David Hagberg - Terminator 3 - Rise of the Machines

Connor, behind the squad car, did not spot the barricades in time to avoid them. But he did manage to miss the open manhole by inches. The pet van fishtailed nearly out of control down the street.

The cop car spun out and stalled at the same time Terminator hauled the Champion's steering wheel hard right, then left, then right again.

The big hook, bouncing and skipping up the street at the end of the extended boom, swung left and then right like a pendulum. It just caught the edge of the open manhole and dropped down inside the tunnel, the thick steel cables unreeling like a fishing line that had snagged a whale.

Terminator pulled himself back up on the roof of the cab as the hook caught on something solid.

The cable suddenly went taut as Terminator leaped from the Champion crane onto the roof of the pet van.

He swung himself over the side through the open driver's door, shoving Connor aside.

"Hold on," he said, and he stamped the gas pedal to the floor.

He swung around the cop car and glanced in the rear-view mirror in time to see the entire tangled mass of the Champion crane and the LAFD truck, between which T-X was preparing to take her shot, stop dead in the street as the front of the boom dug into the pavement.

The back of the wreck shot straight up into the air, the eighty or ninety combined tons of metal and glass and plastic coming down like an earth-shattering meteor on the squad car, instantly flattening it. The entire mass erupted in a huge ball of fire, the blast shattering windows along the entire city block.

Terminator divided his primary action circuits between driving and checking his rearview mirror and electronic emissions detectors for any signs that they were being followed.

He wanted to get out of the city as soon as possible, but not via the main highways or the more heavily traveled county roads. In the condition the pet van was in they would attract too much attention. They did not have time for diversions.

He also understood that the T-X had not been destroyed in the crash. That chassis was extremely battle-hardened. It would probably take more than the crash of even something as large as the Champion crane with its attendant explosion and fire to destroy the cyborg.

Which meant that T-X would continue to follow them, acting on her prime directive, that of assassinating John Connor and Katherine Brewster.

But there was even more at stake than just their lives.

They were finally out of the industrial areas of the city, and they got on a two-lane highway that led up into the hills.

Safe, Terminator thought. He was not able to detect anyone behind them, nor was he picking up the satellite downlink signals that the T-X had used to control the emergency vehicles that had nearly cost Connor and Kate their lives.

Safe, Terminator thought again. But only temporarily.

He turned to look at John Connor, who'd been staring at him since their narrow escape. He reached out and gently touched Connor's face, raising one eyelid and then the other, his optical sensors set on magnify.

"No sign of brain trauma," Terminator said.

Connor pulled his head away. "Yeah, I'm fine. Thanks."

Terminator glanced at the highway. Traffic was slowly starting to pick up as people headed for work. It was a Saturday, otherwise there would be many more vehicles on the road.

Originally, the T-800 series warrior/cyborgs had been programmed to do battle primarily with other robotic units, and human soldiers from enemy states. After Judgment Day, Skynet reprogrammed most of them to hunt and kill any and all humans. His particular unit had been upgraded to a T-850 and programmed to act as a human infiltration model with one mission: preserve the lives of John Connor and Katherine Brewster.

That was his prime directive.

He neither liked nor disliked humans, Connor included. But he was programmed to protect them, and to understand their motivations well enough to help predict how they might act under any given set of circumstances.

Humans were, in his estimation, highly irrational organisms. Their directives were continually being influenced, most often for the worse, by emotional considerations: love, hate, envy, jealousy, fear. And many others. In Terminator's main memory he had access to a file with more than one thousand different emotional elements that modified human behavior. And that, his file cautioned, was only a partial list.

Compounding the difficulty was the phenomenon of multitasking; humans were almost always motivated by more than one emotion. Sometimes by a multitude of them, each subtly acting upon the others in an endless series of combinations.

Starting with the one thousand elements in Terminator's files, he could come up with something in excess of 8 X 109, or eight billion, combinations.

It was no wonder, he continued in the evaluation process, that even for humans the job of understanding each other was often next to impossible.

"Do you even remember me?" Connor asked.

Terminator glanced at him, but made no reply.

"Sarah Connor? Blowing up Cyberdyne? 'Hasta la vista, baby.' Ring any bells?"

"That was an old model T-800," Terminator said, which was technically true. That had been a different chassis.

Connor looked away momentarily, and shook his head. It seemed as if he felt the weight of the world on his shoulders. "So, what—?" he asked. He looked at Terminator. "You guys come off an assembly line, or something?"

"Or something. I'm a new model. A T-850."

Connor was less disappointed than he was bemused. "Oh, man. I gotta teach you everything all over again."

Terminator looked over his shoulder through the dividing window. "Katherine Brewster. Have you sustained injury?"

Kate came to the screen. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth where she'd bitten her lip. Her hair was a mess, and the rear of the pet van was in complete disarray. She looked as if she'd been through the spin cycle of a washing machine.

"Drop dead, asshole," she told him.

Terminator closed the window. "I am unable to comply," he said.

Sirens converged, it seemed, from all over the city of Los Angeles on the mangled, burning wreckage of the National Rentals' Champion crane, the LAFD hook and ladder unit, and the LAPD squad car.

People were already gathering closer to the scene of the accident, drawn to the flames like moths.

Someone had to have been killed. No one could have survived. There was wreckage strewn along a five-block area. There had to be bodies, though a few of the spectators had witnessed what they thought was a man leaping from the crane just before it crashed. But nobody was going to believe that.

A high-pitched whine came from deep inside the tangled mass of metal. People stepped back. There was no telling what dangerous chemicals were in there.

At the base of the fire truck's chassis a gap appeared that widened as if someone or something was opening a tent flap.

T-X, her left hand formed into a diamond-toothed metal saw, stepped out of the wreckage. She glanced with indifference at the small crowd, then walked away, her hand morphing back into human form, her skin and clothing in perfect condition. Not so much as a strand of hair out of place.

No one tried to stop her, or even talk to her.

Around the corner in the next block, she hot-wired a blue Saturn and headed back into the city. Her head-up display was overlaid with a street map on which was pinpointed the home address of Katherine Brewster.

The Toyota's temperature gauge hovered just below the red mark and the needle on the gas gauge bounced half- way between 1/4 and E.