The Future War

the trucks' tanks. And if whoever was out there was after him, they were approaching with exaggerated caution. He slunk back to the bike and pulled his binoculars out of the saddlebags.

He adjusted them carefully, staring in the direction of the flash. He felt his stomach drop when he found himself staring at the skeletal head of a Terminator. It moved out of his field of vision to be replaced by another, and another…

Think! he told himself, cudgeling his brain. What—

'Oh, my God,' he whispered. They're after the trucks… it's a culling operation!

* * *

The buses and trucks came to a halt in the middle of a rocky defile, apparently in the middle of nowhere. The women and children looked around in puzzled silence for a moment; then the kids demanded to get off almost as one. Their mothers looked at one another and made an executive decision that this was a rest stop; everyone eagerly rushed to the exit.

Precious toilet paper was handed out and children were cautioned not to go far and to avoid poison ivy. 'Three leaves, remember. Even this early in the spring it can give you a rash.'

The men in the trucks, seeing the children and many of the women making for the bushes, got out and stretched their legs, waiting by tacit agreement for the women to finish their business before getting on with their own.

Afterward, families mingled and people chatted, relieved and a great deal more comfortable. Finally Paul looked at his watch.

'I think we should get back on the transports,' he said. 'Most rest stops are twenty minutes long and it's been nineteen minutes.'

People looked at him, considered what he'd said, and began to separate in extreme slow motion.

Suddenly the transports started their engines and drove off, leaving the refugees stunned.

One or two chased after them yelling, 'Hey! Stop!'

'Well,' one woman said, 'at least they didn't try to run us down.'

* * *

Salvaging the vehicles, John Connor thought, lips thin as he pondered.

Some distant part of his mind was conscious that he'd gone into combat mode—what he thought of as his Great Military Dick-head mind-set—but there was less resentment in the thought than there had been. The sight of the shining alloy-steel skulls had brought it home, more harshly than anything since the T-1000 had walked through the bars of the mental institution like living liquid metal.

But they're not living, he told himself. And they tend to be a bit single-minded. They see the optimum given their data and go for it. Let's introduce a chaos factor here.

He looked at the side of the road. The cutting was nearly cliff steep, an ideal slaughter pen, but right here the ground rose steeply… not quite too steeply…

He reached into the saddlebags and took out a haversack he'd prepared on the just-in-case theory, checked the shotgun in the saddle scabbard before his right knee, and then dropped a half-dozen thermite grenades into the pockets of his shabby, smelly bush jacket.

So, Lancelot probably smelled, too, with that padding they wore under their armor, he thought.

'Yippee!' he shouted aloud, gunning the engine until the blue smoke rose around him. 'I'm coming, you metal motherfuckers!'

Then he let the bike go, throwing itself up the rocky slope, slewing between boulders and jumping small ravines with tooth-clattering shocks while he crouched over the handlebars and ;grinned a grin that was more than half snarl.

It got a little easier when he reached the crest, the drop-off blurring by to his left; but now he had to spare a few half seconds' flickering glance to trace the convoy moving below. Bus leading, and yes!

A boulder, wedged with two others, but on a downslope toward the cutting and the road. He reached into the canvas haversack and twisted the fuse; there was a hissing, and he now had exactly twenty-eight seconds.

Twenty-seven, twenty-six…

He pulled the sling that held it off over his head, swung the whole mass of the satchel charge—a brick of Semtex and the detonator—around his head and pitched it accurately under the side of the boulder away from the road; it landed with a soft thump and lay, trailing a line of thin blue smoke.

John gave another Comanche screech as he spun the motorcycle around, balanced perilously for an instant on the back wheel as it spat gravel behind him, then fell down on the front and gave the throttle all it had.

The thermite grenade was a smooth heavy green cylinder in his hand. Usually he despised people who pulled the pins on grenades with their teeth—showy, hard on your teeth, a macho-asshole sort of thing to do—but this time there wasn't any alternative. It came free, and he spat the pin aside without any damage to his enamel.

There was a huge crump sound from behind him. He ducked lower, conscious of rock fragments whistling by, then skidded to a halt where a twisted pine gave him some shelter from the roadway. There he looked behind; the ten-ton granite boulder seemed to be floating in midair, and then vanished as it plunged toward the roadway fifty feet below.

CRA SH- TINKLE- TINKLE- WHUDD UMP.

John craned his head to see; the noise had been stunning, even thirty yards away. The boulder had landed right over the rear wheels of the lead bus, and the fuel tank had already caught fire— probably sparks, as the ponderous weight tore metal and sheared pipes. The last truck was already beginning to reverse.

'Naughty, naughty!' John shouted, and opened his hand to let the spoon fly away from the grenade.

He didn't have to toss it far; more of a drop with a bit of a boost. It fell where he'd aimed it, at the gap right behind the cab… just as the fuse set off the filling of powdered aluminum and ferric oxide packed into the magnesium shell. The stab of light was white and painful; that reaction went fast, and it hit nearly five thousand degrees. The fuel tank blew a few seconds later and sent the cab and engine of the last truck catapulting forward into the rear of the next.

Ain't none of you homicidal transports going nowhere, John thought with savage satisfaction.

That left nearly two hundred and fifty people back there, with the Terminators approaching. They'd have heard the explosions.

'Gotta surprise 'em,' he muttered to himself. Now, where won't they be expecting me to come from?

He looked back. The slope off to his left was fairly clear; there was even a lip or ramp projecting out a few feet. The cut was fairly narrow…

Even as he raced back to give himself enough of a run, he could hear his mother's voice screeching in his head that it was too risky—that he carried humanity's hopes with him, and a few hundred individuals were nothing compared to that.

'Fuck it, Mom. No fate but what we make! Eeeee-ha!'

Besides, what sort of leader never took risks for his people? He was going to need a lot of people willing to take a lot of risks to win this war. Crazy risks, the sort a computer would never take.

He wasn't going to inspire anyone to take them by hiding in a bunker.

The rear wheel skidded again, then caught. He felt the wind pushing at him, forcing its way through the thick fabric of his jacket as he built speed in a frenzied dash. Then he hit the upward-sloping lip of rock and he was in the air, soaring above the burning trucks below—all of them had caught now.

Balancing on nothing, heat buffeting him, scraps of burning canvas going past.

He hit the solid rock on the other side of the cutting perfectly, but hard enough that he nearly lost control and smeared out for a moment.

'Spine compressed like a Slinky,' he wheezed, then pulled up and used one booted foot to skid himself into a