Terminator Salvation - From the Ashes

“Simmons is right,” he said. “What counts is not whether we’ve delivered in the past, but whether we can continue to deliver. This is the ultimate in natural selection, where the weak not only die, but die very quickly. Command can’t waste supplies, or risk being compromised, by a group that isn’t going to make it anyway.”

Barnes muttered something under his breath.

“Well, if they think we’re gonna just roll over and die, they’re full of—” He glanced at the children again. “You know?”

“Absolutely,” John agreed. “They want us to deliver? Fine. We’ll deliver.” He straightened up in his chair, his eyes flashing with sudden fire. “And we’re going to deliver so spectacularly that they will never, ever write us off again. Whether they like it or not.”

Kate looked around, watching with a never-waning fascination as John’s words, character, and unshakable strength of purpose quieted a room full of fear and despair and uncertainty. They would succeed, because John knew they would.

“What’s the plan, sir?” David asked, putting the group’s new sense of determination into words.

“Right now, the plan is for everyone to get some sleep,” John said. “Almost everyone, anyway.

David and Tunney will organize sentry duty, and then the seniors and I will sit down for a strategy meeting.” His eyes swept the room one final time. “You behaved superbly tonight, and I want you to know how proud I am of every one of you. Go get some sleep, and by the time you wake up we should have a plan that’ll make the other local Resistance groups, Command, and Skynet sit up and take notice.”

David did a half turn to face the group and gave a brisk nod.

“Dismissed,” he said.

Another low murmur of conversation started as the group began a general movement through the three doorways that led to the bunker’s various sleeping and living areas. As they did so, David and Tunney slipped into the departing crowd, each picking two soldiers and sending them off to the appointed sentry posts.

Two minutes later, the only ones left in the room were John, Kate, Barnes, David, Tunney, and Blair.

“Good pep talk, Connor,” David commented as they rearranged the handful of chairs into a circle. “Though may I suggest that the plan not make Skynet sit up and take too much notice?”

John’s lip twitched in a half smile, and Kate felt her stomach tighten. If the others only knew how long Skynet had been taking notice of him.

“We’ll see what we can do,” John said, turning to Blair. “Yoshi did make it through, didn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s fine,” Blair said. “He’s at the hangar helping Wince check out the Hogs.” Her nose wrinkled. “Afraid I took a little more damage than I’d hoped to.”

“The important thing is that you got back alive,” John reminded her. “Bringing your planes back—in any shape—is an extra bonus.”

“So what exactly did you have in mind?” Tunney asked.

“There are a couple of possibilities,” John said. “One obvious target would be the Capistrano radar tower.”

“Won’t be easy,” David warned. “There’s a reason Skynet built the damn thing so close to NukeZero—there isn’t a single scrap of cover for at least a klick around it. Not even bushes.”

“Not to mention that the whole area’s still a little hot,” Tunney added.

“Both excellent reasons why the tower hasn’t yet been taken down, and why Skynet might not expect us to go for it,” John said. “Kate, do we have any actual readings .on the radiation levels down there?”

“I haven’t had an update since last summer,” she said. “By now, though, I would think that the worst danger would be long-term cancer risks.”

Barnes snorted. “Like any of us is going to live long enough to worry about that.”

“You never know,” John said. “Though that still leaves the lack of approach cover. Blair, you’ve flown around that general area. Anything of interest you noticed that someone on the ground might have missed?”

“Not down there,” Blair said. “But I did notice something tonight that struck me as strange.”

She described her final aerial battle, and the four darkened HKs that had allowed her to escape rather than join in the battle.

“Interesting,” John said when she’d finished. “What did the ground around the warehouse look like? Would anyone at street level have been able to see the HKs?”

Blair’s eyes unfocused a bit as she considered.

“Not from street level, no,” she said. “Probably not even from the second or maybe even the third floor of anything nearby. There were heaps of rubble— big heaps—surrounding the place.

More rubble than there should have been, now that I think about it.”

“As if Skynet deliberately blew up all the nearby buildings so as to block the view?” John suggested.

Barnes snorted again.

“Or else they were just sitting there waiting for her to head back so they could follow her.”

“No one followed me,” Blair insisted, sending a dark look in his direction. “Trust me. I did a weave-and-duck the whole way back.”

“I don’t think Skynet’s plan was to follow her,” John said. “I think the plan was for her not to notice the warehouse.”

“Then why position HKs there at all?” David asked. “If Skynet didn’t want to draw attention to the place, it should have scrambled them when it launched the attack on our bunker.”

“Except that Skynet couldn’t have known I’d be going that far west,” Blair pointed out. “Or that I’d live long enough to tell anyone about it.”

“Exactly,” John agreed. “I submit that by the time Skynet realized the danger, it was too late to move the HKs without revealing that they’d been sitting that far away from a known staging area.

All it could do was go silent and dark and hope she didn’t see them.”

“You think the warehouse is a new staging area, then?” Kate asked quietly.

She saw John’s throat tighten.

“I think it’s the most likely possibility,” he said.

For a moment the room was silent, and Kate watched a fresh layer of grimness settle onto their faces like drifting dust. They knew as well as she did what it meant when Skynet set up a staging area in the middle of a city.

Somewhere deep inside itself, the pitiless artificial intelligence that was Skynet had calculated that it could spare some of the resources it was throwing against the Resistance, and divert them to the job of killing a few blocks’ worth of civilians.

Reaching to a tray behind him, John pulled out a map and spread it out on the narrow table beside the radio.

“Show us where it is,” he said.

Blair stepped over and studied the faded paper as the others got up and gathered around her and John.

“The buildings where I dropped the HK are here,” she said slowly, pointing at a spot on the map.

“So the warehouse is… here.”

“Mm,” John murmured. “What do we know about that area?”

“Not much,” David said. “I don’t think there are any organized Resistance cells anywhere nearby.”

“Except us,” Kate said in a low voice.

“And we’re not all that close,” Tunney noted, leaning over the map. “There could be quite a group of civilians there, though. Looks like there were at least two major strip malls with grocery stores in the area, plus I think this thing here on the edge of the neighborhood was a warehouse outlet store.”

“Lots of packaged food and other supplies, in other words,” David added.

“In theory, anyway,” Tunney agreed. “If enough of it survived Judgment Day, there could be, oh, anywhere from 400 to maybe even a thousand people living in the sixteen blocks around Skynet’s new staging area.”

Kate winced. Up to a thousand people, all of them struggling day in and day out, fighting hard just to survive.

And Skynet was going to send in its HKs and T-600 Terminators and simply wipe them all out.