Infiltrator

Sarah didn't buy it. She resisted the urge to hope, believing it a fool's game. You

could almost see John falling—the blood, the boneless landing—in her eyes.

She'd told him that if the first shot didn't kill him, then they would do it at their leisure, but that they would kill him. If they have him, he's dead, she'd said to him in a voice and manner that brooked no argument.

And so he approached Cyberdyne looking determined but feeling discouraged.

From what Sarah had told him, if John was dead, then humanity's only hope was the total destruction of Cyberdyne. And that looks damn near hopeless. The place was like a Hydra; cut off one head and two more pop out.

FT. LAUREL BASE HOSPITAL: THE PRESENT

'No. I'll go out first, then you. I can steady you, and catch you if you fall. You don't want to risk that shoulder.'

John frowned at Jordan's suggestion. Not because it was a bad idea, but because it was so obviously a good one. He felt strange, distant and distracted, which he supposed was due to drugs and loss of blood. But this was a bad time to be slow as an ox.

'Good thinking,' he said aloud. 'You go first.'

Jordan slipped over the narrow metal windowsill without comment. The drop from the boy's room was about four feet. Not bad, but still enough to be bothersome if one arm was out of action. John followed him immediately, barely giving Jordan a chance to step back. Dyson put his hands on the boy's slim waist and eased him down. Then he looked around. The coast was still clear.

John was wearing his own jeans and sneakers, but Jordan had found a green

surgical shirt to replace the bloodied and torn T-shirt he'd been wearing. Dyson looked down at his own rumpled and bloodstained suit.

We couldn't be more obvious on an army base if we were wearing rubber noses and orange wigs, he thought. Dyson looked around. It was just getting dark, things were getting hard to see, and the camp lights wouldn't be going on for a couple of minutes yet. There was no 'good' time to do this, but right now was better than some. They started off.

By the time they reached Cyberdyne, it was full dark. There were pockets of shadow here and there around the building, looking all the darker for the arc lights surrounding them. They headed for a well of shadow at the back of the building.

John stumbled and nearly went down, but Jordan caught him—awkwardly because he was trying to avoid the wounded shoulder. To a passerby it would have looked like they were struggling.

In fact, to Dieter it did. He moved up silently behind Jordan, and clasping his big hands together, brought them down on the back of Dyson's neck. Jordan moved slightly at the last minute, reducing some of the force of the blow, but he went down in a heap, and John dropped with him.

'Ow!' John said, looking up into Dieter's grave face.

Jordan rolled over onto his back, his eyes wandered for a moment, then focused.

'What the hell did you do that for?' he whispered.

'Dieter, NO!' John barked as Dieter brought his arm back for the coup de grace.

'He's on our side!'

Dieter relaxed, looking down at Dyson.

Looking up, Jordan could discern no expression in his attacker's face or eyes and he was ready to believe that this man was even more dangerous than the resume Serena had given him said he was. Assuming this was von Rossbach.

Then Dieter looked at John and smiled.

'Your mother is going to be relieved to see you,' he said fervently. He offered his hand to help John up. 'Let's roll.'

John's eyes widened. 'Terminal Mission Override XY74!' he snapped.

Dieter spun around and gasped in surprise. He was face-to-face with a Terminator, a thing with his face. He fumbled at his belt for the taser.

The Terminator was frozen by the dissonance of an imperative command phrase uttered at the wrong time, by the wrong person, for the wrong purpose. Its processor worked furiously to reroute its command tree. For a second or two it stood helpless, so much inanimate metal and plastic.

Triggering the taser, von Rossbach stepped to the side, placing himself in front of the boy. Then they all scrambled back as sparks burst from the Terminator's eyes and mouth, its arms flopping wildly and legs stamping in place. Finally it stopped—frozen—with one foot in the air; then slowly, with the majesty of a sequoia, it fell, face forward, at their feet.

John looked around, then picked up a white-painted rock, and moving over to the Terminator, began calmly slamming it 6n the thing's head.

'Thanks,' Dieter gasped.

' De nada,' Connor responded, never letting up the rhythm of his pounding. 'I got the phrase out of the CPU of that Terminator we decapitated. I wasn't sure it was genuine, but looks like.'

Shaken, but not to be outdone in cool, Jordan said, 'We'd better get moving.

Those fireworks might have attracted unwelcome attention.'

Christ, it's real! He felt himself going into shock, and hauled back from the precipice with a gasping effort of sheer willpower. I'll have the nervous breakdown later.

'Can you really kill one of those things with a rock?' Dieter asked.

'No, but you can expose the access plate… here we go.' John peeled back an arc of scalp, opened the plate, poised the pointed end of the rock, and struck twice.

'Sort of ironic—man's earliest tool killing his last.' The big man looked at him, and John went on with a grin: 'So I'm old beyond my years; so sue me.'

John watched the red light of one eye flicker and fade, then dropped the rock.

'Yeah,' he agreed. 'We'd better get Bolts, here, out of sight before we go, though.'

Dieter clipped the taser back onto his belt and leaned down. Grabbing one of the

Terminator's arms, he tugged and grunted.

'He's heavy,' he said in surprise, his voice showing the strain of dragging roughly three hundred pounds of inert mass.

Jordan took the other arm and they finally got it moving. They dragged, then pushed it into the shadows.

'Mom's already here?' John asked as they started off.

'She should be,' Dieter said. 'What do you Americans say? One big happy family.'

'Christ,' Jordan muttered.

CYBERDYNE: THE PRESENT

Sarah rolled the last barrel into the fourth elevator and took it to the lowest level, four. She'd already filled all the other elevators with the makings she'd flung together and sent them to the other floors.

Cyberdyne's equivalent of a quartermaster seemed to love ordering in bulk and she'd taken full advantage of his/her thriftiness. I could come up with the makings for a bomb in a public rest room, she thought; fruits of a not-so-misspent life, one the waitress-student she'd once been would have found incomprehensible and terrifying in equal measure. This abundance of stuff was pure luxury.

The one thing they didn't seem to have an ample supply of was dollies. She'd

been able to find only one. When the door opened on four she tipped the barrel she'd loaded and raced for the far end of the complex. Only fifteen more to go, she thought.

Dieter tapped in the test code and the door lock disconnected with a harsh buzzing sound. The three of them pushed through the doors and rushed toward the desk. John slapped von Rossbach on the arm and pointed to the