Since many took offence at the "political" content, I've reposted this chapter with that stuff removed.
The Secret Diary of Cameron Baum
Saturday
It is forty-two miles from the safe house in Santa Monica to our destination in the San Fernando valley. With an open highway the journey time should be less than an hour.
Except this Los Angeles. There is never an open highway. Certainly not during evening rush hour as commuters stream home in their tens of thousands.
In the driving seat Sarah Connor fumes silently, as evidenced by her constant clenching and reclenching of the steering wheel as we crawl along getting nowhere fast. All the lanes are clogged and there is no way to circumvent the snarled traffic. And even when we have some space she cannot risk exceeding the speed limit. To attract the attention of a patrol car with so many guns and explosives aboard would be folly indeed.
John is seated on the passenger side, while Mac and I share the rear. Mac's legs are spread out at a near right angle. I have read about this. It is called man-spreading. There is no such thing as woman-spreading, at least outside of porn.
Mac turns to me. "I been meaning to ask - who's the President in the future? When you left, I mean."
"There is no President. All senior ranking political figures are targeted for termination during the opening days of the war."
"All of them? Congress and the Senate?"
"According to Skynet records, the last american president is Stella Sparks, a first term congresswoman from Arizona. On Judgement Day she is vacationing in Yellowstone and therefore off the grid."
"What happens to her?"
"She makes the mistake of linking her cell phone to one of the few still functioning cell towers. She is traced and terminated within the hour, dying without ever knowing she was president."
Silence. Oh dear, I've bummed everyone out. I'm very good at doing that.
"What about the military?"
"The military suffered from a similar policy of leadership predation."
"You saying we put up no fight at all? We just rolled over?"
"Oh no, there were numerous instances of armed resistance, both brave and foolhardy. The most notable success was Colonel Alvarez, who commanded a squadron of stealth bombers out of Nevada. He managed to curb Skynet incursions in the south-west for almost a year before his fuel supplies dwindled and he was forced to retreat to the mountains."
It seems Mac is itching to ask me more questions about the future. I get surprisingly few of these. Sarah Connor rarely speaks to me, while John refuses to discuss his future self. Daniel is different. He mostly wants to know the results of forthcoming sporting events so he can bet on them and make, as he puts it, great heaping piles of moolah. Moolah means money apparently and not as I first assumed manure. Who would want to make great heaping piles of that?
It's dark when we reach the firebreak. I get out and open the gate. Sarah Connor drives the pick up through and doesn't bother waiting for me. Charming.
Everyone is gathered round a laptop screen when I finally arrive.
"Any sign of the miata?" John asks.
"Nope. Pretty quiet apart from the guards changing shift. Three new guys showed up in a blue panel van. They all have thermos flasks so I figure they're the night shift."
We take the drones out from under the tarp and don the harnesses. Weapons and explosives are placed in backpacks and secured in place. We're all wearing black pants and sweaters, apart from Mac who's still in khaki. We had no black pants in his size and he point blank refused to wear one of my black skirts. Good. I don't want him stretching it out.
John issues Daniel his final instructions.
"Keep radio silence unless the miata shows up or the guards start getting restless."
"Got it."
"If we call for an extraction drive the pick up round to the front gate. Don't try and ram the gate. That only works in the movies."
"Right. Got it. Good luck."
"Luck? We don't need any of that," Mac insists bullishly. "We're Americans. We make our own goddamn luck."
He had to go and jinx it.
-0-
One by one we take off into the night sky. Cameron subprime. John. Sarah Connor. Mac. And me. We rise to three hundred feet then level off and fly west horizontally for a mile. The target isn't hard to miss: the factory's lit up like a football stadium on match night.
We all nail the landing apart from Sarah Connor who stumbles slightly. Understandable given this is her maiden flight.
Seen up close the door is greyish sheet metal with raised rivets just beginning to corrode. There's no keyhole or door handle.
Cameron subprime produces a tiny gadget with red and green LEDs. She traces the circumference of the door. If it has an alarm system the red light will show.
Green light.
John points to me then the door and I step up give it a kick.
Five hand torches illuminate the interior. There's a metal grid platform with steps leading down, all much as we anticipated. John listens at the doorway. "You hear that humming sound?"
"I hear it," Mac agrees. "What is it?"
"I think it's a generator. Powerful one, by the sound of it."
We head down the steps in single file. At the bottom is a wide corridor with four doors, two each side. We discussed this in the planning stages. We'll have to check them out. We can't have the enemy lurking behind us.
Door number one is unlocked. Five torch beams criss-cross the darkness. It's full of upturned chairs balanced on tables. Against one wall is a long counter such as you find in self-service restaurants. This must have been the canteen.
Door number two is similar, except there are desks piled high with tower computers each wrapped around with electrical flex. None of the computers look less than ten years old.
Behind door number three is an empty room. Or mostly empty. There's a white board on one wall and the remains of a projector mount attached to the ceiling. Bare electrical cables dangle like so many spaghetti strands. A conference room presumably.
We gather outside the final door. John holds up his hand. "Everyone turn your torches off," he orders.
In the dark there is a thin band of light coming from below the door. Someone's home.
John points at me and Cameron subprime. It makes sense to have your heaviest hitters take point.
I twist the door handle and we enter, pistols at the ready. Inside is a blonde woman in white shirt and black skirt. She's seated on a cot bed. There's a chain on her ankle that's attached to a hook on the wall. She screams at our sudden appearence.
It's Jennifer MacKenzie.
Or is it?
"Jennifer?"
"Mason? Is that really you? Omigod!"
John restrains Mac. "Wait. They can imitate people remember."
Yet this Jennifer MacKenzie makes no move to attack us, even with the primary target less than ten feet away.
"Ask her something only your real sister would know," Sarah Connor suggests.
"Okay, um, what did I get for my tenth birthday?"
"A BB rifle. You didn't put it down the whole day until you shot me in the butt and mom confiscated it."
Brother and sister embrace. I take the opportunity to discreetly snap the chain attached to her ankle.
Jennifer MacKenzie's story is told in whispers. She was driving home from a job interview when her miata hit a weird crater in the road. She got out to check for damage and came face to face with herself.
"It was me, I swear. Same clothes. Same face even. This person smiled and that's all I remember. I woke up here chained to the wall. I thought I was being sold into white slavery."
"Did anyone hurt you?"
"No. Some creepy guy shows up in the morning with a plate of food. He never says anything. I've tried pleading, begging, yelling. I even threw the plate. Hit him full in the face. He didn't even flinch."
"No one's spoken to you at all?"
"No! See that sink over there? I just reach it so I can drink, wash and...you know. Do you guys know what's going on? Please tell me."
"It's kind of a long story and we don't have much time. That humming sound. Do you know what it is?"
"No. It started this morning. It's driving me crazy."
"Take your sister up to the roof," John instructs Mac. "If she can manage to fly a drone head for the firebreak."
"The hell I will. I'm sticking with you guys. There's some serious metal ass to kick and I want to be the one doing it."
I suspect John knew he'd get this response. Mac might be brash and headstrong, but he doesn't lack for courage.
"Okay. Jennifer, take my torch. At the end of the corridor are steps leading to the roof. Go there and wait for us."
"Alright. What are you going to do?"
"We're going to blow this place to kingdom come."
-0-
At the end of the corridor are two heavy looking fire doors. Written in faded paint is the slogan:
IN CASE OF EMERGENCY KEEP CLOSED AT ALL TIMES
Yeah, that'll work.
We push the doors open. The sound of the generator, if that's what it is, increases fivefold.
Behind the doors is a narrow steel gantry, suspended high above a large open space. This is the main factory floor. It's the size of a football field.
"Holy shit!"
The generator is huge and even from this distance seems to vibrate the very molecules of the air. Cables as thick as tree trunks snake across the floor feeding this behemoth. No wonder they chose to set up base in this remote spot. Plug one of these babies into a wall outlet and you'd blow every fuse for a hundred blocks.
"Look at that. What is that?"
In the center of the floor is an archway, perhaps ten feet tall by six wide. It's constructed of some kind of pale metal corded and looped with electrical cables. Is that coltan? There's enough here to make a thousand drone bearings.
"Is that some kind of skin? Shit, it's moving!"
The archway is opaque. There's a silvery metallic sheen blocking the view through to the other side. A silvery skin, like a children's paddling pool filled with mercury and set on its side.
As we watch the silvery surface parts and a triple-8 walks through. He's naked. He stops still for a few seconds then walks across to a pile of clothes near the opposite doorway. He dons shoes, pants and a shirt and passes through the door.
The door that leads to the bus.
"See that one over there? I think he operating the machinery."
Yes, there's a triple-8 standing right next to the generator. He's looking down at some sort of control board. I can see the light of a display screen reflected on his face.
John motions for us all to go back through the fire doors.
"What the hell was that?" Mac voices what we're all thinking.
"That's something we haven't seen before," Sarah Connor admits. "They seem to have innovated considerably."
"So you don't know what it is?"
John seems to have some answers. "I think we're looking at a portal."
"You mean when that guy walked through that silvery gunk he was coming from the future?"
"Uh huh. A semi-permanent link. I think this is Skynet's Operation Dunkirk."
"What?"
"During the war, the germans trapped the british army on the french coast at a town called Dunkirk. They were on the verge of capture when Churchill ordered a fleet of small boats to cross the channel and rescue the soldiers. Many of those men returned in 1944 to defeat the germans."
"Hey, yeah, they made a movie about! I hated it. Not a single american in the whole thing."
"Then the bus," Sarah Connor speculates, "is their equivilent of the small boats. They could go anywhere in the country and regroup in this time period and be ready for Judgement Day."
"Mac, that triple-8 at the controls. Think you could shoot him from the gantry with the M-16?"
"Hell, yeah!"
"It needs to be a clean kill. A head shot. At distance."
"Long as he keeps still it's a slam dunk. If he's dancing around it's a fifty-fifty at best."
Dancing around? What's he think this is - a disco?
"Then you need to target those that come through. See how he hesitated for a second? That's when you shoot."
"Yeah, why was that?"
"I think it's a partial reboot. Maybe the trip from the future messes with their circuits."
"Okay. We doing this? What are we waiting for? Come on!" Mac is psyched to the max.
"Wait a second. Mom, when we get down there you and Jan plant the semtex. Cameron and I will take care of the ones already on the bus. And Mac?"
"What?"
"Concentrate. You miss just one and we're in big trouble. It'll be a whole domino effect."
"Okay, chief. You can count on me."
-0-
Crawling on his belly Mac inches towards the lip of the gantry. He settles and takes aim with the M-16. The triple-8 has his head down and there's no way he could hear anything above the hum of the generator.
BOOM
The triple-8's skull explodes and he topples sideways.
Mac quickly adjusts his stance. Another triple-8 steps through and pauses like the one before.
BOOM
"Two for two, baby! Woo! Lock and load! Woo! Bring it on!"
"Hey. Don't get cocky, kid."
"Star Wars, right?"
"Damn straight, pad wan."
John and I hurry down the gantry steps. This close to the generator I can feel the static electricity causing my hair to frizz up. Oh no, my head's going to resemble a giant furball!
The door leads to the loading bay. Broken up wooden crates litter the area, probably the same crates we watched being delivered.
At the front of the loading bay is the bus, rear door obligingly open.
We draw our pistols and step onto the bus.
The passengers are six terminators including the driver, all smartly dressed and seated next to each other at the front. No one looks around. Why would they? They simply assume we're more of their kind.
We kill three before they realise what's happening. Two manage to rise from their seats before we gun them down. The driver gets half way up the center aisle before I put a round between his eyes.
"Set the timer for five minutes," John instructs as we spread the thermite from our backpacks.
"Is that enough time?"
"It's plenty."
Back in the main building there's a neat pile of bodies by the archway.
"Hey, they've stopped coming through. You think they suspect something?" Mac yells.
"I don't see how. Set the timers for five minutes," he instructs his mother and Cameron subprime who are placing semtex around the generator.
There's a sudden buzzing in my jeans pocket, like a small insect is trying to escape. My cell on vibrate. John's goes off too. It's Daniel, voice high with tension.
"The miata! It just showed up!"
"How much time do we have?"
"No time. She's really moving, man. I think she knows you're in there and she's coming to get you."
Well, that's not good.
-0-
Why is Jennifer still alive? I address that in the next chapter.
The time portal. Not canon but when has that ever stopped me. Nobody mention Stargate.
Finally found some time to finish this arc. Finale will be up before new year.
Next: King's pawn sacrifice. Checkmate.