Trial By Fire

Reese nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Barnes said, feeling a small tugging at his heart as he gazed at the kid’s solemn face. How many times, he wondered, had he had to hear that same speech from Connor? Enough times, obviously, that he now had the whole thing memorized.

Distantly, he wondered how many times his brother Caleb had had to hear it.

“Just go easy,” he told Reese. “You’ll get the hang of it.” He pointed to the gun in the kid’s hands. “Just remember that if it takes three or four rounds to do the job, go ahead and spend those three or four rounds. Saving ammo is just as stupid as wasting it if saving it gets someone killed. Especially if that someone is you.”

For a second he saw something else flick across Reese’s face, and waited for the obvious retort: that maybe Reese’s own life wasn’t worth saving anymore. That maybe it would be better for everyone if he did just let himself get killed. God knew Barnes felt that way himself a couple of times a month.

But to his surprise the kid didn’t go that direction.

“Okay,” he said instead. “Sorry. This whole thing is still...” He trailed off.

“Kind of new,” Barnes finished for him, impressed in spite of himself. Maybe Reese was actually smart enough not to base his ideas and future plans on how his emotions were churning at the moment. Barnes had known plenty of people who’d never learned that lesson.

Or maybe it was just that the kid didn’t have the guts to say something that self-pitying to someone who’d lived through more of Skynet’s indifferent savagery than he had.

“But you’ve got lots of good teachers here,” Barnes went on, waving around at the other men and women moving across the field and blowing away damaged Terminators. “Listen and learn.”

Behind them a high-pitched whistle sounded, the noise cutting cleanly through the scattered gunfire. Barnes turned to see a Chinook transport chopper settling to the ground.

“Shift change,” he grumbled to Reese, promising himself once again that he was going to find whoever had come up with this stupid whistle code and kick his butt. “Come on—a little food and sleep and you’ll feel better.”

“Okay,” the kid said, his voice neutral.

Barnes grimaced as he headed toward the chopper and the squad spreading out from it, come to continue the clean-up work. That last had been a lie, and he and Reese both knew it. All the food and sleep in the world wouldn’t ease the kid’s pain. Not yet. Only time would soften the loss of his friend Marcus Wright, and his memories of how that hybrid Terminator had risked his life for Reese and his young friend Star, and then had sacrificed himself to save John Connor.

Just as only time would help Barnes’s own memories of his brother. The memories of Caleb’s last encouraging smile as he climbed aboard the chopper with Connor and the others for that ill-fated mission to Skynet’s big desert lab.

But maybe there was a way to help that process along a little.

The main camp was a fifteen-minute chopper ride away. Barnes waited until his team had turned over their heavy weapons to the armorers for inspection and cleaning, then sent them over to the mess tent for a meal.

And once they were settled, he headed to the medical recovery tent to talk to John Connor.

“Barnes,” Connor said in greeting when Barnes was finally allowed through by the door guards and entered the intensive-care recovery room. As usual, Connor’s wife Kate was sitting at his side, a clipboard full of reports and logistics requests propped up on the edge of the bed between them. “How’s the clean-up going?”

“It’s going okay,” Barnes said, wincing a little as he eyed the bewildering collection of tubes and monitor wires sprouting from Connor’s arms and chest. Barnes had seen plenty of people die, most of them violently, but there was something about medical stuff that still made him a little squeamish. Probably the feeling that all patients who looked like this were dying by degrees, the way it had happened to his and Caleb’s own mother.

“Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it looks,” Kate soothed.

Guiltily, angrily, Barnes wrenched his attention away from the tubes and bottles. He’d sort of gotten used to Connor reading his mind that way, but he hated it when Kate did, too.

“Yeah,” he said. “I have a request.”

Connor nodded. “Go ahead.”

“You told me that Caleb was on the surface when Skynet blew its research lab,” Barnes said. “That means he wasn’t underground with the others.” He braced himself. “I want to go and bury him.”

Kate stirred but didn’t speak. “Are you sure?” Connor asked. “It’s been a couple of weeks, you know.”

“It’s a desert,” Barnes growled. “He’ll still be... You know that thing Kowlowski used to say? That Skynet leaves its fallen lying on the streets?”

“But that we bury ours,” Connor finished, a flicker of something crossing his face. Maybe he was thinking about Marcus Wright, too.

“The clean-up’s going fine,” Barnes said. “It looks like the outer sentry line were the only Terminators that survived the blast, and most of them are pretty smashed. You’ve got more than enough people to clear them out —”

“All right,” Connor said. “You can go.”

Barnes stopped, the other four points he’d been planning to make fading away unsaid. He hadn’t expected talking Connor into this would be that easy.

“You’ll need a pilot,” Connor continued. “I’ll have Blair Williams check out a helicopter for the two of you.”

A knife seemed to twist in Barnes’s gut. Williams?

“Can I have someone else instead?” he asked.

Connor shook his head. “You two have been avoiding each other ever since San Francisco,” he said. “It’s time you cleared the air.”

Barnes clenched his teeth.

“All due respect, this isn’t the right time to do that,” he said.

“Let me put it another way,” Connor said. “You go with Williams, or you don’t go at all.”

If the man hadn’t been hooked up to a hundred tubes and wires, Barnes reflected blackly, he would have considered hitting him. Not that he actually would have hit him, but he would definitely have considered it. As it was, he couldn’t even have that minor satisfaction.

We bury our dead.

There was no point in stalling. Connor had him, and they both knew it.

“Fine,” he bit out. “If she’s willing. Otherwise, I get someone else.”

“She will be,” Connor promised. “I’ll make sure of that. Go eat and then get some sleep. You can leave in the morning.”

Barnes nodded, not trusting himself to say anything else, and stomped out of the room.

He should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

CHAPTER THREE

The eight-point buck was nibbling on the ends of some tree branches when it suddenly froze.

Hope Preston felt her cheek twitch. So the animal had heard them. She’d been afraid it would. Hope herself was more than capable of silent stalking, but this was the first time out for Hope’s new hunting partner Susan Valentine, and the older woman simply wasn’t experienced at moving through the twigs and dead leaves that matted the forest floor beneath their feet.

But it was too late now. The deer had been alerted to their presence. One more suspicious sound or movement and it would be out of here, escaping from the clearing into the deeply forested mountain slopes behind it.

Keeping her head motionless, Hope looked at Susan out the corner of her eye. There was an intent, grimly earnest expression on the woman’s face, and Hope had no doubt she was going to try her hardest.

But willpower alone wasn’t enough to send an arrow to its target. Susan’s bow was less than rock-steady in her left hand, and the taut bowstring was wavering visibly as she held the fletching close beside her right cheek.