Rising Storm

'Haven't you got a cell phone? Why don't you just call your garage?' she said.

'You're going to need a tow anyway. I'm not your mommy, Lazaro; this isn't up to me. You wouldn't be in this fix in the first place if you weren't doing something damned stupid.'

Not to mention if I hadn't been doing something damn stupid. She'd been a lot more focused when she was crazy. Now that I know they're still out there maybe I should let myself go crazy again. Lazaro banged on the glass. Speaking of crazy.

'I don't have my phone with me.'

Sarah rolled her eyes. 'Okay,' she said. 'Who do you want me to call?'

Twenty-four hours later they were on the road to Asuncion in an old wreck of a car that she had gotten by calling in an old debt. Garmendia had agreed to leave them alone on the condition that they left town immediately and never contacted him again. This came about because Lazaro was totally thrown by the new, sane Sarah.

Enjoy it while you can, Sarah thought at him. Who knows how long it will last.

'Mom?' John said. 'Are you all right?'

She put a hand on her hip, feeling the lumpy crumpled bulk of the bandage under the cloth; the wound wasn't bleeding much, but it needed a doctor to take out the slug, and there hadn't been time.

'I've been better, but it'll heal. Another of my patchwork of scars,' she went on, smiling at Dieter's lumpy, bruised face; it was going to turn every color of the rainbow soon.

'I shouldn't have left you with Garmendia,' he fretted.

'It wasn't him. It was the bodyguard, the freak,' she repeated patiently. 'And Garmendia shot him, right afterward. If you'd been there, you might have caught this—and between your eyes, possibly.'

'Garmendia shot him?' Dieter asked. 'The one who looked like a giant Neanderthal in a guayabera?'

'In the back,' Sarah said.

Dieter touched the side of his face, wincing. 'It's an unfamiliar sensation.'

'A bruise?'

'No, feeling envious of Garmendia,' the Austrian said. 'I wanted to be the one who shot that guy, very much.'

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

LOS ANGELES

Clea did her best to project untutored country girl at the CEO and president of Cyberdyne. In an effort to aid that effect she'd worn a denim skirt and jacket with a red plaid Western shirt, her tooled leather belt had a big silver buckle, and on her feet were a pair of well-broken-in cowboy boots. The rustic costume, with the glasses and attitude, she hoped, would eliminate any resemblance to Serena's slick corporate look and, therefore, to Serena.

As long as he doesn't focus on my tits, some sardonic corner of her mind thought.

They're just like Serena's. Clea scowled at the inner voice; it was far too much like the recorded memories of her clone sister/mother. Eventually they would notice; it was inevitable. But by that time they would be used to her and might comment on the resemblance, but they wouldn't be suspicious. Merely curious.

That's one of the things I actually like about humans— their willingness to explain away anything strange. From what she'd observed, on her own and through Serena's memories, they'd perform some unbelievably convoluted feats of logic to return to their everyday frame of reference. At times she found it incredible that these people had conceived and built Skynet.

The I-950 set her battered briefcase on the conference-room table and extracted a portable computer, smiling nervously at the two men as she set it up. The new corporate HQ was nothing like Serena's memories of the underground center the Connors had destroyed; it was pure minimalist functionality, the sort of

'nothing' that cost a great deal of money, and left you wondering if anything as vulgar as paper ever crossed anyone's desk. Some of the people in the cubicles outside weren't even using thin-screen monitors; they were peering into the telltale blackness of vision goggles, miniature lasers painting text and diagrams directly on their retinas.

'Would you like some coffee?' the president of Cyberdyne offered. Paul Warren hefted a carafe with his own hands, considerable condescension from an executive at his level.

She shook her head and gave him a shy smile. He smiled back warmly and she knew she'd taken the right tack with him. Serena had considered initiating a romantic affair with him, but she'd miscalculated his affection for his wife. This was one instance in which Serena's mistake really didn't matter, though. The woman had had to die, even if it did turn out to be a setback in other areas.

By now, though, he must be lonely and his distress over his wife's death should be fading. Perhaps she should co-opt Serena's plan for herself. Although the very thought of intimate relations with a human revolted her.

'Welcome to Cyberdyne,' Roger Colvin said. 'I think, based on what I saw at the unveiling the other night, that we've got a lot to offer each other.'

Clea squirmed as though pleased and allowed her face to flush as though she was

embarrassed. Don't overdo it, she warned herself. 'Thank you,' she said aloud, allowing just a touch of Montana into her voice.

'I was just wondering,' Warren said, 'what have you named your product and have you got a copyright on it.'

'I, uh, sent in the paperwork, but I hadn't heard back before I left home.' She shrugged. 'It may be that it hasn't caught up with me yet.'

'We'll check on that for you,' Colvin said. 'What name have you registered it under?'

'Intellimetal,' Clea said. She smiled ruefully. 'That's more for what it will be one day than for what it can do now. What Mr. Hill was working with was my earliest successful prototype.'

'Really,' Colvin said, his voice dripping with interest.

'Uh-huh,' she said, smiling. 'But'—she twisted her fingers together—'I'd rather not go into detail until we've come to some sort of agreement.' Clea shrugged prettily. 'My uncle was a stickler for getting things in writing. Never agree to anything until you see it written down, he'd say. It always looks different then.'

Warren and Colvin exchanged a glance that said, 'This little lady might be inexperienced, but she's nobody's fool.'

They set to work, and work it was. Clea knew exactly what she wanted, how much she wanted, and what terms she'd accept. As far as she was concerned, almost nothing was negotiable, however hard the two humans tried. Two hours

later Clea typed in the last word of her 'rough notes,' as she called them, on her portable and handed the CEO a disk.

'There ya go,' she said cheerfully. 'Now I'll need to see this all written up formally before I can even begin to decide for sure what I want to do.'

'Thank you,' Colvin said palely.

'You're welcome.' She met his eyes and leaned forward confidentially. 'I would like to leave you contemplating this one little idea I had. Now, I haven't done any real special work on it, but I've been thinking about it real hard.' Watch the Montana effect, she warned herself. She was in serious danger of enjoying her role too much.

'We'd love to hear about it,' Warren said, leaning forward himself.

'Well. You know the F-101, that flying-wing stealth plane?'

The two men nodded.

'The only reason something like that can keep from crashing is because it has an onboard computer that makes thousands of adjustments a minute.' Her listeners nodded again. 'So I was thinking, what we need is a