David Hagberg - Terminator 3 - Rise of the Machines

The crane's boom continued to extend and swing around, taking out electric wires and transformers above the street in showers of sparks.

Terminator grabbed his shotgun. When the ambulances separated, he hammered the throttle, pulling a wheelie. He roared between them, firing over his left shoulder at the nearest ambulance, taking out one of its front tires.

It dropped back, but did not drop out.

The Champion crane surged forward.

Behind T-X was the T-850 that Skynet expected the human resistance would send back, along with the two ambulances that were working the problem.

She was helping that element by using the extended boom to lay down a continuous debris path that might slow the obsolete model warrior/cyborg.

Ahead of her was the target, John Connor. His van was damaged, and she could sense the heat signature of an overworked engine that was leaking lubricating oil from a rear seal in the aft section of the main mass of the block.

Two LAPD remote units were harrying Connor, but to this point they had not been completely effective. The human showed the unusually strong resilience and inventiveness that Skynet had programmed her to expect.

T-X punched a hole in the windshield, morphed her right arm into her plasma weapon, and quickly charged the unit.

Her head-up unit displayed a reticle roughly centered on the pet van. Her target-acquisition stabilizing circuitry popped up and the reticle locked on the pickup truck.

Her weapon indicator showed fully charged as the pet van and flanking police cars raced through a red light, just avoiding collisions with two automobiles.

T-X fired at the same instant a semi tractor-trailer entered the intersection, filling her targeting frame.

For an instant nothing seemed to happen. But then the semi was engulfed in a blue plasma charge field and exploded with an impressive flash-bang that sent flames and debris hammering off the fronts of the commercial buildings on either side of the street.

The Champion crane plowed through the debris like a hot knife through soft butter, and on the other side, T-X glanced in her rearview mirror.

Terminator, his motorcycle laid over on its side, skidded through the flames, then shot upright, apparently unharmed.

Behind it, the first ambulance ran headlong into a major piece of the semi's frame and disintegrated, while the second ambulance emerged from the fire, leaving behind twin vortex swirls in the dense smoke.

A huge explosion obliterated the intersection behind Connor. He looked in his rearview mirror in time to see the Champion crane crash through the fire and debris, followed a second later by Terminator on the police bike, and one of the ambulances directly on his tail.

It was Terminator! Somehow he had caught up.

They weren't out of the woods yet, but Connor felt a small measure of relief. He and Kate were no longer alone. Terminator might be an older model of cyborg, but he'd been there in the past for John, and it looked as if he would be there again.

For the briefest of instants, Connor wished that his mother were here. But then he put that thought out of his mind.

First, he would have to survive this trouble.

The driverless cop cars still flanked him. And it wouldn't take much more for them to finally box the pet van in and run it off the street.

"Hold on," he shouted to Kate in the back.

He slammed the brake pedal as hard as he could, locking up the pet van's wheels, smoke pouring off the tires.

The cop cars shot past, and Connor made a sloppy but effective four-wheel drift to the right, just missing a delivery truck at the corner.

The pair of cop cars locked up their brakes in unison and made perfect 180s, jumping back on Connor's tail as quickly as they'd been thrown off.

The Champion crane took the corner wide, the extended boom taking out the entire side of a building, brick and wood and plastic exploding in every direction.

Whatever kind of weapon the cyborg had fired had been big enough to take out an entire semi truck. One hit, even a near miss, would make short work of the pet van.

Connor kept checking the rearview mirror as the huge crane actually gained on him, rolling over cars whose drivers weren't quick enough to get out of the way, whereas he could only weave in and out of the slower-moving traffic.

But the ambulance and Terminator were still back there, along with the cop cars in some kind of a crazy Fourth of July parade complete with fireworks.

There was a large hole in the Champion crane's wind-shield and something jutted out from inside.

Connor swerved hard to the right, nearly sideswiping a row of parked cars, and then swerved sharply left, laying on his horn for cars to get out of his way.

Kate was being thrown from side to side in the back. He could hear her body slamming against the cap.

"Stop it!" she screamed in desperation. "Stop it!" But he could not. Their lives depended on his driving. He could see a bright blue glow around whatever it was sticking out of the crane's windshield. It was the cyborg's weapon. And it was ready to fire again.

Terminator could see the blue glow in the cab of the Champion crane as the T-X made ready to fire a second time.

Ahead, Connor was maneuvering wildly, but that would not work for long. The police cars would box him in and T-X would destroy him and Kate.

Terminator took the Mossberg from the saddle rack, cycled a round into the breech, and fired at the crane's left rear tire. The machine had eighteen wheels, but the one shredding tire was enough to cause T-X to lurch a little to the side at the same moment she fired.

The shot went wild. The beam of raw energy struck the rear of the squad car off Connor's right, instantly incinerating it. The flaming wreckage tumbled end over end.

Terminator prepared to take a second shot when the ambulance behind him jolted his rear tire, almost making him lose the bike.

The crane's boom accelerated to the left as it extended, dropping a massive hook on thick cables that swung like a lethal wrecking ball.

The hook smashed into Terminator's chest, slamming him off the motorcyle. At the last moment he grabbed on to it with one hand, still holding the shotgun in the other.

Suddenly he was swinging wildly to the left. He twisted his body just as he slammed hard into the pursuing ambulance, shoving it over on its side, sending it skidding down the street in a trail of sparks.

Terminator swung right again in time to see Connor, still harried by one of the squad cars, duck down a side street and disappear.

It was too sharp a turn for the crane, which roared through the intersection. Terminator, dangling from the hook, smashed off parked cars, lampposts, and anything else in his path as he continued to try to bring his shotgun to bear on the T-X's head.

The crane suddenly swerved to the right, crashed over two parked cars, jumped the sidewalk, and smashed into the glass wall of a building.

Terminator found himself crashing into pieces of brick and steel and wires and pipes and girders as the massive machine careened down a long work area and burst through the opposite wall, back out onto the street in the next block.

As the big crane made the impossibly sharp right turn with the boom extended, carrying Terminator's two hundred kilos out at ninety degrees, it lifted off the nine wheels on the left, balanced there, ponderously, like a huge whale about to be beached by a gigantic comber, but then regained its balance when the front end finally came around.

Connor was on the next street over, and Terminator's head-up overlay map of the local streets showed that the pet van would have to come down this street. T-X had the same overlay.