The Future War

'Oh, it's better than good,' his old friend assured him. 'Check this out.' He clicked a few keys and his smiling face was replaced by a picture of what looked like aircraft.

John leaned forward. It was aircraft! B-2s, if he wasn't mistaken. And they're in perfect condition.

'Fuel?' was his first question.

'Tons,' Snog said. 'Literally. But that's not all. Lookee here!'

The B-2s were replaced by what John at first thought were planes, but were actually drones. Bomb-carrying, radar-evading, farseeing drones.

'My God,' Connor whispered, 'it's the mother load.'

'You bet your ass it is!' Snog crowed. 'Look out Skynet, here we come!'

John felt himself smiling. 'And we can take 'em?'

'Now that the defense grid is smashed, yeah,' Snog said.

'Take 'em and fly 'em.'

'And Skynet isn't that distributed,' John said. 'With this, we can root out the central units.'

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

SARAH'S JOURNAL

The years went by with a horrible sameness. We fought, we died, we learned, we struggled, we won. After an eternity, we won more than we lost. Children were born and grew up fighting the machines. It was all turning out much the way Kyle Reese had described it to me.

They were good kids, these children who had never known peace and security, and good soldiers. I honestly don't think that it even occurred to most of them to blame their parents for the nightmare they were living. But then they had no idea that there was any other way to live.

One day the war will be over, and when they've rested, then they'll start asking the hard questions.

'Here's where my head starts hurting again,' John Connor murmured to himself, taking a sip of his herbal tea. 'Christ, I wish we could get more coffee in.'

A few of the technicians in the underground command center—once a Skynet facility—looked at him oddly. Those were the ones who hadn't been assigned to the Command Assault Group for very long; a couple of the others grinned as they bent over their workstations. The chief's oddities were legend.

John sighed, rising and walking over to the big display screen.

Just before it came alive, he caught a glimpse of himself—the long hard face still marked by the long V- shaped scar the cyberseal had inflicted on him, the hard wary eyes and grim-set mouth.

I'm forty-two, he thought, disoriented for a moment.

It still caught him by surprise sometimes, overlaid on the face a part of him expected to see—the laughing teenager with a black cowlick across his forehead.

When did that happen? I have indubitably become the Great Military Dickhead of Mom's dreams, the one Kyle described to her… and I'm older than he is.

'Head definitely hurting,' he said quietly as the screen came live.

Sarah and Dieter moved to stand on either side of him; his mother put a hand on his arm, for just a second, understanding as only she and Dieter could.

I'm forty-two; they're old, he thought.

Faces wrinkled, the great muscles of Dieter's frame gone gaunt; an encounter with an HK had given him a limp that he'd take to his grave, a limp that got a little worse every year. Active, strong, infinitely experienced oldsters, but quite definitely old.

Humans didn't usually live into their sixties anymore. The sheer fact of their survival made them objects of awe, even with Sarah's new identity.

'Display, schematic,' John said.

The screen flashed a Mercator projection of the earth, with color-coded symbols—live human-held territory, dead Skynet zones, a Crosshatch of contested areas, smaller skull symbols for places where radiation or bioweapons still lingered.

And there were a satisfying series of X marks—smashed elements in Skynet's defense grid. With control of the surviving satellites gone, the remains of the grid were all that was keeping Skynet alive at all.

'If it lives,' he murmured.

'It is conscious, it consumes energy, it seeks to fight entropy and survive,' Dieter said.

'Don't go all philosophical on me now,' Sarah Connor said, leaning a little closer to him.

'We know Skynet is working on its time-travel program, here

.'

John said, pointing to the Los Angeles basin—mostly dead zone, or contested. 'It's getting close to the time.'

Sarah stiffened slightly. She knew about Kyle, but she'd managed to avoid ever seeing him face-to-face; with communications as limited as they were, even a VIP like Sarah didn't have her image all over the place the way images had been displayed before Judgment Day. And, of course, since her

'death,' the few available images of her were of a younger woman.

'Well, let's go meet history,' John said. 'We can't chance anything else. If we don't counter what it's doing…'

Both of the elders nodded. John touched a button at his throat. 'Major Nakamura,' he said. 'Operation Chrono is now active.'

* * *

Sarah kicked Snog's butt, hard.

'Hey!' he snapped. 'What the hell are you doin'?'

She got up in the programmer's face and spoke through clenched teeth. 'Get one of these things up and running, Snot!'

'That's Snog.'

'And do it fast!' Sarah barked over his protest. 'Time is literally of the essence right now.'

' 'Kay,' he muttered.

He opened the Terminator's scalp and popped open the channel that led to its CPU. This Terminator's unit had been fried during the first few minutes of their attack. It was now just so much inert metal and flesh. Until, that is, Snog installed the new CPU with the fresh programming that didn't include Skynet.

Snog sealed off the conduit and laid the flap of flesh back in place, sealing it with a bio-adhesive. 'Done,' he said. Then,

'Stand.'

Sarah licked her lips; she couldn't help it. The sight of a young, naked Dieter clone turned her on. She shook her head.

Sick, you're sick, Connor.

'Follow,' Snog said, and they began jogging toward the time displacement device on the other side of the installation.

* * *

John fired and ducked down behind a machine, then rolled several feet away from where he'd been. His heart was slamming against his ribs as if this was the first time he'd faced one of these monsters.

I want to stop this! I want to stop this now! Maybe if he could prevent the