Terminator 2_Hour of the Wolf Page 22

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  Dr. Jaspar took a sheet of paper from her pocket and spread it on the table in front of him. Equations covered it.

  Bobby drew it closer, aware of everyone watching him. A part of him wondered at his sudden change of mood.

  Within less than two minutes he had all but forgotten his fear and depression, becoming completely immersed in the discussion into which Jaspar had drawn him. He did not mind; much better to be engaged like this than trembling fearfully over events he could not control.

  The work was clean and advanced and he saw a lot of his own ideas laced throughout.

  “There’s more?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “This is just a synopsis.”

  “You’re folding a piece of space-time around itself,” he said.

  Dr. Jaspar’s mouth twitched in a brief smile.

  “The energy requirement—” Bobby began to protest.

  “Can be borrowed,” she said. “Same as in quantum tunneling.”

  “Do you know Mr. Casse?” Bobby asked, suddenly excited.

  “Vice president of Cyberdyne? Not personally. I understand you’ve met him.”

  Bobby tapped the paper. “He had similar ideas.”

  Her eyes brightened even more. “I’d love to hear about them.”

  “Well…” He studied the equations. “Do you have something to write on?”

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  NINETEEN

  Oscar Cruz strode into the loading bay, his fingers twitching rhythmically. He made himself stop whistling when the elevator doors opened, but the urge to hum almost overwhelmed him.

  One semi and a big SUV waited just inside the bay doors.

  Cyberdyne personnel huddled around the drivers. As Cruz reached the edge of the gathering, the babble of conversation died. Men and women moved automatically aside, forming a human aisle for him. The two driving teams watched his approach with mixed expressions of relief and fear. All of them looked severely rattled.

  “Okay,” Cruz began, raising his hands, palms down, in a calming gesture. “What happened?”

  “Road blocks, Mr. Cruz,” one of them said. He glanced at the other three, rubbed his face nervously, and continued.

  “We got word from Group C. They figured feds. When we checked with the others, the same story. The convoys had all been stopped, searches were proceeding. So we turned off the interstate and tried to get through by state highways and county roads.”

  “I see only one truck,” Cruz observed.

  “The other three were taken out.”

  Cruz blinked at the man. “Let’s see, you are…?”

  “Roy, Mr. Cruz. Roy Jacobs.”

  “Roy. ‘Taken out?’ What do you mean?”

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  “Um…choppers. Hummers. They were all pulled over, searched—”

  “Why did you get through?”

  “I had a blowout three miles before the roadblocks. The tail car pulled over to help us.” He indicated the SUV. “We were starting to change it when word came over the CB.”

  Roy Jacobs swallowed loudly. “We just went on changing the tire and waited, but they never came. We waited three, four hours, then started up again. When we passed the site where the others had been stopped, we didn’t see anything.

  We couldn’t raise them on the CB, either. After that, we thought it would be a good idea to stay off the air and the cell phone till we got here.”

  “Good, good,” Cruz said. “So they overlooked you.”

  “Doesn’t make sense, I know, but that’s how it looks.”

  Cruz clasped his hands together behind his back, working through the information. He almost asked where, but it did not matter. He walked over to the semi.

  “What part did you bring in?”

  “I, uh…I don’t know, Mr. Cruz. We weren’t told what we were carrying.”

  “That’s right, you weren’t.” Cruz studied the long trailer.

  One shipment out of what should have been fifteen trucks.

  All the rest now in federal hands. But exactly whose? “Get it unloaded, get it where it needs to go. I have some calls to make.” He looked at the four men. “You seem unhurt. A little shaken maybe?”

  Roy laughed humorlessly. “Well, sure. We’ve never had any trouble like this before.”

  “You’d like to end your employment with us perhaps?”

  Roy looked at the others. “Right now we just want to calm down.”

  “Good idea. We can talk tomorrow. We’ll put you all up in executive suites. We’ve got some details to take care of, so if you don’t mind waiting here, I’ll get back with you a little later.” Cruz motioned to one of his assistants to take care of it, and the four men were led away. “Everyone else, back to work. The excitement is over for now.”

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  The gathered employees drifted away. He wondered how many of them would quit before the sun came up tomorrow.

  This was unexpected. If they had been made to know the true nature of the project the way he did, they would stay, certainly, but Casse had chosen not to reprogram any more people when the after effects became clear.

  None of us were supposed to live this long…

  As it was, none of these people knew, which meant Cyberdyne had to rely on ordinary loyalty to the company paycheck.

  The trailer doors swung open. Cruz watched as a foreman checked the manifest. It was coded. The man entered decryption commands on his slate.

  “We have processing nodes,” he said.

  Cruz felt a brief sense of relief. Important components, then, an essential element in the Skynet matrix. Maybe they could duplicate the rest of the Dyson architecture around what they now had.

  “I’ll be in my office,” Cruz said. “See this all gets where it’s supposed to.”

  He went to the cab. A technician worked on the ceiling.

  “Just a second, Mr. Cruz,” she said.

  Cruz watched her work. A panel came loose and flipped down. She reached into the revealed recess and pulled out a small rectangular cartridge. She handed it to Cruz. He thanked her and skipped toward the elevators, forcing himself after a few paces to walk normally.

  I hate this, this being crazy shit…if only I didn’t know it, like normal crazy people…

  He returned to his office. At his desk once more, he inserted the cartridge into a slot. A few seconds later, his screen displayed telemetry from the convoy recorders. All the convoy vehicles possessed these units, interconnected so that each vehicle within the convoy recorded its own and all the others’ data. The computer now assembled all the various elements into a coherent montage.

  The time chop indicated an hour before dawn. The machine amplified detail, added a bit of color. The four 215

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  trucks followed the SUV down a two-lane blacktop bounded on both sides by broad desert. Low hills, scrub, some cactus dotted the landscape. They made good time now, cruising along at a steady seventy-five mph. There was crosstalk between the drivers, but Cruz paid no attention until the word came through concerning roadblocks.

  Over the open channel, the drivers were ordered to pull over and stand down. He heard the sounds of choppers over the CB.

  Then silence. Cruz advanced the recording until the truck began to move again. He heard the navigator calling for the other trucks over the CB, then a brief discussion between them to stay off the air and try to get through.

  As Roy Jacobs said, they had been overlooked.

  Cruz tapped numbers into his phone. “My ass.”

  “Security,” a voice answered.

  “This is Oscar Cruz. I’m sending you a recording. I want the route our convoy survivors came backtracked and checked. Let me know if they were followed.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There’s no doubt, he thought as he punched another number. They don’t miss except on purpose…scared the hell out of the driv
ers, they ran and came right here…

  The telephone screen winked on. A face looked at Cruz.

  “Mr. Cruz, what can I do for you?”

  “Good evening, Senator. I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “We have a problem, Senator. May I send you a file?”

  The late-middle-aged face scowled. “Certainly, Mr. Cruz.”

  Cruz transferred the recording to the phone and sent it.

  He watched the senator listen to it, noted the shifts in expression.

  “I see,” the senator said when it was finished.

  “I have an idea who did this,” Cruz said. “But I want to hear it from someone else first.”

  “Reed.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.”

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  The senator sighed. “I’m sorry about this, Oscar. I thought he was contained.”

  “The president still trusts him.”

  “He does, though god knows why. But I had no idea he could still muster this kind of field work.”

  “We have reason to believe he’s arrested a number of our people and confiscated a great deal of our material. Almost everything out of Colorado Springs, in fact.”

  The senator’s face darkened. “Son of a—let me make some inquiries, Oscar. But first, let me talk to Casse.”

  “He’s not in at the moment, sir.”

  “So you’re minding the store for now. Very well. I’ll see what I can find out. I’ll get your people out of this, Oscar.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “I opposed shutting Cyberdyne down when I was just a congressman and I still think Reed is out of his mind over this. We can’t afford to let a valuable corporation remain under a cloud just because of some wild paranoid notion of a coming war.”

  “I agree, Senator. But right now he has more authority than either of us thought.”

  “I’ll get that taken care of ASAP. Stay by the phone tonight, Oscar. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Thank you, Senator.”

  The screen went blank and Cruz leaned back in his chair.

  What always amazed him about the senator was his willing-ness and eagerness to back the project without ever having been programmed by Layton or himself.

  He scratched the top of his head with both hands. He missed Layton from time to time. Casse was, if anything, colder. But efficient.

  “Reed,” he said aloud, drawing out the name. “Reeeeed.

  Reed Reed Reed.”

  He sat forward abruptly and snatched copies of the pictures Gant had sent him. John Connor. The name itself grated on his admittedly unstable nerves.

  “If you’re around,” he said to the image, “so is your mother.”

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  He reached for the keyboard, but hesitated. Fingers curling, he sat back. He could close his eyes and see the disaster that had overtaken his life.

  In 1994, the Connors, with the help of a rogue T800, had destroyed Cyberdyne’s L.A. facility. Dozens of police not-withstanding, they had escaped. Miles Dyson, head researcher on the Skynet Project, had been killed. The catastrophe had nearly wrecked them. Charles Layton, then CEO of the company, had rallied them, if rally was a word that could describe the utterly practical executive. He had been a cold fish before that event. After the TX-A programmed him, all trace of humanity had left him.

  Not a bad thing, all in all, Cruz thought. Layton had then programmed him, transferring the nanoware then infesting his own body, and relieving Cruz of any vestige of loyalty to humanity. Skynet became all, the only reason for their lives to continue.

  They had a researcher then, Rosanna Monk, Dyson’s assistant. Brilliant, borderline misanthropic, after the TX-A had programmed her, the project was back on track. Not only that, but she developed the time vault as well. Crude, it nevertheless breached the barrier of time travel. Skynet would need it. She had tried to describe it to him once, why it came naturally out of the work on Skynet, but as good as Cruz was, her arguments did not quite make sense. No, that was wrong—she designed the vault, her arguments made perfect sense, just not to him.

  At the time Reed had been on their side. Chief liaison to the State Department, he held the kill switch on any top-level project for the government. At some point, he grew suspicious, and the project was in jeopardy. Layton and Cruz had intended to meet with him, and his assistant, Samantha Jones, and program them. Once that happened, nothing would prevent Skynet’s birth.

  But it had all gone wrong. The new facility in Colorado Springs was assaulted and the work destroyed. Another setback. Reed had been turned against them. Layton killed, all the programmed staff arrested and imprisoned. Skynet 218

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  should have emerged in 2001, 2002 at the latest, and Armageddon was to follow within a couple more years.

  It was a problem, no longer having the Soviet Union to attack and trigger the necessary nuclear exchange. When the timeline began to change with the incursions by Skynet agents, and their subsequent failures to eliminate opposition, many other factors altered unexpectedly. The collapse of the Eastern Bloc had been predicted for decades, but no one thought it would happen so soon, so thoroughly, in the early 1990s. Cruz believed it was the timeline trying to accommodate the changes. The unraveling had to be stopped.

  Another change happened in 2001. More unraveling.

  Now Casse was in charge and the decision to be restrained kept them working covertly. Casse had some theory about the inability of agents from the future to alter certain basic lines. They used human agents where possible. Cruz did not like it, but he was bound by instructions and the still-potent hope that they could resurrect Skynet.

  They would succeed. He knew this, because Skynet existed in the future.

  He just could not see quite how they would succeed.

  Especially with the Connors once more involved. There was something about them, they were linked inextricably to Skynet’s existence or nonexistence. Maybe Monk might have explained it to him.

  Where did they come from, though?

  He looked around the office. Gant had called in earlier to let him know that the entire party—McMillin, the young Porter and his girlfriend, Paul Patterson, and John Connor, plus a few Destry-McMillin security people—had relocated to Destry-McMillin itself.

  He touched the intercom. “Is Mr. Casse back yet?”

  “No, Mr. Cruz.”

  “Ah!” He glared at the picture. “Fine. I can make a decision.” He punched another number into the phone.

  “Gant,” a voice said.

  “This is Cruz. I’m sending you an image.” Cruz rifled 219

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  through his desk as he spoke. He found the old photo in the last drawer. “This is a dated picture of Sarah Connor.

  Modify as necessary and use as an identifier. If you see her, prevent her from getting to Destry-McMillin. All right?”

  “Does this supercede prior instruction?”

  “No, continue surveillance. I expect she might just show up. But do not let her in.”

  “Understood.”

  Cruz shoved the image into his desk scanner and initiated the upload. Within seconds, the file went out directly to Gant.

  “Received.”

  “Report results,” Cruz said.

  “Affirmative.”

  The connection broke. Cruz hated it when the T-800s reverted to their monotone robot-speak. It took time, but they could be taught to mimic human speech patterns.

  Somewhat at least.

  But he felt better now. The last thing anybody here wanted was for the Connors to link up and work together.

  But they already are working together, he thought. He shook his head, annoyed at inconvenient logic. “Keep them apart while the senator takes care of Reed and gets us our toys back!”

  There.

  Next problem. He reached for the phone again.

 
“Get me the Los Angeles Police Department, please,” he told the operator.

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  TWENTY

  Sarah drove to Destry-McMillin, constantly checking for any shadows. She talked little and Lee Portis kept still throughout the drive. He watched as well, his attention alarmingly inhuman. She wondered again if she was wrong, if he was a Terminator of some kind, but he had convinced her that he was human. Like the Specialists, she thought.

  She had distrusted them at first. John and she had managed a life in Mexico City. Not elaborate, but their comfort and sense of security had been growing, they had acquaintances who could conceivably become friends, they had a place much like a home. Then the modified humans from a future different than the one they had expected and feared showed up just ahead of a new Terminator, one even more powerful and deadly than the T1000 that had chased them from L.A. in 1994. Jade, Anton, Robert, the others—they had spilled all over John and Sarah, extracted them from the life they were building, and pulled them into a maelstrom of guerilla war that had taken them into the future. Several futures.

  Since returning in 2003, Sarah had struggled to make sense of all she had seen. It seemed easier to treat it like a story someone else had told her—except for the scars, both physical and mental.

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  Lee Portis was like a Specialist, like Jade and Anton. But different.

  She entered the serpentine maze of the high tech industrial campus that sprawled against the edge of Caltech.

  Destry-McMillin occupied a sizeable campus of its own on the other side. Early evening sun threw long shadows from the decorative flora and unobtrusive buildings dotting the landscape.

  “Is that your real name?” she asked. “Lee Portis?

  “No. I…borrowed it.”

  “So who are you? Really.”

  “Really. I don’t know. It seems there was a problem with the transfer. I’m amnesiac. Partly.”

  Sarah slowed. “You know why you’re here but you don’t know who you are.”

  He hesitated. “Essentially correct. I have files…I’m augmented.”

  “None of those files contain your identity?”

  “Perhaps. Not all of them are freely accessible. They open when I require them, not before.”