“It’s all right!” Callahan shouted again. “We’re your people.”
And then, abruptly, Kyle realized the guards weren’t aiming their weapons toward him and Callahan. Spinning around, he looked back toward the hole they’d blasted.
Their exit wasn’t the only hole anymore. Fifty meters further back along the tunnel, the force of explosion had collapsed another section of the roof.
And clawing its way up to the surface was a T-700.
Kyle looked frantically around them. But the search and clean-up teams were still out working the smoking wasteland, and the perimeter guards hadn’t yet pulled back from the outer daytime ring to their nighttime stations. Just as he’d predicted earlier, all the fighters and heavy weapons were miles away.
Against all odds, Kyle and the others had made it out of the tunnel alive.
Just in time to watch the Terminators kill John Connor. Sweating, Barnes followed Preston across the old rope bridge, trying to ignore the churning water beneath him. Several of the boards were cracked or rotted, and the only safe places to step were the points where they were fastened to the supporting ropes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
But the ropes themselves were sturdy enough, and the young Preston and his visiting friend had done a good job of anchoring the bridge to the banks. Despite Barnes’s misgivings, both men made it across.
Equally surprising was the fact there was nothing waiting on the other side. Either Skynet had mistakenly written off the bridge as impossible to cross, or else its resources were indeed down to Lajard, Valentine, Jik, and whatever Jik was in the process of salvaging from the two broken T-700s.
The sun had passed behind the mountains, and the sky was rapidly headed toward dusk, when Barnes and Preston reached Bear Commons.
“Hell,” Preston murmured as they crouched behind a thick fallen tree trunk at the edge of the clearing. “I
Barnes nodded silently. In the middle of the clearing—the exact geometrical center, if he knew Skynet—was a small cabin, similar to some of the houses he’d seen in Baker’s Hollow, except that this one was constructed of slabs of metal instead of wood or brick. Above the clearing, strung across the empty space, was a thick camo netting that, as near as Barnes could tell, was a perfect match for the contours and coloration of the ring of fifty- meter-tall trees supporting it.
And squatting silently on the ground at the far side of the clearing, like a dragon guarding its hoard, was the dark metal bulk of an H-K.
“What now?” Preston asked.
“Give me a second,” Barnes growled, eyeing the H-K. He’d been hoping that Skynet’s bungled attempt to get hold of their Blackhawk the previous night had left it without any more aircraft in the area. He should have known it would be careful enough to keep at least one heavy fighting machine in reserve.
And that lack of foresight was going to cost him and Williams.
Especially Williams.
Preston was obviously thinking the same thing.
“How fast can Skynet get that H-K into the air?” he asked.
“Fast enough.” More than fast enough, actually. Even from a cold start, if Skynet kicked in the H-K’s ignition ramp-up as soon as it picked up the noise of the Blackhawk’s engines, it could probably be in the air well before Williams arrived.
Unless he and Preston could keep it from leaving the clearing in the first place.
Barnes frowned up at the camo netting. The mesh was laid out across a loose crosshatch of cables that looked capable of being pulled out and back along two thicker cables running along the north and south ends of the clearing. Another pair of cables, thinner than the support lines, snaked down one of the trees on either end and ran along the ground to the cabin in the center.
Which implied that either the control or the power for retracting the netting was inside the cabin. And from the sheer size of the netting and its support cables, not to mention the way it was bending in the treetops it was connected to, the covering had to be both strong and heavy.
Strong enough and heavy enough to trap the H-K inside the clearing? Maybe. Especially since the things weren’t designed to fire upward.
It was worth a try.
“We’re going to make for the cabin,” he told Preston. “There should be extra guns and ammo there, plus the controls to the netting.” He looked sideways at Preston, the face of Preston’s daughter suddenly flashing to mind. “On second thoughts, maybe you’d better stay here,” he amended. “I can do this myself.”
“We do it together,” Preston said firmly. Maybe he was thinking of his daughter, too. “Though we might want to angle a little to the right so the cabin will be between us and the H-K.”
“Way ahead of you,” Barnes assured him. “Follow me. Quietly.”
Keeping an eye on the H-K, Barnes circled around the end of the log and headed toward a gap between trees that should bring them into the clearing at the right spot. He stepped over a mass of brittle-looking dead branches, passed one final clump of bushes—
The swiveling of the H-K’s main guns was his only warning.
“Down!” he snapped, throwing himself forward onto the ground.
Just as the thunder of the H-K’s Gatling guns shattered the evening calm, stitching a line of death above his head.
Barnes was on his feet again even before the burst ended, hunched over and clutching his minigun to his stomach as he made a desperate sprint for the cabin’s gunfire shadow. A second burst hammered through the air at him, and he winced as a sudden slash of pain ripped across his left shoulder. Once again he threw himself forward.
And as he hit the ground he saw that he’d made it. The H-K’s Gatlings were now out of view behind the near corner of the cabin.
Or at least they would be until Skynet revved up the engines and got the damn thing into the air. Even with the canopy closed, there was more than enough room in here for the aircraft to hunt down a couple of human targets.
There was a flicker of movement at the corner of his eye, and Barnes looked over to see Preston heading for the cabin. Heaving himself to his feet, Barnes followed.
They were nearly there, and Barnes was looking for where to aim his thirty rounds in order to blast open the wall, when there was another thunder of Gatling gun fire.
And without warning, the wall they were heading for exploded violently outward.
Barnes found himself once again on the ground, this time without any conscious memory of how he’d gotten there. Preston was beside him, his face turned upward, his eyes closed, the right side of his head wet with blood.
“Preston!” Barnes shouted over the roar of the H-K’s guns as they continued to rip into the cabin.
There was no answer. Crawling on elbows and knees, Barnes worked his way to the other’s side.
“Preston?”
For a moment there was nothing. Then, the man’s eyes fluttered open, narrowing again as the pain from his head wound came jarring back.
“What happened?”
“Skynet’s decided it really, really wants us,” Barnes ground out, throwing a look at the cabin.
Or rather, what was left of the cabin. The entire top half had been shattered, its metal walls turned into shards and splinters by the gunfire still raking systematically across it. Only the lower meter or so of the four walls were still intact.
Cautiously, Barnes eased up enough to sneak a look into the shell that had once been a structure. Sitting on the floor just below the demolished section of the far wall were a pair of generators.
He craned his neck to look skyward. High above the clearing, the canopy was starting to retract.
Snarling under his breath, Barnes rolled up onto his knees and brought the minigun up into firing position. He
