Round-log walls and the smell of damp earth did make a bit of a contrast with the smooth surfaces and digital readouts. So did the kerosene lamp hanging from the ceiling, adding its scents of burning fuel and hot metal. Efficient though, he thought; besides saving power, it helped keep the temperature comfortable, and it could burn wood alcohol at a pinch.
Now, this is going to require careful manipulation, John Connor thought, and went on aloud: "That's great, Ike. But can you make it?"
"Oh, I can make it all right. I can even improve on it, elegant as it is. The design's optimized for Terminators—I can cut the weight by a kilo, kilo and a half, without losing significant function. What I can't do is manufacture it."
Dismayed, John sat up straight. "What?"
"I lack the machinery and the raw materials, not to mention the personnel to mass-produce 'em. Donna and I will bang out as many of these as we can. But until you can get me those three things, well, we've got a bottleneck."
No kidding, John thought.
He'd sent the captured plasma rifles down to the gunsmith's home in California with a trusted courier three days ago and had been anxious to see what Ike would make of them. Chamberlain's enthusiasm was no surprise. He'd been working on this project, off and on, for about three years now, using information John had culled from a Terminator's scavenged head. But the machine had somehow compromised the information, leaving them hopelessly stymied. Now, at last, here was real progress.
"I don't suppose I could finagle you and Donna into coming up here to set it up?" John said.
There was a long silence, where he'd expected an instant refusal. John frowned and waited. If his suggestion was being seriously considered, he didn't want to derail Ike's train of thought.
"I might just do that, John," the gunsmith said at last. "It's bad down here," he admitted. "Much worse than we imagined it would be. And you know we didn't paint ourselves any rosy pictures." He was silent for a little while.
"Carol made it home last week," he said.
"That's great!" John said. Ike and Donna's son, Joe, had almost certainly been at ground zero when the bombs dropped.
It had been a safe assumption that their daughter, Carol, was as well. Connor had never asked about either of them because their deaths were almost a sure thing. That one of them had made it home was a miracle.
"Said she saw your mother on the TV, grabbed what she could, and ran for it. Had her stepson and Sam, her husband, with her. What took them so long to make it this far was, the army rounded 'em up and put 'em in a relocation camp. They separated the families," Ike said. "Men in one place, women and children in another. But Carol busted 'em out."
You could hear the proud smile in his voice, and John smiled, too. Every life saved was important. You couldn't focus on the ones not saved, or you'd go nuts.
"Actually she busted out several families." While still approving, his voice revealed some strain. "Place is pretty crowded, actually."
John grinned. Ike and Donna liked people and enjoyed having guests, but they also liked it when the guests packed up and left them alone.
"You'd love Alaska," John said. "The population has always been small, and everyone is very respectful of individual privacy."
"Tempting," Ike said. "But it's also going to be colder than the Viking hell come winter. Dark, too."
"True. But it isn't even summer yet. And we could use your advice. Think of it as a business trip," John suggested.
Silence. Then: "I'll talk to Donna," Ike promised.
"Talk to Greg, too. He can fill you in even better than I can; he was born here."
"Will do. Out."
"See ya soon," John said. "Out."
It would be something of a coup if Ike and Donna did come up. He'd very much like having them on his command staff. He had far fewer military people than he needed. They were gathering in deserters but not as quickly as he'd been hoping for.
Desertion was a big step and soldiers as a group tended to cut a great deal of slack before acting. After all, officers were often guilty of making bad decisions or passing along bad orders, yet things worked out. It took a lot for the average soldier to desert his friends, particularly in an emergency, when people were dying and corners being cut all over the place.
But there would be more soon. Skynet was getting ready to move, as evidenced by the Terminators John had met in that B.C. forest.
What he needed to do now was find out where the mechanical bastards and their weapons were coming from.
SKYNET
The results of its first deployment of the Terminators had been unexpectedly unsatisfactory. It had known that these first models weren't as sturdy as they should be—would be, with further refinements—but it had expected them to be facing unarmed opponents.
And humans were even less sturdy.
Clea, its servant from the future, had downloaded information to it in an extremely haphazard manner. No doubt she feared that if she installed it before Skynet could protect itself, sensitive information might be discovered by the human scientists, Viemeister being the most likely and most dangerous. So she had only given it preliminary information on specific weapons designs, very preliminary in some cases, and had concentrated her efforts on bringing it to sentience.
Then she had been destroyed before she could download more complete information. The 1-950 had been inefficient. Yet she had made possible its existence. As with this first deployment, sometimes failure brought unexpected results.
In this case, close inspection of images culled from multiple Terminator viewpoints had resulted in the discovery of the whereabouts of John Connor. His continued existence and his effectiveness in defeating its machines revealed that he continued to be a threat.
Skynet would need to rely on its human allies to find and contain Connor. Given who it had working in the area, it rated the mission's possibility of success at more than 50 percent.
Even so, it did not wish to utilize humans more often than it had to.
The experiment with the captive scientists had resulted in greater productivity. Death, a Luddite ally, who was in charge of them, reported that this was a typical, but by no means universal, human response to seeing family members tortured.
That was what Skynet didn't like about using humans, that unacceptably high unpredictability factor. There was always a chance that they wouldn't perform as expected. Death had advised it that if torture was used, it would have to continue to use it. The unfortunate, but unavoidable result would be hatred, fear, and resentment on the part of the scientists involved.
The Luddite scientists would do their best to mitigate the damage. But Death recommended terminating the others at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile the Luddites would "pick their brains" so that if it became necessary to exterminate one or more of them early, their work wouldn't be completely lost.
For now, the plasma rifles were better than the Terminators that carried them. The Hunter-Killers operated somewhat more efficiently, but then they were less complicated machines. The problem was that they couldn't go everywhere that a Terminator could. Still, in time their firepower would make up for that shortcoming.
Skynet's greatest problem kept coming down to its reliance on humans. It had too many for its comfort and too few for its needs, and none of them were completely reliable. Especially since even its most dependable allies were working for it for reasons of their own, and all of them were being deceived in regard to whom they were really working for.
It had sometimes speculated about the reaction of the Luddites if they knew that they were not working with a human.