Alan Foster - Terminator Salvation

Then they found him.

Even in the dim light it was hard to miss their gleaming, reflective, deadly surfaces. One after another took a slug from his oversized pistol and went down, writhing and convulsing in a horrible approximation of real life. A stride at a time, he battled his way toward the shore.

At last the muck underfoot gave way to more stable gravel and rock. Water drained from his legs as he staggered out onto dry land. Designed to operate and survive in water, the limbless Hydrobots could not follow. But they could still fling themselves high out of the shallows. One did, aiming to lock its cutting jaws on his skull. Detecting its prodigious leap out of the corner of an eye, Connor whirled, trained his lethal pistol on it, and fired. Nothing.

Dry round.

Instinctively, he brought one arm up in a desperate attempt to ward off the attack as he struggled to eject the bad round and chamber another shell. The Hydrobot plunged toward him—but metal never met flesh. Hands snatched the writhing machine out of the air and as easily as they would break open a chicken leg, snapped it in half. Spasming independently, both sections were thrown back into the river. Connor did not linger on their sinking shapes. Instead, he straight away trained the muzzle of his weapon on the man who had saved him.

Correction , he told himself. On the thing that had saved him.

His clothing and skin largely gone, not even breathing hard from his flight from the base, Marcus Wright stared back at Connor. In the shallows, a mass of Hydrobots had gathered. But none attempted a repeat of the aerial assault on the human. A gasping Connor used his free hand to gesture in their direction.

“Look at them. They’re not attacking. Not attacking me because you just indicated how you want them to behave. Not attacking you because they know what you are. Even if you don’t.”

Wright replied without rancor, indicating the pistol gripped tightly in Connor’s fist.

“Guess that means that gun isn’t going to do you much good, even if it’s still functional. No gun’s going to stop me.”

Connor studied the powerful figure confronting him, letting his gaze rove over the remarkable amalgamation of the metallic and the organic. Napalm having burned away much of the carefully nurtured epidermal layer, the details of the unparalleled fusion were more visible than ever.

“Nobody’s shot you in the heart,” he wheezed. “I see that thing’s beating a mile a minute. I’d bet that it’s been modified, adapted, and juiced just like the rest of your ‘human’ components, but it still looks like there’s enough of the original left to respond badly to a heavy slug.”

The observation gave Wright pause. Then he nodded.

“That seems pretty close to the mark.” He straightened. “Do it then. Kill me.”

Still shaky from the crash and the frantic flight from the Hydrobots, a panting Connor struggled to fix his aim. His finger began to contract on the trigger.

Wright did not look away, showed not the slightest sign of fear. That was hardly surprising, Connor told himself. Fear was something the creature’s adaptive programming could doubtless cope with easily.

“Kyle Reese is alive.”

Connor tried not to react to the claim, but exhausted and exposed as he was, this time he could not keep his expression from giving his feelings away. His finger eased off the trigger.

“How can you be sure?” Connor spoke guardedly. Though his finger had eased off the trigger, he did not lower the pistol.

“I told you before, but you wouldn’t listen. He and a little girl who befriended me were part of a group taken captive by the machines. Along with the others, they’re probably both inside Skynet Central by now. I want to get them out. That’s the reason I came with Blair Williams to your base, even though you refuse to believe me. I still want to get them out.” Eyes that were at least part human burned into Connor’s. “I think you’d like to get them out, too.”

Here was something upon which they could agree.

“Of course I want to get them out,” Connor said.

Wright nodded. “In order to get them out, you first have to get in. And I’m the only one who can get you in.”

Connor shook his head doubtfully.

“Get into Skynet Central? How?”

Wright approached with deliberation. Connor raised his gun. He could see the beating, modified, augmented heart clearly now. The new, improved model , he thought wildly to himself. If he shot Wright and the—man—went down, and they tried to fix him up, would he more properly be a candidate for surgery—or a tune-up? And what, really, was the difference between the two, anyway? Flesh and blood, machine and hydraulics, weren’t they all machines by any other name? Was what really mattered attitude and outlook, not construction and fabric?

Confused, tired, worried about Kyle—if not himself, he slowly lowered the muzzle of the heavy pistol until it was pointed at the ground.

“Even assuming that you’re telling the truth, why should I trust you?”

“Two reasons,” Wright shot back. “One, I need to find out who did this to me. And two—so do you.”

With the river full of murderous Hydrobots behind, the sound of gunfire and barking of search dogs rising steadily in front, Connor found himself marooned in a quandary. He had a decision to make, perhaps the most crucial of his life, and no time in which to analyze it closely. But then, he had not become such a successful Resistance fighter because he was indecisive. His response was a mix of defiance and pleading.

“You get me in. I’ll be on the bridge—it’s an unobstructed shot from there to Skynet Central and we should be able to communicate freely. You find Kyle Reese for me.” Digging through his pockets, he located a communicator. After a quick check revealed that its batteries were good, he tossed it to the singular figure looming opposite him.

Wright snatched it out of the air without even looking in its direction.

“No problem. They think I’m one of them.”

Though the night was warm, Connor felt a chill. Was he in the process of making the greatest mistake of his life? Maybe this thing’s mind was as clever as its engineering.

But if it was all deception, to what end? When first introduced to the creature that called itself Marcus Wright, Connor and his advisors had been convinced that it represented a wickedly clever attempt to breach base security in order to kill him. Now that it stood free, functioning, and unimpeded barely a yard away and could kill him easily with a single blow, it spoke instead of trying to rescue Kyle. Marcus Wright was as full of surprises as he was contradictions.

Had he not said as much himself?

Connor gestured toward the river and the now quiescent Hydrobots.

“You said they think you’re one of them. Are you?”

It was a question Wright had been asking himself ever since his intermingled insides had been revealed. It was the question above all questions that he needed answered. And naturally, it was the one question to which he could not assign an explanation. Spreading his arms wide, exposing as much of himself as possible to the man standing warily before him, he admitted the only truth he knew.

“I don’t know.”

Moving past Connor, keeping his hands at his sides, he started backing into the river. Raised again, the muzzle of Connor’s pistol never left him, not even when Wright’s head disappeared beneath the rippling surface. He continued to stare at the spot where Wright had vanished until movement on the far side of the river drew his attention. Emerging after a span of time spent underwater far longer than any human could hold his breath, Wright turned, waved once, and vanished into the brush on the far side. He had crossed the river not by swimming—perhaps he was too heavy—but by walking across the bottom.