Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire (21 page)

“Thoughts?”

“I think we’re near the front of the tunnel,” Zac whispered.

“How do you know?” Kyle asked.

“Because those Terminators were going both directions,” Zac said. “One group coming up empty-handed, the other passing them with their loads.”

“Ah.” Kyle hadn’t detected the difference in direction himself. But Zac had shown several times already that he had the best hearing of the group.

“Sounds like they’re gone,” Zac went on. “Let me climb up and see if I can see anything.”

He started to step away. Callahan, still holding onto his sleeve, pulled him back.

“I’ll go,” he said firmly. “I’m a better climber, and that slope looks tricky.”

The slope was every bit as difficult as Callahan had anticipated, and even with Kyle and Zac standing on either side to brace his arms and legs there were times where he nearly slid back. But finally he was there. Carefully taking hold of the edge of the tunnel floor, he pulled himself up and peered through the opening.

He held the pose for about half a minute. Then, easing himself back onto the debris, he climbed back down.

“We’re at the front, all right,” he told them when they were huddled together again. “There’s a stack of eight bags along the wall that look like satchel charges.”

“They’re not right at the tunnel face?” Kyle asked.

“No, about three meters back,” Callahan said. “There’s still a bunch of debris right at the face, so I’m guessing they’ll still be lugging and hand digging for a while longer.”

“Where’s the light coming from?” Zac asked.

“There are a bunch of small holes in the ceiling,” Callahan said “The light’s pretty diffuse, so I’m guessing it’s sifting in through another layer of broken concrete.”

Kyle grimaced. He’d been hoping the light meant another big crack in the tunnel ceiling. They might have used an opening like that to get out, or at least to signal the rest of the Resistance people up there.

“So that’s a dead end,” he said.

“Don’t worry, we’ll figure out something,” Callahan said. “At least we’ll have some light if we can get up there.”

“How are we going to do that?” Zac asked.

“Not sure,” Callahan conceded. “The wall beside the gap is a single slab of reinforced concrete—you can see the rebar sticking out. There’s no way we’re going to move it.”

“What about the tunnel floor?” Kyle asked.

“Well, it’s not too thick, and I didn’t see any rebar,” Callahan said. “Probably used to be a roof or a wall that didn’t need to hold up a lot of weight.”

“A non-load-bearing wall,” Kyle supplied, remembering Orozco talking about things like that while they poked around some of the ruined buildings back in Los Angeles.

“Right,” Callahan said. “On the other hand, it’s getting stomped on by T-700s all day, so it can’t be
that
flimsy. It’s also a little crumbly at the edge, so we might be able to make the hole bigger.”

“Sounds good,” Zac said. “I’ll take first shift.”

“That’s okay,” Callahan said, digging into his pocket. “We can start with my knife. When we wear it down we’ll shift to Reese’s, then we’ll just have to use whatever else we can find.”

“Wait a second,” Kyle said suddenly. “This won’t work.”

“Sure it will,” Callahan assured him. “It’ll take awhile, but—”

“No, I mean we can’t do it,” Kyle said. “The Terminators will see the hole get bigger each time they go by.”

There was a brief silence.

“You’re right,” Callahan muttered. “Damn.”

“So what do we do?” Zac asked anxiously. “It’ll take forever to go back to the other hole.”

“No point in doing that anyway,” Callahan said heavily. “The Terminators are bound to still be watching the conduit. I suppose we could try backtracking and see if there’s an opening we missed.”

“There wasn’t anything,” Kyle asked, peering up. The underside of the tunnel floor was hard to see in the reflected light coming from the opening. But even so—

“Probably not,” Callahan agreed heavily. “But it’s all we’ve got.”

“Maybe not,” Kyle said, pointing at the ceiling. “Is that a crack up there?”

The others looked up.

“You mean that line angling across there?” Zac asked, his pointing finger tracing out the path.

“Looks like a crack to me,” Callahan agreed. “But if you think the Terminators will notice the gap getting bigger, they’ll
really
notice if a quarter of the path they’re walking on disappears.”

“Right, but only if we’re the ones who bring it down,” Kyle said. “What if we just deepen the crack enough so that the next batch of T-700s breaks through? Maybe Skynet will assume it had too much stress and gave way by itself.”

“Of course, if it
doesn’t
assume that, we’ll have a whole mess of Terminators down here hunting us,” Callahan pointed out. “But it’s worth a try.”

He looked upward again.

“You’re not going to be able to reach the crack from the slope. I guess that means you’ll be standing on our shoulders.”

“Hang on a second,” Kyle said, looking behind them. “I think I saw a door frame back there.”

“Yeah,” Zac said. “It was... there it is, over there.”

The frame was partially buried in concrete chips, but it took only a little effort for the three of them to dig it out. A minute after that, they had it in place beneath the ceiling crack, lying on its long side.

“Perfect,” Callahan said, testing its balance. “Wide enough to stand on, and all you two have to do is brace it to keep it from falling over. Okay, hold it steady.”

“Shouldn’t we wait until the Terminators have made their next round?” Zac suggested. “We don’t want you making scraping noises while they’re on their way in.”

“Right,” Callahan said reluctantly, sitting down beside the frame. “I just hope we can get this done before they blast through into the camp.”

“We will,” Kyle said firmly. “We have to.”

It took an hour for the people of Baker’s Hollow to gather the equipment Jik had asked for, and to then make the necessary modifications for what he had in mind. During that time Halverson’s runners brought in three reports from the men tailing the T-700 on the east bank of the river, which seemed to be tracing out a sentry line half a mile north of town that ran from the river to a couple of miles east.

The obvious inference was that the Terminator was guarding something. But neither Preston nor Halverson could think of anything up there that Skynet might be hiding, unless it thought Jik was still out there and was searching for him.

Finally, with the equipment prepped and their ambush positions chosen, they were ready.

Jik had already decided to lean the main, riskier attack. With Halverson and several of the others, he headed north to intercept the Terminator on their side of the river. Preston and the rest went to reinforce the guard at the ford, and to prepare for the moment when the other T-700 returned and tried to cross the river.

And as Jik and Halverson headed toward the spot they had chosen for their ambush, Jik found himself thinking about Barnes and Williams. Thinking, and wondering.

Mercenaries or paramilitary gang members he could understand. They might have spotted Baker’s Hollow and come in to scope out its resources for theft or barter. Con artists he could similarly understand, though how a pair of scammers could have gotten hold of a working helicopter he couldn’t guess. Still, in either scenario it would make sense for them to come in masquerading as Resistance fighters.

But in neither scenario was there any reason why they would be so stupid as to claim Jik was a fraud.

It made no sense. Even if Jik
had
been a fraud, why would they open themselves up to suspicion and the risk of serious consequences, consequences that had now in fact rained down on them? Why not keep quiet, pretend to be from a distant Resistance unit which had never had any direct contact with Jik, and try to get through the rest of their agenda before anyone figured out who they really were?

There was more depth to this thing than Jik had yet been able to sort out. But he
would
sort it out.

In the meantime, there were Terminators to be dealt with.

They reached the ambush point to find a man and woman waiting for them, the woman crouched beside a tree, the man pacing nervously back and forth.

“About time,” the latter said as Jik and the others came up. “This is the path Singer says it’s been walking.” He gestured, indicating a roughly east-west direction.

“But it doesn’t trace out exactly the same path each time,” Jik said, eyeing the tall grass that covered most of the ground area between the trees. “Otherwise it would have worn a more well-defined furrow.”

“That’s right,” the woman confirmed. “Will that be a problem?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Jik said. “How soon before it comes back this way?”

“Probably ten minutes,” the man said. “At least ten. Maybe fifteen.”

“Ten should be plenty,” Jik said, gesturing to the men lugging the equipment. “Let’s get to work.”

Eight minutes later, they were ready. Three minutes after that, Jik felt the first subtle vibrations through the ground as the T-700 approached.

“Get ready,” he murmured to the others.

And then, there it was, pushing aside low-hanging branches and wading through knee-high grass as it walked its solitary sentry path. Its G11 submachinegun was held ready, its metallic skull and glowing eyes swept methodically back and forth.

Jik crouched a little lower behind his tree, one hand gripping each of the two long ropes he and the others had strung around two other trees, watching the Terminator closely as he tried to track its precise path.

“Needs to go a little north,” Halverson murmured from beside him.

Jik nodded and pulled gently but firmly on the rope in his left hand. Twenty meters in front of the approaching Terminator the grasses shifted slightly, the subtle movement camouflaged by their general wind-induced sway. Jik eyed the T-700’s path and gave the rope another few centimeters’ worth of last-minute tweaking. The machine continued forward...

With a startlingly loud
crack
, the Terminator’s right foot hit and triggered the bear trap Jik had maneuvered into its path. The machine came to a sudden, awkward halt, its momentum forcing it to take one final step forward with its left leg. There was a second crack as the second bear trap snapped shut around its other leg—

“Now!” Jik shouted. Letting go of the rope in his left hand, he shifted both hands to the one in his right and pulled. All around him, the other men and women leaped into position from the bushes, grass and trees, some hauling on Jik’s rope, others joining with Halverson in pulling on the other one.

Terminators were incredibly strong machines. But their servomotor musculature hadn’t been designed with this sort of movement in mind. The T-700’s legs were yanked apart, pulled in opposite directions into a gymnast’s splits by the two bear traps now clinging to its lower legs.

And with its balance base suddenly gone, it toppled forward to land on its gun and its outstretched arms.

“Belay!” Jik shouted. Not waiting for the others to secure the thick ropes, he snatched up his borrowed G11 and braced the barrel against the side of the tree. He would have just one shot at this.

The Terminator shifted position, leaving its left hand on the ground and bringing up the G11 in its right. It aimed the weapon down and to its right, targeting the bear trap and attached rope.

And with his own gun on full automatic, Jik fired everything he had into the magazine on the Terminator’s weapon.

Sometimes, he knew, a sustained blast into that much caseless ammunition would cause a spontaneous cascading that would cook off the close-packed rounds. That would create a multiple explosion that would wreck the weapon and usually the hand or entire arm of the Terminator holding it.

In this case, Jik wasn’t that lucky. But he was lucky enough. The G11 broke apart in the T-700’s hand, its firing mechanism shattered and useless.

And with its gun gone and its legs still being held, the machine was helpless.

Halverson was already on his way, running across the grass with Barnes’s SIG 542 gripped in his hands. Dropping the empty G11, Jik grabbed the Mossberg shotgun they’d also taken from the visitors and sprinted after him.

He caught up with Halverson twenty meters from the Terminator, which was now trying unsuccessfully to reach the traps pinning its legs.

“Arms first?” Halverson called.

“Arms first,” Jik confirmed. “And then we’ll see.”

“See what?”

Jik grimaced. What he knew, and the townspeople didn’t, was that this was the moment of truth. If their ensnared T-700 and the one he, Barnes, and Williams had tangled with across the river were the only two machines Skynet had out here, that second Terminator should even now be charging to the rescue, trying to get here before Jik and Halverson reduced its compatriot to rubble. Two Terminators working together were always more effective than one alone, even if one or both of them were damaged.

But if Skynet still had other resources available or close at hand, it would be foolish to waste the other T-700 in an attempt to save this one. In that case, the other Terminator would remain hidden and out of range as it waited for the reinforcements.

And Terminator reinforcements would be bad. Very bad.

“See what?” Halverson repeated. “Then we’ll see,” Jik said, “which part of it we want to destroy next.”

Connor had warned Preston that the last remaining Terminator would probably show up before there were any warning sounds of gunfire from Connor’s own position north of town. Sure enough, Preston’s team had barely gotten themselves prepared when the bushes across the river parted and the dark figure of a T-700 strode into view and headed for the ford.

It was not, Preston noted, nearly as fearsome a sight as he remembered it from earlier that day. The fingers of its right hand were bent and twisted where Williams’s shotgun slug and the Terminator’s own exploding gun had damaged it. Its left shoulder also looked a little odd, and Preston wondered if it had been damaged by the fall into the ravine during the later fight with Connor and Williams. The limb might even have broken off and had to be magnetically reattached. There were some serious dents on its torso, as well, where Williams’s shotgun blasts had nailed it at close range.