Rising Storm

who would lead humanity to victory in the post-Judgment Day future. What was madness for megalomaniacs was plain truth for him.

He was so important that his mother had sacrificed the better part of her life, and briefly her sanity, to train and protect him.

But how do you stay sane when your son has been sired by a man from the future, sent back by his own older self (the one he privately thought of as the Great Military Leader Dickhead) to protect her. Kyle Reese had ended up falling in love with Sarah and died saving her life. Later Skynet sent another Terminator, a T-1000, to kill John, and the Great Military Dickhead sent back a captured, reprogrammed T-101 to protect himself so that he could grow up to send back—

'Thinking about time travel makes my head hurt,' John snarled.

'Time travel brought your parents together,' Dieter said over his shoulder as naturally as if the comment hadn't come out of left field.

No, Skynet and I will bring my parents together. Like a pair of homicidal matchmakers. John shook his head. What I've always wondered is how do I get cold enough to send my own father to his death?

'Yeah.' he said to distract himself, 'keep a good thought.'

At least they had a friend in Jordan Hyson, Miles's brother, who. even more reluctantly than Miles, but just as violently, had learned the unbelievable truth about Skynet. Now Jordan was watching over Sarah as she lay helpless, perhaps dying in the hospital. Keep a good thought, John admonished himself sternly.

She's not alone. And how often had that been the case in her chaotic life? He absently wiped the sweat from his chin.

The Amazonian jungle wasn't really stiflingly hot. The temperature never got much above eighty or so, with all the layers of shade above. The problem was that it wasn't just humid; the air was fully saturated and absolutely still, and unless perspiration ran or dripped off you, it stayed. Sweat slicked his whole body, making him feel like he'd been dipped in canola oil and left to go rancid, chafing anywhere belt or backpack or equipment touched his body; and if you got a rash here, sure as Skynet made Terminators to kill people, it would get infected.

He hated feeling this wet and dirty. John would have sworn it hadn't felt this bad the first time he'd been through here. Maybe it wasn't as hot that year, he thought. He'd hate to think he'd become a fussy old lady at sixteen.

John stopped, chopped the machete halfway into a tree trunk, and yanked off the scarf he'd tied around his forehead. He wrung out the sweat and glanced behind.

Dieter von Rossbach moved forward with the determination of a machine.

A machine he just happens to resemble, John thought with a quirk of his lips.

Even now, after knowing the big man for several weeks, he still couldn't get over Dieter's resemblance to a Terminator.

In fact it was the other way around: Skynet had used Dieter's face and form to

'flesh out' the T-101 series of killing machines. When it decided to put living skin on its robots, it scanned old files looking for faces that fit the thing's profile, literally. And there was Dieter von Rossbach.

Dieter came up and stopped beside him. 'If we stand still, the mosquitoes will eat us alive,' he remarked.

John quirked an eyebrow.

'I haven't noticed that they leave us alone when we're moving.'

Waving a hand before his face, Dieter said, 'Ja, but at least they don't stroll up your nose.'

John took a slug from his canteen. Important to keep hydrated. 'We'll reach the trail sometime between now and sundown,' he said. 'But trails can change or disappear completely around here in six years.' The Amazonian rain forest was notorious for its ability to absorb the works °f man.

'So. we keep heading south.' Dieter said, moving forward. He looked at the GPS

unit strapped to his left forearm, reached over his shoulder. drew the machete, and lopped off a soft-bodied trunk in one economical motion. 'We'll get there eventually.'

John watched him go with a sigh. Yeah, well, if we keep going south we'll hit Tierra del Fuego eventually. Whether they'd get there in one piece or not was the question. At least the climate's better in Tierra del Fuego.

When he and his mother had followed this trail six years ago, they'd succeeded in vanishing from the face of the earth as far as law enforcement was concerned.

But they'd had a guide, which meant they didn't disappear for real.

Lorenzo was still in business, but he flat refused to go through this section of jungle anymore. He'd sat on his portal by the river, cleaning his gun and shaking his head stubbornly.

'Those gold miners are out of control down there. They kill anybody they find, no questions asked. You know? Everybody there, they gone a little loco. They kill the Indios, the Indios, some of 'em, kill 'em back. Kill any white man they see. They're so mad they even think I'm white.' He'd grinned up at John, teeth flashing in his mahogany face.

'I'm sorry, boy, but I won't go there, not for love or money.' He'd pointed a tobacco-stained finger at John. 'You shouldn't go there either.'

Like we had a choice, John thought. It's not like we can buy a first- class ticket and fly home to Asuncion.

Not if they wanted to disappear as thoroughly as they needed to. Though the authorities might like them to try.

He screwed the cap back on the canteen and levered his machete out of the tree, then he started off down the trail in Dieter's energetic wake. The Austrian made a much wider path than John did. It was kind of embarrassing; Dieter was his mother's age. At least. He even thought they had a bit of a thing for each other, which was funny in a gross sort of way.

John sometimes wished he didn't have so much to live up to. In a way it wasn't fair. He not only had his future, fabulous, Great Military Dickhead self to measure himself against, but his mom was superwoman and Dieter, well…

Dieter was in a class by himself. He sighed. Other kids his age could be comfortably contemptuous of their elders. That was sooo not available to him.

Be nice though, he thought. For a moment he daydreamed a life where his mother was a clueless, overweight lady who baked cookies for his friends and worried vaguely that he might be getting into drugs or that his girlfriend was a bad influence. In that life his greatest problem would be just saying no to all the temptations that youth is heir to.

On the: other hand, that could be really boring. Certainly a hit of the guvs at school who had just that lifestyle were; both bored and boring. He might currently be hot and grubby and mosquito-bitten to within an inch of his life, but he wasn't bored. Though if things stayed as quiet as they currently were…

He was kidding himself, of course; things were far from quiet. At the back of his mind, with an almost palpable weight, was his endless worry over his mother. It had been days since he'd been able to get any information on her condition. Last he'd heard she was stable. Which was much too ambiguous for comfort. Not that he didn't keep trying to find some in that lame word. Stable was good when you'd been shot several times and stabbed and lost most of your internal fluids.

Well, you're all alone I when the bullet hits the bone. Truer words had never been sung.

I wonder how she is, he thought. He also wondered what they—the black-ops types who were probably Cyberdyne's link to the government—were going to do

to her. John suspected that the people running Cyberdyne's security were so covert they could not only kill you, they could erase you. He couldn't stop the thought from occurring, but refused to dwell on it.

Couldn't fix it from here, he thought. Couldn't fix it from there either. He whacked some vegetation viciously with the machete. So why do I feel like a piddling little coward?

He remembered the Infiltrator, a female, astonishingly small compared with the Terminators he'd known,