Terminator Salvation: Trial by Fire (34 page)

He waved a hand. “So anyway, there it is,” he went on. “You wanted to know why I was mad at you. Now you do.” He shrugged. “And I guess if he was worth your trust, he was worth mine. I guess.”

“Yes, he was,” Blair agreed. “As it turned out. And I
am
sorry about making you look... you know.”

“Forget it,” Barnes said. “I asked Preston why he put up with Halverson. He said keeping his town running was worth a little wounded pride. I figure if he can do it, so can I.”

“I think sometimes we forget what’s really important,” Blair said. “Right now, the important thing is that taking out all three of the Baker’s Hollow Thetas may persuade Skynet to abandon the project.”

“Just in time, too,” Barnes muttered.

“What do you mean?”

He hissed out a sigh. “I mean we were wrong,” he said heavily. “You and me, when we were trying to figure out the test sequence for the Thetas. We got the part about Lajard and the others infiltrating a bunch of humans, and the part about Jik coming in with a whole set of false memories. But we missed something.”

“What?”

“The bit where Skynet snatches someone from town—someone everyone already knows—and puts in a replacement,” Barnes said. “You didn’t see it, but there was a brand-new Theta half buried inside the cabin that the H-K wrecked. I don’t think it was ready to go yet, but it looked damn close. The body they were using wasn’t perfect, but they’d done a lot of work on the face.”

“Who was it supposed to be?” Blair asked. “Could you tell?”

“Oh, yeah,” Barnes said, an edge of cold darkness to his voice. “It was going to be Hope Preston.”

A hard knot settled into Blair’s stomach.

“We’ve got to win this thing, Barnes,” she said quietly. “We’ve got to beat Skynet back, and we’ve got to break it and every single one of its Terminators into scrap metal.”

“No argument here,” Barnes agreed. “I wonder what it’ll come up with next.”

Blair took a deep breath. She and Barnes would probably never be friends, she knew.

But now that the barrier she’d unwittingly built between them was gone, they could once again be comrades in arms.

And she could settle for that. In the midst of the fires of war, she could settle for that.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’m sure we’ll find out.”

TIMOTHY ZAHN has been writing science fiction for over thirty years. In that time he has published thirty-nine novels, nearly ninety short stories and novelettes, and four collections of short fiction. Best known for his eight
Star Wars
novels, he is also the author of the
Quadrail
series, the
Cobra
series, and the young-adult
Dragonback
series. He is currently working on the third book of the
Cobra War
series and a ninth
Star Wars
novel.

The Zahn family lives on the Oregon coast, where only a tsunami can ruin a perfect day.

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In post-Judgment Day LA, two lost kids named Kyle and Star keep watch for Terminators; a jaded Marine struggles to keep his rag-tag community together in the face of unrelenting danger; and John and Kate Connor assemble their Resistance team for a brutal assault on a deadly enemy.

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Russia 2003. When it appears that the United States has unleashed its entire nuclear arsenal upon the world, Captain Dimitri Losenko, commander of the nuclear submarine Gorshkov, has no choice but to retaliate. His target? Alaska.

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