Rising Storm

regretfully. He frowned. Bennet, not Burns. Have to save Bennet. Bennet wasn't Burns. But she might be. Two peas in a pod.

He blinked and shook his head, regretting it instantly as it rang like a carillon.

'Shit!' he said aloud. He tried to move and found himself well and truly bound.

'Shit,' he said again, with much more resignation.

What had he been thinking about? Oh, yes. Burns and Bennet and how much alike they looked. The two women might be identical twins. What were the odds of that, two unrelated people looking exactly alike except for hair color. Which could easily be handled by Lady Clairol.

And what the hell did it matter? He had to get out of here and down to the labs, where the action was. Tricker started to pull his belt around. One edge of the buckle was especially sharp, something that came in handy for times like these.

Then he heard the outside door open and slam shut.

The shed door was unlocked and Dieter entered, slammed it behind him, and slid

down its surface to rest on the floor. To him the room was pitch-dark. Didn't escape the snow blindness entirely, he thought, disappointed. But at least he wasn't going to freeze. He pushed back his hood and yanked the soaking balaclava from his head. Next time he was going to get one of those fleece ones.

Better yet, he thought, next time there's not going to be a next time. He knew now, right down in his bones, how close he'd come to dying out there. If the wind had been just a little worse…

'Hey!' a voice called from another room. 'Who's out there?'

With a mental sigh Dieter got himself to his feet, then cautiously moved farther into the room. 'Hello?' he said.

'Who is that?' the voice called. 'Viemeister?'

'I can't see,' Dieter said as he bumped into what felt like an office chair. He took hold of it and pushed it in front of him like a bulky white cane. 'I've got a touch of snow blindness. Keep talking and I'll find you.'

'Over here,' Tricker called. 'There's a hallway. I'm in the first room on your left.

This way.'

Dieter found the wall and followed it, still pushing the chair until his hand fell through an opening. 'It's pitch- dark for me,' he said. 'Are the lights on at all?'

'No. There's a switch to the right of the door, about four inches from the frame.'

Von Rossbach found the switch easily and flicked it on. To him the light was

dim, but he could easily make out a man tied up on a bunk. 'Ah! I see my young friends have already been here,' he said with a smile.

'You must be the guide they mentioned,' Tricker said sourly. 'Did they try to kill you, too?'

'Did they try to kill you?' Dieter asked, surprised. He unzipped the parka and began to shrug out of it.

Tricker thought about it. 'No. I guess not.' He lifted his bound hands significantly. 'You gonna help me out here?'

'No,' Dieter said, and turned around, peering into the dark of the hallway.

' No?' Tricker said. 'Why not?'

'They're just a couple of crazy kids,' von Rossbach explained. 'There's no real harm in them. I'll round them up and get them out of your way. The thing is, if they've tied you up they must have had a reason. Until I find out what that is, it might not be safe to let you go. Eh?'

'Buddy, this is a U.S. government scientific installation! I demand that you let me go.'

Dieter looked at him. 'Are you the only one here?' he asked mildly.

Tricker hesitated. 'At the moment, yeah.'

'You might have a touch of cabin fever, then. It may be that you attacked my young friends. Where are they, anyway? Is there another large building on this

base? I didn't see one.'

Tricker tightened his lips and put his head back down on the pillow. 'Maybe they ran off into the storm,' he muttered.

'And left you like this? I hardly think they'd be so irresponsible.'

'They left you, didn't they?' Tricker said precisely.

'A different situation altogether,' Dieter assured him. His eyes were beginning to adjust and he could see things, finally. Like the roll of duct tape on a shelf and the open door on the other side of the hall. He picked up the duct tape and began to wind it tightly around his torso, feeling immediate relief. He cut it off with the knife he found on the shelf. It was John's; he decided to keep it. 'I'll just have a look around for them, shall I?'

'Like you'd stay put if I told you no?' Tricker muttered.

'Surely you want me to find them,' von Rossbach said cheerfully. Even his face wasn't feeling so bad now; maybe he'd escaped frostbite after all.

'Oh, surely,' Tricker muttered as he heard the man clatter down the stairs and then heard the elevator begin to work. Don't call me Shirley, he thought woozily.

He'd only been awake for maybe a minute when he heard the man come in.

Then, when he'd heard that slight accent, he'd thought, crazily, that it might be Viemeister coming after Bennet.

That kid must have hit me pretty hard, he thought. Hell, if I'm imagining that

super-kraut would risk his precious ass in an Antarctic blizzard for a woman who has publicly rejected him, then I might actually have brain damage. But then this place seemed to be turning into Grand fucking Central Station, so who knew who was going to turn up next.

He got to work pulling his belt around so that he could use the buckle to get him out of this mess. This definitely wasn't one of his most shining moments, he complained to himself. On the downside, it was three to one and the kid had his gun.

But on the upside, that wasn't his only gun.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Clea was hiding in one of the labs that John had already inspected when she heard the elevator engage. Empty, she thought as she mentally switched to the surveillance camera. But von Rossbach waited patiently for it to arrive…

She had assumed the Sector agent was dead and was not pleased to see him.

Still, having almost all of her important enemies in one isolated place had its charm. Though having one less to worry about would be even more charming.

So far the seals had been a disappointment. 'If only Antarctica had polar bears!'

she mused.

The I-950 quickly moved to a lab three doors closer to Viemeister's when John entered another lab to inspect it. She watched Wendy work through the security cameras, and evaluated the program, even helped her when the girl got bogged down too much. It would be necessary to be careful, though; it wouldn't do to

help her so much that she began to install the second and, presumably, dangerous part of her program.

Meanwhile von Rossbach had entered the elevator and was on his way down.

Fortunately, one of the base's security measures was the ability to halt the elevator at any point. Clea did so now, freezing it between the office and laboratory floors.

From the look of the man, she doubted he'd be able to squeeze through the escape hatch. Of course he could just break the controls— but that would send the car plummeting to the bottom of the shaft. Actually overriding them would take either sophisticated equipment or specialized knowledge and a great deal of patience. Which left him out of the equation for the moment.

Tricker was still writhing around on the bunk, trying to get free. And even if he was free, how was he going to get down here? The elevator was disabled, and the emergency exit couldn't be opened from outside, so that was two down.

Which left her free to deal with Connor and the girl. It would be the girl first after all. Connor would return to her eventually, which was convenient. And once she'd ensured that the girl's program couldn't harm Skynet, the I-