T2 - 01 - The New John Connor Chronicles - Dark Futures (37 page)

As the pseudo-man forced its way after them, Anton fired again, and it backed off under the heat. The doors shut at last, and John swiped Monk's keycard against a wall-mounted security unit. He stabbed the button for the twelfth floor, then reloaded as the elevator moved.

"Everyone here okay?" Danny said. John nodded. They had two of the rapid-response security guards, plus Jade. Anton, Sarah, John, and Dr. Monk.

"I'll live," Anton said.

No one replied except the Asian guard. "What is that thing?" At the same time, John sensed that the Specialists were planning silently among themselves, using their throat mikes.

"It's from the future," Monk said, her voice full of venom. "One of our mind children."

"What?"

"Forget it, Tony. I'll explain later."

"You'd better believe her," John said.

Both guards nodded. "I believe it from Dr. Monk," said Tony.

Monk gave a bitter smile, then rolled her eyes. "Thanks."

"If anyone else said it—"

"-you'd say they were crazy," Sarah finished for him. "Forget about what it is—we've got to find a way to destroy it. It wants to kill us all. Everyone, everywhere."

"Give me the keycard," Anton said to John.

"Why?"

"
Please
," Jade said. "Anton knows what he's doing."

He shrugged. "You guys keep saying that." Still, he passed it over-just as they reached the twelfth floor.

The doors opened. Immediately, the pseudo-woman and -dog rushed at them from the lobby. Anton caught the dog in mid-leap with the laser beam, and John blasted the pseudo-woman right in the head, splashing it open and knocking it back six feet.

Jade got both hands free, strapping her grenade launcher on her shoulder, and tossed the dog out of there. The skin of her hands sizzled where she touched its heated surface, but she showed no pain. "Where?" she said to the security guards, as she stepped out.

Tony said, "I don't know that detail. It's not my job." But the other guy said, "I know this floor." He pointed "That way."

Anton fired at the pseudo-woman. And kept firing. The laser was effective, but it couldn't finish the Terminator components. They needed something more.

"You've got to help us, Rosanna," John said. "We need to destroy everything."

"Leave me alone. I despise you all."

"If you're still on its side, what are you doing on our team?" Sarah said.

"I'm not on anybody's team. I don't even know who I am anymore. My mind's not my own—I realize that. Just because I hate you doesn't mean I have to like Skynet. It wants to kill me, too."

Danny ran for the nearest set of doors, pulling at them with all his strength and breaking the lock. Jade powered past him, not worrying about lights this time. She ran through the area like a cyclone, faster than John could follow in the near-darkness. Anton was in the rear, still firing with the laser rifle. The pseudo-woman and dog merged to form the clawed and fanged werecat they'd fought at Monk's house. As Anton played the beam over it, it shot out an arm, twenty feet long, with claws like scimitars, lashing at the laser rifle. A powerful blow sent Anton staggering, and he fell to his knees, but kept a grip on the weapon.

A dent appeared in a pair of elevator doors-not the one they'd used. The dent expanded, and the doors wrenched open.

The pseudo-man stepped out.

Charles Layton arrived at the scene in a hire car. It was chaos. Everywhere were men, and some women, in uniforms. Military helicopters flew above. There were spotlights and endless rows of vehicles. None of it looked effective.

A uniformed officer met him. "What's going on?" Lay-ton said. Humans really were despicable-an incompetent, vicious, good-for-nothing lot. He'd always seen it that way, now it was very clear. What a pity he'd been born as one.

"We're tracing their movements, sir. There's activity on the twelfth floor-''

The nanoprocessor! The T-XA Terminator would know what to do. How fortunate they were to have met it!

"Don't worry about that," he said quietly. "It'll take care of itself."

John groped near the door for a light switch as Danny passed his bag to Sarah. Anton fired the laser rifle from one knee, while Danny stood against the half-open door, leveled his grenade launcher, and fired into the pseudo-man. John crouched and covered his ears. The 40mm. grenade penetrated, and the Terminator splashed out, going amoeba-shaped. It made strange, muffled noises as it tried to reform.

John found the lights, then reloaded the 12-gauge. Monk pointed to a room in one of the floor's corners, thirty yards down the corridor. It was locked with a metal door. "There,
dammit
. That's the AI
Operations
Center
. Tony will tell you if I don't. Now you can go to hell, and Skynet with you. I don't care what happens. I never asked for this." A look of naked malice crossed her face. "From now on, I do whatever I like."

She broke away from them and ran into the lobby. There, she ran about in confusion, avoiding the T-XA, Anton, and the burning, stabbing laser light.

"She'll get over it," John said. "I guess she's upset." But it was anyone's guess what shape Monk would be in when this was all over. Meanwhile, he saw that the pseudo-man was still failing to reform. "What's wrong with it?"

"Selena," Danny said.

"Her
nanoware
?"

"Yes. It's trying to shut the T-XA down."

Without expression, Jade popped an impact grenade into the M-203 launcher on her rifle. She found an angle to aim at the AI room's steel door, taking cover as the grenade exploded with a huge
boom!
, shaking the floor beneath their feet.

"Please give us your keycards," Jade said to the guards. "We may need them. Then get out. Hide somewhere until it's safe to run." That made sense. The way these buildings worked, you could always get to the ground floor, card or no card. Anyone could exit-getting entry was the hard part. They handed over their cards, no longer even arguing, then ran down the corridor past the AI room, and round the corner, looking for another exit.

Sarah lugged the explosives to the AI Center as Danny said, "All right, team, it's
showtime
!"

Outside in the lobby, Anton still fought the T-
XA's
werecat component. He'd huddled into a corner when the grenade exploded, but he kept the werecat at a distance with the laser rifle's stabbing, burning light.

Suddenly, the werecat liquefied. Then there were two white pseudo-dogs in its place, bigger than Dobermans, with mouthfuls of three-inch metal teeth. One leapt for Anton, who kept his nerve and fired again, straight down its throat, as he stood and dodged past. He followed Monk into one of the elevators, just as its doors shut.

As Danny slammed shut the glass door between the offices and the lobby, the other dog struck it. The glass cracked, but didn't break. The pseudo-man managed to liquefy, going featureless, but still not reforming.

From the AI room came the sound of rifle fire. Go Mom, John thought. She'd be shooting up anything vulnerable to bullets.

The pseudo-dogs joined, morphed, and slithered like a mercury pancake into the office area, under the half-inch gap between the door and the carpet. John blasted at it with the 12-gauge, trying to stop it morphing any further. Danny and Jade joined in, firing bursts with their rifles. Outside, the pseudo-man had finally reformed, but it liquefied again and dove into the elevator shaft it had come from, probably following Anton and Monk.

They fought a losing battle against the pseudo-dogs. In a minute, they'd reformed, against all the bullets and shot being thrown at them. John, Danny, and Jade backed away, waiting for the dogs to leap, still firing, reloading, trying to keep them at a distance as long as possible, to give Sarah time. They worked their way down the corridor, keeping their faces to the dogs, maintaining the continual deafening fire, desperate for every second they could garner. Someone was always firing, while someone else reloaded.

Finally, John ran out of shot.

"Go and help Sarah!" Danny said to him.

"All right." He ran to the AI Center, which was not all that impressive-about fifteen feet square, with an
aircon
outlet in the ceiling, metal shelves full of cardboard cartons and electronic components. A long bench in the center was covered by monitors and black boxes, with a dozen ergonomic office chairs placed neatly around it. The room had tiny vertical slits for windows, and the helicopters patrolled outside, their spotlights intermittently shining in.

While they'd been fighting the pseudo-dogs, Sarah had trashed this place, shooting out the equipment, and she'd set up a radio-controlled detonator attached to blocks of plastic explosive, enough to wipe out a corner of this floor.

"We've
gotta
get out!" John said.

"All right. Give me a minute." She finished taping a block of explosive in place. This was almost a reprise of their first raid on Cyberdyne, back in '94. But this time, they had no chance to be thorough. It was just a matter of destroying what they could and hoping to give Cyberdyne a setback. If the company had back-ups of Monk's work, the struggle would have to go on.

"Mom, we don't have a minute."

"All right. That'll have to do." She passed him the detonator switch. "Take this," she said, then snatched up her rifle from the bench.

They ran out into the corridor as Jade fought with one of the pseudo-dogs, skin and flesh getting ripped from her arms. Danny still fired at the other dog, but it had backed him into a corner. The Specialists had the worst of it. In another few seconds, it would be over for them. With his free hand, John used his handgun to shoot "Danny's" dog. Sarah opened up on the other one with her rifle, not seeming to care if she hit Jade. Jade took some bullets, but the dog took more, breaking into crater wounds, and she tore away from it.

John and Sarah ran straight through the fighting, getting the nearest door open. Danny and Jade joined them, while the dogs melted together to form the liquid-metal werecat, which caught the door as it closed.

They headed to the nearest fire door, which was not locked from this direction, and ran down two flights of stairs before John detonated the explosives, back in the AI Center. The building rocked with a huge, satisfying ka~ boom!, but they never stopped running.

Above them, the werecat had entered the fire escape, and it headed toward them with bullet speed, leaping whole flights of stairs at a time. Danny suddenly pushed Sarah, then John, down a flight, and they landed, bruised and hurt—

----just as Jade loaded her grenade launcher.

Danny covered his ears and turned his body, as she fired an impact grenade into the werecat. As he turned back to see what happened, it landed on the stair railing and fell the remaining eight floors. The Specialists look unhurt, or almost so.

"That won't stop it for long," Jade said.

Danny got the nearest fire door open, struggling to break the lock to get back in. He was clearly getting weaker. Once more, they followed him back into the lobby.

"We need to get to the basement," he said. "That's where Anton's gone." He pressed the button for an elevator, which soon arrived. They swiped a keycard and headed down to the level marked "B."

They stepped out into an extraordinary area, a concrete room twenty feet high, and as long and wide as a football field. It was full of metal benches, arrays of monitors and other electronic equipment. John took it all in.

Anton. Dr. Monk. The pseudo-man.

Anton crawled in the corner formed by the wall and a bench of computer equipment His head hung down, he seemed exhausted beyond endurance. He was bleeding from many wounds, and his clothes were almost shredded. His M-16 and the laser rifle both lay on the floor in front of him. Evidently, he'd gotten a clear grenade shot at the pseudo-man, for it was backed against a wall on the other side, its head and upper body all squashed in. It tried desperately to reform: liquefying, then solidifying, turning inside out, then back again, never making much progress.

But none of that seemed extraordinary—not anymore. The extraordinary part was Rosanna Monk. She sat at a computer console, tapping away, seemingly unconcerned. Someone-Monk, presumably-had powered up the apparatus here, and the whole area vibrated from the work of subterranean engines. On one wall, four huge flatscreens showed different angles of the same futuristic scene: an enclosed, brilliantly lit space, a kind of vault. There was chunky, metal apparatus all round it, and a five-foot metal circle was recessed in the center of the floor. John couldn't make any sense of it, or what Monk was doing.

He watched the flatscreens carefully. In the center of the room was an opaque cubical block that reached almost to the ceiling. It was made of white ceramic bricks whose harsh lines were broken by a massive, round steel door in the nearest side. This hung open, mounted on huge hydraulic hinges. It looked like a blast door designed to deflect a nuclear explosion. Now it made sense. The screens depicted the inside of the cube. It was designed to contain enormous energies, and the screens were one way of observing them.