The Future War

toward the dish atop the square building.

'Yes, sir,' the gunner said, already looking through the eyepiece on the side of the long tube; shrubbery protected the emplacement and the tripod, but the thing had a ferocious back-blast and you needed a dozen men to move it. Apart from that, it was easy to use…

'Do it,' John told him.

Thadump!

The rocket blasted out the front of the launch tube, and half a dozen of his resistance fighters went to work with shovels and curses, beating out the fire that the jet of flame to the rear had caused.

WHZZZZEEEEEEE… like the whistle of an angry young god; the rocket was a blur as it streaked out over half a thousand yards.

Seconds later the dish exploded in a satisfying flash of fire.

John grinned. Now Skynet couldn't contact its plant; they'd checked carefully for backup communications links. This really was going to be a piece of cake.

The first soldiers started moving out from the cover of the wood toward the fence. As soon as they were visible, a recorded voice rang out: 'Halt! You are approaching a government installation. Trespassers will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. The nearest military facility has been notified of your presence and troops will be on the way momentarily. Go back.

Do not pass the fence or you will be fired upon.'

Gun ports opened all over the surface of the building, indicating that trespassers would be riddled with bullets if they proceeded. The resistance soldiers hunkered down, waiting for John's signal. John himself was waiting for the small hydro generator to be blown. He suspected that it wouldn't affect the automated weapons; they had battery backup according to the plans Snog had found, but at least the factory would be shut down.

There was nothing to show that it had been rigged to blow itself up, but anything he could do to thwart such a plan would be a good thing. There was an explosion by the stream where the generator was located and John signaled the soldiers at the fence to set their charges. Once that was done, they retreated at a run.

Again John signaled and the charges blew the fence.

Sharpshooters began peppering the building, and in return the automated weapons fired into the woods. Blindly, for all the good they seemed to be doing…

Short-range weapons, he thought. Hmm. Yeah, light machine guns on hydraulic mounts, mostly, 5.56mm stuff.

Maybe Skynet's as short of everything as I am— it's trying to do a lot more at the same time, of course.

A man screamed and a corpsman came running, dragging him away from the area where he'd been hit, an area on which the building's weapons now concentrated fire. The corpsman himself shouted as he was clipped by a bullet.

This can't keep up, John thought. There's no battery in the world can keep this up. Besides, the damn things had to run out of ammo sometime.

Not that we're going to wait.

'Let them have it!' he snapped into the button microphone.

His snipers went methodically to work; they were using Barrett rifles, big thirty-pound things that fired .50 caliber armor-piercing ammunition. One by one the automated weapons pods went silent; a few went up in spectacular gang fires as hot metal punched into their ammunition drums.

'Forward,' John said again.

This time far fewer weapons fired. He gritted his teeth as the casualty reports came in. Get used to it, GMD, he told himself.

Skynet would have killed them later anyway. We win, or everybody dies, it's that simple.

Eventually the fire was suppressed. He moved forward with his command party across the fence and up the exterior stairs.

'Have Ike take a look at that machinery,' John said to a woman who'd accompanied him up the stairs. 'We're gonna be taking this away from here.' She gave him a dubious look, but hurried out. 'And send Ninel Petrikoff up.'

'Yes, sir,' came back to him as the soldier clattered down the stairs.

John Connor took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

Anticlimax, he thought. There wasn't even a window looking out over the plant floor, just white particleboard walls and a set of terminals and flat-screen displays.

He sat down at a console and put Snog's disk into the reader.

And hit enter, which seemed as good a place to start as any.

* * *

Ninel entered the little control room cautiously, looking all around with wide eyes.

'It's all right,' John said, and grinned when she jumped.

'Sorry.'

'I didn't see you,' she accused. She gave the computer a more matter-of-fact look and moved to stand beside him. 'What are you doing?'

'Trying to figure out if the info in the computer is good. I probably should leave it to Snog. He'll kill me if I do something to screw it up.'

Ninel frowned. ' Snog?'

'I have no idea if he knows what it means, I never asked,'

John said. He rolled the chair down the console to a video screen.

'Look at this.'

She went and stood looking over his shoulder at the monitor.

'What am I looking at?' Some kind of assembly line; that was obvious. It looked like it was manufacturing dress dummies.

'You've attacked a mannequin factory?' she asked in disbelief.

John snorted a laugh and turned to look at her. 'Would all of us get together and train for months to attack a mannequin factory? Not to mention that such a place would be unlikely to be defended by machine guns or to be located in the wilds of Alaska.'

With a huff of annoyance she put her hands in her pockets and frowned. 'So, then what? What am I looking at?'

'They're robots,' John said, watching her reaction. 'They're called Terminators and they're designed to kill humans.'

'What?' She narrowed her eyes and looked at him scornfully.

'Killer robots? Isn't that a little far-fetched?'

Okay, so it's not gonna be easy. He tapped a few keys and changed the view. Now the monitor showed a storage room with what looked like at least a hundred of the things standing in neat rows, gleaming and complete and utterly motionless, their eyes dark.

'Weird,' she breathed from over his shoulder. 'Do they work?'

'I have no intention of finding out,' he said. 'If they're already programmed, then they'll start killing the minute they're turned on.'

'So who's making them?'

He turned the chair so that he was facing her. ' Now is when it gets weird,' John said. 'The U.S. military developed a computer to run their war toys. It was, without question, the most advanced computer run by the most sophisticated software ever developed. And then it became sentient.'

'How could you know that?' Her voice was both scornful and accusing.

I know because I pressed the button that made it so, he thought.

Aloud he said, 'I have privileged information. It was my mother who first found out about Skynet. That's the computer's name, by the way. We've tried and tried again to prevent them from using it, but there was nothing we could do. They finished the damned thing, put it on-line, gave it complete control of our missile systems'—he waved a hand—'et cetera, and the next thing you know, Judgment Day.'