The Future War

smile and sat.

'Thank you for your help, Ms. Connor,' he said.

'It was my very great pleasure,' she answered. 'Throwing a spoke in Senor Reimer's training wheels has made my day.'

'Reimer?'

'The shark in the sharkskin suit,' Sarah told him. 'The one who, no doubt, arranged to fence you in. He annoys me.' She sat straighter, leaning slightly forward. 'But let's get down to business.'

'I might have known,' Chu said ruefully. He folded his hands on his desktop. 'This is a U.S. Navy vessel, Ms. Connor. Neither my crew nor I have any business doing anything with it without orders.'

Sarah looked away and nodded slowly, then looked at him from the corners of her eyes. 'Are you going to try and tell me that whenever you've come in hailing distance of any other United States Navy vessels, it's been a peaceful, brotherly encounter?'

He blinked before he could stop himself and smiled at her knowing smile. Although how she could have known that when he refused the order to report to San Diego, his ship had immediately begun drawing fire from other navy ships was beyond him. One, a brand-new Los Angeles— class boat, had fired a nuclear-tipped homing torpedo toward them, nearly destroying the Roosevelt.

But he knew—he knew—that the crew had not done it. Calls from the captains' private cell phones had warned him that they had lost control of their ships. Once refitted, they'd been stripped to skeleton crews and it turned out that none of the men and women aboard had the technical knowledge that would have allowed them to take over the computer-controlled vessels.

They'd also found out too late that the computers were very well defended with an impressive battery of automatic weapons.

Chu stared at Sarah Connor. How could she possibly know?

She stared back at him, her expression sad and a little tired. She shook her head and brushed her hair back.

'It doesn't really matter how I know,' she said, startling him again. 'What matters is that my information is solid.'

The captain's aide came in with a tray bearing two bowls of chicken soup and hot biscuits. /

'I'm cool,' Sarah said when he tried to lay the bowl at her side of the desk. 'Why don't you enjoy that.'

The aide glanced at Chu, who nodded, and smiling, he picked up the tray and began to leave.

'Talan,' Chu said. He pushed the little basket of rolls toward him. 'Take a couple of these.'

'Thank you, sir.' The aide took two and left.

Chu looked at Sarah, who smiled. 'Enjoy,' she said.

'Thank you again for this, ma'am.' The captain dug in; he could practically feel the hot soup giving him strength. 'We were pretty much down to our belts.'

She grinned briefly, then grew very serious. 'Not to spoil your meal, Captain, but I do have some very bad, if not fully unexpected news for you.'

'And that would be?' Chu asked.

'There is no federal government anymore.'

The captain continued to spoon up soup as he thought about what she'd said. Then he dabbed at his lips with a napkin. 'With respect, ma'am, there's no way you could know one way or another.'

With a sigh, she laid it down for him. 'Skynet. You must have heard of it.' At his nod, she went on. 'It controlled everything, ships, planes, missiles, and'—she tipped her head forward—'all bases and bunkers. As soon as the missiles started going up, the heads of the government and many of the 'best minds' in the country were hustled to air-conditioned safety in the deepest hardened bunkers on the planet. And since that sorry day, not one of those people has been seen alive. And they never will be.

'The damn computer has run mad, Captain. We didn't send those missiles aloft and your fellow captains haven't been hunting you down of their own free will, and you know it.' She spread her hands. 'At the very least you must suspect it.'

He didn't answer as he split a biscuit, then bit into one flaky half. Sarah Connor was a very disconcerting woman. Half the time she seemed to be reading his mind; the rest of the time she was telling him things that rang horribly true. 'Why don't we just cut to the chase here?' he said. 'What, exactly, do you want, ma'am?'

'I want you to serve the people of the United States, who desperately need your help.' She smiled to see him blink. 'Things are worse than you think,' she said. 'The bombs were just phase one. Since then, people have been rounded up, ostensibly at the behest of the government, and put in relocation and reconstruction camps.'

Chu frowned. 'Doesn't sound quite right,' he said. 'But it doesn't seem altogether unreasonable, either.'

'Which is why so many have gone along with it,' Sarah said agreeably. 'In many of these camps, the inmates have been deliberately infected with diseases such as cholera, or they're being forced to work under dangerous conditions with inadequate food and shelter. Men and women in that uniform are doing these things.'

He tilted his head toward her. 'Men and women in this uniform as distinguished from… ?'

'As distinguished from those who are actually in the military.' Sarah leaned forward. 'No doubt you've heard of Luddites?' He looked troubled, but nodded. 'Apparently some of them have been preparing for these times with an eye toward reducing the human population of this planet. They're dedicated, well organized, and well supplied. God knows how many deaths they're responsible for so far, or how many they'll be responsible for before they're killed themselves.'

'By us?' Chu asked. 'Because, you know, I'm not going to send my people out to fight without proof of what you're saying.'

Sarah looked at him for a long time before she spoke. 'Once again it's Skynet I'm talking about. It's an amazing computer,'

she said. 'There's never been anything like it before, and I hope to my soul there never will be again. The damn thing has become sentient, and it's decided that we are a danger to it and therefore must be eliminated.'

'Proof, Ms. Connor,' Chu said.

'Surely you heard about all those cars and trucks running amok?' she asked.

'Of course. But…'

Sarah sighed deeply. 'Skynet was originally created by Cyber-dyne Corporation. Cyberdyne created the first completely auto-mated factory. Then, somehow, the plans for those factories became public knowledge and they proliferated all over the planet like some kind of fungus. And in each and every factory Skynet had a root. It hid programming in every car, truck, and tractor produced over the last two years. As the time approached for the government to give it control of all military operations, it began to experiment, sending orders to its various components, taking control from their drivers and causing thousands of accidents. I researched this; I can give you a disk on it.' She watched him absorb what she'd said.

'Incidentally, it can imitate voices perfectly. Kurt Viemeister programmed it. You may not recognize the name, but he was a master of programming; he extrapolated from voice recognition to voice imitation, right down to characteristic phrasing. Wrote several illegal articles on the subject. I know they're illegal because I know he signed a secrecy contract with the government regarding his work. So if you've been getting messages from well- known people—the president, some admiral, whatever—that was Skynet.'

Chu nodded slowly, thinking about the strange way Admiral Read had been talking the last time they spoke, on the day the bombs came down. His eyes flashed to her. 'Yet this is still not proof.'

'No,' she said sadly. 'The proof is that I'm not asking you to do anything illegal or against the interests of the United States.

I'm asking you to place yourself, your crew, and your ship at the disposal of what we're calling the resistance.'

'Who exactly are you resisting?' Chu asked.

'Skynet, the Luddites, and all too soon, whatever machinery Skynet will be producing in its automated factories.'

The captain studied her. She seemed quite sane, clear-eyed and intelligent. And given what he and his men had been through during the past weeks, her story held together amazingly well. Be