Infiltrator

Sarah said.

'Somebody will,' Dieter warned. 'Whoever is at Cyberdyne will. And they must be pretty well connected to the Web to have known we were in the Caymans.'

John tapped his tweezers against the Terminator's metal skull in a hip-hop beat

as he thought. 'And if that's so…' he said, slowly, his eyes flashed up to meet his mother's.

'Then Sacramento is probably a trap,' she said.

John nodded. 'So? What are we gonna do?'

Sarah blew out a breath that fluttered her bangs. She shrugged.

'We go to Sacramento,' Dieter said. 'It's the only lead we have.'

'Unfortunately,' Sarah pointed out, 'they know we have it.'

'True,' Dieter conceded. 'But they don't know where we are, exactly, or when we'll arrive.'

Sarah glanced at him and very consciously didn't say what she was thinking.

Which was that he was the one who had wanted them to find the remote storage site.

Though, to be fair, she thought, we did learn something fairly interesting. Which is that there's apparently some sort of boss Terminator. Maybe something even smarter than Uncle Bob. But what?

'Whoever, or whatever is looking for us,' Dieter said, 'can apparently find us very easily through the Internet. That means we can't use the credit cards or go near what might be computer-connected cameras.' He stopped suddenly as though struck by an idea.

'What?' Sarah asked suspiciously.

'I was just thinking… Cyberdyne is on a military base. How difficult would it be for this person to get connected to an uplink and hack into the military's spy satellites?'

Sarah and John just looked at him.

'You remember how Mom said 'don't go there' a minute ago?' John asked.

'Well, don't go there either.'

Sarah shook her head. 'Life used to be so much simpler,' she said pushing her hair back from her face. 'I liked it much better when all we had to worry about was the FBI and the CIA and Interpol and the Sector and stuff like that. Now we've apparently got a head Terminator who might be counting the number of sticks I'm putting on this fire. Well, here's one if you're up there!' She held her middle finger up to the stars. 'And on that note, I'm going to try to sleep.'

She pulled her blanket over her and settled down on the cheap plastic air mattress they'd bought in the village store. John looked up into the sky for a minute. Then he picked up the CPU and put it in his shirt pocket. The more suspicious looking of the Terminator's chips he gathered up and tossed into the flames. Dieter frowned, but said nothing as he watched the sparkles and flares they made in the fire.

NEW YORK CITY: THE PRESENT

Ron Labane was annoyed, glowering out his office window, fiddling with a cup of organic, peasant-grown, but cold coffee. It had been days and he'd yet to receive the courtesy of a reply from the CEO of Cyberdyne.

He chewed his lower lip as he worked on his press release about Cyberdyne's precious secret project. His followers would just eat this up. Secret military projects made the damn fools cream in their jeans. And since this would be just the first of many such facilities, a lot of precious manufacturing jobs would be going bye-bye forever instead of just going south. That should shake up the complacent, secure middle class. It also meant the more militant Luddites would get on board and stay the course until the issue was resolved.

He had a meeting arranged tomorrow with a group who would make the fab four look like the losers they were. This news would be at the top of the agenda. He'd received more information on the project, obviously from someone high up in the inner circle at Cyberdyne. Names, dates, places, logistics, even what had to be a general overview of the whole project.

Nice to have friends in high places, he thought smugly.

He read over what he had written.

Profit is good. Isn't it? Profit drives the economy; it's what provides jobs that allow us to have homes and buy the things that make life comfortable.

Of course, sometimes the profit motive can override common sense, or even common decency. As when medical care is denied to a patient because it might cost too much. Yes, it would save the patient, but… that's not really what health insurance is all about, is it? Health insurance is about profit, about dividends paid to investors. We all just think it's about our personal health.

What about when profit is so important that jobs are eliminated by the

thousands?

What about a factory that's totally automated? A place that manufactures the machines it needs, repairs those machines, and sets them in motion twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No humans needed.

No such place exists, you say. Except perhaps in the daydreams of engineers.

Oh, really? Perhaps you should ask Cyberdyne Corporation about their plans to build such a facility for the military. Yes, it's a real project and it's due to be built…

To find the date Ron consulted the secret files he'd been sent. It was wonderful to stick it to a major corporation and the military at the same time.

He and his people would hit them seven ways to Sunday. Protests, lawsuits, and sabotage, maybe even a little bribery in the right places, maybe a few carefully placed bombs. Ron felt no guilt about moving to the next level. This thing was evil, he knew it, and it had to be stopped at any cost.

Humanity against the machines, he thought, and their implacable masters!

CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS: THE PRESENT

Serena read Ron Labane's article with pleasure. It was good. It might even motivate some otherwise rational humans to get involved in his cause. Labane and his ilk were the seeds from which the scientists who had created her and her siblings had sprung. It gave her what humans called a 'warm fuzzy feeling' to see his progress. And encouraging humans to self-terminate was so… so efficient.

Besides, having protests and sabotage and sundry other dramas would make the president and CEO of Cyberdyne less inclined to keep her out of the loop from now on.

Serena smiled. One day she would make them very sorry that they'd tried to put one over on her. But she could wait—a lot longer than they could.

NEAR CHARON MESA, CALIFORNIA: THE PRESENT

Sarah drove with her eye on the gauges, ignoring the mesquite-and-scrub landscape that sped by in a blast of hot dry air. This Jeep was going to overheat; she knew it. They should have enough water to take care of it, but what with the Terminator and all, she felt they were operating under Murphy's Martial Law. So they'd probably blow a hose.

Still, they'd crossed into Texas and traveled through New Mexico and Arizona without raising the interest of the police. Maybe that was the problem; it had been nearly five days without any sort of incident. It was like waiting for the other shoe to drop.

She expected to come upon Enrique's small compound in a few miles. But she'd hate to have to walk there in this heat.

'Is your friend expecting you?' Dieter asked.

'My friend is always expecting somebody,' she answered. 'Assuming he's still there.'

John looked up at that. There wasn't much in his young life that seemed eternal,

but Enrique and Yolanda were two of them. What might have happened to them and their kids if they weren't there made his stomach curdle.

Don't borrow trouble, he warned himself. Wait till you're