David Hagberg - Rise of the Machines

Another part-of his brain reacted in horror as Kate's body was hammered with bullets.

She was shoved backward, crashing through a partition in a shower of glass, computers exploding in sparks and plastic and metal shards, Kate falling to the floor in a heap behind a console.

Pandemonium erupted as technicians dove for cover, screaming in panic, trying to get out of the line of fire.

This was some kind of a nightmare. All the air had gone out of the room, and Brewster could not breathe, let alone cry out his daughter's name.

He started forward when a woman to his left shouted at him.

"Get away from it!"

It was Kate. He would know her voice anywhere. Behind him. But he could see her feet on the other side of the destroyed console where she had fallen.

He turned in time to see his daughter coming toward him in a dead run. A young man in torn, bloody blue jeans and a scuffed-up suede jacket, a knapsack over his shoulder, came right behind her. He carried an AK-47.

A large man, vaguely familiar, dressed in black leather, sunglasses covering his eyes, strode across the room. He dropped the AK-47 he'd just fired and unslung a Mk-19 grenade launcher from his right shoulder.

A mass exodus out of the two emergency exits was taking place as technicians scrambled, some of them on all fours, to get out of what had become a battle zone.

Kate was coming across the room toward Brewster,

but that was impossible. He'd seen his daughter hit at least a half-dozen times and fall to the floor,

He turned again in time to see a bullet-riddled figure rise up from behind the computer console quad. It was Kate, and yet it wasn't.

Brewster staggered back a half step with the enormity of what he was witnessing.

There was no blood. Something that looked like liquid metal was coalescing around the wounds, closing them, impossibly healing her injuries.

But she wasn't Kate now. She was a blond woman dressed in rust-colored pants and a jacket.

T-X raised the Beretta 9mm pistol she'd taken from Captain McManus's body, and fired two shots, both slamming into Brewster's stomach, shoving him back as if he'd been hit by a freight train coming at full speed.

Kate screamed.

At that moment Terminator fired the first 40mm grenade, hitting T-X squarely in the chest with a tremendous explosion that shoved her back several steps, almost off her feet.

But she recovered, and had taken a step forward when Terminator fired a second grenade at her, which hit her chest again, shoving her backward.

Not waiting for her to recover, Terminator fired again as he moved toward her. Each time she was pushed back several feet by the force of the blast. And each time before she could regain her forward momentum from the attack, Terminator fired again.

With the last grenade T-X was pushed back into the

broad louvers over the main ventilation shaft that shattered from her weight She disappeared through the opening.

Alarms were ringing, sirens shrieking as technicians continued to get out of the Computer Center as fast as they could move.

Kate raced to her father's side. He was spitting up blood, and obviously was in great pain. He could not talk above a whisper as Kate set to work checking the extent of his wounds.

"Katie, thank God. I thought—"

"Don't talk, Daddy," she said. She opened his blood-soaked blouse and shirt Black fluid leaked out of one of his belly wounds. He had to be taken to a hospital soon or he would die.

Terminator walked over to the busted open ventilator shaft and looked inside. It ran straight down for a couple of stories, ending at the shattered blades of a large fan.

Terminator turned to Connor and Kate. "She'll be back," he told them.

Connor nodded grimly. He hunched down beside Kate and her father. "We have to shut down Skynet," he told the general. "Where's the system core, somewhere in this building?"

Brewster had trouble digesting what the young man was telling him. It wasn't possible. "Who are you?" he whispered, the words gurgling in his throat "You can't know about that"

Connor grabbed his shoulder. "Cut the top-secret shit!"

Kate batted his hand away. "Stop," she screamed. "You're hurting him!"

Connor turned on her. "If he can't tell us what we need to know, we're all dead." He grabbed a handful of Brewster's uniform blouse. "Where is it? How can you shut it down?"

"Skynet," Brewster mumbled breathlessly. "It's fighting the virus."

Connor took a breath. His eyes never left the General's. "You don't understand, do you? Skynet is the virus," Connor shouted over the noise of the alarms and sirens. "It's the reason everything's falling apart."

This was even more impossible to believe than anything else. "No, that can't be true," Brewster croaked. "I just gave the command to... link to all secure military systems."

Terminator came over, reloading the grenade launcher. He'd retrieved the AK-47 and he slapped a magazine into its receiver.

"Skynet has become self-aware," he said. "In one hour it will initiate a massive nuclear attack on its enemy."

Brewster looked up. He knew this man. "What enemy?" he whispered urgently. He had to know what was happening.

"Us," Connor said with bitter finality.

There was automatic weapons fire from somewhere in the distance, but still within the building. Whatever kind of a weapon was being used, it sounded extremely fast and powerful.

People started to scream, desperate sounds rising out of the stairwells from the floor below.

Kate looked up. "Oh, God—"

"It's the machines," Connor said. "They're starting to take over."

Brewster reached up and grasped Connor's arm, finally realizing that this was no nightmare. The young man was right.

"My private office," he said with great difficulty. "On this floor. We have to get there. The access codes, they're in the safe."

Between Connor and Kate they managed to get the general to his feet.

Terminator led the way as advance guard, his AK-47 and Mk-19 up and at the ready.

CRS

Brewster directed them toward the corridor to the right that led, he said, to his office and the offices of the principal engineers and administrators.

The entire building was in a panic now. They could hear gunfire from every direction, some of which was the sharper sounds of the Ml6s the Air Force security troops carried.

But the guards were outclassed by the chainguns the robots were equipped with.

Just as they were leaving the Computer Center, they looked back in time to see the main elevator doors opening. A group of eight or ten technicians sprang up from behind consoles meaning to scramble aboard the elevator and get away.

But a T-l robot, massive on its twin treads, its red optical sensors in the tiny cranial case ominous, its bulk almost completely filling the elevator car, immediately opened fire with its twin chainguns. The depleted uranium slugs tore into the people, ripping their bodies

apart, blood and shattered bones flying outward like geysers.

Terminator stepped around the corner and had started down the corridor, his weapons at the ready.

Connor and Kate half carried, half dragged the general out of the Computer Center, moving as quickly as they could.

Kate's heart pounded nearly out of her chest as they held up at a corner. Terminator took a quick look, then stepped out across the empty corridor.

"What was that?" Kate asked.

Terminator glanced back at her. "A T-l, first generation terminator. Primitive targeting system, heat and motion sensitive."

Brewster suddenly struggled to get his balance. To stand on his own two feet. "You're Sergeant Candy," he blurted.

Terminator took a quick look up the still empty corridor, then turned back. Brewster's eyes widened. A small section of Terminator's metal cranial case was exposed.