Trial By Fire

repeated the sequence, then slipped the whistle back into his shirt.

“That’s the best I can do. Ready?”

Barnes resettled the minigun on his arm.

“Ready.”

“Good luck,” Halverson said.

“You too,” Preston said. He hesitated, then reached down and took Halverson’s bow and quiver. “Here,” he said, pressing his rifle into the other’s hand. “You can’t use a bow, not with broken ribs. You might be able to use a rifle, though.”

“Thanks,” Halverson said softly. “I see Lajard or Valentine, you’re damn right I’ll be able to use it.”

A minute later, with the roar of the river on their left, Preston and Barnes left the open area at the ford and once again plunged into deep undergrowth.

“What was that about the radios?” Preston asked over his shoulder. “Something you didn’t want Halverson to hear?”

“No, just something that wasn’t worth wasting time talking about,” Barnes told him. “I just figured out why Skynet’s been jamming our radios in San Francisco. It wasn’t just to annoy us, but to keep us from hearing the fake John Connor broadcasts Jik’s been making.”

“Because if you heard them, you’d send someone to investigate,” Preston said, nodding. “Lucky for us— well, lucky in the long run—you came anyway.”

Barnes winced. Except that they wouldn’t have if Williams hadn’t gotten her back up on tracking that cable.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why do you put up with him?”

“Who?”

“Halverson,” Barnes said. “You’re supposed to be in charge. Why do you let him tell your people what to do?”

Preston’s shoulders hunched in a shrug.

“That’s just Halverson,” he said. “He was a master hunter out here long before Judgment Day, and he likes to think he knows how to do everything better than any of the rest of us.”

“And you just stand there and let him think that? Why?”

“Because he is a master hunter, and we need him,” Preston said. “More than that, we need the rest of the expert hunters who look up to him.”

“So you just let him walk all over you,” Barnes bit out. “You let him make you look like a fool.”

“I suppose you could say that,” Preston said calmly. “But letting him play his games is what keeps this town functioning and its citizens alive. I think that’s worth a little wounded pride, don’t you?”

He gestured. “We’d better be quiet from here on. We don’t want to reach the bridge to find Jik waiting at the other end.”

The distant whistle call was faint, just barely on the edge of hearing. But the dots and dashes were distinct.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

From the puzzled look on Hope’s face, though, the message itself wasn’t nearly so clear.

“Well?” Blair asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Hope murmured back. “That was one of our hunting codes. It means an assigned area has come up dry, and that the hunt team is moving on to the next one. But why would anybody be out hunting now?”

Blair looked around through the fading light at the densely packed tress and bushes hemming them in from all sides. The snaky, Hope had called this route. Blair would probably have named it ‘the claustrophobic.’

“You said the hunt team. But you’d normally have more than one out at a time, right?”

“Right,” Hope said. “Yes, I see—the team leader’s code should have been attached. But there wasn’t one.”

“So it probably wasn’t talking about a normal hunt team,” Blair said.

Hope pondered that a moment.

“You think they’re telling us to give up?”

“More likely that Barnes and your father are leaving the river ford,” Blair said.

“To go where?”

“I don’t know,” Blair said. “Maybe once we’re in the air we’ll be able to figure that out. How much farther?”

Hope looked around them.

“Ten minutes,” she said. “Fifteen if we want to be extra quiet.”

“Let’s make it fifteen.”

Blair’s best-case scenario was that Lajard wouldn’t have been able to locate the Blackhawk at all. Her next- best hope was that he would locate it, but decide to set up an ambush along the trail from town that Hope’s route through the snaky would circumvent.

No such luck, on either count. They arrived at the edge of the clearing to find Valentine already in the Blackhawk, sitting straight and tall and motionless in the pilot’s seat.

The way a Terminator would sit.

“We’re too late,” Hope whispered, her whole body slumping.

“Easy,” Blair soothed, frowning. They’d come out on the helo’s portside bow, and between the portside door and the broken windshield she could see into most of the cockpit. Valentine was there, but where was Lajard?

And then, she heard a soft, metallic click.

“Try it now,” Lajard’s voice came faintly.

Valentine stirred, hands moving across the controls.

“Nothing.”

There was a muffled curse from the cockpit, and Blair smiled tightly. Lajard wasn’t off somewhere on some dangerous errand. Instead, he was lying on his back under the control panel.

Trying to figure out how Barnes’s kill switch worked.

Blair looked up at the sky, her smile fading. Unfortunately, the stalemate wasn’t going to last much longer. The minute the sun was fully down and long-range transmitters began to function, Skynet would probably download every scrap of data it had on Blackhawk piloting and tech into Valentine. At that point, it would be simple for the Theta to sort through Wince’s jury-rigs and patches and figure out where Barnes had diverted the starter circuit.

And when that happened, the game would be over. Lajard and Valentine would fly out of here, rendezvous with Jik somewhere, and they’d all be off to play the John Connor charade in front of some other trusting and doomed Resistance group.

There was only one way Blair could think of to stop them. One nasty, bloody way.

“We can’t let them leave here, Hope,” she murmured. “We have to take them out. Both of them. Do you understand?”

For a long moment the girl was silent.

“Yes,” she said at last. Even in a whisper her pain and grief were clearly audible. “What do you want me to do?”

“I need you to stay right here while I work my way around the tail to the other side,” Blair told her. “Once I’m there, I’ll find a way to get Susan to turn in my direction. Remember that shot you made across the river this afternoon, where you hit the T-700’s motor cortex?”

Hope’s breath came out in a strangled huff.

“Oh, no,” she breathed. “Please. I can’t do that.”

“I know it’ll be hard,” Blair said gently. “But we have no choice. You saw what Oxley did to those people in town. If Susan and Lajard get away, they’ll do the same to other people somewhere else. Maybe hundreds of other