Trial By Fire

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Barnes and Williams had been trudging through the forest for over an hour, and Barnes was starting to regret he’d ever agreed to go on this little nature hike, when they found the bridge.

“What do you think?” Williams murmured as they crouched in the undergrowth about thirty meters away.

Barnes eyed the structure through the branches, wishing he’d thought to grab a pair of binoculars before leaving San Francisco.

“Looks solid enough,” he murmured back. “I suppose someone could have crossed on it.”

“Mm,” Williams said. “Pretty hard to tell how solid a bridge is without trying it.”

“Go ahead,” Barnes offered. “I’ll wait here.”

Williams grunted. “Funny. What do you want to do?”

Barnes looked around. Aside from the bridge, there was nothing here but more forest, the same as the stuff they’d already tromped through. No people, no buildings—no Terminators.

“I guess we could look around a little,” he said doubtfully. “See if we can find some trace of this visitor Preston’s so hot to bring in. Or just call it a bust and go back.”

“Can’t say I’m overly thrilled by either option,” Williams said. “But you’re right. You want to flip a coin —?”

“Shh!” Barnes hissed, snapping his head around to the left. Something had rustled over there, loudly enough to be audible over the noise of the river churning through the deep gorge beneath the bridge.

Williams froze, her Mossberg already pointing that direction. Barnes kept his eyes moving, sweeping the area where the sound had come from, while also keeping an eye on their flanks. A nice, loud rustling in the bushes was the oldest trick in the book...

The noise came again. This time Barnes spotted its source: a small rippling in the branches of a thorn bush forty meters away.

“If that’s a Terminator, it’s awfully small,” Williams said softly.

“Aerostats and hydrobots aren’t exactly huge,” Barnes reminded her. It would be just like Skynet to have seeded the forests with some new kind of ground-hugging nasty that they hadn’t run into before. “Stay here—I’ll check it out.” Watching the rippling bush and the ones right beside it, searching for the glint of metal, he started to rise from his crouch.

“Freeze,” a quiet voice ordered from behind him. “Don’t turn around.”

Barnes hissed a curse. And he’d been watching for this trick, too, damn it. “Easy, friend,” he soothed.

“What makes you think I’m your friend?” the voice countered. “Who are you?”

“Barnes, she’s Williams. You from the town back there?”

“What makes you think that?”

“Your friendly approach to strangers,” Barnes growled. “They say hello with hunting arrows.”

“So you’re not from Baker’s Hollow, either,” the man said. “What are you doing here?”

“We were heading home when we spotted the smoke from the town,” Williams said. “You may have heard our helo coming in early this morning. What’s your name?”

“Where’s home?” the man asked, ignoring the question.

“At the moment, San Francisco,” Williams said. She twitched her left arm, jiggling her red armband. “We’re with the Resistance.”

“Yes, I already saw the armbands,” the man said. “If you’re Resistance, I assume you listen to John Connor?”

Barnes snorted. “All the time.”

“Good,” the man said. “What was in his last broadcast?”

Barnes frowned. Connor’s last broadcast had been over a week ago, before the attack on Skynet Central. He had no idea what Connor had said in that message, and it was clear from Williams’s silence that she didn’t either.

“I don’t know,” he told their captor. “We don’t have time to listen to every broadcast. Who does?”

There was a short pause.

“Skynet does, for one,” he said. Oddly enough, the tension level in his voice had actually gone down. “That’s a point in your favor, actually.”

“Wait a minute,” Barnes said, frowning. “You think we’re Skynet? What, we don’t look human enough for you?”

“You look very human,” the man said grimly. “But that isn’t a defining quality anymore.” He murmured some sort of curse under his breath. “Unfortunately, aside from cutting you open, I don’t know any way to prove you’re who you claim.”

The skin on the back of Barnes’s neck began to tingle.

“Let’s not do anything drastic,” he said carefully. “There’s got to be some way we can prove ourselves.”

“While we’re thinking, how about telling us your name?” Williams suggested.

There was a short pause.

“Call me Jik,” the man said.

“You a pilot?” Williams asked.

“No,” Jik said. “Why?”

“Jik sounds like a pilot’s call sign,” Williams said. “Who’s your friend out there?”

“My friend?” Jik asked. “Oh. This.” The distant bush rustled again. “Some rope tied to a small branch. Simple but effective. If you spotted smoke in Baker’s Hollow, what are you doing way out here?”

“Hunting a Terminator,” Barnes told him. “It headed up this side of the river, and we wanted to see where it went. Or whether it just gave up and went away.”

“Oh, it didn’t go away,” Jik said sourly. “It’s somewhere to the south, I think—I caught a couple of glimpses of it while I was trying to get to the ford.”

“So you’re the one it’s hunting?” Williams asked.

“So it would seem,” Jik said. “And be advised that there are two T-700s on this side of the river, not just one. I shot the other one earlier, during all the gunfire. But I only had one round left, and that wasn’t enough to kill it.”

Barnes felt a cautious stirring of hope.

“You only had one shot?”

“But I got its weapon away from it before it recovered,” Jik said, an edge of warning in his voice. “In case you were thinking I’m bluffing back here.”

“No, of course not,” Barnes said. “Those G11s are heavy, aren’t they?”

“Heavy enough,” Jik agreed. “But I’m sure I’d be able to get off a couple of rounds before my biceps gave out.”

“What did you mean, looks aren’t a defining quality anymore?” Williams asked.

“I mean that Skynet’s come up with something new,” Jik said grimly. “A human heart and organs wrapped up inside metal.”

Williams inhaled sharply. “You mean Marcus?”

“Was that its name?”

“His name,” Williams corrected harshly. “His name was Marcus Wright.”

“Well, its name isn’t Marcus Wright anymore,” Jik told her. “I killed it. Or destroyed it, however you want to put—”

“Wait a second,” Barnes interrupted. “You killed it?”

“I just said that,” Jik said.

“Yeah,” Barnes muttered.