The Future War

sunrise would find the humans in exactly these positions.

'Acceptable,' the machine said at last. 'Carry on, A-36.' It backed up slightly, turned, and moved back down the road.

Sam motioned them forward, riding the mule carefully around the flaming wreckage. No one spoke; no one but Mary and Kyle watched the killing machine trundle away.

They'd been walking for at least half an hour before Mary got up the courage to ask Sam, 'What was that?'

He didn't answer for a long time, riding on without even looking down at her. They rode and walked on for a mile or more before he spoke. 'That was a Hunter-Killer machine,' he said at last. 'Its job is to seek out humans and destroy them.'

Mary looked at him. 'I thought, from the way you were all acting, that it was going to kill you.'

Sam's lips thinned. 'Sometimes they do. But we're all good Luddites,' he said. 'We've had ourselves fixed. So there's no need to kill us; we won't be breedin' anytime soon and we're good at our jobs. That's what makes this patrol an A unit.'

'Oh,' she said.

They walked on for several more miles before she began to notice a definite industrial tang in the air.

'We're almost there,' Mona called out.

Sam called a halt and pulled an instrument out of his pocket.

He tapped a code into it and they waited. After five minutes there was a chime from the unit and they started forward again.

Shortly thereafter they walked up a hill, and when Mary came panting to the top, she stopped breathing altogether in shock.

Before her, in what once must have been a small valley, was a single one-story building. It must have been two miles square by three. Smoking chimneys appeared every five hundred feet or so and there were towers at each corner and a small satellite dish every thousand feet. The whole structure was surrounded by a wire fence, which had guard towers every fifty feet. It was ugly and had a thrown-together look, common to all completely utilitarian buildings. She hated it on sight.

'It's a lot worse inside,' Sam said.

She looked up at him and could have sworn she saw pity on his face. Maybe that's why he wears those glasses, she thought.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CORUNA, MEXICD THREE YEARS LATER

The Terminator turned its head toward the ill-defined heat signature, trying to refine its focus. After a few seconds, when the brightness refused to become distinct, it turned away. Its processors told it that the bright mass was probably rock with a high metal content still hot from the recently set sun. It was the last evaluation the Terminator would ever make, because its neural net processor was completely wrong.

John grinned as he raised his head from behind the rock and watched the Terminator turn away. Snog's new gizmo might not have much staying power, but it was a real lifesaver while it did last. It offered a false signal for a space of about four feet around its wearer, evening out the heat signals, making the body appear a bright, amorphous mass, such as might be left behind by an explosion. He carefully lined up the Terminator's head; the plasma bolt struck in a beam of actinic light, and the hard resistant alloy of the thing's skull turned into a strobing mass of molten gobbets and burning gas.

John's night-vision goggles automatically turned the brightness down; he rolled to another rock—always displace after you shoot— then flipped the switch on his unit and moved forward.

Others moved forward with him, the HQ strike unit. They went from rock to rock across the stony hillside, scattered with chamisos and cactus. The night air smelled of the herbal scents of desert shrubs, and of ozone and hot metal as bolts split the darkness.

It was unusual for John to do fieldwork these days. Most of what he did now was plan and organize and give orders. Actually carrying a rifle into the fray? He honestly didn't have the time for it.

But in this case, nothing would have kept him out of it. His mother was in trouble.

From out of nowhere a spring box leaped up before him, multiple legs reaching, acid-filled hypo already exposed. John swung the butt of his plasma rifle like a baseball bat, knocking the thing flying and followed up with a blast that turned it to melting parts—one of which stung his arm through the coarse strong fabric of his uniform. He swore and batted it away; the cooling metal crackled as it spun away, leaving a discolored spot on his sleeve.

Up until now most of the Central and South American auto-factories had mainly produced these small but quite deadly killers. They were very simple, with very simple programming: the mechanical equivalent of a weasel. Leap up from the front, inject the heart with hydrochloric acid; leap up from the back, inject the brain. Small, cheap, and easy to produce, their only defect from Skynet's point of view was that they could kill only one human at a time.

And so Skynet had slowly expanded its smaller south-of-the-border factories until they could produce full- scale HKs and Terminators. The resistance had taken out the factories that they knew about, but knowing they would, Skynet had built many more of them, not always in remote areas. The HKs had seemed to come out of nowhere and twenty small villages had been destroyed before the resistance in Mexico had even been able to get the word out.

The attackers crested a rise; the maps said it was an abandoned lead-silver mine, with an equally deserted village gradually crumbling back into the adobe mud it had been made from.

Instead, it was seething with not-life. Before him, John could see the ground moving, a glittering ripple as the tiny robot killers came forward, and his stomach clenched. There was something about an infestation like this that brought the hair up on the back of his neck and made him want to kill mindlessly. He swept the plasma beam from right to left and back again, retreating before the tide of them, cursing as the rifle began to burn his left hand through the insulated forestock.

Beside him a soldier came up and swept the ground with a low-tech—but for this operation, equally effective—flamethrower.

His heart beating overtime, John put up his rifle. He should save the batteries for the big killers. Skynet was keeping them back, sending in these little monsters to wear the resistance fighters down and to use up their ammunition.

Not gonna work, John thought. When's the damn thing gonna learn? If the future wasn't something he could change significantly, then neither could Skynet. The humans were going to win. Not yet. Probably not for a long time, but piece by piece, bit by bit, they were gaining ground. Biologicals had a distinct advantage over the machines. They could reproduce without having to mine, refine, transport, mold, and construct themselves; the biosphere took care of that.

The soldier stopped spraying and the two of them waited to see if anything would come out of the flames. When nothing moved, they did, cautiously making their way through the burned parts. Stepping on an acid-filled needle would be a stupid way to lose your foot.

According to reconnaissance, the factory was in this basin.

John gripped his rifle a bit tighter. It had been a long time since the factories were easy targets. Skynet didn't rely on keeping them remote anymore; it would fight the resistance for this factory with all its power.

John ducked down when he saw the lights. HKs had huge spotlights mounted on the top of their metallic carapaces, not that they needed them. Like the Terminators, they had IR

sensors that tracked by body heat. But there was something about those huge lights that intimidated, and distracted, and, unfortunately, rendered night-vision goggles less effective.