Terminator Salvation - From the Ashes

“And someday they’ll have to?” he asked.

Kate felt her chest tighten. Don’t say things like that! she thought fiercely.

But stifling the words wouldn’t change the reality that had already been foretold by that last Terminator they’d met before the horror of Judgment Day. Just as John would one day rise to lead all of Earth to victory over Skynet, one day he would also die at Skynet’s hand.

“That’s still a long way down the road,” she said instead. “All I’m saying is that I need to do this. I need to do this.”

John reached his hand up and stroked her cheek.

“I hate this,” he said quietly. “You know that, don’t you?”

Kate pulled her right arm from beneath the blankets and took his hand.

“More than I hate watching you go off without me?”

“Touche,” he admitted. “Does anybody say ‘touche’ anymore?”

“You can say it in private,” Kate assured him, feeling some of her tension fade away as she sensed his change from solid refusal to reluctant consent. “And I don’t have to actually lead anyone, not this time. That part can wait until later. I just need them to see me fighting alongside them.”

John didn’t answer. Kate waited silently, her mental fingers crossed, letting him work it through.

“Compromise,” he said at last. “You can come with the infiltration teams and help with the recruitment part of the trip. Actually, you can probably take point on that—you’re much better at talking to people than Barnes or even Tunney.”

“I’m better than Barnes, anyway,” Kate said. “I think Tunney ought to handle the actual recruitment speech, though. I’d rather watch him this first time, and maybe just answer a few questions.”

“Well, you can sort out the duties however you want,”

John said. “But once the actual attack starts, you’ll stay put in whatever temp base we’ve set up in the neighborhood.”

“At least until you need a medic?”

“Until we need work that our junior medics can’t handle,” John corrected firmly. “Is it a deal?”

For a moment Kate considered pointing out that sitting alone in the middle of a fire zone wouldn’t be a lot safer than being out in the middle of the action. But bringing that up would probably get her summarily left here at the bunker instead. “Okay,” she said. “So I can recruit, hide, and maybe bandage.”

“You just can’t shoot,” John said, nodding.

“Well, I can shoot,” Kate said in the prim voice a couple of her mother’s upper- crust friends had always used. “I’m a woman of many talents, you know.”

John squeezed her shoulder, pulling her closer.

“Definitely,” he said. “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”

CHAPTER

FIVE

Breakfast at Moldering Lost Ashes that morning consisted of a handful of dried seed pods from one of the wild plants that had popped up around the city over the past few years, plus a slice of three-day-old coyote.

Kyle and Star ate quickly, which was usually the best way to get three-day-old coyote down, and then made their way up the untrustworthy stairways to the highest inhabitable part of the rickety building.

Kyle didn’t really like sentry duty. Not so much because it was boring, but because if Skynet ever launched an attack he and Star would be stuck up here, instead of downstairs where they could help.

Chief Grimaldi, the man running the building, didn’t think that would happen as long as the people here minded their own business. But Orozco said it would, and that was good enough for Kyle.

The southeast sentry post had once been the outside corner of a fancy apartment’s living room. It wasn’t so fancy now, though. The firestorm that had swept the city on Judgment Day had blown off one of the living room’s outer walls, along with half of the other wall and most of the ceiling. The result was a roughly three-meter-square section of floor that gave a clear view of that part of the city, but which was largely open to the elements.

Today, those elements consisted of a sporadic southwest wind that grabbed at the collar of Kyle’s thin coat as he and Star stepped off the stairway onto the platform. He pulled the collar back into place as he went to the equipment alcove set into the sentry post’s inner wall. There was supposed to be a spare blanket up here, but a quick check of the alcove showed no sign of it.

Apparently, whoever had been on duty during the night had taken it with him when he left.

That, or else someone had sneaked up between shifts and stolen it. Chief Grimaldi said things like that didn’t happen here, but Kyle knew they sometimes did.

Orozco didn’t much like Grimaldi. He’d never actually said anything, but Kyle could tell.

Grimaldi had run some sort of group before Judgment Day, something called a corporation, which had made him think he could run anything. Some of the other people on the Board that made all the decisions had worked in the same corporation he had, which was probably how Grimaldi had been chosen chief.

Orozco hadn’t been there when the Board was set up. He’d arrived only two years ago, a year after Kyle and Star had stumbled across the building and had been allowed to move in. What Kyle couldn’t figure out was once Orozco had shown up, why he hadn’t been put in charge instead of Grimaldi. Orozco had been a soldier once, and in Kyle’s book that had to count more than anything anyone else had been doing before Judgment Day.

But Kyle was only sixteen, so of course he wasn’t on the Board. He didn’t get a voice in any of their discussions, either, the way some of the adults did. The way it worked was that Grimaldi or one of his men told Kyle where to go scrounging for food or supplies, or Orozco told him which post he’d been assigned for sentry duty, and Kyle would do it.

It irritated him sometimes, especially when Grimaldi tried to use words like tactics or strategy or logistics when Kyle could tell from Orozco’s expression that Grimaldi didn’t have the slightest idea what he was talking about. Sometimes, usually late at night, Kyle thought about saying good-bye to Orozco, packing up his and Star’s few belongings, and getting out of here.

But bad moods like that never lasted very long. The Ashes could be annoying, but he and Star were eating at least one meal every day here, and had a safe place to sleep. Considering some of the places they’d been, that all by itself made it worth putting up with a little irritation.

Beside him, Star shivered. “Cold?” he asked.

I’m okay, she signed back even as she shivered again.

“You could go sit over there by the alcove,” Kyle suggested. “You’d be out of the wind there.”

But then I won’t be able to see anything, she pointed out.

“That’s okay,” Kyle assured her. “I can watch alone for awhile.”

Star shook her head. I’m okay.

Kyle sighed. Star considered his sentry duty to be her sentry duty, too, and she took the job every bit as seriously as he did. Aside from physically carrying her over to the alcove, there was no way he was going to get her there, and aside from physically sitting on her, there would be no way he could make her stay.

“Fine,” he said. Standing up, he walked around her and sat down again so that he was at least between her and the wind.

She gave him one of those half patient, half exasperated looks that she did so well, and for a moment Kyle thought she was going to get up and go sit in the wind again just to show him she didn’t need babying. But Kyle was as stubborn as she was, and they both knew it, and so rather than playing a pointless game of leapfrog with him and the wind, she just rolled her eyes, drew her knees up to her chest, and wrapped her thin arms around them.

Smiling to himself, Kyle turned his eyes back to the ruined city.

The wind apparently wasn’t nearly so potent down at street level, and he could see a soft mist rolling in from