Alan Foster: Terminator Salvation

“I’ve found something else, sir,” he called out. Seconds later Olsen was looking over the tech’s shoulder.

“What’ve you got, man?”

“I’m not quite sure, sir, but it’s readable.” His fingers flashed over the keyboard before him.

Buried within the reddish illumination that lit the chamber, a deeper crimson began to glow. An edgy drone unlike any human alarm began to rise above the continued wailing and crying of the freed prisoners.

Away from the techs and the civilian babble, Tunney looked at his friend David. Their eyes met. Having served together and been in the field a long time, their senses had grown battlefield sharp. Unlike the techs they were unable to interpret the flow of information that continued to stream across the multiple monitors.

Unlike the techs, they also knew that the flashing lights and keening whine that now enveloped them portended no good.

High above but insufficiently far away, Connor was banking the commandeered chopper when a few square miles of southwestern desert heaved upward, seemed to hang in the air a moment, and then collapsed back upon itself. Gouts of flame shot from depths unmeasured, volcanic eruptions of dirt and smoke, and a shockwave that sent the chopper careening off its axis. Hard though Connor fought to maintain control, the blast was of such magnitude that puny human muscles were helpless against it.

It was a miracle that he managed any kind of landing. Striking the ground at an angle sheared the rotors, sending potentially lethal metal blades screaming in all directions.

The engine died but Connor did not. Arms, legs, head—he was far more intact than the machine that had cushioned him from the crash. Staggering out of the harness and the now mangled helicopter, he found himself gaping at a gigantic depression that marked the limits of the obliterated subterranean Skynet facility.

It was all gone, entirely destroyed. A very good thing—except that his entire company, from commanding officers down to the lowest-ranking member of his own squad, were also gone. Friends, fellow fighters—there was nothing left.

Well, not quite nothing.

A grotesque mass of mangled metal, the T-600 he had put out of commission earlier, slammed into him from behind. Behind what remained of the battered skull, emotionless eyes glowed a deep, burning red.

His arm slashed, a surprised and dazed Connor stumbled clear. As single-minded of purpose as all of its brethren, the T-600 came lurching after him. Pulling his sidearm, Connor took aim and fired several times. He might as well have been throwing spitwads. The small-caliber shells pinged harmlessly off the T-600’s face, and Connor was unable to hit either of the eyes.

If the machine had been intact, Connor knew he would already be dead. But while they were both hurt, the machine was more badly damaged than the man. Staggering backward and trying to keep clear of the crippled killing device, Connor banged into something else unyielding: the downed chopper. Protruding from the nose, its mini-gatling gun drooped downward, but was still attached to its swivel mount.

Reaching into the cockpit, he fumbled at the controls, working from practice and relying on memory. Equally unbalanced, the Terminator lunged at him. Connor jerked to one side and the stabbing claw-hand just missed his face.

Recovering, the T-600 re-triangulated its apparently helpless target and came forward again. As it did so, the human used his other hand to swing the barrel of the gatling hard around. The muzzle slammed into the Terminator’s faux human jaws as Connor yelled and activated the trigger.

A shriek of metal-piercing rounds blew the T-600’s head into a hundred pieces of scrap metal. Breathing hard, Connor slumped back against the side of the chopper. Small flames from ignited circuitry flared from the neck of the decapitated machine—Terminator terminated.

When the voice reached him the shock of it was nearly as great as the reappearance of the T-600. But this was a recognizably human voice. The source was the helicopter’s radio. Garbled at first, the transmission gradually became fully intelligible as the operator at the other end worked hard to clear the frequency.

“Bravo Ten, come in,” the exhausted Connor was able to make out. “Bravo Ten, this is HQ. Anyone there? Respond, come back.”

Reaching inside the cockpit, he located the compact mike, brought it to his lips, and switched it on. What should he say after what he had just been through and had just witnessed? What could he say?

“Here,” he gasped.

There was a pause at the other end, as if the caller was trying to derive whole reams of information from the one-word response.

“Who is this?” the mike finally crackled afresh.

“Connor.”

“John Connor?”

“No. Lucy Mae Connor.”

That prompted another pause, followed by a query voiced in a stronger, no-nonsense tone.

“Is the target destroyed?” When Connor didn’t respond, the voice tried again, more forcefully. “Connor! You’re in a hot zone! You have no time. Acknowledge. Do you copy? I repeat—is the target destroyed?”

Gathering himself, Connor gasped out a one-word reply.

“Affirmative.”

The radio voice turned from demanding to anxious.

“You have a location on General Olsen? We can’t raise him.”

This time Connor took a deep breath before replying.

“Olsen’s dead.”

A longer pause.

“Proceed to ex-fil point. We’ll send pickup. How many survivors are there?”

Straightening, Connor regarded the new valley that had appeared where formerly there had been flat desert and a few low, scrub-covered hills. Still settling dust continued to obscure the view. The vast satellite array, the rest of the Skynet center, all the poor, pitiful human prisoners, every one of his comrades—dead and buried as the ages. Remembering that he was isolated only physically, he lifted the mike once again.

“One.”

The voice on the radio came back much subdued.

“Repeat—please.”

“One!” Connor snapped.

Perhaps surprisingly, nothing further was heard from the mike. After waiting to make sure the connection had been cut, Connor put it down, straightened, and started limping away from the chopper. Not because he had a destination in mind—he wasn’t even sure exactly where he was. Not because he feared a resurgence of the T-600 he had finally and definitively put down. He started walking because, if nothing else, he desired to put the scene of colossal devastation and destruction as far behind him as he possibly could.

If he was lucky, he mused as he trudged toward an increasingly stormy horizon, maybe he would find a lizard. In the world in which he now found himself, any companion not made of metal and circuitry was one to be cherished.

***

The storm brought darkness to the desert sooner that it would otherwise have arrived. Frequent flashes of lightning illuminated the scorched and shredded fragments of the day’s reckoning: bits of bone, limbs both human and metal that had been divorced from their owners’ bodies, pieces of machine that had served humans, pieces of machine that had been motivated by their own ruthless and uncompromising drive. Among the organic and metallic debris, nothing moved save clouds and bursts of torrential rain.

Even the birds and insects had fled.

Amid the destruction, a patch of mud stirred. Wormlike shapes emerged from the sodden earth and thrust skyward. Not snakes, not centipedes—human fingers. The fingers were attached to a hand, the hand to a wrist, the wrist to....

A shape arose, cloaked in mud and dripping fragments of debris. Eyes opened, vitreous but not glowing. Dazed by the reality of itself, arms at its sides, the figure tilted back its head to stare at the storming night. Driving rain lashed mud and dirt from face and ribs, limbs and torso. The shape was that of a man.