Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire (2 page)

Ten minutes later he was on the move again, picking his way through the growing darkness, hoping to find someplace hidden or at least a little more defensible where he could spend the night. The body he left covered by a thin layer of dirt, stones, and leaves.

Maybe the saying was right. But the dead man back there wasn’t one of theirs.

Not anymore.

The T-600 was in bad shape.

Really
bad shape. One leg was completely gone, the other had been twisted and then mashed flat, and the minigun still gripped in its hand was long since empty and useless. Its eyes still glowed their malevolent red, but there was nothing to speak of behind the glow, not since the Skynet Central command structure that had once controlled it had been reduced to slag. The T-600 was more pitiful now than actually dangerous.

Barnes shot it anyway.

He watched with grim satisfaction as the light in the machine’s eyes faded to darkness.

“For my brother,” he muttered.

Not that the T-600 cared. Or would have even if it had been functional.

We bury our dead
, the old defiant Resistance claim ran accusingly through Barnes’s mind.
We bury our dead.

There was a burst of gunfire to his left, and Barnes looked up from the empty Terminator eyes. Kyle Reese was over there, and even at this distance Barnes could see the grim set to the kid’s jaw as he blew away another of the crippled Terminators. As Barnes watched, Reese stepped over to another twitching machine and fired a half-dozen rounds into it.

Shaking his head, Barnes swung the barrel of his SIG 542 assault rifle up onto his shoulder. Glancing around at the rest of the clean-up team scattered across the half-slagged debris field, he headed toward Reese.

The kid had just unloaded another third of a magazine when Barnes reached him.

“Hey! Reese!” he called.

Reese paused in his work. “Yes?”

Barnes gestured down at the twisted mass of metal at the kid’s feet.

“You think that’s the one who got Connor?” he asked.

“What?”

“Or that one?” Barnes asked, pointing back at the last Terminator Reese had blown apart. “Or that one over there?”

“No, of course not,” Reese said, a wave of anger and pain flickering across his face.

“Then stop taking this personally,” Barnes said firmly. “Stop taking
them
personally. They’re machines, nothing more. Skynet’s your enemy the way a thunderstorm or earthquake is your enemy.
It
isn’t taking this personally. You can’t, either.”

For a moment Reese just glared up at him. Then, reluctantly, he lowered his eyes.

“I know,” he said.

“Then act like it,” Barnes growled. He pointed again at the Terminator at Reese’s feet. “One or two rounds into the skull is all you need. More than that and you’re just wasting ammo.”

Reese nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Barnes said, feeling a small tugging at his heart as he gazed at the kid’s solemn face. How many times, he wondered, had he had to hear that same speech from Connor? Enough times, obviously, that he now had the whole thing memorized.

Distantly, he wondered how many times his brother Caleb had had to hear it.

“Just go easy,” he told Reese. “You’ll get the hang of it.” He pointed to the gun in the kid’s hands. “Just remember that if it takes three or four rounds to do the job, go ahead and spend those three or four rounds. Saving ammo is just as stupid as wasting it if saving it gets someone killed. Especially if that someone is you.”

For a second he saw something else flick across Reese’s face, and waited for the obvious retort: that maybe Reese’s own life wasn’t worth saving anymore. That maybe it would be better for everyone if he
did
just let himself get killed. God knew Barnes felt that way himself a couple of times a month.

But to his surprise the kid didn’t go that direction.

“Okay,” he said instead. “Sorry. This whole thing is still...” He trailed off.

“Kind of new,” Barnes finished for him, impressed in spite of himself. Maybe Reese was actually smart enough not to base his ideas and future plans on how his emotions were churning at the moment. Barnes had known plenty of people who’d never learned that lesson.

Or maybe it was just that the kid didn’t have the guts to say something that self-pitying to someone who’d lived through more of Skynet’s indifferent savagery than he had.

“But you’ve got lots of good teachers here,” Barnes went on, waving around at the other men and women moving across the field and blowing away damaged Terminators. “Listen and learn.”

Behind them a high-pitched whistle sounded, the noise cutting cleanly through the scattered gunfire. Barnes turned to see a Chinook transport chopper settling to the ground.

“Shift change,” he grumbled to Reese, promising himself once again that he was going to find whoever had come up with this stupid whistle code and kick his butt. “Come on—a little food and sleep and you’ll feel better.”

“Okay,” the kid said, his voice neutral.

Barnes grimaced as he headed toward the chopper and the squad spreading out from it, come to continue the clean-up work. That last had been a lie, and he and Reese both knew it. All the food and sleep in the world wouldn’t ease the kid’s pain. Not yet. Only time would soften the loss of his friend Marcus Wright, and his memories of how that hybrid Terminator had risked his life for Reese and his young friend Star, and then had sacrificed himself to save John Connor.

Just as only time would help Barnes’s own memories of his brother. The memories of Caleb’s last encouraging smile as he climbed aboard the chopper with Connor and the others for that ill-fated mission to Skynet’s big desert lab.

But maybe there was a way to help that process along a little.

The main camp was a fifteen-minute chopper ride away. Barnes waited until his team had turned over their heavy weapons to the armorers for inspection and cleaning, then sent them over to the mess tent for a meal.

And once they were settled, he headed to the medical recovery tent to talk to John Connor.

“Barnes,” Connor said in greeting when Barnes was finally allowed through by the door guards and entered the intensive-care recovery room. As usual, Connor’s wife Kate was sitting at his side, a clipboard full of reports and logistics requests propped up on the edge of the bed between them. “How’s the clean-up going?”

“It’s going okay,” Barnes said, wincing a little as he eyed the bewildering collection of tubes and monitor wires sprouting from Connor’s arms and chest. Barnes had seen plenty of people die, most of them violently, but there was something about medical stuff that still made him a little squeamish. Probably the feeling that all patients who looked like this were dying by degrees, the way it had happened to his and Caleb’s own mother.

“Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Kate soothed.

Guiltily, angrily, Barnes wrenched his attention away from the tubes and bottles. He’d sort of gotten used to Connor reading his mind that way, but he hated it when Kate did, too.

“Yeah,” he said. “I have a request.”

Connor nodded. “Go ahead.”

“You told me that Caleb was on the surface when Skynet blew its research lab,” Barnes said. “That means he wasn’t underground with the others.” He braced himself. “I want to go and bury him.”

Kate stirred but didn’t speak. “Are you sure?” Connor asked. “It’s been a couple of weeks, you know.”

“It’s a desert,” Barnes growled. “He’ll still be... You know that thing Kowlowski used to say? That Skynet leaves its fallen lying on the streets?”

“But that we bury ours,” Connor finished, a flicker of something crossing his face. Maybe he was thinking about Marcus Wright, too.

“The clean-up’s going fine,” Barnes said. “It looks like the outer sentry line were the only Terminators that survived the blast, and most of them are pretty smashed. You’ve got more than enough people to clear them out—”

“All right,” Connor said. “You can go.”

Barnes stopped, the other four points he’d been planning to make fading away unsaid. He hadn’t expected talking Connor into this would be that easy.

“You’ll need a pilot,” Connor continued. “I’ll have Blair Williams check out a helicopter for the two of you.”

A knife seemed to twist in Barnes’s gut.
Williams?

“Can I have someone else instead?” he asked.

Connor shook his head. “You two have been avoiding each other ever since San Francisco,” he said. “It’s time you cleared the air.”

Barnes clenched his teeth.

“All due respect, this isn’t the right time to do that,” he said.

“Let me put it another way,” Connor said. “You go with Williams, or you don’t go at all.”

If the man hadn’t been hooked up to a hundred tubes and wires, Barnes reflected blackly, he would have considered hitting him. Not that he actually
would
have hit him, but he would definitely have considered it. As it was, he couldn’t even have that minor satisfaction.

We bury our dead
.

There was no point in stalling. Connor had him, and they both knew it.

“Fine,” he bit out. “
If
she’s willing. Otherwise, I get someone else.”

“She will be,” Connor promised. “I’ll make sure of that. Go eat and then get some sleep. You can leave in the morning.”

Barnes nodded, not trusting himself to say anything else, and stomped out of the room.

He should have known it wouldn’t be
that
easy.

The eight-point buck was nibbling on the ends of some tree branches when it suddenly froze.

Hope Preston felt her cheek twitch. So the animal had heard them. She’d been afraid it would. Hope herself was more than capable of silent stalking, but this was the first time out for Hope’s new hunting partner Susan Valentine, and the older woman simply wasn’t experienced at moving through the twigs and dead leaves that matted the forest floor beneath their feet.

But it was too late now. The deer had been alerted to their presence. One more suspicious sound or movement and it would be out of here, escaping from the clearing into the deeply forested mountain slopes behind it.

Keeping her head motionless, Hope looked at Susan out the corner of her eye. There was an intent, grimly earnest expression on the woman’s face, and Hope had no doubt she was going to try her hardest.

But willpower alone wasn’t enough to send an arrow to its target. Susan’s bow was less than rock-steady in her left hand, and the taut bowstring was wavering visibly as she held the fletching close beside her right cheek. Already she’d held position longer than should have been necessary to aim, and there was no indication even now that she was preparing to release.

It wasn’t hard to guess why. That wasn’t a simple softwood target out there, like the ones Hope had spent all those hours training Susan to shoot at. It was a living, feeling creature, something that would gush blood, go limp, and die. Some people simply couldn’t handle that.

Hope, born and bred out here in the mountains, had a different take on the ethics of the situation. That buck out there was dinner. For the whole town.

And she was
not
going to let it get away.

Her own arrow was already nocked into her bowstring. Measuring the distance with her eyes, keeping her arrow pointed at the ground in front of her, she drew back the string as far as she could without being obvious about it. If Susan was going to stay in Baker’s Hollow, she was going to have to learn how to do this. Hope could take the shot, and she would if she had to. But she would rather give Susan every reasonable chance to do it herself.

Maybe Susan sensed that. Maybe she’d come to the same conclusion about this being her make-or-break moment. A small whimper escaped her lips, and with an odd sort of abruptness she released her arrow. It flashed between the small branches of their blind and buried itself in the animal’s side.

Too far back. The buck jerked with the impact, but instead of falling dead it twisted around and leaped for the pathway that led out of the clearing.

It was crouching into its second leap when Hope’s arrow drove into its side, dropping it with a thud onto the ground.

Susan’s bow arm sagged. “Sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” Hope replied, lowering her own bow and pulling out her whistle. “Watch your ears,” she warned, and gave her personal signal: one long, four short. “Come on—let’s make sure it’s dead.” She stepped out from behind the bushes and headed across the clearing. With only a little hesitation, Susan followed.

The buck was indeed dead.

“Good shooting,” Hope said, drawing her knife and starting to dig out the arrows.

“You’re very kind,” Susan said, an edge of weary bitterness in her voice. “But we both know better. I missed, pure and simple.”

“It’s not easy to hit the heart,” Hope responded diplomatically. “Especially your first time out.”

Susan exhaled a quiet, shuddering sigh.

“This is my last chance, Hope,” she said. “I can’t sew, I can’t tan, I can’t cook worth anything. I barely know which end of a hammer is which. If I can’t learn to hunt, there’s nothing left.”

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Hope soothed her, barely noticing the oddness of a fifteen-year-old mountain girl comforting a forty-year-old former world-class scientist. Maybe because it wasn’t girl to scientist anymore, or even teacher to student. Maybe because it was now friend to friend. “Or else you’ll find something else you’re good at,” she added. “Maybe something you don’t even know about yet.”

Susan sighed. “I just hope I can find this mystery talent before your father throws me out of town.”

“He won’t do that,” Hope said firmly.

But that was a lie, and she was pretty sure Susan knew it too. Hope’s father Daniel was the mayor of the small, tight-knit community that had built up in Baker’s Hollow through the dark years following Judgment Day. From the very beginning one of his jobs had been to make sure that everyone who ate their food pulled their weight.