"If you'll all just join us on the beach in about ten minutes, we'll have something quite dramatic to show you." He pulled a bag out from under his chair and passed it to the person next to him. "Take a pair of these and pass it along," he said.
The woman next to John took out a pair of sunglasses, then looked in the bag.
"They're all the same size and style, I'm afraid," John said with a smile. Then he gave Ike a look and the two of them exited.
"What's going on, ma'am?" the captain asked, taking a pair of sunglasses and passing the bag to his XO.
"I'm not sure," Sarah said. "And I don't want to speculate."
She smiled. "Wouldn't want to spoil the surprise."
* * *
The SEALs and other sailors at the beach party took the sunglasses with loud cries of delight, putting them on and striking Joe Cool poses, pleased with the souvenir. It didn't take much to make a hit these days. Then some of the resistance drove a pickup carrying a shrouded box onto the beach and the men and women grew quiet, some murmuring speculatively.
Down from the pier area came the captain, his officers, and the town worthies, along with Sarah, and the excitement began to mount. Whatever was programmed to happen would start now.
John jumped up onto the bed of the pickup and looked out over the crowd. The captain stood with his arms crossed over his chest, most of his officers unconsciously imitating his posture.
Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, John thought, I'll just have to get over it and get on with it.
"We've had a devastating war," he began. "With, as far as most of us knew, no enemy. We've all assumed that this terrible devastation was the result of a tragic accident. Some flaw in the system, some diode burning out resulted in the death of billions and the end of life as we knew it. Our foreign friends had it a little easier; they just blamed the U.S., as usual."
That got a rumbling laugh. John smiled, too, then winced.
"Unfortunately, this time they kinda had a point. See, what happened was the government turned all control of nuclear devices, among other things, over to a super-computer. What they didn't know was that this computer had been sentient for some time. And in that time it not only decided that the human race had to go, it began preparing an army to kill those the bombs didn't get."
"Is this, like, live-action sci-fi theater?" the captain asked, a skeptical brow raised.
"Is this, like, post-Judgment Day, or did I imagine all that?"
John answered. "Initially Skynet—the computer's name, by the way—relied on human allies. People who didn't realize that they were working for a machine. They thought they were working for an environmentalist radical, and that by reducing the human population to their own eco-conscious members, they were saving the earth. We have reason to believe that some of the most radical members of this group heavily infiltrated the armed forces."
That earned him a growl from the SEALs present and some grumbling from the sailors; the officers just stood pat, but their eyes were hard.
"Those camps the army and National Guard and Marines were taking people to are extermination camps. The civilian population and the unindoctrinated soldiers were eliminated largely by the use of biological weapons.
"But that's not the only plan Skynet has. It's been using automated factories to produce weapons that will be under its complete control."
"Hey, guy, what have you been drinking?" one of the SEALs bellowed. The crowd laughed.
"Don't worry," John said, grabbing a handful of the tarp, "we have a demonstration model." He leaped from the truck, dragging the covering with him. Inside a cage of steel bars stood a dormant Terminator, its gleaming metal surfaces reflecting the bonfire, giving it an eerie semblance of motion.
Chu yanked off his sunglasses. "What the hell is that?" he demanded. His tone of voice left no doubt as to what he thought of the thing. He thought it was a joke and a very bad one.
"Please put your glasses back on, sir," John said. He walked over to Ike and took the small control box from him. "They're meant to protect your eyes. This model is fully operational, except for the communications module—we pulled that."
He flicked a switch and the Terminator's eyes slowly lit to red.
It turned its grinning head slowly, left to right, then back again.
Then it stepped forward from the center of the cage in the stolid gait of its kind and grasped the bars. The crowd murmured, impressed in spite of themselves. The Terminator bent the bars effortlessly. When the center, horizontal bar prevented it from opening them far enough it lifted a leg and pressed down until the bar snapped from its moorings and slid down.
"Now!" John said.
At his word, one of the resistance fighters aimed a burst from one of the captured plasma rifles at the thing's chest and it stopped. For a moment only, then with amazing speed it thrust itself through the bars and leaped toward the man holding the rifle. The crowd automatically drew back with cries of surprise, even the SEALs. John lifted his plasma rifle and shot the Terminator in the head; it was dead when it hit the ground.
Immediately the sailors crowded around; the captain had to push his way to the front. He looked for John and found him back on the truck bed, looking down at them.
"What the hell was that?" Chu asked, annoyed to hear his voice shaking.
" That was a Terminator," John said. "Our enemy's foot soldiers. There are other machines, more and more of them even as we speak, all of them designed for one purpose—to kill humans. We need your help to beat them."
Chu looked at him for a moment, then held his hands up, palms out. "Whoa there," he said, laughing softly. "How do we know this wasn't just some sort of special effects stunt? I mean, c'mon…"
John tossed him the plasma rifle over the heads of the crowd and the captain caught it handily. He looked down at it, frowning.
"That's a plasma rifle in the forty-megawatt range," John said.
"A design Skynet came up with. Be careful, it doesn't have a safety."
The captain looked up sharply at that and adjusted his hold so that his hands weren't anywhere near anything that might be a trigger. "Still," Chu said, "this is a lot to swallow in one gulp."
John dropped down from the truck, and pushing his way through the crowd retrieved his rifle. "Yeah," he said sarcastically, "you caught me out. We're trying to make this boffo science-fiction film and we want to use your sub as a prop.
Never mind the billions of unburied dead, forget about the fact that you and your ship have been chased all over the place by U.S. Navy vessels that were out of the control of their crews, put aside the insane orders you've been getting from officers who are undoubtedly dead! Just jump to the conclusion that this is some kind of joke or some kind of publicity stunt. That makes sense, doesn't it?"
Chu blinked at the younger man's ferocity and opened his mouth to speak.
"John," Sarah said.
He ignored her, getting more into the captain's face. "What's it going to take to convince you, for God's sake?"
" John!" his mother said more insistently, grabbing his shoulder.
At that moment the Terminator grabbed the XO by the ankle and the officer went down, screaming as the small bones in his foot were crushed.
Connor shot a blast into the thing's head and it went limp again.
"It's alüive," Sarah said. The look she gave John brought a flush to his cheeks. They moved aside to let the ship's doctor through. "When do I get one of those?" she asked, indicating the rifle.
"You can have this one," he said, handing it to her. "The firing mechanism is the same as we thought, but a lot of the wiring is completely different."