The Future War

'No'm. My ma was here once. But I ent seen 'er for I don'

know how long. An' I looked. I looked all ober this place. 'Course I cain't 'member what she looks like. 'Cept she had brown hair.'

'You'd know her if you saw her,' Mary assured him/her.

'Oh,' Kyle said. 'Mom, this is Jesse. Jesse, my mom.'

'Jesse,' Mary said with a smile and a nod, getting a more solemn nod in return. Not an awfully helpful name, she thought.

It could still be a boy or girl. I can't just ask, she would be insulted. And I couldn't blame him/her.

'Anyway,' she said aloud, 'Sam says that Skynet is getting ready for a big push and that it's really active around the factory.

Lots of HKs and Terminators all over the place. He was burned, he says, because he wasn't quick enough giving his designation.

So they're looking to kill right now, not to take prisoners.' She bit her lip, looking at both of them, so young, so fragile. 'I don't think this is a good time to try and get away.'

'Mom…'

'Something is going to happen!' she insisted. 'Soon.'

'Something is happening right now!' Kyle said. 'Mom, I'm goin' crazy in here! And you don't know what the new place is like. I do!'

'All right, tell me,' she said calmly.

'This place is old; it's made so people can help the machines.

But the new place is made so the machines run each other. Jesse and me can barely squeeze through most places. And there's no people. Not a one.' He was breathing hard in his distress. 'And there's fewer people here all the time. You don't know that because you grown-ups aren't allowed to go places like we are.

There's no new people, Mom. Not ever.'

'We have to go now, ma'am,' Jesse said gravely.

Out of the mouths of babes, Mary thought. 'Okay. Just let me see if I can at least get us some water to take with us, and maybe some food.' And maybe Tia and Sally.

Then she looked at her son and decided to be selfish. The fewer who knew about this, the less chance of betrayal or accident. She didn't like it, but when it came to Kyle, she had to be ruthlessly practical. It was the only sure way to keep him alive.

* * *

'Well, this is a real battle,' Dennis Reese said, a little surprised.

John Connor smiled a little, squatting, grim and silent, with the rest of the command group around a thin-film display beneath dead hickories—killed by the acid efflux from the Skynet Complex three miles away.

A line of actinic light lanced into the sky from a crew-served weapon nearby, and high overhead in the frosty blue sky something blew up in an improbable strobing ball of purple fire.

'Damn,' Reese muttered.

'Mostly it doesn't try to use high-fliers anymore,' Connor said, not looking up from the screen. 'Not when we've got heavy plasma rifles available.' He smiled again, a remarkably cold expression. 'You know, it would be a lot better off if it had stuck to pre-Judgment Day designs. Plasma weapons and perfect dielectric capacitors are wonderful equalizers—lots of punch, not much weight.'

'It has them, too,' Reese pointed out.

'Yeah, but it doesn't need them,' Connor said. 'Anything can kill a human. It takes something pretty energetic to kill most of Skynet's ground-combat modules.'

Columns of troops were moving up in the narrow wooded valleys that stretched all around them, local guerrillas and the assault troops John Connor had infiltrated over the past few months. They were sheltered by the crest lines. Sheltered until—

The warning came through the communications net a minute or two before they could hear the roar of the ducted fans. The command squad jumped into their slit trenches, barely slowing in their job of coordinating the resistance units; everyone in the marching columns hit the dirt, too. Around the perimeter were pre—Judgment Day vehicles, mostly four-by-fours of various makes; each of them had a light antiaircraft missile launcher mounted on it.

The RRRRAAK-shwoosh! of the missiles sounded almost the instant the Skynet fighting platforms cleared the crest lines.

Lines of light stabbed out from the fighting machines as they launched missiles and plasma bolts of their own, but one by one the twisting lines of the heat-seeking missiles found them.

'Of course, some of the old technology still works,' Reese said.

His eyes met John Connor's. They nodded once, in perfect agreement, as the ruins of the HKs burned on the poisoned hillsides.

SKYNET

Things were at a desperate juncture. Skynet needed to drive the human fighters from the factory or it would inevitably lose the facility. If worse came to worst and it seemed that nothing would save the factory, Skynet had developed a recent innovation—a self-destruct sequence that would eliminate the plant and everything in it as well as obliterating several miles of surrounding countryside. ICBMs might be beyond its capacity to produce, but nuclear bombs were simply a matter of putting together the right materials.

It had set a part of its consciousness into a planning subroutine that would give it maximum advantage in the productivity of its factories before the humans discovered and moved against them. If it could determine the point at which they would make their move against the factories, it might be able to influence how many of them would become involved—luring in the greatest number for the kill. Thus if Skynet lost, then so did its enemies.

Of course, the resistance fighters would quickly learn the consequences of an attack on a major facility such as this one.

But by then it would be too late for a great many of them.

In this case, the humans had taken far longer to act than had been projected. Skynet had assumed that it was the presence of hostages within the facility that had held the humans at bay. For this reason it had continued to harbor the one hundred and three individuals long after they were no longer needed for productive purposes.

It couldn't see why, after all this time, the hostages had suddenly become unimportant to the invaders. Unless they never had been important and Skynet had been wrong about them from the beginning.

Its problem was that it could never truly predict human behavior. It could predict to certain percentage points, but never closely enough for certainty. That was why it had decided to retire its Luddite allies rather than use them as infiltrators. They could not be relied upon completely. It kept those Luddites that it had maintained isolated and heavily guarded, and they were working out splendidly. But that wasn't an option in field operations.

Hence its improvements in its Terminators. There were difficulties to overcome, but it estimated that in ten years or less it would have a viable infiltrator form of the unit. Should this conflict last that long.

Skynet watched the human soldiers crawl through its factory, and an ancient poem intruded itself: ' 'Come into my parlor,'

said the spider to the fly.' It would wait to initiate the destruct sequence. It wanted the maximum number of flies to die.

* * *

Mary boosted Kyle up, pushing on the soles of his feet to get his hips over the lip of the opening. All around them the machines clattered and screamed and whirred as they performed their various functions. She wished she had earplugs; the sounds were deafening, an eternal shrill threnody of nonlife.

Kyle had turned around and was offering his hands to give Jesse some help. Mary stooped to pick the child up when something shook the ground so hard they both fell. Around them the machines stopped and there should have been silence, but there were explosions and the whistle of rockets… and more explosions, and the savage crackling