Trial By Fire

Vincennes shook his head.

“Grab a shotgun if it makes you feel safer, but you’re well within the daytime perimeter, and that area’s already been swept. You’ll have plenty of weight to carry on your way back as it is.”

“Yes, sir,” Kyle said.

Vincennes’s eyes drifted over Kyle’s shoulder to the line of hungry refugees.

“And while you’re out there, keep an eye out for anything that might mark a food depot.”

Star pressed against Kyle’s side, and even through all his layers of clothing he could feel the shiver that ran through her small body. Both of them had vivid memories of being herded together in this place with the rest of Skynet’s human captives.

“Skynet wasn’t feeding anyone very much,” he muttered.

“No, but it was giving them something,” Vincennes said. “Whatever the machines had stashed away, we want it.”

“Understood,” Kyle said, pushing back the memories.

Vincennes dug into his pocket and pulled out a folded slip of paper.

“Yarrow has the whistle for your team, but he’ll need the code for that part of camp—I forgot to give it to him. It’s a little different from the one the hunter teams use, so have him check it before he whistles anything.”

Kyle took the paper. He didn’t mind the whistle code nearly as much as some of the others. Barnes, for one, made no secret of his disgust with it. But even Kyle was starting to question its efficiency.

“Any idea when the radios will be up and running again?”

“About two minutes after we find out where the damn interference is coming from,” Vincennes said sourly. “And don’t bother volunteering to blow it up when we find it. I’ve already got a waiting list.”

Star tugged at Kyle’s sleeve, and he looked down. What does the noise machine look like? she signed.

“It’s probably not an actual machine,” Vincennes said when Kyle had translated the question. “More likely just a high-voltage short-circuit that’s creating big, noisy sparks. Probably some big underground motor that was damaged enough to leak current but still has enough connection to a power supply that it hasn’t run dry yet.”

Star tugged at Kyle’s sleeve again. Maybe it’s not an accident, she signed. Maybe the machines are trying to keep John Connor quiet.

“Could the interference be deliberate?” Kyle asked Vincennes. “Star thinks Skynet may be trying to keep Connor’s broadcasts from getting out.”

“Oh, Skynet wants to stop his broadcasts, all right,” Vincennes agreed. “You can bet a week’s meals on that one. But you can’t do that by flooding the airwaves with interference at the source. Your jamming needs to be at the receiver’s end, not the transmitter’s. Or so the tech guys tell me.”

He looked out at the devastated landscape around them.

“No,” he went on. “As soon as Connor feels well enough to start broadcasting again, he will. Nothing Skynet does has ever stopped him before. It’s not going to stop him now.”

“I hope you’re right,” Kyle said, thinking back to that single broadcast that he, Star, and Marcus had heard back in Los Angeles. “The people out there need to hear him.”

“They will,” Vincennes promised. “Very soon.” He gestured at Kyle’s half-empty plate. “Eat up, and get to work. Connor’s not so weak that he can’t still kick your butt halfway to L.A. if he catches you loafing.”

The fireball that had consumed Skynet Central had barely faded away when Connor ordered his Resistance team in for search and clean-up duty. In the middle of all that barely controlled chaos, Star had been scooped up by the mess tent people and assigned to dishwashing duty.

That job had lasted exactly two hours, the length of time it had taken Kyle to find someone to listen as he described Star’s skill at disassembling, cleaning, and reassembling firearms. The woman had taken Star to the armorer station for a test, and fifteen minutes later the mess people were back to looking for a new dishwasher.

This morning the armorers were as busy as always, stripping, cleaning, and repairing the group’s impressive array of firearms. Kyle got Star settled behind her usual table and helped her get all her cleaning fluids and cloths arrayed in their proper places around her work area. He collected four backpacks and then, just because he didn’t feel right without it, also picked up a sawed-off shotgun. Slinging the weapon over his shoulder, he headed for the south checkpoint.

Callahan and Zac were waiting when Kyle arrived, along with a smallish man Kyle didn’t recognize.

“You Reese?” the man asked as Kyle came up.

“Yes, sir,” Kyle said. “Sorry if I’m late.”

The man grunted. “Bill Yarrow. Pass out the bags, and let’s get started.”

“Yes, sir,” Kyle said again, eyeing Zac as he handed each of them a backpack. He hadn’t seen the thirteen- year-old since the day Zac and the others had walked out of the Moldavia Building. But the months he’d spent with Connor since then had clearly been good for the kid. Like Callahan, Zac was harder, leaner, and more muscular than he’d been back then. Better fed, too.

“First pass will be to pick up the live ammo,” Yarrow said as he looped his backpack over one shoulder. “If we’ve still got space, we’ll go back and collect as much empty brass as we can carry. Clear?”

There were three murmured assents.

“Good,” Yarrow said briskly. “Let’s go.”

“For me, it happened two years after Judgment Day,” Susan said, shifting uncomfortably in one of the plain wooden chairs that Hope had brought in from the kitchen to help accommodate the unexpected crowd currently standing and sitting around their living room. “There were half a dozen of the big walkers, the ones I found out later were T-400s, plus a couple of T-1 tanks that had come along for support. I was living in a sort of group house—it was the only building in our neighborhood that hadn’t fallen down or been scavenged for lumber.”

Hope threw a surreptitious look across the room. Blair was listening closely to Susan’s story, just as she had Oxley’s and Lajard’s, an intense but otherwise neutral expression on her face. Barnes was listening just as closely, but his expression was one of outright suspicion.

And every so often he turned that suspicious look toward Hope and her father.

“At first I thought they were going to kill us,” Susan continued. “I’d heard the rumors that they were doing that in some of the other neighborhoods. But they didn’t. They just walked up to the house, and one of them put a radio up against the door so that I could hear there was someone trying to talk to me.”

“That someone being me,” Lajard put in. “As I said, I’d been with Skynet for a year at that point. We needed a good metallurgist, I’d found Susan in what was left of the university database, and sent a team out to get her.” He looked over at Barnes. “And for the record, the term Terminator originally meant that their job was to terminate the chaos and crime that had become endemic across the world since the war.”

“The war that Skynet started,” Barnes growled.

Lajard shook his head. “I’m not convinced of that.”

“I don’t give a damn whether you are or not,” Barnes said flatly. “I was one of the people the Terminators were hunting. I saw what they did.”

“And I say that all of that happened later, after the gangs ramped up and started terrorizing the rest of the populace,” Lajard countered, just as firmly. “Maybe Skynet just got tired of trigger-happy vigilantes wrecking its machines. Machines that were only trying to protect people.”

“What about the prisoners in Skynet Central?” Barnes countered. “Or the ones in that underground facility, the place you claim you were working in? Connor said they were living in cages while Skynet did experiments on them.”

“I never saw anything like that,” Lajard insisted. “Maybe Connor misinterpreted what he saw. Maybe they were refugees that Skynet had taken in.”

Hope sighed. It was an argument that had been going on ever since the three scientists first arrived in town three months ago. Despite all the stories and rumors that had filtered into Baker’s Hollow over the years, Lajard stubbornly refused to believe that Skynet was actively and deliberately slaughtering the scattered remnants of humanity. He insisted that, even now, Terminator killings were either gang-related, self-defense, or rare and atypical accidents. In his view, all the anti-Skynet bias was propaganda driven by lies from dangerous malcontents like John Connor.