Items related to Terminator 3: Terminator Dreams
Despite the sacrifice of a T-850 and the heroic efforts of John Connor and Kate Brewster, Skynet became operational. It is now 2029 AD, and the war between the human Resistance and Skynet rages on. With small guerrilla forces, John and Kate continue to sabotage and destroy Skynet forces . . . but it's not enough.
Before Judgment Day, Danny Avila helped program what became Skynet and was plagued by nightmares of Terminators destroying cities and decimating mankind. He disappeared two days before Judgment Day, and didn't resurface until Kate and John discovered him years later. Danny still can't remember what happened to him just before Skynet attacked. He has the nagging feeling that he has forgotten something very important. Despite this memory lapse, he has become a vital member of the Resistance.
Horrible dreams have begun to haunt him again. Could these dreams be a psychic link to his past self? John Connor has an idea: if Danny past and Danny present can communicate, perhaps they can help the Resistance gain an edge and defeat Skynet. But to accomplish such a connection would place Danny at tremendous physical and emotional risk. It's a dangerous experiment, but one that might prove the salvation of mankind's future... and the death of Danny.
"Arnold's adventure fans, rejoice; this is the stuff that role-playing dreams are made of."
--Publishers Weekly
Before Judgment Day, Danny Avila helped program what became Skynet and was plagued by nightmares of Terminators destroying cities and decimating mankind. He disappeared two days before Judgment Day, and didn't resurface until Kate and John discovered him years later. Danny still can't remember what happened to him just before Skynet attacked. He has the nagging feeling that he has forgotten something very important. Despite this memory lapse, he has become a vital member of the Resistance.
Horrible dreams have begun to haunt him again. Could these dreams be a psychic link to his past self? John Connor has an idea: if Danny past and Danny present can communicate, perhaps they can help the Resistance gain an edge and defeat Skynet. But to accomplish such a connection would place Danny at tremendous physical and emotional risk. It's a dangerous experiment, but one that might prove the salvation of mankind's future... and the death of Danny.
"Arnold's adventure fans, rejoice; this is the stuff that role-playing dreams are made of."
--Publishers Weekly
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Aaron Allston is the author of a number of science fiction and fantasy novels including the Doc Sidhe books, The Star Wars New Jedi Order novels Rebel Dream and Rebel Stand, among a number of novels, original and tie-in. An award-winning game designer as well an SF writer, he lives near Austin, Texas.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
C.1
August 2029
San Rafael, California
Population 0
It wasn't exactly a jungle, but in the decades since Judgment Day, trees had forced their way up through street pavement and sidewalk concrete; grasses and weeds had overrun lawns and medians. Now, where on a normal afternoon traffic sounds would have once drowned out every other noise, John Connor could hear only the summery rise and fall of insects calling to one another. That, and the occasional bang or clank or curse from the crew working behind him.
He stood at the open loading door, looking out into the overgrown parking lot. There were still some cars, here, left behind when the world went to hell decades ago, but they shared the lot with aggressive waist-high weeds and, wonder of wonders, a lemon tree that had taken root at the corner of the property.
John felt a bit like the parking lot. His wife still told him his face was handsome; that his upright posture, his camo-style uniform, all projected the image of a leader of men, grayed but unbending. But on days like this he could feel every injury that he had sustained in his fifty-plus years--every gunshot wound, every broken bone, every burn. Scars, new and old, marked his body like weeds marked the parking lot, and there were more every year.
Even so, he needed to lead the occasional mission in the field. He was the leader of the Resistance, and decades of experience made it clear to him that the men and women he commanded would lose faith in a commander who always sat safely in his hardened underground bunker at Home Plate compound, dispatching others to their deaths. To keep spirits up, to keep himself from becoming some sort of distant, unattainable figure who never met and therefore could never inspire the troops elsewhere, he had to expose himself to danger a few times each year.
He couldn't complain. There were men and women in his forces--including his own children--who exposed themselves to danger several times a month. There were some who almost never had the opportunity to relax, to feel safe.
"Hey." The voice was female. He glanced over his shoulder at the speaker.
She stood a few feet behind him, just beside the angled column of light spilling in through the loading door, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust so he could make out her features. She was of average height and build, but he didn't find her in the least average. Her nose was just a little too broad to be considered elegant; but that, her round face, and her mouth--made for smiling--added up to a combination that was impossibly attractive. Her eyes were dark brown, her hair graying from the same color. She wore a camo uniform like his, though she'd set aside the belt with its holsters and pouches.
He modulated his tone to that of an office lothario. "Hey, yourself," he said. "Are you new?"
She grinned, taking on the cuteness of a teenager. "First day here."
"What are you doing after work?"
"I was thinking about a long moonlit drive with a bunch of sweaty freedom fighters."
He offered her a mock shudder. "Well, I guess a girl's got to do what makes her happy." He dropped the act. "How's it going back there?"
"They'll be ready for the fourth truck in about two minutes. They wanted me to tell you to send out the call."
"Will do."
She turned away, toward the dark interior of the loading dock. He reached out and caught her by the shoulder, dragging her back to him. Off-balance, she fell into his grasp, simultaneously grinning and scowling up at him. "What?"
"Kate, you know the price for approaching this checkpoint."
She leaned up to kiss him. "There. Does everyone who passes this way have to do this? Earl? Warthog? Crazy Pete?"
"I dunno. It's a brand-new policy."
Laughing, she shrugged free of him and headed back into the manufacturing facility.
John stared after his wife for a moment, savoring the bare minute of privacy they'd shared, perhaps the only minute they'd have this day. Then, reluctantly, he turned his mind back to business.
The building they were pillaging, a sprawling, nearly windowless single-story edifice larger than a football field, had once been decorated with a sign that read, EOSPHOR TECHNOLOGIES. Before Judgment Day, it had been a circuit board manufacturing concern, a subcontractor that built boards for companies that sold munitions components directly to the government. The sign had fallen, possibly on Judgment Day, possibly many years later. For whatever reason, the interior of the building had survived unpillaged for decades, and one of Connor's scouts had discovered it a few weeks ago. Two days ago, Connor's advance team had arrived and begun preparing selected pieces of equipment for transportation.
They couldn't take everything. A rough estimate of the amount of equipment here suggested that it would take a convoy of forty trucks or more to move every item of machinery, all surviving chemicals, all fabrication supplies. He had five trucks, a massive and vulnerable convoy by the standards of the Skynet-controlled world. So they had to be selective.
The equipment his technical team was dismantling and preparing for transportation included computers that his programming adviser Įvila had said still worked, still contained diagrams for hundreds of varieties of circuit boards. There was a room-size plotter that could transcribe those circuit board plans onto sheets of silver-coated Mylar at photographic levels of reproduction, for use in exposing circuitry images onto copper-clad fiberglass laminates. There were photographic exposure units, some merely oversize and ungainly, some large enough nearly to fill the back of a two-and-a-half-ton truck. There were rugged, hardy screen printers for use in silkscreen processes, usable both for circuit board manufacturing and more mundane tasks such as cloth decoration. Last of the primary haul, but certainly not least in size, were laminate presses that turned individual layers of laminates into multilayer circuit boards.
Less crucial to circuit board fabrication but still useful to the Resistance were control computers for sophisticated drill processes, laboratory equipment, tools, components for setting up partitions and metal cage walls, and parts scavenged from dozens of machines.
The booty from this haul, augmented by equipment that John's technicians would assemble on site, would allow the Resistance to set up two entire circuit board fabrication lines. That meant two sites that could produce radios, targeting systems, even computers someday. The lines would be much slower, much less efficient than those operating before Judgment Day, but they'd be a tiny edge in the favor of humanity, a fraction-of-a-percentage improvement in mankind's chances for survival. The Human Resistance had other circuit board fabrication sites operating, but every additional one they set up increased their available resources.
And with luck, the Eosphor Technologies building would go unnoticed by Skynet even after their departure. A few months from now, perhaps a year, they might be able to return and pick up even more equipment.
He pulled his field phone from its belt pouch. Shaped much like one of the walkie-talkies he'd known from his youth, it seemed cruder, more unfinished than the commercial products of the twentieth century. Its surfaces were black-painted metal instead of molded plastic. A cable ran up from a jack atop the device to the headset John wore and the microphone on his lapel.
With his thumb, he popped open the protective faceplate, revealing a small LCD screen and an alphanumeric keypad. He keyed in the following commands:
TRANS STARLING ALL
AC 4T
OFF
This operation was code-named Starling, a random word generated by a computer program back at his base of operations. The first command had instructed the simple microprocessor in the device to send the rest of the message only to the participants in the operation. "Ac 4T" was shorthand for "activate fourth transport." The entire transmission would be encrypted when transmitted.
It would have been much easier to have depressed the speaker button on the faceplate, or to have keyed the microphone attached to his lapel, and spoken the appropriate words. But a voice transmission took much more time to transmit than his five-character code, was easier to detect and decode, and was less likely to be mistaken for an atmospheric anomaly. A voice transmission would, in short, drastically increase their odds of getting someone killed.
And there just weren't enough people left alive for him to let himself be careless that way.
* * *
Half a mile to the south, four figures huddled under a tarpaulin on a rooftop. They were situated at the edge of the roof where some long-ago calamity had knocked away a portion of the waist-high protective wall. The hole gave them an unobstructed view of the city's ruins southward.
Kyla Connor, the woman with her eye to the sniper rifle's high-powered scope, was young, not yet quite out of her teens. Her dark brown hair, a practical shoulder length, was tucked up under her billed cap. Her features were even and flawless; at rest, as they were now, they were unmemorable, but when lit by one of her rare smiles, they were transformed into earthy beauty. She wore the same camouflage uniform as most of the other participants in Operation Starling.
Her field phone beeped softly, but she didn't stir. "Mark, get that, would you?" she whispered.
Mark Herrera, the man lying on his back beside her, yawned and stretched. He was darker than the woman, Latino, with everyday good looks that seemed made to wear their current expression, an amused and self-satisfied smile. He was perhaps a decade older than she, but with his more casual attitude he actually seemed younger. "Sure, sure. I wasn't doing much. Just getting my first sleep in twenty hours."
"God, you complain."
He pulled out his field phone and popped the faceplate open, then tilted the device to read the screen in the dim light spilling in past the tarpaulin's edge. "It's your dad. Calling in the fourth truck."
"Ahead of time. That's good."
The third member of their post offered up a concerned whine. Kyla didn't break discipline; she kept her attention focused on the scope, which was trained through a break in the buildings ahead on a stretch of what had once been U.S. 101. But she did reach a hand back to scratch the whiner behind the ears. This was Ginger, eighty pounds of reddish-yellow Siberian Husky or Alaskan sled dog and who-knows-what, and she was a bit more anxious than Kyla's other dog, Ripper. Ripper, lying sideways across the backs of Kyla's knees, was 120 pounds of deep-chested, flat-faced guard dog. Kyla's mother, once a veterinarian, said she thought he was mostly bullmastiff; but his coloration was evidence that he was not purebred. Ripper, seeing Ginger getting attention, wagged his short tail, making a thumping, rattling noise against the gravel of the roof.
"How long till dinner?" Mark asked.
Kyla restrained a sigh. Mark was just baiting her. "Why don't you go out there and see if you can find an open restaurant?"
"Oh, good one. Of course, I might find a can of thirty-year-old, not-too-radioactive corned beef hash--"
There was something in the view afforded by her scope, something moving in the distance up the highway, and Kyla stiffened. "Hold it. Contact."
All business, Mark rolled over onto his stomach and put his eyes to the sighting gear set up beside Kyla's bipod-mounted rifle. "I don't see it."
"I think it dipped down into a depression in the road."
Then it was there again, barely visible, a tiny dot moving like a car. Toward them.
"Transmit 'Hell-Hounds Post One, contact, unknown, stand by,'" Kyla said. "And tell Daniel Įvila he was right again."
"He'll know."
HH-2, flag, ??, stdby.
John Connor read the message and swore silently. It was almost always too much to ask that any operation run without incident, but he always hoped.
Transport 4, an ancient Army truck kept miraculously alive by the mechanics of Connor's Resistance movement, was backing up against the loading bay. The instant it came to rest, flush with the bay, its tailgate came down. Two men and a woman spilled out of the bed, and another woman out of the cab. In moments they deployed a long sheet that had once been a pair of recreational parachutes. Now tattered and unusable in their original role, they were painted as close as possible to a match with the gray of the parking lot, complete with occasional splashes of green to simulate weeds, and its handlers drew them up over the top of the truck. In the minutes it would take for the truck to be loaded, it would not be recognizable as a truck by the imaging satellites that still circled the Earth and fed their data to Skynet.
As the first of the dollies and pallet-jacks loaded with fabrication equipment and propelled by tired-looking but energetic Resistance fighters reached the rear of the truck, Kate rejoined her husband. She had her field phone in hand and looked worried--worried to the point of misery. "That's Kyla, isn't it?"
John nodded, waiting for the screen to update. "If this is anything but a false alarm, we might get out of here with the fourth truck, but we're not going to get the fifth load."
"We won't even get the fourth truck out if we don't use the Hell-Hounds for diversion."
"I know." John didn't want to look at his wife at that moment.
If John Connor was the informal equivalent of the U.S. president, his Secret Service was Company A--the only company--of the Resistance 1st Security Regiment, the tiny branch of the armed forces devoted to Connor's personal security. Company A was further broken down into several squadrons, each of which was used to ensure Connor's safety or to undertake special missions that required an eclectic range of skills and nontraditional planning methods.
Though technically a branch of the military, the 1st Security Regiment tended to operate outside military procedure. Members were not addressed by military rank unless outsiders were present--it was enough to know who was in charge of the squad. Beyond that, everyone within the squad was equal.
Kyla Connor, John and Kate's youngest child, was the junior member of Company A, Squad 3, the unit nicknamed the Hell-Hounds. And now, to get away with a truckload of antique machinery meant putting her at risk. Every time this sort of thing happened, John wondered if he would lose a child, and wondered if Kate would come to hate him because he had ordered it.
The screen changed:
HH-2, T800 Blondie, incoming.
That settled it. The contact Kyla had seen was a Terminator, one wearing a known set of facial features--dull-looking, approximately Scandinavian in appearance, muscular as a twentieth-century weight lifter. It was nicknamed Blondie.
"So they haven't scrapped all the T-800s after all," Kate breathed.
"I figured they hadn't," John said. "Skynet's probably retiring them as they get harder to maintain, stripping their usable machinery rather than building new, dumping only those that aren't cost-efficient." He began keying in a new command.
Kate read what he was typing. "Dammit."
&...
August 2029
San Rafael, California
Population 0
It wasn't exactly a jungle, but in the decades since Judgment Day, trees had forced their way up through street pavement and sidewalk concrete; grasses and weeds had overrun lawns and medians. Now, where on a normal afternoon traffic sounds would have once drowned out every other noise, John Connor could hear only the summery rise and fall of insects calling to one another. That, and the occasional bang or clank or curse from the crew working behind him.
He stood at the open loading door, looking out into the overgrown parking lot. There were still some cars, here, left behind when the world went to hell decades ago, but they shared the lot with aggressive waist-high weeds and, wonder of wonders, a lemon tree that had taken root at the corner of the property.
John felt a bit like the parking lot. His wife still told him his face was handsome; that his upright posture, his camo-style uniform, all projected the image of a leader of men, grayed but unbending. But on days like this he could feel every injury that he had sustained in his fifty-plus years--every gunshot wound, every broken bone, every burn. Scars, new and old, marked his body like weeds marked the parking lot, and there were more every year.
Even so, he needed to lead the occasional mission in the field. He was the leader of the Resistance, and decades of experience made it clear to him that the men and women he commanded would lose faith in a commander who always sat safely in his hardened underground bunker at Home Plate compound, dispatching others to their deaths. To keep spirits up, to keep himself from becoming some sort of distant, unattainable figure who never met and therefore could never inspire the troops elsewhere, he had to expose himself to danger a few times each year.
He couldn't complain. There were men and women in his forces--including his own children--who exposed themselves to danger several times a month. There were some who almost never had the opportunity to relax, to feel safe.
"Hey." The voice was female. He glanced over his shoulder at the speaker.
She stood a few feet behind him, just beside the angled column of light spilling in through the loading door, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust so he could make out her features. She was of average height and build, but he didn't find her in the least average. Her nose was just a little too broad to be considered elegant; but that, her round face, and her mouth--made for smiling--added up to a combination that was impossibly attractive. Her eyes were dark brown, her hair graying from the same color. She wore a camo uniform like his, though she'd set aside the belt with its holsters and pouches.
He modulated his tone to that of an office lothario. "Hey, yourself," he said. "Are you new?"
She grinned, taking on the cuteness of a teenager. "First day here."
"What are you doing after work?"
"I was thinking about a long moonlit drive with a bunch of sweaty freedom fighters."
He offered her a mock shudder. "Well, I guess a girl's got to do what makes her happy." He dropped the act. "How's it going back there?"
"They'll be ready for the fourth truck in about two minutes. They wanted me to tell you to send out the call."
"Will do."
She turned away, toward the dark interior of the loading dock. He reached out and caught her by the shoulder, dragging her back to him. Off-balance, she fell into his grasp, simultaneously grinning and scowling up at him. "What?"
"Kate, you know the price for approaching this checkpoint."
She leaned up to kiss him. "There. Does everyone who passes this way have to do this? Earl? Warthog? Crazy Pete?"
"I dunno. It's a brand-new policy."
Laughing, she shrugged free of him and headed back into the manufacturing facility.
John stared after his wife for a moment, savoring the bare minute of privacy they'd shared, perhaps the only minute they'd have this day. Then, reluctantly, he turned his mind back to business.
The building they were pillaging, a sprawling, nearly windowless single-story edifice larger than a football field, had once been decorated with a sign that read, EOSPHOR TECHNOLOGIES. Before Judgment Day, it had been a circuit board manufacturing concern, a subcontractor that built boards for companies that sold munitions components directly to the government. The sign had fallen, possibly on Judgment Day, possibly many years later. For whatever reason, the interior of the building had survived unpillaged for decades, and one of Connor's scouts had discovered it a few weeks ago. Two days ago, Connor's advance team had arrived and begun preparing selected pieces of equipment for transportation.
They couldn't take everything. A rough estimate of the amount of equipment here suggested that it would take a convoy of forty trucks or more to move every item of machinery, all surviving chemicals, all fabrication supplies. He had five trucks, a massive and vulnerable convoy by the standards of the Skynet-controlled world. So they had to be selective.
The equipment his technical team was dismantling and preparing for transportation included computers that his programming adviser Įvila had said still worked, still contained diagrams for hundreds of varieties of circuit boards. There was a room-size plotter that could transcribe those circuit board plans onto sheets of silver-coated Mylar at photographic levels of reproduction, for use in exposing circuitry images onto copper-clad fiberglass laminates. There were photographic exposure units, some merely oversize and ungainly, some large enough nearly to fill the back of a two-and-a-half-ton truck. There were rugged, hardy screen printers for use in silkscreen processes, usable both for circuit board manufacturing and more mundane tasks such as cloth decoration. Last of the primary haul, but certainly not least in size, were laminate presses that turned individual layers of laminates into multilayer circuit boards.
Less crucial to circuit board fabrication but still useful to the Resistance were control computers for sophisticated drill processes, laboratory equipment, tools, components for setting up partitions and metal cage walls, and parts scavenged from dozens of machines.
The booty from this haul, augmented by equipment that John's technicians would assemble on site, would allow the Resistance to set up two entire circuit board fabrication lines. That meant two sites that could produce radios, targeting systems, even computers someday. The lines would be much slower, much less efficient than those operating before Judgment Day, but they'd be a tiny edge in the favor of humanity, a fraction-of-a-percentage improvement in mankind's chances for survival. The Human Resistance had other circuit board fabrication sites operating, but every additional one they set up increased their available resources.
And with luck, the Eosphor Technologies building would go unnoticed by Skynet even after their departure. A few months from now, perhaps a year, they might be able to return and pick up even more equipment.
He pulled his field phone from its belt pouch. Shaped much like one of the walkie-talkies he'd known from his youth, it seemed cruder, more unfinished than the commercial products of the twentieth century. Its surfaces were black-painted metal instead of molded plastic. A cable ran up from a jack atop the device to the headset John wore and the microphone on his lapel.
With his thumb, he popped open the protective faceplate, revealing a small LCD screen and an alphanumeric keypad. He keyed in the following commands:
TRANS STARLING ALL
AC 4T
OFF
This operation was code-named Starling, a random word generated by a computer program back at his base of operations. The first command had instructed the simple microprocessor in the device to send the rest of the message only to the participants in the operation. "Ac 4T" was shorthand for "activate fourth transport." The entire transmission would be encrypted when transmitted.
It would have been much easier to have depressed the speaker button on the faceplate, or to have keyed the microphone attached to his lapel, and spoken the appropriate words. But a voice transmission took much more time to transmit than his five-character code, was easier to detect and decode, and was less likely to be mistaken for an atmospheric anomaly. A voice transmission would, in short, drastically increase their odds of getting someone killed.
And there just weren't enough people left alive for him to let himself be careless that way.
* * *
Half a mile to the south, four figures huddled under a tarpaulin on a rooftop. They were situated at the edge of the roof where some long-ago calamity had knocked away a portion of the waist-high protective wall. The hole gave them an unobstructed view of the city's ruins southward.
Kyla Connor, the woman with her eye to the sniper rifle's high-powered scope, was young, not yet quite out of her teens. Her dark brown hair, a practical shoulder length, was tucked up under her billed cap. Her features were even and flawless; at rest, as they were now, they were unmemorable, but when lit by one of her rare smiles, they were transformed into earthy beauty. She wore the same camouflage uniform as most of the other participants in Operation Starling.
Her field phone beeped softly, but she didn't stir. "Mark, get that, would you?" she whispered.
Mark Herrera, the man lying on his back beside her, yawned and stretched. He was darker than the woman, Latino, with everyday good looks that seemed made to wear their current expression, an amused and self-satisfied smile. He was perhaps a decade older than she, but with his more casual attitude he actually seemed younger. "Sure, sure. I wasn't doing much. Just getting my first sleep in twenty hours."
"God, you complain."
He pulled out his field phone and popped the faceplate open, then tilted the device to read the screen in the dim light spilling in past the tarpaulin's edge. "It's your dad. Calling in the fourth truck."
"Ahead of time. That's good."
The third member of their post offered up a concerned whine. Kyla didn't break discipline; she kept her attention focused on the scope, which was trained through a break in the buildings ahead on a stretch of what had once been U.S. 101. But she did reach a hand back to scratch the whiner behind the ears. This was Ginger, eighty pounds of reddish-yellow Siberian Husky or Alaskan sled dog and who-knows-what, and she was a bit more anxious than Kyla's other dog, Ripper. Ripper, lying sideways across the backs of Kyla's knees, was 120 pounds of deep-chested, flat-faced guard dog. Kyla's mother, once a veterinarian, said she thought he was mostly bullmastiff; but his coloration was evidence that he was not purebred. Ripper, seeing Ginger getting attention, wagged his short tail, making a thumping, rattling noise against the gravel of the roof.
"How long till dinner?" Mark asked.
Kyla restrained a sigh. Mark was just baiting her. "Why don't you go out there and see if you can find an open restaurant?"
"Oh, good one. Of course, I might find a can of thirty-year-old, not-too-radioactive corned beef hash--"
There was something in the view afforded by her scope, something moving in the distance up the highway, and Kyla stiffened. "Hold it. Contact."
All business, Mark rolled over onto his stomach and put his eyes to the sighting gear set up beside Kyla's bipod-mounted rifle. "I don't see it."
"I think it dipped down into a depression in the road."
Then it was there again, barely visible, a tiny dot moving like a car. Toward them.
"Transmit 'Hell-Hounds Post One, contact, unknown, stand by,'" Kyla said. "And tell Daniel Įvila he was right again."
"He'll know."
HH-2, flag, ??, stdby.
John Connor read the message and swore silently. It was almost always too much to ask that any operation run without incident, but he always hoped.
Transport 4, an ancient Army truck kept miraculously alive by the mechanics of Connor's Resistance movement, was backing up against the loading bay. The instant it came to rest, flush with the bay, its tailgate came down. Two men and a woman spilled out of the bed, and another woman out of the cab. In moments they deployed a long sheet that had once been a pair of recreational parachutes. Now tattered and unusable in their original role, they were painted as close as possible to a match with the gray of the parking lot, complete with occasional splashes of green to simulate weeds, and its handlers drew them up over the top of the truck. In the minutes it would take for the truck to be loaded, it would not be recognizable as a truck by the imaging satellites that still circled the Earth and fed their data to Skynet.
As the first of the dollies and pallet-jacks loaded with fabrication equipment and propelled by tired-looking but energetic Resistance fighters reached the rear of the truck, Kate rejoined her husband. She had her field phone in hand and looked worried--worried to the point of misery. "That's Kyla, isn't it?"
John nodded, waiting for the screen to update. "If this is anything but a false alarm, we might get out of here with the fourth truck, but we're not going to get the fifth load."
"We won't even get the fourth truck out if we don't use the Hell-Hounds for diversion."
"I know." John didn't want to look at his wife at that moment.
If John Connor was the informal equivalent of the U.S. president, his Secret Service was Company A--the only company--of the Resistance 1st Security Regiment, the tiny branch of the armed forces devoted to Connor's personal security. Company A was further broken down into several squadrons, each of which was used to ensure Connor's safety or to undertake special missions that required an eclectic range of skills and nontraditional planning methods.
Though technically a branch of the military, the 1st Security Regiment tended to operate outside military procedure. Members were not addressed by military rank unless outsiders were present--it was enough to know who was in charge of the squad. Beyond that, everyone within the squad was equal.
Kyla Connor, John and Kate's youngest child, was the junior member of Company A, Squad 3, the unit nicknamed the Hell-Hounds. And now, to get away with a truckload of antique machinery meant putting her at risk. Every time this sort of thing happened, John wondered if he would lose a child, and wondered if Kate would come to hate him because he had ordered it.
The screen changed:
HH-2, T800 Blondie, incoming.
That settled it. The contact Kyla had seen was a Terminator, one wearing a known set of facial features--dull-looking, approximately Scandinavian in appearance, muscular as a twentieth-century weight lifter. It was nicknamed Blondie.
"So they haven't scrapped all the T-800s after all," Kate breathed.
"I figured they hadn't," John said. "Skynet's probably retiring them as they get harder to maintain, stripping their usable machinery rather than building new, dumping only those that aren't cost-efficient." He began keying in a new command.
Kate read what he was typing. "Dammit."
&...
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherTor Books
- Publication date2004
- ISBN 10 0765349108
- ISBN 13 9780765349101
- BindingPaperback
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Tor Books
(2004)
ISBN 10: 0765349108
ISBN 13: 9780765349101
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Mass Market Paperback
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Book Description Mass Market Paperback. Condition: New. Brand New!. Seller Inventory # VIB0765349108
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