Rising Storm

them dancing and singing for her and frowned.

Perhaps that wasn't what she meant; humans often said one thing and meant another.

They drove past her now in a battered pickup, a young woman wedged between

them. The three of them looked at her, slowing down as they passed the portal, then continued on their way.

So there had been someone else in the house, who might have given the alarm if the old couple had been terminated.

Alissa was pleased that she had waited. She only hoped that Connor would return from her ride soon. The I- 950 was eager to complete her assignment.

Sarah saw the truck coming and opened the gate for them. ' Gracias, senora,'

Epifanio called out.

She smiled and waved in return, but instead of driving through, he brought the old pickup to a halt.

'Senora, there is an American girl waiting for you on the portal,' he said.

'She says she is a friend of Sienorita Dorset,' Marietta said, leaning toward Epifanio's side of the truck, crushing poor Elsa without a second thought.

Sarah looked up toward the house. 'Oh?' she said.

' Si.' Marietta said. 'And she is a very rude young woman, too. Demanding to see people, threatening to call the police.' She gave a loud 'tsk!' and sat back up.

'Sounds like a handful,' Sarah said with a slight smile. 'Thank you for telling me.'

' De nada,' Epifanio said.

'Enjoy the fiesta,' Sarah said. 'Go with God.'

She closed the gate behind the truck and turned the mare's head toward the house, not at all happy with the situation. Nobody knows where I am— she said,

'I didn't tell anybody' — she said, 'There's no way they can follow me here' —

she said. Not much! Sarah thought bitterly. Lying little bitch! Sarah rode on, wondering if she was going to need to apply some serious damage control here.

Having decided to wait inside the house, the I-950 picked the old-fashioned lock with ease. After all there was a good chance—probability in excess of 73 percent

—that Connor would recognize her as a duplicate of Serena Burns, causing her to escape. But if she saw a shadowy stranger lurking in her doorway, she would probably march right in, demanding an explanation.

Alissa thought it a pity that she didn't have a rifle. It would be so much easier to just pick Connor off at a distance and then drive away. She wondered if von Rossbach had gums and decided that he almost certainly did, but that he also probably had hidden them too well or locked them up too well. Besides, there was also something to be said for a hands-on approach. Confirmation of a kill was much more certain, for example. The Connors had looked doomed, (defeated, dying, far too often—and the way they kept coming back reminded her of an advertisement she had seen of a synthetic rabbit with a chemical energy-storage device.

The I-950 found a spot in the' hallway that would render her visible from outside but not recognizable, and waited.

***

As Sarah rode up to the house she saw a rental car off to the side and that no one was on the portal, but the front door was wide open. Would Marietta leave a

'rude girl' in the house alone? she wondered. It seemed unlikely.

Would Wendy have a friend who was a housebreaker? Actually she doubted it.

Sarah might not have taken to the girl, but she'd seemed thoroughly honest, and honest people tended to have honest friends. She got off the horse and looped its reins over the railing out front. This shouldn't take long.

As she approached the front steps she saw a slender woman lingering in the hall and she called out a pleasant 'hello.'

The woman pulled back into the shadows and the hairs rose on the back of Sarah's neck. She stopped walking. I smell ambush.

Then a young voice with a Boston accent said, 'I'll be right there, I'm just going to get my purse.'

It seemed such a normal thing to say that Sarah moved forward again. For a moment she had thought it might be the Serena Burns clone, but then, how would the clone know about Wendy? Hell, I didn't even know about Wendy.

As she entered the hall Sarah was sun blind for a moment. When she could see again the hall was empty.

'I'm in here,' the voice called from the office. 'I'm afraid I spilled some of the lemonade that lady gave me.'

Sarah wasn't surprised that Marietta would give a guest refreshment, but she was

surprised that she'd let her into the office. It was much more her speed to use the living room or the portal on a nice day like this. She moved down the hall and looked into the office…

Ancient habit saved her life—she ducked her head before looking in. A sharp snap sounded, and a light-caliber bullet punched through the hardwood molding at precisely the place where her face would have been at natural height.

Something unusual, maybe one of those plastic derringers built to get past airport scanning machines—

Terminator! her reflexes screamed. Nothing else could manage an offhand shot like that, calculating the angles with machine precision to anticipate where her skull would show around the doorjamb.

In the wake of the shot came pounding feet, sounding far heavier than the young girl Epifanio had described, beating a machine-gun-rapid tattoo on the floorboards, faster than anything natural could run.

Sarah Connor had come a long way from the time when she'd been a waitress and part-time student. She ran herself, but deliberately in place, feet pounding the floor to supply the sound of flight. A slight form came out of the door, pivoting in place, with one hand flung out for balance—a hand that held something long and bright. Sarah was turned away, head cocked back over her shoulder to aim, in a perfect position for the mule kick.

Any of the unarmed-combat instructors she'd had over the years would have been proud. Her right foot was already slamming back and up as her body went forward, toes curled back toward her shin to present the heel of her riding boot and all the power of leg and gut and body behind the kick. The steel inset met

the thing's jaw with a gunshot crack and an underlying crumbling feeling.

The Terminator cyborg might be stronger than six large men, and heavier than it appeared by a good 50 percent, but it still had the dimensions of a slender teenager, which put an upper limit on mass. Sarah felt as if she had kicked a cement-block wall, but the creature catapulted backward four feet down the corridor, landing on neck and shoulder in the angle of floor and wall with a smack and wrench that would have put a human in traction and neck brace for months if they were lucky.

Even the thing that was hunting her was stunned for an instant. The long knife flew out of her hand as she reeled, sinking into the corridor paneling and humming like a malignant bee.

Sarah snatched at the hilt, and it came free effortlessly—not steel, some sort of fancy composite, and the twelve-inch blade was sharp as a malicious thought.

She threw it overarm as the thing shook its blond head and started to rise. The throw felt right, moving with a graceful inevitability to her adrenaline-sharpened senses. Teeth and blood showed through torn flesh on the perfect countenance of the killer cyborg as its head came up; then it froze again as the needle-pointed blade sank into its body right below the ribs, sank hilt-deep.

That made the calm in its blue-eyed gaze even more chilling as it checked for a moment, looked down, then