Alan Foster - Terminator Salvation

He made especially sure that he grabbed his new G’n’R CD.

Most of the fifty-odd people of the team had made it to the supply room by the time he arrived, with only a few stragglers still coming in. Kate was in the center of the activity, coolly pointing each newcomer to the boxes, bags, and packs she’d selected for the must-save list.

“How are we doing?” Connor asked as he picked up two ammo satchels and slung one over each shoulder.

“Another ninety seconds and we’ll have everything we can carry,” Kate told him, threading a bungee cord between the satchels’ straps and fastening them together across Connor’s chest so that they wouldn’t slip off his shoulders. “They took Piccerno’s body down,” she added more quietly.

Connor nodded. He’d noticed that on his way through.

“Have Blair and Yoshi been through? I didn’t spot either of them, but it was pretty dark and I wasn’t exactly taking roll.”

“Blair’s here,” Kate said, waving to a pair of latecomers and pointing them to a stack of ration boxes. “She said she’ll go out with the rest of us and make her way back to the hangar. Yoshi’s already there, or at least he’s supposed to be.”

“We’ll need to get the ground crew out, too,” Connor said, grimacing as a low vibration tickled at the soles of his feet. “Here comes our company.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when one of the younger women dashed in from the direction of the sentry post, nearly running down an eight-year-old boy in the process.

“T-1s,” she announced breathlessly. “Coming in from all directions.”

“Are they heading for the main door?” Connor asked.

“No, toward here. I saw them through the—” she faltered a little “—where Piccerno was. Maybe a hundred meters out.”

Connor nodded. T-1s were heavy, splay-armed fighting machines mounted on heavy treads, slower than the humanoid T-600s but more heavily armed and even harder to take down. The plan was probably to roll them up onto the roof near Piccerno’s sentry post in hopes of collapsing it by sheer weight and trapping the group in a pincer.

“Go to the front and tell Barnes and the others I said to pull out now,” Connor told her. “They’re to collect the rest of the backstops along the way.”

The girl nodded and took off down the corridor at a dead run.

“Tunney?” Connor called, looking around at the heavily laden men and women.

“Here, sir,” Tunney called from the side wall. He and the other lieutenant, David, were standing beside the dark opening that led into the bunker’s emergency exit. Like Connor, each man was loaded with two shoulder bags of ammo or grenades, but instead of just a submachine gun each of them also carried a grenade launcher and flame thrower. “Time to go?” he asked.

“Almost,” Connor said, squeezing Kate’s shoulder briefly and then crossing to join them. “Now it is,” he said. “I’ll take point; keep a three-meter spacing between us.”

“I believe it’s my turn for point, sir,” Tunney said, his voice low but firm.

Connor shook his head.

“My team; my job. Stay alert—if Skynet’s found the far end, we’ll have some unpleasant surprises waiting.”

He looked back at the group, to find them silently watching him. Watching, and trusting.

“Stay as quiet as you can, and don’t stop moving,” he said, keeping his voice as calm as if this was just another training exercise. “Once you’re through the tunnel, depending on what’s waiting out there, we may decide to split into small groups of two or three. Everyone knows where Fallback One is?”

The room bobbed briefly with nodding heads.

“Then I’ll see you all there,” Connor said. “Good luck.” Nodding for Tunney and David to follow, he headed into the tunnel.

The group referred to the emergency exit as a tunnel, but a real, hand-dug tunnel would have taken far more time and manpower than the group had had to spare over the past few months. The route was instead a mostly natural pathway consisting of half-crushed hallways, basements, and service corridors. Connor’s people had cleared out the blockages, propped up the ceilings, and dug short connecting shafts where necessary until they’d created an exit route that could take them invisibly a good three blocks from the bunker.

But there was always the chance that one of Skynet’s endlessly roving machines had spotted the route, and Connor felt his nerves tightening with each step as he made his way through the darkness.

There were dozens of places where the roof had eroded through to the outside world, allowing in some badly needed starlight but also precluding the use of any lights by the escapees. Worse, the longest straight-line segment anywhere in the tunnel was about six meters, with everything else being a collection of zigzags, right-angle turns, and occasional backtracks. A T-600 waiting in the darkness around any one of those corners could have Connor and his vanguard dead before they even knew what had hit them.

But each corner was clear, the starlight filtering through the fissures never blazed with HK floodlights, and he heard nothing of the telltale growl of T-1 treads. Gradually, Connor’s hopes and pace began to pick up. They might make it. They just might make it.

He was about halfway through the tunnel when the sounds of distant explosions and gunfire began to echo through the passageway from behind him.

He swore feelingly under his breath. The blasts could be nothing more ominous than Barnes setting off the last string of the bunker’s booby traps. But they could also be the rear guard fighting desperately against T-1s that had succeeded in crashing through the bunker roof.

And Kate would be one of the last of the group to leave, probably just a couple of steps ahead of Barnes. If the Terminators had cut through...

If they had, there was nothing Connor could do to help. He could only trust to hope, and to the destiny that linked him and Kate to humanity’s ultimate salvation.

He’d gone twenty meters more when a blast rolled through the tunnel, sending a wave of warm air across the back of his neck. The final booby trap had been triggered, bringing down the bunker’s ceiling and burying any Terminators that had made it inside as it sealed off the end of the tunnel. Connor and his people were committed now, with nowhere to go but forward.

Still no sign that Skynet had noticed them. Connor kept going, the drifting air currents from the overhead gaps slowly becoming a single steady breeze in his face. He rounded one final blind corner, and with a suddenness that for some reason never failed to surprise him, he was at the end.

Cautiously, he looked out between the carefully positioned rotting two-by-fours that blocked the exit. The street beyond was cleaner than some he’d seen, with much of the masonry and wood having been scavenged over the years by the handful of civilians who still scratched out a tenuous existence in the ruined city. More importantly, there was no sign of Terminators.

From the direction of the bunker came a short burst of gunfire from one of the remote-activated guns set up there and in nearby buildings. The burst was answered instantly by a longer, staccato roar from the T-600s’ miniguns. Connor gestured Tunney forward, and the two men set to work clearing the exit.

The wooden barrier looked sturdier and more impassible than it actually was, and it took less than half a minute for them to silently move the boards out of the way. Connor started to step out.

And ducked back as an HK swooped past, just half a block away, heading toward the bunker. Connor waited a few seconds, then tried again.

Nothing jumped or swooped out at him, either metal or human. As the sporadic gunfire continued from the vicinity of the bunker, he did a quick three-sixty, then gestured to Tunney and David. The two men slipped past him, moved ten meters in opposite directions down the street, and did three-sixties of their own. They hand-signaled the all-clear, then hunkered down in the rubble with weapons ready.