them less conspicuous than in Danny's current dinner suit, Anton's police uniform, and the short dance dresses worn by Jade and Selena. Selena spent a few minutes in the women's bathroom cleaning herself up, and returned looking more or less normal, in blue jeans and a bright T-shirt. Dressed the same way, Danny, Jade, and Anton looked like a group of tough, but fairly harmless, tourists.
After that, Jade drove on, for hour after hour. John re- alized how long he'd been awake, and let himself drift off to sleep. The Specialists seemed tireless, but it was no use trying to compete with them. He was only human, not enhanced like them.
When he woke, it was bright daylight Selena had taken over the wheel, and John hadn't even noticed them stopping; he'd slept right through it Now he was between the passenger door and Jade on his left, squeezed be- | tween him and Anton. He realized, in fact, how closely he was pressed against Jade. Embarrassed, he sat up straight.
The sun was high in the sky and they had entered desert scrub country. Up front Sarah and Danny were both sleeping.
'Good morning, John,' Jade said. She spoke very softly, but Sarah stirred.
'Uh, hi, Jade,' John whispered. 'I hope you feel better after some sleep.'
'Yeah, sure. Where are we?'
'Nearly halfway to the border, south of Mazatlan. We've been driving hard.'
'You must have been. What time is it?'
In the front seat, Sarah checked her wristwatch. 'Almost midday,' she said.
John checked the time as well. They'd been driving for most of the last eight hours. All the same, Jade and Selena must have been breaking every possible speed limit. Right now, the car was doing 110 mph. These guys weren't too worried about the police.
On Jade's other side, Anton looked completely recovered. John had never seen the extent of Anton's laser burns, and he couldn't imagine the damage that the T-XA had done to his organs when it put that spike through him. But time, rest, and food had restored him. Those nanoware implants must really be something.
'We're going to stop soon,' Danny said. 'We've got to bury one of our own.'
'Then where do you want to go?' Sarah said.
'Colorado. But we need weapons and supplies. We know you have friends in California. Our records don't tell us who they are.'
'Leave them out of this.'
'Mom!' John said.
'We can't endanger them, John.'
'Mom, I don't think we have a choice.'
She considered that, while everyone waited. 'All right We have friends near Calexico. The Salcedas.'
'Right,' Danny said. 'We'll go there. Then we'll head for Colorado Springs.'
In the afternoon, they made a deep grave for Baxter in the sands of the Sonora Desert, north of Hermosillo. The Specialists dug it out with their usual strength and swiftness, but then they stopped to take time, placing his body carefully, his long arms across his chest. Moving calmly, deliberately, they filled in the grave.
'Robert did so much for us all,' Selena said. She turned to Sarah. 'I wish you and John could have known him. He was always there for us, always ready to fight the machines. You could count on him.' She shook her head in wonderment, giving a small smile, as her eyes moistened. 'That was the great thing about Bobby. You always could count on him. Always. He never let us down.'
There was little they could do to commemorate his gravesite. Jade took a fistful of sand, and let it fall gently. 'We won't forget you, Robert.'
'We're all mortal,' Anton said, 'however long we live. We're mortal, but we still keep fighting.' Anton seemed like a real tough guy, but even he was choking back tears.
'Amen,' Danny said.
Selena said, 'We love you, Bobby.'
John felt overcome. 'He must have been a great guy. I wish we could have known him better.'
Jade nodded. 'He was one of our best. That's why he came back with us. One day, I'll tell you all about it, how he fought Skynet, and the machines, the Terminators.' She stopped as a sob overcame her.
Sarah reached out and held her, forgetting any reservations she had about the Specialists. For the moment, Jade was just another young woman, overcome with grief. 'It's okay,' Sarah said. 'It'll all be okay.'
Jade wept openly. 'Thank you, Ms. Connor,' she said, between the tears and painful sobs. 'I know. We'll make it worthwhile. I know. It's all right. I know. I know.'
As the shadows stretched out through the afternoon and they headed towards Mexicali and Calexico, John said, 'Okay, we were going to compare notes. At least set out the highlights, remember?'
'All right,' Danny said. 'Let's get your half of the story. You had two Terminators try to kill you, one in 1984 one in 1994, right? That's the story you told my mother, back in '94, when you came to our house.'
'The 1984 one was programmed to hunt me,' Sarah said. 'John wasn't born yet. The T-1000 came after him ten years later. Maybe this gets confusing.' She took the Specialists through it quickly. In the original future, America's Skynet computerized defense system reached self-awareness in 1997 and discovered in itself a will to live. When its creators tried to shut it down, Skynet had launched the U.S. ICBMs at targets in Russia and several other countries. The Russians had responded in kind. From the ashes, came nuclear winter. 'Then the machines came, hunting the humans down, seeking us out to the ends of the Earth.'
But one man had led the human Resistance in the future: John Connor. Skynet was beaten in 2029, but had played one last card, sending back the Terminators to kill John, or prevent him from being born. It had tried to change the past, but it failed.
'Right,' Danny said. 'That makes sense. Let's call the future you described the baseline reality. When you blew up Cyberdyne in '94, things changed.'
“That was the whole idea,' John said.
'Yeah, sure. But they didn't change the way you thought they did, because that's not how time works. We know that now. Before Judgment Day happened, there was a lot of theory about time and time travel. Let's say that we've all diverged from the baseline. In the world that Jade and Selena were born in, the one we're all in now, Skynet gets implemented in 2007, but Judgment Day isn't until 2021. As you can imagine, lots of things happened in between, stuff we all grew up with. With the kind of computer processors that were used for Skynet, there were huge technological advances in every field. Time travel was invented, the research has already started. Soon, we mastered it. We made great strides in bioteeh—every possible field of science. There were protests about Skynet, but they came to nothing and the system worked fine until 2021. By then, everyone trusted it completely. There were no signs that it was sentient or self-conscious.'
'It was everywhere,' Anton said. 'It controlled the armed forces and their support units almost without human safeguards. Over all those years, they hadn't been necessary, so they got pared back. When Judgment Day happened, Skynet had the upper hand. We haven't been able to defeat it.'
'So now you're the ones trying to change the past?' Sarah said. 'You're trying to stop Skynet being built, like we tried in '94?'
Anton shook his head. 'I wish it worked like that. It's not so simple.'
'We don't think you can ever change the future,' Selena said. 'Or the past.'
'That's right,' Danny said. 'And Skynet must have known that as well as we do.'
'But we
'That's just how it seems to you.'
'We want to create a different future,' Anton said, 'alongside the ones that already exist. We want to give mankind another chance.'
'I don't think I'm going to like this story,' Sarah said.
Anton took them through it quickly. Sometimes you could make changes in time, but you didn't wipe out the old timeline-that never happened. You just created a new one. The timeline in which John grew up to win the war against Skynet still existed. So did the future that the Specialists had come from.
'So what's your future like?' John said.
'Hard. Skynet is winning. By 2036, it had crushed all human resistance in North America. Other centers of
