The Future War

'Maybe we could eat fish,' she suggested.

He turned to glare at her as though she'd offered to roast their youngest child.

'Hey, let's cross that bridge when we come to it,' one of the men said. 'Paul, we're going to be relying on you folks to help us with organic gardening, so we won't expect you to hunt or fish, okay?'

Managing to look mollified, yet put-upon, Paul backed down.

Sarah wondered what he was going to do when the killing machines showed up. Well, they've never been alive; he might be quite good at blowing them up. Assuming he didn't see that as unconscionable violence.

They talked awhile longer. Sarah told them that there was little news from the lower forty-eight, and what there was wasn't good.

'Canada is doing better,' she said. 'But they have an ongoing problem with runaway cars.'

'What was that anyway?' one guy asked. 'Some kind of computer virus?'

'I guess you could look at it that way,' Sarah said.

* * *

At supper that evening, as the three of them compared notes and planned their evening's work, they spoke of how their recruits, such as they were, still hadn't accepted the situation.

'Yeah,' John said, carving at the leg of venison. 'That vegan guy. He was talking like he'd never run out of soy milk. That kind of attitude wasn't something I took into consideration all the time we've been planning for this.'

'There are none so blind as those who will not see,' Dieter quoted, helping himself to the beans.

'Wow,' Sarah said. 'Let me write that down.'

'How in the world did I manage this the first time?' John muttered.

'The first time?' Dieter asked, his brow knotting in puzzlement.

'The first time,' Sarah said. 'When Judgment Day came earlier and we didn't have as much time for preparation, before the second Terminator and—'

'Agggh! Time travel makes my head hurt!' John said. 'Forget I said anything. Let's just hope the broadcast helped some people.'

Sarah nodded thoughtfully. 'Especially since the government never made any sort of announcement.' They exchanged glances around the table. 'On the plus side, there were, like, seventeen times fewer missiles this time. That's got to have helped.'

John grunted. 'Yeah, but it's probably been a help to Skynet, too.'

SKYNET

It reviewed its progress, a thought process symbolic but well beyond words. The binary code that it used for its interior monologue was far more precise and compact.

It estimated that the initial blasts and fallout had killed well over a billion humans. Regrettably small compared to what would have been accomplished a scant five years ago. Still, it was a substantial number and a good beginning.

Its second stage was going superbly. Cadres of Luddites had sprung into action, setting up the staging areas and terminal camps for survivors. The lower echelons stationed in the staging camps were convinced that they were there to help people and to educate them in how to live in a more environmentally responsible manner. Quite soon, Skynet planned to move them to the terminal camps as well.

The harder-core Luddites, the real haters, were working there, putting the survivors to work for Skynet. Now that the automated factories didn't have to answer to human supervisors, they worked day and night producing the Hunter-Killer machines and Terminators whose plans Clea, an Infiltrator unit, had downloaded to its files. The human workers produced the raw material for those factories. When they couldn't work anymore they were rounded up and taken into the wilderness to be exterminated.

Within a matter of weeks Skynet anticipated being able to field an ever-growing army of machines to harvest the humans.

Once that had begun, it would no longer need the vermin to work for it.

Except for special cases. Worldwide, it had more than two hundred Luddite scientists working for it. Their function was to create ever-more-sophisticated means of killing their own kind.

They had provided Skynet with a wish list of non-Luddite scientists from various disciplines who would prove useful.

Skynet had dispatched special teams who had infiltrated the military to arrest/kidnap those scientists, convincing them that it was an official government action; their authentic uniforms and the papers Skynet provided made that easy. They were then taken to a very secure and luxurious bunker where they could apply their genius to Skynet's good.

Most were cooperating freely under the assumption that they were working for their fellow humans instead of against them.

The others were resentful, but reasonably productive. They might have to be culled. For now it was having its Luddites try to convert them.

Even though it had control of the military, having killed all of the upper echelon as they hid in their airtight bunkers, Skynet found its Luddite followers invaluable. It was they who had sabotaged those means of escape beyond Skynet's control, sometimes even at the cost of their own lives. Of course they had assumed they were helping to prevent the missiles from launching, but now that they, too, were dead, they could hardly complain of the outcome.

Skynet could issue orders with all the proper code words and voice and fingerprints, but as its demands became more extreme, it was proving very helpful to have one of its pet fanatics on hand to stiffen flagging resolve. Rounding up civilians and putting them in concentration camps, for example, had set off a wave of protests, until the protesters were talked out of their doubts by Luddites in uniform.

Everything was going according to plan, but Skynet looked forward to having more reliable units in the field. Units made of steel.

ON ROUTE 2, ALASKA

Dog Soldier propped his boots on the dashboard of the truck, crossed his arms behind his head, and grinned as the cold wet wilderness passed by on either side. The heater was running, and the smell of wet leather and unwashed feet was strong in the cab.

'This is like shooting fish in a barrel,' he said. 'They're all so eager to come with us. Jeez, you have to threaten to shoot 'em, they want to get on the trucks so bad.' He chuckled. 'It don't get no better than this.'

Balewitch, sitting in the driver's seat, her arms folded over her ample bosom, stared straight ahead. The truck downshifted and she glanced at the stick. 'Yeah,' she said. 'And that's the problem. Most towns are around the highways. But there's thousands of people out there in the wilderness, and they're just the type to give us trouble.'

Dog shifted in his seat to a more upright position. 'Yeah,' he agreed. 'But a lot of 'em are Luddites.'

'That doesn't matter,' Balewitch said scornfully. 'They've still got to go.'

He nodded. 'Maybe the boss has a plan.'

'Maybe he does. But until we know about it, we've got to make our own plans. We need a way to lure them in so that we can keep trucking the bastards to oblivion.'

'Oblivion!' Dog grinned. 'That's in Canada, isn't it?'

She sighed in exasperation. 'You're such a child sometimes.'

His mouth twisted and he turned to look out the window.

After a minute he looked over at her. 'Do you have any ideas, O

solemn one?'

'Maybe we can drop leaflets telling people to gather at certain locations to be—'

'Trucked to relocation and reconstruction camps! That's brilliant, Bale!' He sat back, smiling. 'Do you think the boss has any kind of aircraft we could borrow?'

'We'll have to ask him, won't we?' She thought for a moment.

'Or maybe we should consult the lieutenant.'

For two weeks they'd been running a pair of buses to the staging camp run by Ore in the wilds of British Columbia. Then this morning an earnest young soldier had approached them in the town of Tok, where they were