man. John crouched and covered his ears. The 40mm. grenade penetrated, and the Terminator splashed out, going amoeba-shaped. It made strange, muffled noises as it tried to reform.
John found the lights, then reloaded the 12-gauge. Monk pointed to a room in one of the floor's corners, thirty yards down the corridor. It was locked with a metal door. 'There, dammit. That's the AI Operations Center. Tony will tell you if I don't. Now you can go to hell, and Skynet with you. I don't care what happens. I never asked for this.' A look of naked malice crossed her face. 'From now on, I do whatever I like.'
She broke away from them and ran into the lobby. There, she ran about in confusion, avoiding the T-XA, Anton, and the burning, stabbing laser light.
'She'll get over it,' John said. 'I guess she's upset.' But it was anyone's guess what shape Monk would be in when this was all over. Meanwhile, he saw that the pseudo-man was still failing to reform. 'What's wrong with it?'
'Selena,' Danny said.
'Her nanoware?'
'Yes. It's trying to shut the T-XA down.'
Without expression, Jade popped an impact grenade into the M-203 launcher on her rifle. She found an angle to aim at the AI room's steel door, taking cover as the grenade exploded with a huge
'Please give us your keycards,' Jade said to the guards. 'We may need them. Then get out. Hide somewhere until it's safe to run.' That made sense. The way these buildings worked, you could always get to the ground floor, card or no card. Anyone could exit-getting entry was the hard part. They handed over their cards, no longer even arguing, then ran down the corridor past the AI room, and round the corner, looking for another exit.
Sarah lugged the explosives to the AI Center as Danny said, 'All right, team, it's showtime!'
Outside in the lobby, Anton still fought the T-XA's werecat component. He'd huddled into a corner when the grenade exploded, but he kept the werecat at a distance with the laser rifle's stabbing, burning light.
Suddenly, the werecat liquefied. Then there were two white pseudo-dogs in its place, bigger than Dobermans, with mouthfuls of three-inch metal teeth. One leapt for Anton, who kept his nerve and fired again, straight down its throat, as he stood and dodged past. He followed Monk into one of the elevators, just as its doors shut.
As Danny slammed shut the glass door between the offices and the lobby, the other dog struck it. The glass cracked, but didn't break. The pseudo-man managed to liquefy, going featureless, but still not reforming.
From the AI room came the sound of rifle fire. Go Mom, John thought. She'd be shooting up anything vulnerable to bullets.
The pseudo-dogs joined, morphed, and slithered like a mercury pancake into the office area, under the half- inch gap between the door and the carpet. John blasted at it with the 12-gauge, trying to stop it morphing any further. Danny and Jade joined in, firing bursts with their rifles. Outside, the pseudo-man had finally reformed, but it liquefied again and dove into the elevator shaft it had come from, probably following Anton and Monk.
They fought a losing battle against the pseudo-dogs. In a minute, they'd reformed, against all the bullets and shot being thrown at them. John, Danny, and Jade backed away, waiting for the dogs to leap, still firing, reloading, trying to keep them at a distance as long as possible, to give Sarah time. They worked their way down the corridor, keeping their faces to the dogs, maintaining the continual deafening fire, desperate for every second they could garner. Someone was always firing, while someone else reloaded.
Finally, John ran out of shot.
'Go and help Sarah!' Danny said to him.
'All right.' He ran to the AI Center, which was not all that impressive-about fifteen feet square, with an aircon outlet in the ceiling, metal shelves full of cardboard cartons and electronic components. A long bench in the center was covered by monitors and black boxes, with a dozen ergonomic office chairs placed neatly around it. The room had tiny vertical slits for windows, and the helicopters patrolled outside, their spotlights intermittently shining in.
While they'd been fighting the pseudo-dogs, Sarah had trashed this place, shooting out the equipment, and she'd set up a radio-controlled detonator attached to blocks of plastic explosive, enough to wipe out a corner of this floor.
'We've gotta get out!' John said.
'All right. Give me a minute.' She finished taping a block of explosive in place. This was almost a reprise of their first raid on Cyberdyne, back in '94. But this time, they had no chance to be thorough. It was just a matter of destroying what they could and hoping to give Cyberdyne a setback. If the company had back-ups of Monk's work, the struggle would have to go on.
'Mom, we don't have a minute.'
'All right. That'll have to do.' She passed him the detonator switch. 'Take this,' she said, then snatched up her rifle from the bench.
They ran out into the corridor as Jade fought with one of the pseudo-dogs, skin and flesh getting ripped from her arms. Danny still fired at the other dog, but it had backed him into a corner. The Specialists had the worst of it. In another few seconds, it would be over for them. With his free hand, John used his handgun to shoot 'Danny's' dog. Sarah opened up on the other one with her rifle, not seeming to care if she hit Jade. Jade took some bullets, but the dog took more, breaking into crater wounds, and she tore away from it.
John and Sarah ran straight through the fighting, getting the nearest door open. Danny and Jade joined them, while the dogs melted together to form the liquid-metal werecat, which caught the door as it closed.
They headed to the nearest fire door, which was not locked from this direction, and ran down two flights of stairs before John detonated the explosives, back in the AI Center. The building rocked with a huge, satisfying ka~ boom!, but they never stopped running.
Above them, the werecat had entered the fire escape, and it headed toward them with bullet speed, leaping whole flights of stairs at a time. Danny suddenly pushed Sarah, then John, down a flight, and they landed, bruised and hurt—
----just as Jade loaded her grenade launcher.
Danny covered his ears and turned his body, as she fired an impact grenade into the werecat. As he turned back to see what happened, it landed on the stair railing and fell the remaining eight floors. The Specialists look unhurt, or almost so.
'That won't stop it for long,' Jade said.
Danny got the nearest fire door open, struggling to break the lock to get back in. He was clearly getting weaker. Once more, they followed him back into the lobby.
'We need to get to the basement,' he said. 'That's where Anton's gone.' He pressed the button for an elevator, which soon arrived. They swiped a keycard and headed down to the level marked 'B.'
They stepped out into an extraordinary area, a concrete room twenty feet high, and as long and wide as a football field. It was full of metal benches, arrays of monitors and other electronic equipment. John took it all in.
Anton. Dr. Monk. The pseudo-man.
Anton crawled in the corner formed by the wall and a bench of computer equipment His head hung down, he seemed exhausted beyond endurance. He was bleeding from many wounds, and his clothes were almost shredded. His M-16 and the laser rifle both lay on the floor in front of him. Evidently, he'd gotten a clear grenade shot at the pseudo-man, for it was backed against a wall on the other side, its head and upper body all squashed in. It tried desperately to reform: liquefying, then solidifying, turning inside out, then back again, never making much progress.
But none of that seemed extraordinary—not anymore. The extraordinary part was Rosanna Monk. She sat at a computer console, tapping away, seemingly unconcerned. Someone-Monk, presumably-had powered up the apparatus here, and the whole area vibrated from the work of subterranean engines. On one wall, four huge flatscreens showed different angles of the same futuristic scene: an enclosed, brilliantly lit space, a kind of vault. There was chunky, metal apparatus all round it, and a five-foot metal circle was recessed in the center of the floor. John couldn't make any sense of it, or what Monk was doing.
He watched the flatscreens carefully. In the center of the room was an opaque cubical block that reached almost to the ceiling. It was made of white ceramic bricks whose harsh lines were broken by a massive, round steel
