Alan Foster - Terminator Salvation

But he was under orders to be cooperative. More than that, he was a professional, and he was damned if he would let a few resentful locals get the best of him.

It was getting on toward evening, and the team was just wrapping up a search-and-corral exercise, when out of the corner of his eye Orozco saw the flash.

His first reflexive assumption was that the Mexicans had sneaked an aircraft into the exercise, just to shake things up a little, and that he’d caught a flicker of sunlight off one of its windows. He turned that direction, opening his mouth to warn the rest of the team.

The words died in his throat. In the hazy distance far to the north, right where he’d seen the flash, a tiny, red-edged cloud had appeared.

And as he watched, its top boiled over into the shape of a mushroom.

He was trying to wrap his brain around the sight when there was another small flicker, slightly brighter this time. He waited, still staring at the mushroom cloud, when a second fiery pillar boiled up from the earth a little ways to the east of the first.

“My God,” someone whispered beside him. “Is that...? Oh, God !”

“It’s San Diego,” Orozco said, the sheer unnatural calmness in his voice as frightening as the mushroom clouds themselves. “San Diego.”

“Maybe Mexicali, too,” someone else muttered.

“Or Twentynine Palms,” Orozco said, marveling at the strange disconnect that had severed the link between his intellect and emotions. “Who the hell would want to take out Mexicali?”

“I just thought—”

“ Oh, Dios mio! ”

With an effort, Orozco tore his eyes away from the twin pillars of death. One of the Mexicans was staring past Orozco’s shoulder, his eyes wide and horrified, his face as pale as any of the gringos he derided. Moving like a man slogging through a nightmare, Orozco turned to look.

In the distance to the southeast, another tiny mushroom had appeared, clawing its way toward the sky.

“What the hell ?” someone gasped. “That can’t be—”

“Hermosillo,” one of the other Mexicans said in a quavering voice. The man had tears shimmering in his eyes, and Orozco remembered him talking about his family in Hermosillo.

Orozco stared at the third mushroom cloud, his mind reeling with the utter insanity of it. San Diego, yes. Twentynine Palms, maybe. But Hermosillo? The place didn’t have a single shred of military or political significance that Orozco could think of. Why would anyone waste a nuke taking it out?

Unless someone had decided to take out everything.

Slowly, he turned to look at the rest of his team, their faces etched with varying degrees of terror, anger, or disbelief. They’d figured it out, too. Or they would soon enough.

Their lives were over. Everyone’s life was now over.

Orozco took a deep breath.

“I think,” he said, “we can safely say the exercise is over.”

“What do we do now?” someone asked.

Orozco took another look around the group...and this time, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before. All the Marines were looking at him. Even Lieutenant Raeder, whose face was as frozen as anyone else’s. They were all looking at Orozco.

Waiting for their sergeant to tell them what to do.

He took another deep breath. One of these deep breaths, he thought distantly, would be his last. He wondered if he would even know at the time which breath that would be.

“We’ll be all right,” he said. “We’ll survive, because we’re Marines, and that’s what Marines do. We’ll start by going back to camp and figuring out what we’ve got to work with.”

For a moment no one moved. Then the lieutenant stirred.

“You heard the man,” he called. “Gather up the gear and head back to camp.”

Slowly, the clustered knots broke up as the men finally began to move. Orozco took one last look to the north, noting that the mushroom clouds, too, were starting to break up.

And as he began helping the others collect the gear, he realized he’d been wrong. This day hadn’t been hell on earth. This day had been paradise.

Hell on earth had just begun.

CHAPTER ONE

It was after one in the morning by the time John Connor and his Resistance team made their way back through the rubble of Greater Los Angeles to the half-broken, half-burned-out building they’d called home for the past three months. He supervised the others as they stowed their gear, then sent them stumbling wearily to their bunks.

Then, alone in the small pool of light from his desk lamp, amid the outer darkness that pressed in against it, he sat down to make out his report.

In many ways, he reflected, this was one of the worst parts of the war against Skynet. In the heat of battle, with HK Hunter-Killers swooping past overhead and T-600 Terminators lumbering in from all sides, there was no time for deep thought or grand strategy or clever planning. You played it on the fly, running and shooting and running some more, hoping you could spot the openings and opportunities before Skynet could close them, trying to achieve your mission goal and still get as many of your people out alive as you could.

But sitting here alone, with a piece of crumpled paper laid out on top of a battered file cabinet, things were different. You had the quiet and the time and—worst of all—the hindsight to replay the battle over and over again. You saw all the things you should have done faster, or smarter, or just different. You saw the mistakes, the lapses of judgment, the miscues.

And you relived the deaths. All of them.

But it was part of the job, and it had to be done. Every Resistance contact with the enemy—win, lose, or draw—was data that could be sifted, prodded, evaluated, and tucked away for possible future reference. With enough such data, maybe the strategists at Command would someday finally find a weakness or blind spot that could be used to bring down the whole Skynet system.

Or so the theory went. Connor, at least, didn’t believe it for a minute. This was going to be a long, bloody war, and he had long since stopped hoping for silver bullets.

But you never knew. Besides, Skynet was certainly analyzing its side of each encounter. The Resistance might as well do the same.

It took him half an hour to write up the report and transmit it to Command. After that he spent a few minutes in the bathroom cleaning up as best he could, scrubbing other men’s blood off his hands and clothing. Then, shutting off the last of the bunker’s lights, he cracked the shutters to let in a bit of fresh air, and wearily headed down the darkened corridor to the tiny room he shared with his wife.

Kate was stretched out in bed, the blankets tucked up under her chin, her breathing slow and steady. Hopefully long since asleep, though Connor had no real illusions on that score. As one of their team’s two genuine doctors, the hours she put in were nearly as long as Connor’s own, and in some ways even bloodier.

For a minute he just stood inside the doorway, gazing at her with a mixture of love, pride, and guilt. Once upon a time she’d had the nice, simple job of a veterinarian, where the worst thing that could happen in a given day was a nervous horse or a lap dog with attitude.

Connor had taken her away from all that. Wrenched her out of it, more accurately, snatching her from the path of Skynet’s last attempt to kill him before the devastation of Judgment Day.

Of course, if he hadn’t taken her away, she would be dead now. There were all too many days when he wondered if that would have been a kinder fate than the one he’d bestowed on her.

There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves. The old quote whispered through his mind. Kyle Reese’s old quote, the words Connor himself would one day teach the boy—