Startled by her sudden move, Dieter pulled as hard as he could against the door, using his body as a weight. Once again he went flying as though smacked by God's pillow when the plastique blew. This time, in answer to the explosion, the Terminator's head flew into the cabin and bounced off the far wall. Bits of flesh and spatters of blood sprayed out into the cabin; not nearly as much as from a real body, but enough. Its massive body went pinwheeling through space, exploding in a magenta ball of flame just before it hit the azure blue of the water.
Dieter was slumped, once again unconscious, against the bulkhead. The door hung open.
Sarah raised her head and found herself looking into the Terminator's blue eyes.
It snapped its teeth at her and wobbled on the floor, helpless to make itself move toward her.
'John?' she said, not taking her eyes off of it.
'Here, Mom,' he said from beside her. He was watching the Terminator, too.
'We'd better get that door,' she said.
Taking in her breath in a gasp that was too close to a sob for her liking, Sarah staggered to her feet and grabbed the door. John moved in beside her and pulled.
They found that it moved better this time; at least the hinges weren't fighting them. It just wouldn't stay closed. Sarah tried to work the lock and got nowhere.
Apparently something was jammed inside.
'Shit,' she muttered. 'I can't shut the door!' she shouted to the pilot.
'Right there,' he said, a quaver in his voice. 'Okay, got her on autopilot.'
He came into the passenger cabin white-faced, a sort of crowbar in his hand.
There was a slot in the floor into which he inserted one end, then pushed the other end into a similar slot on the door. 'That's never happened before,' he said weakly. 'But it's good to be prepared.'
He turned around to see John pick up the head.
'I'll need to make a Faraday cage for this,' John said to him. 'To cut it off from communicating with any of its friends. Assuming it has any. So I'm going to need some wires. Where can I take them from so I don't do serious damage to the plane?'
The pilot watched the head dangling by its hair from John's bloody hand with fascination. Then the head swung out, face forward, and clicked its teeth at him, its eyes rolling wildly.
From some place deep within, possibly the soles of his feet, the pilot felt a scream building, rushing upward until it blared out of his mouth. He leaped toward the pilot's cabin and slammed the door behind him, locking it and cowering in his seat, screaming.
Sarah tsk'ed and looked around her, then went over to Dieter, kneeling beside him to feel his pulse. She looked up at John and smiled, giving him a reassuring nod. Peeling back one of Dieter's eyelids and then the other, she breathed a sigh
of relief. The pupils were the same size. Pretty much. He should be all right.
'First the Faraday cage,' she said briskly to John. 'And then the pilot.'
Sarah tossed another stick of mesquite onto the fire and glanced over at John, at work on the Terminator's head in the uncertain light of a pair of Coleman lanterns. She watched him pull something out of the thing's skull with a pair of long-nosed electrician's pliers, holding it up in triumph under the brilliant desert stars.
Somewhere a coyote announced its presence to the night.
'This is a Terminator all right!' he said. 'But it's primitive. Heck.' He held up another bit he'd excavated. 'This thing here is from a cell phone! It's nothing like Uncle Bob. Y'know? But the chip seems right.'
At least it resembled the stuff he remembered seeing on Miles Dyson's computer printouts. This weird little- connected-boxes design had been all over everything.
He turned it, studying it by the light of the lantern.
He'd been trying to get this thing out for the last forty-five minutes. The CPU
was the first thing he'd wanted to take out. The damned Terminator seemed disinclined to stop trying to bite them all to death until he did so. Unfortunately the CPU had been buried deep underneath a solid steel cage and getting to it had
been a long and nasty process.
Even knowing that the Terminator wasn't a living being, cutting into its head as it snapped its teeth and rolled its eyes at him had been pure nightmare fodder.
'And I suppose the power cell must be authentic, original equipment, too,' John continued. 'It sure wasn't running on a lawnmower engine! But the rest's like a cheap knockoff. Like something someone could do in a lab now. It's all a little different somehow. This thing was made out of here-and-now components, mostly. With the
Sarah smiled tiredly; they'd driven a long way through the desert today in the rather crappy Jeep one of her 'friends' had sold them. Desert grit still made unpleasant little sounds between her back teeth, and itched in all the creases of her underwear.
'Now you're psychoanalyzing a genocidal computer?' she asked.
'What can I say—it's a long-term relationship,' John pointed out. 'You might say it's my mission in life. Hey! I'm supposed to be this great military leader, right? Did Napoleon's mom treat him this way?'
'She probably whacked him upside the head with a broomstick now and again.
Of course, she didn't know he was going to be anything but a Corsican dropout.'
'Yeah, but you do. So how 'bout a little respect?'
Sarah grinned and settled herself down, leaning her back against a rock and
wiggling until the gritty desert soil felt a little more comfortable. 'That thing from a cell phone,' she said after a moment, 'what's it do?'
'Basically it's the whole works,' John said, 'without the speakers.'
She nodded, gazing into the fire. 'So you were right to make that Faraday cage,'
she said grimly. 'It was communicating with someone.' She glanced up at him.
'Any way to find out who?'
'Not without the right equipment.' John's eyes grew dreamy for a moment.
'Jackson Skye probably had stuff I could've used to find out.'
'Hold on to it,' Sarah said. 'We may yet be able to find out.'
'If it was communicating with someone it means there are more of them,' Dieter said.
Sarah and John looked at him.
'We know,' she said gently.
'The question is,' John said, 'another Terminator, or something else?'
'Like a T-1000?' Sarah said, her eyes distant.
John took a shaky breath.
'Yeah,' he said.
'Or maybe just a better-made Terminator,' she said. 'If this isn't an original
Skynet special, then something here is building them. It has to be. Something came back from the future,
'Sort of a master Terminator?' John said. He held up the board from the cell phone. 'And this might have its number.' He looked at his mother. 'So, do we give it a call?'
A smile lifted one side of her full mouth. 'Maybe, when we figure out how to get the number.'
'I'm worried about the pilot,' von Rossbach said suddenly.
'Don't go there, Dieter,' Sarah warned. 'If he's smart he'll go for therapy and within a month the doctor will have talked him into disbelieving what he saw. If he's not smart he'll take a lot of drugs or drink a lot of booze, and when they cart him off with the d.t.'s he'll have a therapist convince him it was all in his head.'
'I think the second way sounds smarter,' John volunteered.
His mother pointed a finger at him and he subsided, grinning.
'Thing is you can't concern yourself with him. We haven't got the time. Nobody will believe him anyway.'
