! he thought in anguish, and pushed the feeling away, forcing anger into its place, overriding the grief with fury. The machines would not succeed. He wouldn't let them.
The soft, methodical sound of footsteps came closer.
* * *
The Terminator scout came to the end of its designated watch zone and turned away. No humans appeared to have escaped the assault. The enemy had been caught completely unprepared. It appeared that there had been 100 percent enemy casualties.
It stopped every five feet to scan the woods all around, then proceeded on its way. No humans seemed to have escaped the assault.
Terminated, it transmitted to Skynet.
ALASKA
John Connor was worried.
I suspect that's going to be my natural state from here on out, he thought.
The PDA in his hand showed the terrain, his location, and the jump-off points of the other attack parties. The factory was located in a low wooded valley surrounded by spruce-clad hills…
And this is the first big operation I've personally commanded
, he thought nervously, looking around at the confident faces.
Maybe I am the Great Military Dickhead of Mom's dreams, but right now I feel more like a confidence man. Not that that's my only worry.
By the time they'd moved out, he hadn't heard from Tom Preston in Iowa. Unusual. Tom was one person who could be relied on to report regularly. He'd remarked once that having young children kept you awake and alert and therefore on time.
But not today.
Hope it's not an omen. Maybe that was an ill-omened thought. So far everything had gone extremely well. Almost suspiciously well. Could it really be that the computer was arrogant enough to not protect its most important assets?
Because there was, as yet, no sign that the resistance fighters had been seen. He couldn't help it; continuous good fortune raised his hackles.
Ninel was back with the various transports; also there was Ike, who'd arrived in Alaska yesterday. He appeared to like Ninel, but had looked askance at John when he found out she was going with them. It hadn't been necessary for him to comment; John knew the older man well enough to have gotten paragraphs of meaning out of that one look.
The two of them would come up to the factory once John was sure the place was secured. Although with Skynet, secured tended to be a relative term.
There was a fence around the installation and about twenty yards of cleared ground all around the inside. The building was a metal frame affair with steps leading up to a second level. From the blueprints there was a small office there. But most of the interior was pure machinery up to forty feet high. There were spotlights at each corner of the building and on each corner of the fence at the top of tall poles.
John crouched beside the crew with the TOW antitank missile. "Can you take out the antennae?" He gestured toward the dish atop the square building.
"Yes, sir," the gunner said, already looking through the eyepiece on the side of the long tube; shrubbery protected the emplacement and the tripod, but the thing had a ferocious back-blast and you needed a dozen men to move it. Apart from that, it was easy to use…
"Do it," John told him.
Thadump!
The rocket blasted out the front of the launch tube, and half a dozen of his resistance fighters went to work with shovels and curses, beating out the fire that the jet of flame to the rear had caused.
WHZZZZEEEEEEE… like the whistle of an angry young god; the rocket was a blur as it streaked out over half a thousand yards.
Seconds later the dish exploded in a satisfying flash of fire.
John grinned. Now Skynet couldn't contact its plant; they'd checked carefully for backup communications links. This really was going to be a piece of cake.
The first soldiers started moving out from the cover of the wood toward the fence. As soon as they were visible, a recorded voice rang out: "Halt! You are approaching a government installation. Trespassers will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The nearest military facility has been notified of your presence and troops will be on the way momentarily. Go back.
Do not pass the fence or you will be fired upon."
Gun ports opened all over the surface of the building, indicating that trespassers would be riddled with bullets if they proceeded. The resistance soldiers hunkered down, waiting for John's signal. John himself was waiting for the small hydro generator to be blown. He suspected that it wouldn't affect the automated weapons; they had battery backup according to the plans Snog had found, but at least the factory would be shut down.
There was nothing to show that it had been rigged to blow itself up, but anything he could do to thwart such a plan would be a good thing. There was an explosion by the stream where the generator was located and John signaled the soldiers at the fence to set their charges. Once that was done, they retreated at a run.
Again John signaled and the charges blew the fence.
Sharpshooters began peppering the building, and in return the automated weapons fired into the woods. Blindly, for all the good they seemed to be doing…
Short-range weapons, he thought. Hmm. Yeah, light machine guns on hydraulic mounts, mostly, 5.56mm stuff.
Maybe Skynet's as short of everything as I am— it's trying to do a lot more at the same time, of course.
A man screamed and a corpsman came running, dragging him away from the area where he'd been hit, an area on which the building's weapons now concentrated fire. The corpsman himself shouted as he was clipped by a bullet.
This can't keep up, John thought. There's no battery in the world can keep this up. Besides, the damn things had to run out of ammo sometime.
Not that we're going to wait.
"Let them have it!" he snapped into the button microphone.
His snipers went methodically to work; they were using Barrett rifles, big thirty-pound things that fired .50 caliber armor-piercing ammunition. One by one the automated weapons pods went silent; a few went up in spectacular gang fires as hot metal punched into their ammunition drums.
"Forward," John said again.
This time far fewer weapons fired. He gritted his teeth as the casualty reports came in. Get used to it, GMD, he told himself.
Skynet would have killed them later anyway. We win, or everybody dies, it's that simple.
Eventually the fire was suppressed. He moved forward with his command party across the fence and up the exterior stairs.
"Have Ike take a look at that machinery," John said to a woman who'd accompanied him up the stairs. "We're gonna be taking this away from here." She gave him a dubious look, but hurried out. "And send Ninel Petrikoff up."
"Yes, sir," came back to him as the soldier clattered down the stairs.
John Connor took a deep breath and pushed open the door.
Anticlimax, he thought. There wasn't even a window looking out over the plant floor, just white particleboard walls and a set of terminals and flat-screen displays.
He sat down at a console and put Snog's disk into the reader.
And hit enter, which seemed as good a place to start as any.
* * *