Apparently Vera's brief stay had been memorable because at the mention of Love's Thrust, her yacht, eyes rolled, grins appeared, and hands were thrust out in welcome.
John and Ike sat on the pier eating smoked salmon and sipping some very bad home-brewed beer.
"Jee-zus Christ," Ike said, looking into the bottle. "What the hell did they make this with? Yak piss?"
"More likely moose," John said. "Not many yaks in Alaska."
He took a sip and looked at the bottle with a grimace. "Or maybe grizzly."
"It does have a bite," Ike said with a chuckle, and glanced nervously at the younger man. Since the raid on the automated factory there'd been something different about him. It was hard to pin down. But sometimes, even times like now when they were just sitting and eating, he felt almost like he was talking to a stranger.
He's preoccupied, Ike told himself, as he had a dozen times before. But deep down he found himself thinking: He's getting to be like his mother.
Not a good thing; Sarah sure as hell hadn't handled it all that well. At least not at first. Of course Dieter had a lot to do with centering her; if ever there was a solid man it was the big Austrian. Ike chewed thoughtfully.
Maybe it's for the best. If John was going to be the leader of the resistance, he was going to need some distance from the people around him. People he might have to knowingly send to their deaths. The old man's jaws froze. People like his father. He turned to study his young friend. Christ, what a world they were living in.
John sat up straighter and put his bottle of beer aside. "Yup, here they are," he said.
Out in the bay the water slid back from something huge and black, then curled into foam as the hull broke free. Then the rest of the submarine surged to the surface, water sloughing off its blunt sides. Ike grinned.
"It's huge!" he said, and laughed.
"Sixteen thousand tons," John said. "Eighteen thousand submerged; crew of a hundred and forty, and a hundred SEALs."
He winked. "Think it'll do?"
"You betcha, kid. We're in business!"
"My mom always did get me the coolest toys," John said with a satisfied smile.
* * *
"You're the first military we've seen here in months," the mayor said to Chu. "The army and National Guard came by a coupla weeks after Judgment Day, but that was it."
The captain and crew had been invited to a crab feast, and except for a skeleton crew on board the Roosevelt, all had accepted. The crew were cavorting around bonfires on the beach while the captain and his officers were at a slightly more formal indoor banquet. With, John noticed, better beer.
"They haven't been back?" the captain asked, frowning. It seemed to him that if any military were patrolling the area, this solid community would make an ideal base, or at least a supply depot.
"Naw. We made it plain we were gonna go it alone," the mayor said. "Didn't see no sense in runnin' off to Canada."
" Canada?" Vaughan, the XO, said.
"The word was that civilians were being rounded up for transport to relocation camps in Canada," John explained.
"Supposedly they'd be parceled out to various provinces, since Canada had suffered less than the states."
The officers around the table glanced at one another.
"No, it doesn't sound right, does it?" John said. "But if you've got kids and no food, I guess it might sound like a great idea.
Besides, with the army and National Guard involved, it was
'official.' Your average law-abiding citizen will try to accommodate under those circumstances. As long as it's voluntary."
"We haven't heard about any of this," Chu said.
"Shoulda come to us right away, son," the mayor said. "We'da made ya welcome."
"That wasn't possible at the time." Chu's mind flicked to memories of being pursued by friends' ships, which, when they failed to herd the Roosevelt to San Diego, opened fire; while speaking to him on their cell phones, former classmates shouted that they had no control over what was happening. "If things hadn't calmed down somewhat, we wouldn't be here now." He'd seen one of those ships in the distance as they'd sped toward Alaska. It was now a floating tomb; he and his men had seen the remains of bodies on the deck, and a hole where the crew had cut their way out, only to starve or die of thirst.
"What kind of transmissions have you been getting?" Sarah asked. She'd been quiet for the most part, letting John do the talking for both of them, but this was something she'd been wondering about. Asking about it en route would have been too intrusive, but in this casual setting, she felt it was permissible.
"Mostly demands to report to San Diego," Chu said grimly.
"Actually we haven't been getting much of anything for a while.
Amateur civilian stuff mostly. Some foreign military interaction.
Our side seems to be playing its cards close to the chest."
"I ain't heard a decent radio program for months," the mayor complained.
Sarah smiled. Things had gotten wild and woolly out there in radio land. With a lot of the major stations off the air, a whole world of underground communication had opened up.
Conspiracy theorists had more than come into their own, and alternative music stations were frying the eardrums of the uninitiated, but desperate, general public. The news was largely hearsay; occasionally, to ears as honed as hers, genuine information about Skynet's progress came through.
The company around the table fell to talking about the strange things they'd been hearing on the airwaves of late and John leaned toward his mother for a private conversation.
"Tom Preston finally got in touch with me yesterday," he said quietly.
Sarah frowned slightly. "He was out of touch? Tom's old reliable; what happened?"
"Terminators," John said. "Set fire to the houses and killed everyone but Tom, his wife, and daughter."
"Shit!" Sarah said quietly.
Shit is the kind of word that, even spoken quietly, can attract attention. She looked up to find the captain's eyes on her, smiled briefly, and looked away.
"I take it they hadn't posted a guard," she murmured.
John sighed. "They'd become a fairly large community." He shrugged. "Most of them were civilians and they didn't think it was necessary. After exhausting themselves night after night, the core group decided maybe they were right."
Shaking her head, Sarah popped a bit of crab into her mouth.
"It must be killing him," she said quietly. "He knew better."
"I've advised him to get away from there," John said. "In fact, I've told a lot of people to get to the cities."
Lifting her brows, his mother looked at him.
"They'll be harder for the Terminators to find there. And the radiation's died down."
"Still not the safest place in the world." When John looked at her with a pained expression, Sarah laughed.
He said what was on his mind anyway. "Skynet's rising, Mom.
Safety's gonna be hard to come by for the next few decades."
"Yeah, but can we prove it?" Sarah looked over at the captain and his officers. They really, really needed men like these.
"I've got a demonstration planned," John said. He rose and all eyes went to him. "Gentlemen and ladies, I'd like to ruin your meal."
Those around the table looked both anxious, because such things happened for real too often these days, and amused, because they were hoping he was kidding.