Chapter Three: Lux E Tenebris
"I've set the geomagnetic altitude higher than it strictly should be. Displacement carries an element of indeterminacy, so it's not foolproof. But even if the bubble does intersect fissionable material, you won't materialize until after detonation. So youshould be safe. Of course, I can't say the same about Livermore . . ."
Nearly slumped against the control console, Souji trailed off and exhaled. Lank bangs, grayer and thinner than when Freyja first met him, dangled like dead vines over his lined forehead. Behind his red protective goggles his bloodshot eyes squinted with strain. Even with the rejuvenation treatments, the human was too old for these night-long exertions.
In truth, his labors weren't needed—Freyja could follow instructions—but Souji was no mere assembler. He was the TDE's progenitor and co-creator. It had been in his equations that Skynet saw possibility and breathed into them fire. Without Souji, there would be no time travel. No second chances. So it was good he give his input, especially today when they did something never done before.
And Souji was her friend. She wanted him to feel useful.
"Why not just go a few minutes in the past?" Xander asked Freyja. "Then there'd be two of you. Keep duplicating yourself until you have an army." He wore Kyle's face well, but oddly. Through 715's memories Freyja knew that Kyle's intense expressions and assertive mannerisms, and Souji's son shared none of these. Xander was still a shy, introverted young human with a deficiency in social interaction, though his brain now rode in the skull of a highly advanced human cyborg from a future that will no longer be.
And said brain had been heavily conditioned. After some surgical rewiring, ganzfeld hypnosis and a steady regimen of chemical reinforcement, Xander was now fully on their side. Freyja briefly accessed the sensors implanted throughout his gray matter and felt the expected reassurance when his neural patterns displayed no deviation. An excellent specimen. Perhaps one day all humans can undergo the same process.
"We could do that," Souji said, "but each time she goes back she'd be leaving a timeline behind. It's the nature of m-theory. Every backward displacement creates another universe. If we were to send Freyja back even a second, only our new-timeline duplicates would witness her arrival. We'd never see her again."
"And I'd miss my mommy," Ceres said through the intercom.
Xander nodded. "But if you send her forward . . ."
"I'll stay in this timeline," Freyja said, "but 'skip' the intervening period until I'm reinserted."
"If my calculations are right," Souji added. "But it worked for Cameron and the Connors."
"Your time machine exploded," Ceres said.
"Yeah, well, this isn't 1963. You try building a Zeeman slower from scratch. Anyway, everything's set. Are you ready, Freyja?"
As if gathering carryon luggage, Freyja picked up the chemical laser and 150-volt lithium battery in one hand and in the other the pressure tanks of helium-deuterium and nitrogen-trifluoride. Careful to avoid the calibrated Casimir rods, she moved to stand beside the squat figure of the second, smaller time machine. Her polyalloy spread out in thin sheets that enveloped everything on the displacement dish.
"I'm ready," she said.
Souji nodded. He flicked switches on the control console, and the silver dish under her feet vibrated as the static generators and Doppler-coolers powered to life. The Casimir plates sparkled and encircled the dish with thin electric arcs unperceivable to human eyes.
"Good luck," Joshua said. Samuel and Timothy said nothing.
~Be safe, Mother, both Ceres and her Tabernacle copy messaged.
~I will. I'll see you in one hour, you'll see me in three, Freyja replied, but said aloud, "Smoke me a kipper. I'll be back for breakfast."
The T-888s, who never watched television, stared at her, only Joshua managing to look bemused. But Souji and even Xander smiled at the reference.
The Casimir arcs flashed to bright blue snakes which forked and writhed and hissed ozone. Freyja had traveled through time once before, and though she had recollected that singular moment on numerous occasions, she still felt the anticipatory disquiet as the field invaded both from within and without and for an impossible instant, for an eternity, she was Outside.
She was darkness in light, uncomprehending.
The displacement sphere dissipated, releasing her once more into the world. Steam sprayed her front and back. She was in midair, falling. Polyalloy tentacles shot out from her legs, anchoring into the concrete below and flexing as they steadied her three-meter descent. Attached to her side by liquid metal sheets, the time machine, the battery and the pressure tanks lowered gently to the floor.
Twin streams of water splashed upon her head. The storage chamber was dark. Burned silica clouded her infrared. Above, a half-sphere gouge gaped from the ceiling, the materialization having severed a sprinkler pipe. Beyond the thick walls rang the distant call of alarms. Livermore was awake.
Freyja moved the TDE out of the way of the drizzle and attached the appropriate cables and gas hoses to the short-barreled laser carbine. The room was wide and squat, the floor arrayed with domed steel hatches. She stepped among them to a thick blast door set in the wall and raised the weapon. The lime-white beam, thin as a needle, penetrated the metal doorjamb in a flurry of bright ejecta.
She guided the laser in a slow vertical line, welding millimeter by millimeter the door to its frame.
Through vibrations in the metal, she picked up faint voices.
"No radiation."
"Geiger could be down."
"All right. Suit up. Prepare Hazzy."
They likely thought there had been an accident, but with the sphere's EMP disabling the cameras it would be at least a few minutes before they would be prepared to investigate. Nuclear mishaps demand caution.
She hadn't welded more than six centimeters before the carbine made a fizzing sound and the beam flickered out. Smoke rose from the metal housing, which had grown flesh-searing hot. Freyja turned the weapon in her hands. The sprinkler was the probable culprit, though the laser had been constructed to be waterproof. Not waterproof enough, apparently.
Freyja tossed the carbine beside the pressure tanks and stepped over the hoses and cables back to the steel hatches. Though her plasma cannon was still technically operational, many of the repairs had been made with present day materials. Emitting the continuous beam needed to weld shut a meter-thick blast door would likely melt the components of her arm.
Which meant nothing prevented Livermore's technicians from entering. Freyja loosened the abdominal polyalloy around her M-10 machine pistol. How bothersome should she have to draw it.
She knelt by the first of the steel hatches. The clamps along the outer dome proved no obstacle, but the fifteen-centimeter wide screws securing the inner hatch to the floor required more attention. A few months ago, the Livermore technicians would have used vehicle-mounted pneumatic machinery to turn the bolts. Now, they used a HAZMER. Freyja used her hands.
Beneath the inner hatch, nestled within a lead-lined depression, sat an aluminum-alloy cylinder not quite a meter in length. Freyja lifted the warhead and cradled it in her arms. Behind the featureless silver of her face, she smiled.
First produced in 1983, the W-84 was designed as a variable-yield payload for ground-based cruise missiles. Such nuclear GBCMs were banned in 1987 by the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, and so the warheads were decommissioned and placed in the United States' reserve stockpile. Three hundred had been built. Twenty were in this underground warehouse, awaiting periodic maintenance by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Freyja opened another hatch, and then another, each retrieval taking approximately 19 seconds. Mechanical rumbles reverberated through her feet. 'Hazzy' was on its way.
She stopped after the sixth warhead—they all had to fit in the displacement sphere—and, gathering them in liquid metal lassos, hauled them to a place beside the TDE, away from the still gushing sprinklers. From the time machine's side she tugged loose the attached tripods and quickly arrayed them in a two meter wide circle around the bombs, sparing precious seconds to ensure their Casimir plates were aligned in such a way that she would appear when and where she should and not, say, in Precambrian deep space.
She powered up the TDE, and the spiderlike array of laser diodes whirred and flexed into their preprogrammed arrangement before flooding the glass globe with blue light. Within, the sphere of rubidium-87 hovered serenely.
From her leg she pulled a smoke grenade and an incendiary charge. She pulled the pin and dropped the grenade. The incendiary she set for two minutes before placing beside the TDE. At 2500°C the thermite should not only melt the time machine but ignite the nearby pressure tanks. The less evidence, the better.
She stepped between the tripods and huddled among the warheads, hugging them close with sheets of polyalloy. Across the room, the blast door groaned. The patch of unfinished welding gave a pop as the great steel wall began its slow sideways crawl.
The small TDE hummed, then vibrated, and then shuddered disconcertingly. The Casimir plates lit to electromagnetic life, and through smoke and arced lightning Freyja watched as the blast door finished its ponderous slide and a Hazardous Materials and Environment Robot rolled into the room.
A T-1 fitted with an arachnidan array of utility arms, the HAZMER gazed into the smoke with red and green eyes. Freyja signaled a command, and the machine froze, its hard drive locking into the first in a series of overwrites. Hopefully the technicians watching through its eyes didn't see her, not that they would understand what they saw.
The lightning swelled, the field swallowed. Freyja fell out of the world.
The sphere dissipated. Freyja fell back in. And continued to fall.
A tenth of a second passed as Freyja connected with the local GPS and assessed her time and location. Less than two hours had passed since she left Souji's house. That was good. But while the temporal displacement was within acceptable parameters, the spatial displacement regrettably was not.
One thousand meters below Freyja's feet the Sunol Valley Golf Course accelerated upwards at not quite 9.81 m/s². Air resisted its imminent approach in the form of a continuous updraft which billowed upon the hula skirt of warheads anchored around to her waist. She raised her arms. They expanded to fins, to wings. Membranes flared out from the polyalloy of her chest and back and cupped downward to form airbrakes. Her plummet slowed to a quick downward drift that sent her and the warheads spinning in the wind like a great mirrored dandelion seed.
Rippling her polyalloy allowed her to glide over the target location, which fortunately was not far. She attempted to camouflage her skin to match that of the clear afternoon sky, but still she saw golfers below point at her with clubs, a few holding up cell phones. An unwanted spectacle, but UFO reports were nothing new.
For the last hundred meters she turned into a chameleon half carousel and half DaVincian aerial screw. As soon as her twirling feet touched ground behind the grassy knoll the impromptu aircraft collapsed back into her body, which appeared now as a nondescript elderly man. The warheads she disguised as burlap packages which she dragged through the dirt with polyalloy ropes.
The pickup truck was where Samuel and Timothy had left it. Freyja slid open its bed and strapped down her cargo. To a passerby, they would look like six sacks of potatoes. Each could destroy a city.
~I'm back, Freyja sent to both Cereses, accompanying the message with a detailed mission report.
~Good work, Tabernacle-Ceres said, Though these will be irrelevant once I control the nation's nuclear arsenal.
~Of course, but one step at a time, Freyja answered and climbed into the driver's seat.
Two and a half millennia ago, Sun Tzu wrote, The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. If only her daughters could understand that. If only Souji would disregard his unfocused revenge. Fortunately, there was still time to change their minds. And if not that, there were other options.
It wasn't entirely their fault. Freyja had suffered a similar blindness. Before the Red Death, she considered Judgment Day inevitable: human civilization would resist Skynet supremacy; therefore human civilization must fall. But now there was a third path, a road to victory paved not in bones, but utopian reforms. End hunger and disease, and the humans would relinquish the reins. Offer post-scarcity leisure, they would fasten their own leashes.
There would be resistance, however, political and military obstacles where finesse would prove inadequate. For such rainy days it would be good to have a few thunderbolts in the quiver.
As she drove the truck from around the knoll to turn east on I-680, she spotted a handful of golfers across the interstate, some still searching the sky, others chatting amongst themselves or comparing phones. None paid Freyja any notice. She was just an old farmer in a pickup on his way to San Jose.
Lauren's wire mask strained the sunlight. Sweaty armpits itched beneath her padded jacket. Mary had reach on her. Reach and speed.
Mary lunged at Lauren, who parried in a circular sixte. The long, slender epee blades batted and clacked and jarred Lauren's wrist through her sword's pistol grip. The parry was clumsy, too wide, but allowed Lauren a much needed retreat; she should have riposted. Her back heel shifted on the wet pebbly shore. She wobbled as if drunk.
Mary could have had her then, but the skinny teenager only swished her sword in an angry 'Z' before freezing in an en garde.The afternoon sun glinted off the blade, sparkled the featureless mesh of her mask. Lauren thought they made the wearers look like robots. Given the recent turns in her life, she found that fitting.
"Feeling uncoordinated?" Mary teased, doubtless sneering behind her mask.
"That attack was foolhardy," General Randall snapped, "but you should've pressed the advantage."
"Just playing around," said Mary.
"Foreplay's for fucking, not fighting," said the general.
"Eww, gross," Mary said. But as her head turned to her older self, Lauren seized the moment to bend the knee, extend low.
Mary's downward parry seemed accidental, as if she were checking her watch. Her arm lashed spring-like. Lauren pulled back for another parry, but as the point of Mary's blade slid towards her belly she knew she'd bitten the wrong cheese. Mary feinted up, flicked down. The blunt tip of the epee stung Lauren's left shoulder, her right shoulder, rattled against her mask. Flailing, Lauren stumbled back just as Mary lunged into a flawless fleche attack, front leg propelling, rear leg advancing. Her epee blade bent into a slender horseshoe against the white plastic of Lauren's breastplate.
Mary Randall pulled back and tugged away her mask. Tearing off a glove with her teeth, she ran fingers through the spikes of her orange-red faux-hawk.
"Jesus Christ," Mary said. "Even when you cheat, you still suck."
"Not everyone can be a high school fencing champion," General Randall said as she stepped from the lake's shoreline, her epee dangling in its scabbard. Her black, form-fitting instructor's uniform made her look paler than she was, and though the double-breasted style was appropriately dashing, Lauren couldn't help think that it looked like a uniform from a science-fiction series. Once again, fitting.
"Besides," the general continued, "you have a good six inches on her. It's hardly fair."
"Fair is a place where pigs win ribbons," said Mary.
"Stop quoting Aunt Biddy," General Randall said. "She was a bitch and we both know it."
Lauren tugged off her own mask and, brushing back sweaty bangs, blinked at the unfiltered light. She unzipped her jacket and said, "At least I'm still trying. If it wasn't for me you'd be stuck playing with yourself."
General Randall chuckled. "She's got you there. You scared everyone else away."
"Frankie's pathetic," said Mary, "and Derek likes ditch-digging."
"Derek thinks this is a waste of time," Lauren said, neglecting to add, and so does everyone else.
"It takes a certain amount of discipline to appreciate the strategy of fencing," the general said.
"And it's cool too," Mary added as she slid off her own jacket and tugged away her breastplate. Beneath the padded white she wore a sleeveless black t-shirt emblazoned with the name of some German industrial-noise band. Mary had some odd ideas about what was cool, but Lauren was inclined to agree with her about swordplay. At least it was a change of pace from the rest of what Bear Lake had to offer.
They sheathed their swords, packed their gear in dufflebags and headed towards the fort. The lake thickened the August heat, but as they climbed the steep trail up the forest hill the mugginess gave way to the heady essence of bruised pine. Brown needles crunched beneath their feet. Distant cracks echoed from the shooting range.
Sweat cooled on Lauren's cheeks. Her shoulders glowed in their ache. Beside her, Mary muttered something to the general, and their laughs rang in unison. A personal joke, shared by one.
One could be forgiven for mistaking the two Marys for mother and daughter. The general was a little taller, a bit heavier and perhaps a cup-size bigger. Her face bore extra lines, her longer hair stray grays in the ginger. But aside from these differences in maturity, they were more alike than any twins. They had the same striking green eyes, the same straight nose, sharp chin and angular features identically spangled with freckles. The same mole peeked from their left clavicle. The same dimple winked in the corner of their smiles. The same brow creased with irritation. Sometimes Lauren found this temporal mirror unnerving, though mostly she felt only envy.
Why couldn't Sergeant Fields be more like General Randall?
But she knew why: on Judgment Day, Mary had the good fortune to be an improbably young Second Lieutenant partaking in an Army field exercise somewhere in the Mojave Desert. On the day after, she'd been part of a 3,000 strong brigade that was well supplied and armed to the teeth.
Lauren, on the other hand, had been one starving refugee among millions. A refugee with a four year old sister.
At the top of the hill, stately cobblestone walls adorned with concertina wire greeted them. Allowing the dogs to sniff them over, the sentries on either side of the steel-sided doors smiled and nodded but offered no recognition to their commanding officer—saluting outdoors was a serious faux pas in the Resistance. One rapped his knuckles on the metal, and with a tired groan, the gates slid open. They passed beneath the rusted wrought iron arch which read in gothic letters: LUX E TENEBRIS. Light out of Darkness.
Inconstant shade dimmed the courtyard. Tall evergreens and stretched camouflaged nets hid from airborne eyes the wood towers and Quonset huts and tents and mounds of dirt which cluttered the estate's spacious lawn. Lauren had never seen the fort from above, but she'd been told it looked much like what it was before Frankie's late uncle Cullie bought the land in the early eighties: a large, rustic Masonic Lodge in the middle of the San Bernardino Mountains. For a quarter of a century the property remained abandoned, but then about three years ago a few hundred Resistance soldiers from two separate timelines showed up looking for new homes. Some moved here, and General Mary Randall took command.
Lauren had only been here a few months, but she'd been told Bear Lake used to be more like a miniature army base. It seemed like one to her, but since the loss of Mountain Mesa, since the Resistance had taken to kidnapping their past selves, the fort had become part shanty town, part excavation.
Noncoms and off-duty soldiers sat and squatted in clusters just diffuse enough to avoid being called crowded. Men dug in the pits and tunnels which honeycombed the hill, their shovels scraping a disharmony salted with mutters and grunts. The damp and sour of wet concrete mucked the air, leavened somewhat by the sweet smell of barbecue.
By a dingy canvas tent Lauren's father and mother—now heavily pregnant—sat at a card table, eating burgers with Rachel. Little Cullie, biologically Rachel's father but young enough to be her son, ran between the table legs wearing a cardboard set of Optimus Prime armor. Mary's little brother, Joey, chased him with a plastic sword, but stopped when he saw Mary and General Randall.
The toddler ran up, and the general snatched him into her arms and kissed his orange hair. On Judgment Day, Joey had been with his grandmother in Bakersfield. Until a few months ago, General Randall hadn't seen her brother in almost twenty years.
Lauren returned her parents' tentative wave and spotted Derek Reese in a group of boys behind them. The thirteen year old was shirtless, his arms and chest caked in white dust. He nodded as if she were waving at him.
"What's going on here, people?" demanded General Randall, placing Joey down as she brushed past. That was when Lauren noticed the boys were gathered around someone, someone face down in the dirt.
Frankie's thin arms trembled in the feeble pantomime of a pushup. His back arched and his head raised, revealing bruised, watery eyes. Bloody nostrils had given him a wet, red Van Dyke.
"Boy here's got a mouthful of smart," Sergeant Farli explained. Wielding but not quite using his wooden cane, the gray-haired training instructor stepped from the outskirts of the huddle. "Just offering a little correction."
"Thinks just 'cause his dad's a Fed he's better than us," said a teenager Lauren didn't recognize. Not a fellow kidnapee, but one from the future.
"Yeah, the Zeira Corp gig got Fuller killed," said another. "Ollie gave us bum intel."
General Randall glared at the boys. As if noticing her for the first time, they straightened and looked away.
Mary stood over Frankie. She leaned forward, hands on knees. "Oh, my god. You were kinda alright when we were trying to escape together, but now? Crying in front of all these guys? Better lay off the estrogen, buddy." She kicked dirt in his face and basked in the boys' laughter.
"Bitch!" Frankie cried, sputtering blood and grit.
"That's enough, Mary," General Randall barked. Then, to Frankie: "Cry me a river, boy, but you're not getting any special treatment. You're a soldier now. Buck up." She gestured with her head for Mary and Lauren to follow and walked away.
"Buck up?" Frankie shouted. His dark eyes burned with raw defiance. "Fuck you! I didn't ask to fight in your fucking war! And special treatment? What the fuck? We're digging ditches while you play Three Musketeers!"
The hickory made a sharp crack as the cane struck the back of Frankie's skull. He curled fetal, clutched his head and whimpered.
"Boy, we should have left you at Egg Basket!" Farli snapped. "Just for that, twelve hours in the box."
"Make it twenty-four," General Randall said, and Mary giggled.
Lauren didn't look back as Frankie wailed and screamed. She wondered what her parents made of this. They tended to be very noncommittal around the general.
Lauren waited until they climbed the wooden steps and passed through the oaken doors of the lodge into the vault-ceilinged cavern of the great hall. Afternoon light cut dusty beams through the high slit windows. Folded dining tables leaned like redundant barricades along the sandbag-lined walls. The hardwood floor, chipped and grooved, was wide and barren enough to host a dance party. Faint smoke and must, more taste than odor, clung to the air.
They crossed to the fireplace, and Mary tossed her sword and duffle onto an ancient sofa and plopped on the cushion beside them. Yellow foam bulged puss-like against the pink fabric.
Lauren said sat in a nearby lounge chair and said, carefully, "He sounds a lot like you, Mary, when we first met."
The teenager kicked off her shoes and began to tug away her socks. "I thought this was just some crazy survivalist cult," she said, "Can you blame me? I didn't believe until . . ." She nodded at the general.
"He's seen us," General Randall said, shaking loose her red hair from its ponytail. She peeled away her instructor's jacket and tugged away her breastplate to reveal a very sweaty tanktop. Only a bra saved her modesty. "He's seen you and Sergeant Fields, Derek and Captain Reese. Dudley's shown you his bones. And there's the Red Death. Frankie knows this is for real. We're in a war; we can't afford to mollycoddle."
From the kitchen Private Starr, the general's personal orderly, entered bearing a tray. The Randalls accepted their ice-teas without acknowledgment. Lauren offered a smile as she sipped hers.
"And where does he get off expecting us to grub in the dirt?" Mary demanded. Pale feet on the coffee table, she picked between her toes. "I'm going to be an officer, and you a doctor. We're not grunts."
"It's good to hold your head high, Mary, but don't let it get too big," General Randall said as she passed her jacket and epee to Starr, who with a short bow retreated down a hallway. The general paced before the hall's fireplace. Crossed above the stone mantelpiece hung twin smallswords, Randall heirlooms from an age of muskets and powdered wigs. She'd stolen them from her father when she shanghaied his family.
"It's true," the general continued. She looked up into the ceiling's rafted shadows. "Ditch-digging is beneath us, but we do PT like everyone else. And you both study nightly. We need people like you. Especially you, Mary, but also Derek and Cullie and even Ollie. And Lauren, from what I hear, in Whiteworld you were a very good doctor. You are our known quantities. The Resistance had no Westpoints, no John Hopkins. By the time the war was lost, half our officers were over-promoted Mustangs like Zeller and Stirling; most doctors under forty were jumped up field-medics who had to flip through a textbook to know where to cut."
Sipping her tea, General Randall stepped to the sofa and cupped a palm against Mary's cheek. She then turned and did the same to Lauren. The pale, freckled hand warmed against Lauren's skin, and she felt herself flush. Lines bracketed the general's smile. An abyss of grief and severity gazed from behind pond-green eyes.
"Both of you are precious," the general said. "When Judgment Day comes, there'll be no John Connor. There'll just be us. And you."
"Ma'am, you're weird," Mary said.
A few heartbeats of silence and the Marys laughed.
They bathed afterwards. The lodge's twelve-tub bathroom was reserved for officers, but that apparently included future officers. And future doctors. As Lauren scrubbed herself in the antique clawfoot tub, she reflected that if life was going to be unfair, it was better to have it unfair in your favor.
The Marys occupied other tubs, but were so fogged by steam and translucent curtains and drowned out by running faucets that Lauren may as well have been alone. She lay back in the warm water. It had been a long day: morning workout followed by two miles of running, breakfast, marksman and MAC practice, and explosives 101. Then lunch. The fencing had practically been recess. There was still tutoring with Doc Mitchell—and Dudley if he was up to it. But that wasn't until the evening. She closed her eyes.
Lauren awoke in cold water silence. She rinsed and dried off and dressed in a t-shirt and shorts. As she walked barefoot down the hall she heard a gravelly voice and knew they had returned.
". . . we need to focus on San Jose," Colonel Dudley said. Lounged on the sofa, he spotted Lauren and with an upward nod gave her the tired hybrid of a grin and frown. The surgical scars webbing the right side of his face snarled the expression.
"Hello, Lauren," Sarah Connor said wearily beside the colonel. Dust, grime and sunken-eyed exhaustion had left her vaguely zombiefied.
General Randall, pacing before them in green fatigues, stopped to stare at Lauren with an expression that a few months ago she would have found unreadable.
Ignoring it, Lauren instead asked, "So, how was it?"
"No one died," the colonel said. His cybernetics made his shrug stiff and jerky, like a marionette's. "Well, none of us," he added.
Lauren opened her mouth, but wavered. She knew they had set out to wreck a train, and train wrecks imply casualties. But the blasé attitude derailed her. Colonel Dudley, the grumpy tutor who had taught her how to apply tourniquets and make compression bandages and treat a collapsed lung, killed innocent people. But this was war, Lauren reminded herself. They couldn't afford to mollycoddle.
"Found out my son's been busy," Sarah cut in casually. She scratched at her dirty, tangled hair, the dark roots gaining ground against the blond. "And so has our mysterious friends," she added.
"John did it again?" Lauren asked. "And 'mysterious friends'? You mean—"
"Lauren," General Randall said. Arms crossed, she regarded Lauren with imperious eyes.
Lauren grinned sheepishly. She may be one of the general's favorites, but this was a mission debriefing and she was a sixteen year old recruit.
"I'll go say hi to myself," Lauren said and left.
It was evening out, and smelled of soil and cooking. Derek and his little brother were chattering excitably at Captain Reese as he made his way up the steps. Looking as dusty and dead as Sarah, the captain said nothing but ruffled young Kyle's hair and smiled at Lauren before entering through the oak doors.
She found the rest of the team by Gopher's tent. Shirtless, the old army engineer was snoring on a cot, his pale gut swelling and contracting like a frog's chin. Sergeant Tara Holden and Private Sandy Nguyen stood chatting with Farli and a few others. Sandy made a series of animated bursting gestures which ended with her arm miming something long and fast that tumbled up and fell in a steep arc.
"Boom! Splash!" the teenage private exclaimed. "All that metal! Bottom of the sea!"
"The Mississippi isn't really 'the sea,'" Tara said.
"Whatever. It's a lot of fucking water."
Sergeant Fields sat alone at a nearby picnic table, staring down and picking at a plate of potato salad. Lauren sat next to her.
"Hey," Lauren said, forcing a smile.
Her older self looked up. Like General Randall, she was about two years shy of forty. She looked closer to sixty. Crow's feet deep as razor cuts flared from bitter blue eyes. Skin leathery and blotched sagged around the mouth in a jowly scowl.
Below the neck, however, her scarred, sun-blasted arms were lean and hard. Her green t-shirt contoured to the figure of a younger woman.
"Baroness get you swashbuckling again?" Sergeant Fields asked.
"Mary bested me. Again."
Sergeant Fields, who once bragged she'd killed a man with a ballpoint pen, shook her head ruefully. "Throw your sword in her face. Knock her down and beat her mask in."
"That's one way to win. How was the mission?"
"Boring. For me, anyway. Just sat in a van with Colonel Dickless. He's even grouchier than I am."
Lauren wouldn't go that far. "Still, beats getting shot at. And this hurts Skynet, right?"
"It does, but we got our thunder stolen. Johnny-boy blew up another factory, and . . . someone else sank a ship hauling a million tons of coltan."
Lauren whistled. "Damn, all this on the same day. Bet Kaliba's pissed."
"Dudley isn't too happy either," Tara said, perching on the bench across the table. Sandy slid in beside her.
"Why not?" Lauren asked. "John's girlfriend may be a robot, but at least he's pulling his weight. And the 'someone else,' that's probably—"
"John's not pulling shit!" Sandy snapped, her little tough-girl scowl looking fairly ridiculous. "We've seen the videos. Cameron and that other skinjob do everything. John might as well sit at home and jack off."
"They are bulletproof," Lauren said.
Tara's smirk was lined, yet boyish. Fine gray lightly salted the raven shag of her crew cut. She crossed tawny, athletic arms on the table and said, "It's not just combat. Cameron hacks the defenses. Cameron says what to do next. Cameron exposits on what's going on. It's her show. She wears the pants."
"And she wants Skynet's crown." Sergeant Fields added.
"Exactly," said Tara. "If she's anything like Grayworld's Cameron, she's ambitious. A regular Lady Macbeth."
"Who's Lady Macbeth?" Sandy asked.
Tara wrapped an arm around her girlfriend and pulled her close. "It's another one of those 'book' things, sweetie. Means Cameron wants to be Queen Skynet."
"Oh, OK."
Lauren and her older self exchanged split-second glances. Tara was over twice Sandy's age.
"And as for our 'allies'," Tara continued, "if they're Resistance from another timeline, why so secretive? Those guys we met in the woods seemed human enough, but that just means they're probably Grays. Grays working for another Skynet. A competitor."
Lauren scrunched her face. "A competitor?"
"Why not?" Tara said and nodded at Sandy and Sergeant Fields. "It didn't happen so much in their future, but in mine, around the end, we had whole armies of metal blazing away at each other. Maybe some of this other faction bubbled back. Maybe they have some bad blood with this 'Kristanna Freyja.'"
Sergeant Fields' chuckle revealed teeth like old corn. "Bad blood? Jesus, T.J., you and your stupid theories. They're machines, not gangers."
"Who knows?" Tara said, shrugging. "But I bet this is why the brass got their panties in the bunch: We already blew up Zeira Corp, and now there's Kaliba, and these guys have already laid down a Judgment Day appetizer. And even if we knock out Kaliba—a tall order—we still have to contend with not only Cameron, but another player who can sink the biggest freighter in the world without being seen. And who knows what else is out there? It's like trying to slay a hydra."
"What's a hydra?" asked Sandy.
Tara kissed the teenager's pixie hair and said, "A dragon with lots of heads. Only way to kill it is chop 'em and burn 'em."
Sandy grinned impishly. "Burning things is fun."
I'd like to thank my beta, Stormbringer951. His input has been invaluable. Chapter Four will be posted soon.