Connor and Kate jumped out of the trench as the security keypad and LED screen began beeping. The screen was flashing a new message: abort?emergency closure.
The blast door started to close with a tremendous squeal. The fire had triggered some emergency circuit. Connor had a feeling that there would be no way to override it.
Terminator brushed past Connor, got down on his hands and knees, and pulled himself under the closing blast door, catching the bottom part of it with his powerful shoulder.
The motors lowering the door hummed in overload, sparks flew from around the edges of the mechanism, and groaning gears stripped with loud cracks as Terminator put his back into the effort to not only hold the massive
steel blast door from closing, but to raise it one millimeter at a time.
Behind them, within the twisted, burning wreckage of the transport helicopter, T-X managed to shove an engine block off her chest. She raised her head and torso above the flames, her optical sensors locked on the bottom of the blast door.
Her infiltration covering was completely gone now, leaving only her battle chassis that itself was scarred and dented from the tremendous heat and forces it had endured over the past twenty-four hours.
But T-X's imperatives were still intact, her programs were still up and running, and her prime directive was still driving her actions.
She had been sent to eliminate twenty-two targets. John Connor and Katherine Brewster were at the top of the list.
They were here.
She would kill them.
Terminator's internal mechanisms were strained to their limits, exceeding even their built-in safety and redundancy engineering.
He knew that he would not be able to hold out much longer.
He was also aware that the T-X was struggling to free itself from the wreckage. There was no time left. 'Go!' he told Connor and Kate. 'Now!'
The fire and smoke were getting thick in the tunnel, making it difficult to see, let alone breathe.
Connor tossed the heavy knapsack filled with C-4 under the blast door, sliding it all the way through to the other side.
He helped Kate crawl under the door. She paused long enough to give Terminator a grateful look, and then scrambled the rest of the way through.
Connor got down on his stomach and pulled himself under the massive blast door that vibrated like a live beast just above his head.
Terminator's body trembled with exertion. Connor could hear overloaded hydraulics and servo motors, and smell the stench of burnt electronic circuitry. A joint in Terminator's shoulder failed with a loud pop, and hydraulic fluid began to spurt from beneath the mechanism.
'Thank you,' Connor said. He had lost this friend once before. It was very hard to go through it again. So much had happened, so much had gone on.
'We'll meet again,' Terminator said with as much emotion as was possible for a cyborg.
Connor scrambled the rest of the way under the door, which, at the base, was nearly two meters thick.
Kate was there. She reached down for him when
something clamped over his left ankle, tearing into his flesh.
The pain was impossible to bear, and he screamed.
The T-X, her legs sheared off in the wreckage, held on to Connor's ankle with her right hand and began to inexorably draw him back under the blast door.
Terminator grabbed her wrist with one hand and her throat with the other in an effort to drag her away from Connor.
In the effort his shoulder turned away from the blast door that then inched downward, pinning him and the T-X like a hydraulic press.
The buzz saw morphed from the T-X's left hand, and she drove it into Terminator's chest, just above his one remaining power cell.
Terminator tightened his grip on her wrist, bending hydraulic joints out of position, causing her finally to lose her grip on Connor's ankle.
The door was pinning their torsos even more tightly now. Nevertheless the T-X managed to bring the saw up from Terminator's chest, into his neck, and then into his chin and cranial case.
Circuits shorted out and massive dumps of random data no longer under the control of subroutines cascaded like shivers through his CPU and servos.
Still he did not release his grip, although with what little RAM was left in his cognitive circuits he finally reduced his chances of success to zero percent.
His body, broader at the shoulders and in the chest than the T-X's, was being crushed by the lowering blast door.
He could feel all of his systems going off-line, one by one. And there was nothing he could do to stop his own destruction.
He brought up John Connor's image, now and in the future, superimposed over the images of Katherine Brew-ster now and then. They were not machines. They were humans, creatures his original programmers had meant for him to eliminate.
But a montage of pictures of interactions with Connor and with Katherine Brewster rippled across his dying memory circuits.
One final course of action was left open to him. The only logical choice.
He released his grip on the T-X, and for a second their optical sensors locked together.
The T-X withdrew the saw and started to crawl the rest of the way under the blast door.
Terminator pulled aside the armor plating in his chest to expose his last hydrogen fuel cell. Without hesitation he yanked the cell out of his chest, trailing wires and mechanical parts, sparks and fluids flying in all directions.
With his free hand he grabbed the T-X by a piece of tubing protruding from her hip and dragged her back.
She turned and fixed him with a baleful gaze.
'You are terminated,' he told her.
Terminator crushed the fuel cell to rupture it, and thrust it into the T-X's mouth, driving it deep into her throat
'Eat me,' Terminator said, and the fuel cell erupted with a tremendous explosion.
c.33
The Refuge
Kate had to help Connor hobble down an unfinished concrete corridor to a short set of stairs. They had just started down when a wall of flame shot out from under the steel blast door.
They managed to get to the bottom of the stairs and race down the lower corridor when the shock wave hit them with a blast of incredibly hot air, sending them reeling and stumbling forward as if propelled by unseen hands.
The blast door settled on its track with a tremendous metallic bang that instantly cut off the flames and shock wave.
Connor and Kate pulled up short and turned to look back. Connor half hoped to see Terminator appear at the head of the stairs. But he knew in his heart of hearts that would not happen.
He and Kate exchanged a glance and then headed the rest of the way down the tunnel that was lit at intervals by caged lights.
Dust lay everywhere. No one had come this way for
a very long time. A quarter century, Connor supposed.
The corridor ended at an elevator cage. Functional. Industrial. Meant to move people and machines to and from a subterranean control center.
Or was that right?
Connor looked back again for a moment. All the vehicles in the tunnel were very old. Coated with dust.
