David Hagberg: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

"Okay, people, let's move out, we have a job to do," Benson said. He hefted the nuke's twenty-kilogram physics package, slung it over his shoulder by the straps, and headed across the face of the ridgeline on a path that would eventually take them to the broad rockfalls on the far side of the mountain. It was where Steve and his people had discovered the shaft.

It was also Colonel Earle's last known position before communications abruptly ceased.

An ominous silence hung over Los Angeles. For the past three days there had been almost no machine activity in any sector. Everyone was glad for the respite, but no one was happy. Especially not John Connor, who, along with his headquarters staff, had stuck it out in the comm center to monitor Red One's progress to Colorado.

With Skynet's AI destroyed, the war would be finished for all practical purposes. It would just be a matter of mopping up the stray machines programmed for limited independent action.

"Home Plate, Red One, we're coming up to the base of the north ridge," Toni radioed. Her encrypted voice sounded flat, emotionless. But John and the others could hear that she was out of breath from the altitude.

"Copy that," he replied. "Still no signs that you've been detected?"

"Negative, Home Plate. It's been real quiet so far."

Just like here, John thought He brushed back a strand of graying hair. It was an unconscious gesture he'd had since he was a kid. Of medium height and build, he was an unremarkable-looking man, who'd never once considered himself the savior of mankind, and certainly not a hero. You just did what you had to do. His mother had taught him that lesson.

His instincts wanted to pull Benson and his people out of there right now. But the prize was simply too great for that. They had to push on.

They had no other choice.

Benson signaled for them to hold up as he climbed the last ten meters to the top of the ridge. Navajo Mountain towered above them, the summit covered with enough snow that avalanches were a constant danger. In the distance they could see Pikes Peak and the mountains beyond it that formed the spine of the Continental Divide.

It was very cold now. By tonight the weather would be brutal. Benson wanted to finish the job and be long gone at lower elevations no later than midnight.

The nearer they got to the area where Steve said he'd found the shaft, the more Benson became spooked. It seemed as if the mountains themselves were holding their collective breath, waiting for something to happen.

He got down on his hands and knees and eased himself to the top of the hill. Rising up so that he could see what was below, his heart skipped a beat. All the spit in his mouth dried up and he dropped back, his muscles suddenly weak, his jaw slack.

Toni and the others scrambled up to him as fast as they could climb. Anders and Taggert had their weapons unslung, safeties off, their shooting ringers flat across the trigger guards.

"My God, Joel, what happened?" Toni demanded. "Are you okay? What is it?"

"There're hundreds of them down there," Benson said. He couldn't get the picture out of his head. "Maybe thousands."

The others crawled to the top of the rise and looked over to the other side. Benson took out his Steiners and joined them.

"Nothing's moving so far," Hess said in a hushed tone.

"What the hell does it mean?" Anders asked, but no one thought that he expected an answer. Leastways not at this moment.

For millions of years avalanches and weathering had caused massive rockfalls down into a broad valley that swept dramatically up toward the summit This was the back face of Navajo Mountain beneath which Skynet was entrenched, and where Colonel Earle and his people had found the ventilation shaft.

But at the bottom of the rockfall, spread out for a kilometer, or possibly farther, were tens of hundreds, maybe tens of thousands, of gleaming metallic bodies. T-l-5s and T-l-7s, along with hundreds upon hundreds of T-600s and T-800s. They were piled in jumbled heaps, in some places in mounds fifty meters or higher. The raw power the junkyard represented was awesome.

Benson handed his binoculars to Hess. "What do you make of it, Don?"

Hess studied the graveyard for several long minutes, humming something to himself, some toneless melody that was actually Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D minor with a full orchestra in his head. He always listened to that concerto when he was thinking.

He dropped back, a serious, worried expression on his face. He shook his head as if he had come to a conclusion that he didn't like, and then looked up at the others. "We'd best call this in to John, and then get the hell out of here." He glanced up at the deepening sky. "It's already getting dark in the valleys, and I don't think I want to be stuck up here tonight."

"What about the mission?" Taggert asked.

Hess looked at him. "Not a chance. We'll be lucky to get off this mountain alive."

"Home Plate, Red One, this is Don Hess, is John there?"

Connor keyed the mike. "I'm here, Don. What do you have?"

"We've got big trouble coming our way. We're near the bottom of the north slope. We came across a junkyard filled with T-l-5s and l-7s, along with a lot of T-600 and T-800 models. Maybe a kilometer across. Piled high. They're discarding their old models."

Connor looked at the others gathered in the bunker's comm center. "We've been expecting that What's the problem?"

"There's more than that down there. I spotted T-1000s. A bunch of them. And I do mean a bunch."

The significance of what Hess was reporting hit everyone in the command bunker at the same time. Connor's breath caught in his throat. "They're pumping out a new model," he radioed to Hess and the Colorado team. "Something to replace the T- 1000s. Something so good that Skynet can afford to discard everything else."

"That's what I figured—" Hess was cut off. Someone screamed, and then the radio went dead.

Toni's scream echoed in the canyons as her head disintegrated in a blue laser flash. Benson and Taggert turned and tried to bring their M-28 assault rifles to bear on the ten sleek silver and burnished gold and platinum robots standing no more than five meters away, plasma cannons in their perfectly machined and articulated mechanical hands.

Benson died with his wife's name on his lips, but with the vision from hell of Skynet's newest warrior robot on his retinas.

John Connor's wife closed her eyes for a moment, as if she could somehow blot out what she knew was happening on the north slope of Navajo Mountain.

"We'll continue monitoring their frequency," Connor said.

"Doesn't matter, sir," the young comm tech said, looking up. "Our satellite is down."

Connor's wife opened her eyes and shook her head. "We have to send another one back." She looked inward, and shuddered. "A T-850."

"They'll send a machine," Connor said. "One of the new ones."

"We don't have anything better."

Connor lowered his eyes. His wife was right. There was nothing else they could do. They had run out of options.

Skynet's AI was an absolute marvel of human-machine science and engineering. First stumbled upon by Cyber-dyne's Miles Bennet Dyson, the computer's main central processing units used Quantum Effects chips. Until then computers were powered by chips composed of millions of transistors. Computing the old way was done in the binary system — ones and zeroes, ons and offs. With the QE brain in which 1054 computations could be made each second, quadrillions of switching positions were possible, many of them simultaneously at each quantum level. All this happened down around the Planck length — theoretically the smallest measurement possible — so in-finitesimally small that superstrings were the major-league players; strange ten-dimensional building blocks that were more than one thousand billion billion times smaller than a single proton in the nucleus of a hydrogen atom.