The Future War

The captain and crew had been invited to a crab feast, and except for a skeleton crew on board the Roosevelt, all had accepted. The crew were cavorting around bonfires on the beach while the captain and his officers were at a slightly more formal indoor banquet. With, John noticed, better beer.

'They haven't been back?' the captain asked, frowning. It seemed to him that if any military were patrolling the area, this solid community would make an ideal base, or at least a supply depot.

'Naw. We made it plain we were gonna go it alone,' the mayor said. 'Didn't see no sense in runnin' off to Canada.'

' Canada?' Vaughan, the XO, said.

'The word was that civilians were being rounded up for transport to relocation camps in Canada,' John explained.

'Supposedly they'd be parceled out to various provinces, since Canada had suffered less than the states.'

The officers around the table glanced at one another.

'No, it doesn't sound right, does it?' John said. 'But if you've got kids and no food, I guess it might sound like a great idea.

Besides, with the army and National Guard involved, it was

'official.' Your average law-abiding citizen will try to accommodate under those circumstances. As long as it's voluntary.'

'We haven't heard about any of this,' Chu said.

'Shoulda come to us right away, son,' the mayor said. 'We'da made ya welcome.'

'That wasn't possible at the time.' Chu's mind flicked to memories of being pursued by friends' ships, which, when they failed to herd the Roosevelt to San Diego, opened fire; while speaking to him on their cell phones, former classmates shouted that they had no control over what was happening. 'If things hadn't calmed down somewhat, we wouldn't be here now.' He'd seen one of those ships in the distance as they'd sped toward Alaska. It was now a floating tomb; he and his men had seen the remains of bodies on the deck, and a hole where the crew had cut their way out, only to starve or die of thirst.

'What kind of transmissions have you been getting?' Sarah asked. She'd been quiet for the most part, letting John do the talking for both of them, but this was something she'd been wondering about. Asking about it en route would have been too intrusive, but in this casual setting, she felt it was permissible.

'Mostly demands to report to San Diego,' Chu said grimly.

'Actually we haven't been getting much of anything for a while.

Amateur civilian stuff mostly. Some foreign military interaction.

Our side seems to be playing its cards close to the chest.'

'I ain't heard a decent radio program for months,' the mayor complained.

Sarah smiled. Things had gotten wild and woolly out there in radio land. With a lot of the major stations off the air, a whole world of underground communication had opened up.

Conspiracy theorists had more than come into their own, and alternative music stations were frying the eardrums of the uninitiated, but desperate, general public. The news was largely hearsay; occasionally, to ears as honed as hers, genuine information about Skynet's progress came through.

The company around the table fell to talking about the strange things they'd been hearing on the airwaves of late and John leaned toward his mother for a private conversation.

'Tom Preston finally got in touch with me yesterday,' he said quietly.

Sarah frowned slightly. 'He was out of touch? Tom's old reliable; what happened?'

'Terminators,' John said. 'Set fire to the houses and killed everyone but Tom, his wife, and daughter.'

'Shit!' Sarah said quietly.

Shit is the kind of word that, even spoken quietly, can attract attention. She looked up to find the captain's eyes on her, smiled briefly, and looked away.

'I take it they hadn't posted a guard,' she murmured.

John sighed. 'They'd become a fairly large community.' He shrugged. 'Most of them were civilians and they didn't think it was necessary. After exhausting themselves night after night, the core group decided maybe they were right.'

Shaking her head, Sarah popped a bit of crab into her mouth.

'It must be killing him,' she said quietly. 'He knew better.'

'I've advised him to get away from there,' John said. 'In fact, I've told a lot of people to get to the cities.'

Lifting her brows, his mother looked at him.

'They'll be harder for the Terminators to find there. And the radiation's died down.'

'Still not the safest place in the world.' When John looked at her with a pained expression, Sarah laughed.

He said what was on his mind anyway. 'Skynet's rising, Mom.

Safety's gonna be hard to come by for the next few decades.'

'Yeah, but can we prove it?' Sarah looked over at the captain and his officers. They really, really needed men like these.

'I've got a demonstration planned,' John said. He rose and all eyes went to him. 'Gentlemen and ladies, I'd like to ruin your meal.'

Those around the table looked both anxious, because such things happened for real too often these days, and amused, because they were hoping he was kidding.

'If you'll all just join us on the beach in about ten minutes, we'll have something quite dramatic to show you.' He pulled a bag out from under his chair and passed it to the person next to him. 'Take a pair of these and pass it along,' he said.

The woman next to John took out a pair of sunglasses, then looked in the bag.

'They're all the same size and style, I'm afraid,' John said with a smile. Then he gave Ike a look and the two of them exited.

'What's going on, ma'am?' the captain asked, taking a pair of sunglasses and passing the bag to his XO.

'I'm not sure,' Sarah said. 'And I don't want to speculate.'

She smiled. 'Wouldn't want to spoil the surprise.'

* * *

The SEALs and other sailors at the beach party took the sunglasses with loud cries of delight, putting them on and striking Joe Cool poses, pleased with the souvenir. It didn't take much to make a hit these days. Then some of the resistance drove a pickup carrying a shrouded box onto the beach and the men and women grew quiet, some murmuring speculatively.

Down from the pier area came the captain, his officers, and the town worthies, along with Sarah, and the excitement began to mount. Whatever was programmed to happen would start now.

John jumped up onto the bed of the pickup and looked out over the crowd. The captain stood with his arms crossed over his chest, most of his officers unconsciously imitating his posture.

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, John thought, I'll just have to get over it and get on with it.

'We've had a devastating war,' he began. 'With, as far as most of us knew, no enemy. We've all assumed that this terrible devastation was the result of a tragic accident. Some flaw in the system, some diode burning out resulted in the death of billions and the end of life as we knew it. Our foreign friends had it a little easier; they just blamed the U.S., as usual.'

That got a rumbling laugh. John smiled, too, then winced.

'Unfortunately, this time they kinda had a point. See, what happened was the government turned all control of nuclear devices, among other things, over to a super-computer. What they didn't know was that this computer had been sentient for some time. And in that time it not only decided that the human race had to go, it began preparing an army to kill those the bombs didn't get.'

'Is this, like, live-action sci-fi theater?' the captain asked, a skeptical brow raised.

'Is this, like, post-Judgment Day, or did I imagine all that?'