David Hagberg - Rise of the Machines

T-X turned and headed for the door, her sensors reaching out for indications from the T-ls roaming at will through the complex for signs of her primary targets.

Terminator rose easily from the tangled mass of stall doors and partitions and in three quick strides reached the T-X.

He grabbed her shoulders and working with her forward momentum drove her cranial case, face first, into a mirror above a sink, smashing the glass and cracking the wall.

He pulled her head back and smashed it into the reinforced concrete wall again. And again. And again.

Connor and Kate held up at the ground-floor landing in the executive wing emergency stairwell.

They could still hear gunfire somewhere above, but the screams had diminished, as had most of the returning gunfire from the Air Force security people.

The machines were winning as they had been designed to do. The only two questions in Connor's mind were how Terminator was doing against the T-X, and how they were going to get out of here without him.

He looked through the mesh-reinforced glass window in the door. Offices, workshops, and labs opened off the long corridor. The place was all shot up. The T-ls had already been here.

There were bodies on the floor, and all the rooms, especially the labs and workshops, were in shambles. But there was no sign of the robots. Connor glanced back the way they had come, half wondering if they shouldn't go back to try to help Terminator.

"What?" Kate asked.

"We can't get out of here without him," Connor said. Kate had followed his gaze. She knew what he was thinking. "Yes, we can," she told him. "I have a pilot's license."

Connor's left eyebrow rose. He nodded, impressed. "Good to have you around," he said, and he meant it. He was starting to appreciate her strength and resilience. She was good to have at his side.

"It should be the next wing from here," he told her. They stepped out into the corridor and raced to the end, . where they came to another emergency door with a reinforced window.

The situation here was the same as in the wing they'd just come through. Offices and labs opening off the main central corridor were in shambles. Bodies lay everywhere, and small fires burned here and there, the haze of smoke thick in the air.

But there were no warrior robots.

The entrance down to the particle accelerator complex was somewhere off this last corridor. Connor and Kate stepped through the door and pulled up short. The stench of shredded human bodies hit their noses at the same time, and they gagged.

Pictures and diagrams and artists' renderings of T-ls and H-Ks and other futuristic weapons systems were framed and hung on the walls in some of the offices and work areas.

"God, it's actually beginning," Connor said. This was the future his mother had worried about. The future she had fought so hard to prevent

They started down the corridor, passing a big, smoke-filled work area. There were a lot of bodies here, where the fighting and destruction seemed to have been more

intense than in other parts of the building. A pool of some flammable liquid had collected in the center of the room and was burning.

Connor took Kate's arm again and had started around the tire when they heard the distinctive whirr of a T-l moving their way.

Kate pulled back, but Connor bodily hauled her to the floor and scrambled as close to the fire as he could stand without being too badly burned.

The T-l, its hunched back and shoulders nearly reaching the ceiling, came around the corner, its treads crunching over debris and bodies.

It stopped short. A red laser targeting beam swept the room, avoiding the heat source of the fire.

The machine was searching for the heat signatures of still living humans. This unit was evidently part of a mop-up squad. Either that or the T-X had sent it ahead to search for them.

Either way the T-l presented a deadly menace. Connor eased closer to the fire, dragging Kate with

him.

"No," she whispered urgently in his ear. "It's too hot!" "The heat will blind it," he explained. "Don't move."

c.28

CRS

Smoke started to rise from the sleeve of Connor's jacket.

The heat was nearly impossible to bear, but he willed himself not to move a muscle as the T-l continued its methodical sweep of the room.

The machine sensed that someone was here; it may have heard them coming through the door. But it was unable to detect their heat signatures because they were so close to the open flames.

Its laser targeting beam swept over their bodies, came back, lingered above their heads for a second, and then began to angle directly at them.

The red targeting beam reflected in Kate's eyes, inches from Connor's. She was frightened, but she seemed resolute now. Something had changed inside of her. He could see it in her eyes, in the way she looked at him, in the way she clung to him, her will to survive fully as strong now as his.

He had the sudden urge to lean forward, just an inch, a half inch, and kiss her mouth. Her lips were slightly

parted, and her breath, after all they'd gone through, was still sweet on his face.

The beam played across their heads, then moved away to the left, sweeping up and down like a television raster, painting an infrared picture of the contents of the room,

line by line.

The rubber wheels of a small equipment cart had caught fire. Black smoke rose from the hubs. One of the wheels suddenly collapsed, sending the unbalanced table with its test instruments crashing to the floor.

The T-l swiveled with lightning speed, homing in on the noise and motion, and opened fire with its chainguns, completely destroying the cart

When it stopped firing the sudden lack of noise was

deafening.

The T-l swiveled again, its targeting beam sweeping the room for further movements or heat sources.

This time it ignored Connor and Kate as already classified nontargets, and after a minute turned away and trundled through the door back toward the R&D wing.

As soon as the robot was gone, Connor rolled away from the fire, and heedless of his burns helped Kate to her feet.

"Okay?" he asked. She nodded. "You?"

"I'll live," he said, and they skirted the fire and raced down the corridor in the direction of the entrance to the accelerator.

Terminator knew he had a double handicap: his model had lesser abilities than the newer T-Xs, and he had only a single remaining hydrogen power cell.

Already he was starting to feel the effects his efforts were having on his power circuits. If he ran down completely it could take an hour or more to regenerate sufficient power to operate. During that time he would be helpless.

The primary cause for concern, however, was his steadily diminishing abilities that were only offset by the double imperatives deeply imprinted in his CPU.

The T-X batted him aside again, but before she could step away, he leaped on her back, wrapping his powerful titanium alloy arms around her neck.

The tile floor and concrete slab beneath them finally gave way, and together they crashed through the crawl space and ceiling of the physical plant equipment room below in a hail of broken tile, shards of glass and porce-lain, and showers of water.

The sounds of running machinery, refrigeration units, water pumps, emergency generators, and servo motors for dozens of emergency controls such as fire suppression systems, fire doors, sirens, and lights, were very loud.

A row of boilers stood like sentinels down one side of the long room, while a dozen power distribution buses contained in large steel boxes were attached to the opposite wall.

Mazes of pipes and cable runs and microwave guides

crisscrossed the ceiling, an entire section just below the men's room bent out of place or destroyed.