Terminator Salvation

And as he began helping the others collect the gear, he realized he’d been wrong. This day hadn’t been hell on earth. This day had been paradise.

Hell on earth had just begun.

CHAPTER ONE

It was after one in the morning by the time John Connor and his Resistance team made their way back through the rubble of Greater Los Angeles to the half-broken, half-burned-out building they’d called home for the past three months. He supervised the others as they stowed their gear, then sent them stumbling wearily to their bunks.

Then, alone in the small pool of light from his desk lamp, amid the outer darkness that pressed in against it, he sat down to make out his report.

In many ways, he reflected, this was one of the worst parts of the war against Skynet. In the heat of battle, with HK Hunter-Killers swooping past overhead and T-600 Terminators lumbering in from all sides, there was no time for deep thought or grand strategy or clever planning. You played it on the fly, running and shooting and running some more, hoping you could spot the openings and opportunities before Skynet could close them, trying to achieve your mission goal and still get as many of your people out alive as you could.

But sitting here alone, with a piece of crumpled paper laid out on top of a battered file cabinet, things were different. You had the quiet and the time and—worst of all—the hindsight to replay the battle over and over again. You saw all the things you should have done faster, or smarter, or just different. You saw the mistakes, the lapses of judgment, the miscues.

And you relived the deaths. All of them.

But it was part of the job, and it had to be done. Every Resistance contact with the enemy—win, lose, or draw—was data that could be sifted, prodded, evaluated, and tucked away for possible future reference. With enough such data, maybe the strategists at Command would someday finally find a weakness or blind spot that could be used to bring down the whole Skynet system.

Or so the theory went. Connor, at least, didn’t believe it for a minute. This was going to be a long, bloody war, and he had long since stopped hoping for silver bullets.

But you never knew. Besides, Skynet was certainly analyzing its side of each encounter. The Resistance might as well do the same.

It took him half an hour to write up the report and transmit it to Command. After that he spent a few minutes in the bathroom cleaning up as best he could, scrubbing other men’s blood off his hands and clothing. Then, shutting off the last of the bunker’s lights, he cracked the shutters to let in a bit of fresh air, and wearily headed down the darkened corridor to the tiny room he shared with his wife.

Kate was stretched out in bed, the blankets tucked up under her chin, her breathing slow and steady. Hopefully long since asleep, though Connor had no real illusions on that score. As one of their team’s two genuine doctors, the hours she put in were nearly as long as Connor’s own, and in some ways even bloodier.

For a minute he just stood inside the doorway, gazing at her with a mixture of love, pride, and guilt. Once upon a time she’d had the nice, simple job of a veterinarian, where the worst thing that could happen in a given day was a nervous horse or a lap dog with attitude.

Connor had taken her away from all that. Wrenched her out of it, more accurately, snatching her from the path of Skynet’s last attempt to kill him before the devastation of Judgment Day.

Of course, if he hadn’t taken her away, she would be dead now. There were all too many days when he wondered if that would have been a kinder fate than the one he’d bestowed on her.

There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves. The old quote whispered through his mind. Kyle Reese’s old quote, the words Connor himself would one day teach the boy—

“Good morning,” Kate murmured from the bed.

Connor started.

“Sorry—didn’t mean to wake you,” he murmured back.

“You didn’t,” she assured him, pushing back the blankets and propping herself up on one elbow. “I only got to bed an hour or so ago. I heard everyone else come in, and I’ve just been dozing a little while I waited for you. How did it go?”

“About like usual,” Connor said as he crossed to the bed and sat down. “We got the Riverside radar tower—not just taken down, but blown to splinters. If Olsen’s team got the Pasadena tower like they were supposed to, that’ll leave Skynet just the Capistrano one and no triangulation at all. That should take a lot of the pressure off our air support in any future operations. At least until Skynet gets around to rebuilding everything.”

“Good—we can use a breather,” Kate said. “How many did we lose?”

Connor grimaced.

“Three. Garcia, Smitty, and Rondo.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and Connor could see some of his own pain flash across her eyes. “That’s, what, ten including the ones Jericho lost when his team took out the Thousand Oaks tower?”

“Eleven,” Connor corrected. “Those towers come expensive, don’t they?”

“They sure do,” Kate said soberly. Abruptly, she brightened. “By the way, I have a surprise for you.” Reaching to the far side of the bed, she came up with a small bag. “Merry Christmas.”

Connor stared at the bag in her hand, a surge of husbandly panic flashing through him. How could he possibly have forgotten—?

“Wait a minute,” he said, frowning. “This is March.”

“Well, yes, technically,” Kate conceded innocently. “But we were all kind of busy on the official Christmas.”