Terminator Salvation - From the Ashes

Full night had fallen, and the team was indeed ready, when Connor finally heard the distant sound of mini-gun fire.

“That’s it, people,” he said. “Time to move.”

The other men and women in the room didn’t need to be told twice. Already they were grabbing their packs and guns and doing their final weapons checks.

“One minute,” Connor said.

Sixty seconds later, they were ready. He cracked the door and took a careful look outside. All seemed clear.

“Remember: radio silence if at all possible,” he said. “David?”

David nodded, and he and his demolition squad slipped past, disappearing into the night as they headed out toward the access shaft where they would enter the tunnel that ran alongside the Skynet warehouse. Tunney was next, his squad slated to follow David’s group as rearguard until they split off to approach the staging area from the west.

The newcomers were with the latter group, Callahan and the Iliakis and young Zac. They had wanted to go with Barnes’ squad, but Connor had judged Tunney’s to be the one where they would be in the least danger, as well as where their inexperience was least likely to get someone else killed.

Ideally, of course, he would have preferred to leave them here with Kate in the relative safety of the temp base. But they’d made it clear that they were going to go out there, either with Connor’s people or by themselves. Better they at least go with someone who could look out for them.

The Iliakis were the last of the squad out the door, and Connor felt a twinge of guilt as he watched them go. Carol had quietly insisted on going into danger with her husband, exactly as Kate had wanted to do with her husband.

Only in her case, Connor had said no.

And then it was Connor’s turn. He gave Kate a silent nod good-bye, got one in return, and led his team out into the night. Distantly, he wondered if Kate was thinking about the Iliakis, too.

The gunfire had slackened somewhat, he noted as he and his four teammates moved quickly but cautiously through the deserted streets on their way to the staging area’s southern edge. The Terminators must have finished off one of their targets and were in the process of moving on to the next one.

Fortunately, the recruitment tours they’d made of the neighborhood had marked most of the inhabited buildings, where the Terminators were going to be gathering. Hopefully, the routes Connor and Tunney had mapped out would get them all where they needed to be with a minimal chance of running into trouble along the way.

“Shh-shh!” Someone behind Connor hissed a warning.

Instantly, Connor dropped into a crouch, the rest of the squad doing likewise. Minimal, the thought flashed through his mind, doesn’t mean zero.

Half a block to their right, striding away from them down the street, were a pair of T-600s.

Connor eased his hand away from his rifle and onto one of the blast grenades at his belt. The Terminators were facing away from his squad, their attention clearly elsewhere. But that didn’t mean they might not suddenly decide to look behind them.

Especially given that Skynet’s spotters were already in the air. The HKs drifting over the city were playing it cool, running with spotlights off and minimal turbo-fans. But Connor could hear their rumble as they watched for any refugees who might try to slip past its ground forces.

But like the T-600s themselves, the HKs were evidently focusing for the moment on their own map of targeted buildings, leaving the neighborhood’s uninhabited areas alone. The two T-600s came to the end of the block, turned the corner, and vanished from sight.

Still watching the corner, Connor rose from his crouch.

“Damn, that was close,” Tony Tantillo muttered. “Where’s our air support, anyway?”

“It’ll be here,” Connor assured him.

Somewhere down the street, from the vicinity of the Moldavia, the miniguns opened up again.

All those children, Kate had said earlier, troubled by the thought of leaving them to die. All those children….

But it was out of Connor’s hands now. Signaling to his team to follow, he continued on into the night.

Yoshi was strapping into his A-10 when Blair finally made it to the hangar.

“Come on, come on—the call came three minutes ago,” Yoshi called impatiently. “What’s the holdup?”

“Ninety seconds,” Blair promised as she sprinted toward her own fighter. “Wince? Yo—

Wince?”

“Right here,” the old man said, popping into view around her plane’s nose. “You’re all set. I think.”

“What do you mean, you think?” Blair asked as she stopped beside him.

“I got you an extra 150 rounds for your GAU-8, just like you wanted,” he said, patting the Gatling gun protruding from the plane’s nose. “But I have to tell you: there’s a chance—a really small chance—that the gun will jam up first thing off the chocks.”

“Really,” Blair said. “Let me get this straight. My options are either I get to completely snooker the HKs with extra firepower, or else I get to be flying toast?”

Wince made a face.

“Something like that.”

“Good enough,” Blair said, grabbing the cockpit ladder and heading up. “I’ll let you know what happens.”

The hangar doors were open, and Yoshi was jockeying his A-10 out into the wide street beyond by the time Blair got her engines up to power. She gave Yoshi a thirty second head-start, then followed him out.

To her mild surprise, both planes reached the end of their avenue airstrip and made it into the night sky without any HKs appearing overhead to argue the point.

“Hickabick?” Yoshi’s voice crackled in her headset. “How you doing?”

“Smooth and hungry,” Blair replied, glancing over her board. The GAU-8’s counter, she noted, still indicated her ammo load at 1100 rounds, which implied that Wince’s extra one-fifty weren’t being registered. She would have to remember that as she watched her fire count. “Ready to kick some?”

“You bet,” Yoshi said. “You’re on cleanup—follow me in.”

His A-10 turned left toward the Skynet staging area. Blair matched the maneuver, falling back far enough off his tail to make sure he had all the fighting room he might need. There were four HKs in the air over there, running dark and probably quiet, drifting along over the multi-block region like vultures waiting for something to die.

Little did Skynet know.

She and Yoshi had covered about half the distance when the HKs suddenly seemed to notice that they had company. Two of them veered suddenly out of their lazy search pattern and turned toward the A-10s, jumping like scalded frogs as they kicked their turbofans to full power.

“Watch it—two more coming in from the north,” Yoshi warned.

Blair peered in that direction, to find that the two new bandits were also coming in dark. Big surprise there.

“I see them,” she confirmed. “Which ones do you want?”

“You know how my vertigo is,” Yoshi said.

Blair smiled tightly.

“Happy hunting,” she said. Twisting her stick over, she sent the A-10 into a hard turn north toward the incoming HKs, a turn that would certainly exacerbate the imaginary vertigo of any pilot.

The two newcomers were coming in fast she noted as she settled into an intercept course. Way too fast for a typical dogfight. Had Skynet analyzed her performance over the years and concluded its best bet was a high-speed skimmer attack?

Or had it conceded the point of her combat record and decided to simply ram her and be done with it?

There was one way to find out. Aiming her A-10 squarely between the two incoming aircraft, she nudged up her speed.

The hardest part about playing chicken, the old saying went, is knowing when to flinch. But the HKs didn’t seem to have heard that one. Neither aircraft veered so much as a degree off their intercept course as they all rushed toward each other. Blair gave it three more seconds,