Trial By Fire

They were nearly to the fiery circle now. Barnes and Preston were somewhere down there, Blair knew, hopefully still alive. Jik, another Terminator with a human face, would also be down there.

Blair would have to make sure that, when the time came to open fire, Jik was on Halverson’s side of the Blackhawk.

The fire was fading as Blair eased them into a hover directly above it. Much of the camo mesh itself had already burned away, revealing a network of slender cables anchoring the mesh to the treetops around the edge of the clearing.

“What now?” Halverson called.

Blair settled her hands on the controls.

“Hang on,” she advised.

Shoving the throttle forward, she sent the helo into a stomach-lurching drop straight onto the mesh.

Open-area camouflage nets were designed to support their own weight, the additional pressure of an occasional curious bird, and very little else. The mesh held the helo’s weight for maybe half a second before collapsing in a flurry of displaced sparks and snapped treetops. Blair was ready, hauling back on the throttle to kill the Blackhawk’s drop and bring it back up to treetop height again.

“Look sharp,” she shouted as she set the helo into a slow clockwise rotation around its vertical axis. “They’re down there somewhere. So’s Jik.”

“There!” Halverson snapped. “That clump of birch trees. I can see someone.”

Blair craned her neck, angling the helo a bit so that she could look past Halverson out the portside door. But the fading fire wasn’t bright enough to give any clear light to the edges of the clearing.

Paradoxically, it was bright enough to throw flickering shadows across the ground, adding that much more visual confusion to the gloom already filling the forest.

“I don’t see anyone,” she called.

“He’s there,” Halverson insisted. “Crouching behind those birches.”

“Was it my father?” Hope called from the other side of the Blackhawk.

“I couldn’t tell,” Halverson said with an edge of impatience. “I need to get closer.”

Unfortunately, that was exactly what they couldn’t do right now. Like all Resistance helos tasked with hunting ground-based Terminators, the Blackhawk had a heavily armored underside. Hovering here at treetop height, they were reasonably safe from anything Jik could be waiting to shoot at them.

But once they headed down, all bets would be off. The main cockpit skin was much thinner and more susceptible to weapons fire, and Blair didn’t have even the modest protection of a windshield anymore. A single shot into her head, and all three of them would die.

“We can’t get closer,” she told Halverson. “Not until we know who that is.”

“How the hell do you expect me to figure that out from way up here?”

And then, almost as if on cue, there was a fresh flicker of fire from below them. Not from the birch trees Halverson had indicated, but from halfway across the clearing. The flame faltered a little, shifted position slightly—

And then flashed across the clearing to impale itself chest-high against the trunk of a big tree a couple of meters away from the birches.

“That’s a fire arrow!” Halverson shouted, a note of triumph in his voice. “That’s Preston—he’s marked Jik for us!”

“Can you see him?” Blair called. “Can you see that it’s Jik?”

“He’s there—he’s right there,” Halverson confirmed excitedly. “But I can’t—damn it, I can’t swing this thing far enough around.”

“Hang on,” Blair ordered, slowing the helo’s clockwise rotation and starting it turning back the other direction. “And don’t lose him.”

Suddenly, without warning, a burst of fire from the forest on the other side of the clearing shot across toward them. Reflexively, Barnes ducked—

And with a sharp thunk a flaming arrow buried its tip in a big tree two meters to Barnes’s right.

Preston gasped, dropping lower as a shower of sparks rained down.

“What the—? Barnes?”

For a fraction of a second Barnes just stared at the burning arrow. What the hell was Jik up to?

Tearing his eyes away from the fire, he looked upward.

The chopper, which had been slowly turning as Williams searched for a target, had come to a stop. He watched, with a surge of horror, as it started turning the other direction.

Moving around to bring its portside M240 into range.

“He’s suckering them,” he growled. “Jik saw you light the camo net with a fire arrow, figured we might be smart enough to try marking his position with another one, and decided to get there first.”

“How could we mark him?” Preston said, his voice bewildered. “We don’t even know where he is.”

“We do now,” Barnes said, looking across the clearing to where the arrow had come from. In the fading light from the smoldering camo net, he could just make out a figure standing motionless beside one of the bigger trees.

“Shoot him,” Preston urged. “Come on, shoot. That’ll show Blair who we are.”

Barnes sighed. Only it wouldn’t show Williams anything of the sort. If things had been reversed, if it had been Preston who marked Jik’s position with a flaming arrow, the Theta would certainly respond by opening fire toward his attackers with whatever weapons he had.

Williams would know that. Rather than getting her to hold her fire, an attack on Jik now would simply get her shooting at him and Preston that much faster.

He looked up again, his mind whirring as he tried to figure out a plan. The chopper was too high for Williams to be able to distinguish either of their faces well enough for a positive ID. Ditto for their clothing, Preston’s bow, or anything else they had with them.

Their only hope was to find cover.

Only there wasn’t any. Not from a machinegun firing from above.

“Barnes,” Preston said, the name a sigh of resignation.

Barnes squeezed his hand around the grip of the G11. The chopper was nearly to firing position now. Five more seconds, maybe six, and they would be dead.

He had exactly that long to come up with some way to stop Williams. Any way that he could.

“Almost there,” Halverson called tensely. “Come on, come on.”

“Easy,” Blair said, frowning out the side door as the Blackhawk continued to turn back toward firing position. She could see the figure down there now, just visible in the flickering light from Preston’s fire arrow. He was standing still, possibly hoping the hunters wouldn’t spot him. There was a flicker of movement a meter to his side —

“Hold it,” Blair said, leaning toward the door. Was that a second figure hunkered down in the bushes? “I see someone else.”

“Oh, damn,” Halverson snarled. “I knew it. He got one of the T-700s working. Come on, come on—we’re almost there.”

Blair bit hard at her lip. Yes, that could indeed be a T-700 down there. It could also be a T-600, or even another Theta they hadn’t yet accounted for.

It could also be a human being.

But it had to have been Preston who had fired that arrow. Preston had a bow, and there was no reason she could think of why Jik would have bothered to pick one up.

And if that was Jik down there, he had every reason to position his reconstructed T-700 under just enough cover to masquerade as another person in hopes of throwing Blair off track.

She huffed out a breath. It wasn’t perfect, but it made more sense than any other theory.

And until and unless she got some solid reason to think otherwise, she would just have to go with it.

* * *

“We’re going to die, aren’t we?” Preston murmured. “They’re going to shoot us down, and we’re going to