More important for her purposes, the local government hadn't broken down; there weren't any—well, many—bandits in the area around it, and food was reasonably cheap. Particularly if you liked mutton, because the estancias all about had lost their markets.
Sarah was thoroughly sick of it, enough so that the sight of the piled carcasses was faintly nauseating, though she'd long ago overcome any city-girl squeamishness about butchering livestock or game.
Still and all, the sailors will be glad to get it, she thought.
The carcasses were as the trucks had left them; not entirely sanitary, but needs must, and the weather was cold enough that they wouldn't go bad in a day or two. She'd gotten sacks of flour as well, and canned vegetables from the Chubut Valley.
She sat atop the pile of boxes and watched the sub rise gleaming from the waves through her binoculars. Teams of men emerged and began to inflate rafts and put them overside; then some dropped into the sea beside them. They and the men still aboard the sub maneuvered engines onto the craft, climbed aboard the zodiacs, and headed for the shore. She could see the night-vision apparatus on their faces and wondered if they'd spotted her yet.
The men were well trained and efficient; deploying the inflatables with the engines had taken only a little more than five minutes and some of that had been because the rafts needed time to inflate.
Oh, this is a happy day for the resistance, she thought. A hundred trained SEALs, the rest of the crew, the sub herself…
They were armed, and going by the position of their heads, they most definitely had seen her. Sarah smiled grimly.
Technology was a wonderful thing—when it was on your side.
She slid down from the top of the pile and stood waiting for the zodiacs to beach themselves. /
One of the men trotted up to her—young, hard, fit, in cammo fatigues and body armor, face hard to see behind the goggles.
"Are you Sarah Connor?" he asked.
She nodded, then said, "Yes. I'd like to speak to your captain if he wouldn't mind."
"Sarah Connor would like to speak to the captain," he said.
She blinked, then realized he was wearing a throat mike, almost invisible in the dark.
"The captain would like me to bring you now, ma'am," the sailor said.
"Let's fill the raft with supplies," she said. "No need to waste fuel."
The sailor relayed that, then nodded and grabbed a sack of rice. Sarah followed suit, and in short order they had the zodiac filled to capacity and were on their way, cold salt spray flicking into their faces.
Looking up at the conning tower, she saw two shadowy figures outlined against the night sky, above the diving planes.
"Permission to come aboard," she called softly.
"Permission granted, Ms. Connor," Chu said. "Welcome aboard."
* * *
It wasn't until he'd sat at his desk that he realized exactly how small she was. Somehow he'd been expecting an amazon, six feet tall or more and pumped with muscle. Although for a middle-aged lady she was, in fact, quite muscular and moved with the ease of one who kept very fit. He gestured her to a chair and she gave him a polite smile and sat.
"Thank you for your help, Ms. Connor," he said.
"It was my very great pleasure," she answered. "Throwing a spoke in Senor Reimer's training wheels has made my day."
"Reimer?"
"The shark in the sharkskin suit," Sarah told him. "The one who, no doubt, arranged to fence you in. He annoys me." She sat straighter, leaning slightly forward. "But let's get down to business."
"I might have known," Chu said ruefully. He folded his hands on his desktop. "This is a U.S. Navy vessel, Ms. Connor. Neither my crew nor I have any business doing anything with it without orders."
Sarah looked away and nodded slowly, then looked at him from the corners of her eyes. "Are you going to try and tell me that whenever you've come in hailing distance of any other United States Navy vessels, it's been a peaceful, brotherly encounter?"
He blinked before he could stop himself and smiled at her knowing smile. Although how she could have known that when he refused the order to report to San Diego, his ship had immediately begun drawing fire from other navy ships was beyond him. One, a brand-new Los Angeles— class boat, had fired a nuclear-tipped homing torpedo toward them, nearly destroying the Roosevelt.
But he knew—he knew—that the crew had not done it. Calls from the captains' private cell phones had warned him that they had lost control of their ships. Once refitted, they'd been stripped to skeleton crews and it turned out that none of the men and women aboard had the technical knowledge that would have allowed them to take over the computer-controlled vessels.
They'd also found out too late that the computers were very well defended with an impressive battery of automatic weapons.
Chu stared at Sarah Connor. How could she possibly know?
She stared back at him, her expression sad and a little tired. She shook her head and brushed her hair back.
"It doesn't really matter how I know," she said, startling him again. "What matters is that my information is solid."
The captain's aide came in with a tray bearing two bowls of chicken soup and hot biscuits. /
"I'm cool," Sarah said when he tried to lay the bowl at her side of the desk. "Why don't you enjoy that."
The aide glanced at Chu, who nodded, and smiling, he picked up the tray and began to leave.
"Talan," Chu said. He pushed the little basket of rolls toward him. "Take a couple of these."
"Thank you, sir." The aide took two and left.
Chu looked at Sarah, who smiled. "Enjoy," she said.
"Thank you again for this, ma'am." The captain dug in; he could practically feel the hot soup giving him strength. "We were pretty much down to our belts."
She grinned briefly, then grew very serious. "Not to spoil your meal, Captain, but I do have some very bad, if not fully unexpected news for you."
"And that would be?" Chu asked.
"There is no federal government anymore."
The captain continued to spoon up soup as he thought about what she'd said. Then he dabbed at his lips with a napkin. "With respect, ma'am, there's no way you could know one way or another."
With a sigh, she laid it down for him. "Skynet. You must have heard of it." At his nod, she went on. "It controlled everything, ships, planes, missiles, and"—she tipped her head forward—"all bases and bunkers. As soon as the missiles started going up, the heads of the government and many of the 'best minds' in the country were hustled to air-conditioned safety in the deepest hardened bunkers on the planet. And since that sorry day, not one of those people has been seen alive. And they never will be.
"The damn computer has run mad, Captain. We didn't send those missiles aloft and your fellow captains haven't been hunting you down of their own free will, and you know it." She spread her hands. "At the very least you must suspect it."
He didn't answer as he split a biscuit, then bit into one flaky half. Sarah Connor was a very disconcerting woman. Half the time she seemed to be reading his mind; the rest of the time she was telling him things that rang horribly true. "Why don't we just cut to the chase here?" he said. "What, exactly, do you want, ma'am?"
"I want you to serve the people of the United States, who desperately need your help." She smiled to see him blink. "Things are worse than you think," she said. "The bombs were just phase one. Since then, people have been rounded up, ostensibly at the behest of the government, and put in relocation and reconstruction camps."