David Hagberg - Rise of the Machines

Connor reached over and opened the passenger door. "Get in," he shouted to her.

She didn't move. The cops were charging toward them, guns drawn, but the firing had stopped for the moment. But only for the moment.

"Do you want to live?" Connor shouted. "Come on!"

Kate looked over to where the T-X had already gotten

to her feet The cyborg's weapon was a mangled ruin, but

she ripped off the tip of the cannon and the artificial skin

began to form over the machinery. She was damaged but not out of commission.

T-X looked up, and started for the hearse.

Move or die, the thought was like a high-power bolt of electricity to Kate's brain. She jumped into the hearse and pulled the door shut.

Terminator slammed the gas pedal to the floor and the hearse shot across the cemetery, spewing grass and dirt from its back wheels.

He glanced in the rearview mirror as the T-X picked up speed, crashing through gravestones as if they were not there.

But she was not gaining on the hearse. The dispersal of the plasma energy had apparently caused an overload in her power circuits. But that reduced capacity would not last for long. Terminator had been programmed with what few specs the resistance had managed to gather. Among them was the T-X model's ability to recharge its own power cells. The tiny fusion generator in its chest cavity took a finite amount of time to replace such a large loss of power, but the recharge time was very short.

Measured not in minutes, but in seconds.

Terminator hauled the hearse around a mausoleum, bumped up onto the driveway, and shot through the gate back to the blacsktopped highway.

The T-X was no longer visible in the rearview mirror.

"What the hell was that thing?" Kate demanded. She was all out of breath. "Why is it after me? What did I do?"

"It's what you're going to do," Connor said from the back. He pulled out another RPG rocket in case the T-X caught up with them. "You're important in the future. We both are."

Terminator headed to the highway that led away from LA. and back out onto the desert.

There was almost no traffic, only an occasional fanner in his pickup or delivery truck, and a tractor pulling a flat wagon on car tires loaded with hay.

There would almost certainly be police units, but for the moment the only thing that Terminator's sensors were picking up was a helicopter. Judging by its attempt at radio communications it was probably a police chopper outbound from Los Angeles.

Kate looked nervously from Terminator to Connor, fear and uncertainty in her eyes. "It was Scott," she said. "How could it be Scott?"

"Your fiance?" Connor asked.

Kate nodded, Unable to speak.

"The T-X is polymimetic, able to take the form of anything it touches," Terminator told her with no hint of emotion. "Your fiance is dead."

Kate's complexion paled. She looked like a ghost.

Connor had to wince at Terminator's lack of tact, but he kept his eyes on the road behind them. The T-X would not stop coming after them. Not until her entire chassis was destroyed.

If such a thing were possible.

"Looks like we lost her," he said without much conviction. It was mostly wishful thinking on his part.

The road swept around the base of a steep, boulder-strewn, wooded hill. The embankment loomed close to the highway.

The T-X suddenly emerged from the woods at the top of the hill at a dead run and leaped out into space, landing with a tremendous bang on top of the hearse.

The roof was crushed inward almost to the level of the coffin by the impact of the T-X's 150-kilo mass. The back windows shattered into thousands of pieces, and the windshield starred but held in place.

Connor had just pulled an AK-47 assault rifle and a thirty-round box magazine out of the coffin. He barely managed to roll left and flatten himself on the floor before he was trapped by the collapsing roof.

The hearse swerved sharply left, nearly off the road and down into a ditch before Terminator was able to bring it under control.

Kate screamed in absolute terror, crouching as low as she could get in the front seat.

A high-pitched angry whine came from above the hearse, and suddenly the lower half of a circular saw cut through the roof in a shower of sparks.

Terminator hauled the hearse to the right, laying rubber on the highway as he slammed on the brakes.

He immediately jammed the gas pedal to the floor and swerved sharply left in an effort to dislodge the T-X from the roof.

But it did not work.

The T-X's left arm had morphed into a high-speed metal cutting saw that was opening a U-shaped flap in

the roof as easily as a razor blade through tissue paper.

"Do something!" Kate screeched in desperation.

Terminator ignored her. A map of the rural area was overlaid in his head-up display with a thermal imaging picture. The road they were on intersected with the highway in three hundred meters. Barreling down the highway from the west was the heat signature of what Terminator identified as an eighteen-wheeler.

His processors did the math, and he reduced his speed slightly to 71.3 miles per hour, which gave him the solution.

The saw retracted from the roof and the long, rectangular flap peeled open like the lid on a sardine can.

No longer hemmed in by the collapsed roof, Connor swung the AK-47 to bear on the T-X as he pulled the cocking slide back and flicked the safety catch forward.

He pulled the trigger, firing the 7.62mm rounds directly into her face, emptying the magazine in three seconds flat.

The T-X recoiled after each shot, but then came back to the opening and reached down to grab Connor, who scrambled a few inches forward just out of her grasp.

A semi's air horn suddenly blared right on top of them.

Terminator shoved Kate farther down in the seat as he hunched over, steering the hearse beneath the trailer just behind the turnbuckle with a last-moment burst of speed.

The roof and the T-X suddenly disappeared as the bottom of the semi trailer sheared off the top of the hearse

with a shriek of tearing, twisting metal, breaking plastic, and shattering glass.

Connor got a split-instant glimpse of the semi's rear wheels less than one foot from the side of the hearse when they were on the other side and clear on the empty highway.

A tremendous wind roared through the now open hearse. Connor sat up cautiously as they rounded a curve, the semi sliding sideways across the highway behind them.

Kate sat up too. Tentatively, as if she couldn't believe that they had come through the crash alive.

Terminator was impassive. They had merely completed another phase of his assignment

"We need a new vehicle," he said to no one in particular.

Kate looked at Connor and he couldn't help but laugh with relief. She laughed too. This was insane. All of it. His entire life. This morning. This moment.

T-X sat up. She had landed at the side of the road fifty meters from the jackknifed semi.

Her diagnostic circuits registered some damage to her infiltration overlay, but only superficial damage to her battle chassis.

The most severe damage had been done to her plasma cannon by the small missile's explosive warhead that had made a perfectly timed hit.

Her flesh retracted from the mangled discharge head

of the cannon. She studied the damage for a few milliseconds, her diagnostic-repair processor immediately devising a solution.

With her free hand she artfully twisted and bent the various plasma magnetic containment conduits into a new, much smaller, cruder transmission head.

Only a fraction of her available power could be transmitted with the new arrangement, but the repaired weapon would still be formidable.

The trucker jumped down from his rig and took a few steps up the road toward T-X. He was dazed, and still uncertain of what had happened.