“They nearly didn’t make it, either,” Preston put in. “One of our hunting parties ran across them thrashing weakly through a row of thorn bushes. All three were suffering from exposure and malnutrition.”
“Most of that last part is a blur,” Susan admitted, a flicker of memory crossing her face. “At least, for me. I think it was a week before any of us could even get out of bed.”
“Bottom line is that we owe these people our lives,” Lajard said firmly. “We’re not going to repay them by bringing destruction down around their heads.” He eyed Barnes warningly. “Or by letting anyone else do it, either.”
“Fine,” Barnes said calmly. “We got the message. Nice meeting you all.” He stood up and headed for the door. “Come on, Williams.”
“Wait a minute,” Preston said, jumping to his feet. “Where are you going?”
“We’re leaving,” Barnes said. “You heard Lajard. He says we’re putting you at risk.”
“Lajard doesn’t speak for the town,” Halverson spoke up brusquely, throwing a hard look at Lajard as he stepped away from the wall into Barnes’s path. “Anyway, we’re not sending you on your way until you’ve had some food and rest. We owe you that much.”