At least the mayor was smart enough to get in the first word.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said, nodding to everyone as if he’d actually invited them all. “I’d like you to welcome our visitor, Jik, who seems to be the man the Terminators have been searching for. We asked you here—”
“They’re looking for him,” one of Halverson’s buddies interrupted, “and you brought him here?”
“Don’t worry, we’ve got some time,” Jik said calmly. “We know Skynet still has two T-700s in the area. If it was in a hurry to get me, it should have attacked us on our way into town. The fact that it didn’t means that it has something else in mind.”
“Probably waiting until nightfall,” someone else muttered.
“Possibly,” Jik agreed. “If they want new instructions or data, that would be the time when Skynet could get it to them.”
“Or possibly the whole thing is a misunderstanding,” Lajard put in, eyeing Jik curiously. “Who exactly are you, friend?”
“As you say, a friend,” Jik said. “Before we go into specifics, I’d like to hear a bit more of your story. I’m told you worked for Skynet in that big underground lab to the southeast.”
“You make it sound like we had a choice,” the woman scientist, Susan Valentine, said quietly. “We were taken from our homes, all of us, and forced to do what Skynet wanted.”
“I’m sure Skynet was quite insistent,” Jik agreed. “But you did have a choice. People always have choices.”
Oxley snorted. “You sound like Barnes,” he said. “It’s all very well to talk about sacrificing your life for a noble cause. It’s a lot different to just stand there and get yourself killed.”
“I never said all the choices were pleasant,” Jik pointed out. “But they’re always there.”
Oxley snorted. “Right.”
“And if more of the people like you had chosen that option,” Jik added pointedly, “it might very well be that we’d be facing Terminators that weren’t nearly so dangerous.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Oxley growled. “You’ve got guns—you get to shoot back. We didn’t have anything.”
“Yeah, we’re the lucky ones, all right,” Barnes growled. “Tell us about Theta.”
The room went suddenly silent. Valentine’s face looked all pinched and pained, and Oxley shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Lajard, in contrast, met Barnes’s gaze without flinching.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Let’s start with the designation,” Jik said. “Theta, the Greek TH. Was it a plan for turning human beings into Terminators?”
Halverson’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“You make it sound sinister,” Oxley protested. “It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like?” Preston asked, his voice as cold as Halverson’s.
“Oh, don’t be so squeamish,” Lajard chided. “It was a solid and practical idea, and it might have gone somewhere useful if people hadn’t turned Skynet against them.”
“You must be the live-and-let-live one I’ve heard so much about,” Jik said, eyeing Lajard closely.
“What, because I believe humans and Skynet can coexist?” Lajard countered. “Absolutely. And I’ve yet to be proved wrong.”
“We may change your mind,” Jik said. “Tell us about Theta.”
Lajard shrugged. “Conceptually, it was simple enough. The idea was to enhance basic human abilities to give people a better chance against the harshness of the post-Judgment Day world.”
“Enhancing them?” Barnes bit out. “You gut a human and stuff him inside a metal body, and you call that enhancing him?”
A murmur rippled through the room.
“Absolutely,” Lajard said, ignoring the reaction. “A Theta is stronger than a normal human, with more stamina and less need for food and sleep. He’s a survivor, in the very best sense of the word.”
“And all it costs is his humanity,” Preston said.
“Or it gives him his humanity back,” Lajard countered. “Take our prototype, for example. When Marcus Wright was brought to us, he—”
“So you’re the ones who turned him into a machine,” Williams said.
Barnes looked over at her, a shiver running up his spine. Williams hadn’t moved, hadn’t even raised her voice... and yet, as he looked into her eyes, he suddenly had the sense that he would rather face down an armed T-700 right now than tangle with her.
Lajard, who didn’t know her, missed it completely.
“No, we’re the ones who took a dead man and gave him a second chance at life,” he said irritably. “We rebuilt his brain, created a technique for stripping donated organs of biochemical identity tags so that they could be put together without running into rejection problems—”
“How did you know Marcus?” Valentine interrupted.
“I met him,” Williams said, that same graveyard chill in her voice.
“He paid us a visit,” Barnes added, watching the scientists’ faces closely.
“That’s impossible,” Valentine said, frowning. “He was our prototype. He never left the lab.”
“Well, he did,” Barnes told her. “Maybe the explosion opened up his cage.”
“No one was kept in a cage,” Lajard insisted.
“The hell they weren’t,” Barnes said hotly. “And Skynet was doing experiments on them.”
“Yes, well, until you can actually prove that, I’m sticking with what I saw,” Lajard insisted.
“But Barnes raises a good point,” Jik said. “You say this Marcus Wright was your prototype. How many more Thetas did you make?”
“None,” Oxley said. “We were still working on Marcus when our transport crashed and we got stuck out here.”
“Of course, that was three months ago,” Valentine pointed out. “It’s possible the others finished Marcus’s tests during that time and started work on another one.”
“Oh, they built another one, all right,” Jik said grimly. “I know because I killed it.”
Some of the color drained from Valentine’s face.
“You what?” she breathed. “Another Theta?” She shot quick, startled looks at Oxley and Lajard, then turned back to Jik. “When was this?”
“And where?” Preston added.
“A couple of days ago, on my way here,” Jik said.
“What did it look like?” Lajard asked.
“Like a skin-covered Terminator,” Barnes told him. “That’s what they all look like. That’s the point.”
“I meant what were its facial characteristics,” Lajard said with exaggerated patience. “There were other conversion candidates waiting in storage. If we knew which one you ran into, we might be able to figure out how far along the others got before the lab went up in smoke.”
“You couldn’t have mistaken this one for anyone else,” Jik said. “Or anything else, for that matter. It had a scar on its right cheek, and the whole left side of its face looked like it had been burned by acid.”
“I don’t remember anything like that in the queue,” Lajard said, frowning at the others.
“Maybe there was an accident during the procedure,” Oxley suggested. “There was a fair amount of hydrochloric and other acids involved in the tag-stripping process.”
“You were the one who handled the bio-medical aspects?” Jik asked.
“One of them, yes,” Oxley said. “Susan was with the metallurgical group, while Remy worked on programming.”
“What programming?” Preston asked. “You said these hybrids were nothing but enhanced people.”