Chapter Name: Steven.
Notes: Thank you to reviewers OneHorseShay, baronvonmilo, Fanfic-Reader-88 and Nindira.
No third party camerawoman telling me what to do this time kiddies. This is my own personal video. I guess it got to me after a while. It felt good talking. Maybe we all die.. no-one survives failed missions. Not by getting back to base at least. If that happens no-one will ever see these.
Maybe we succeed and it doesn't matter anyway. Might as well let it all hang out. This will be the last for a while. Maybe forever.
Normally I talk shit. Half the stuff I say is a lie. Everything else is exaggerated. Usually.
Not today. Why lie? There's no point. It's dark. Cold. There's no noise. Everything is silent. No birds. No dogs. No cats. No anything. Even the air itself feels dead.
The Jimmy Carter. It sank. That Australian bitch Jesse fucked up.
Now he's gone too.
Steven.
He never made it out with the rest of the crew. His station was in the torpedo room. Too far away. Whatever it was they left in too much of a hurry. Or maybe he died before the evacuation. I told him he needed to leave, to come help us with strategy. To be as safe as any of us. I had a bad feeling. Any sub that's active in enemy waters will eventually become unlucky. But he wouldn't leave his post on the ship. Fuck. Boat. He never let me forget that.
'Jimmy is a boat Sam. A ship is a target.'
I just wish I could have got my hands on her. But I couldn't. The cowardly bastards who abandoned their posts and killed Steven. They were taken away to Serrano Point HQ for a debrief. We lost a lot of good people on that boat.
How did she lose it? It wasn't the metal. They say it's 'classified' but we talk. We aren't a military. We are the 'resistance'. People talk. Our metal talks. They just doesn't realize it. The boat was supposed to go to Perth and back. Like they'd done so many times before. I've even done it once when they needed someone to fill in for a sick member of the crew.
Boat went to crush depth. That doesn't happen by accident. Not with the freak "Queeg" in charge. It doesn't make mistakes. It wasn't programed to.
I hope she burns in hell. Steven might have been one of the oldest people left, but he shouldn't have died. Not now. Not on that mission. It wasn't his time. It was her fault.
I shouldn't dwell on this, but I don't have much time myself. I just needed to talk about it. I'm on my own mission now. The great and awesome leader John Connor gave it to the team himself. I don't think he's that impressive. I'd probably think more of him if he didn't need his bodyguard robot girlfriend following him around everywhere.
Important.
Vital to the future of humanity.
We needed to be the best we could.
Complete the mission at all costs.
That's what this supposed 'leader' told me.
The only humanity I care about is the people I've lived with for the last.. god.. fifteen years? I don't even keep track. Days and nights meld into one when you live in an underground bunker sealed up from the outside world until you need to go out and people die.
We survived the bio weapons. The radiation. The infiltrators. Hunger. The chems. Together.
I can tell what everyone is thinking. Can we survive our first real mission for Connor?
I'm beyond caring if this is classified or not. John Mr. Sir, court martial me if I survive.
We're going for the Idaho National Laboratory. There's tech we need to use. Supposedly. We move by night. On foot. Alongside but not on the I-84. Until day is about to break then we head for shelter to arranged supply caches.
Yakima. That was the first stops. The city itself was pretty much abandoned. 90,000 people were now less than a hundred. The machines come back every so often, a few dumb idiots who made too much noise or showed themselves too clearly get wasted, the rest hide, then a year or two later the cycle repeats itself. We were there a few days.
I found Carly's grandpa's house. It wasn't looted or burnt. Not enough people survived the initial chemical attack on the city to cause anything like the same problems as our own fellow humans caused us in Seattle.
You might think it was overgrown with weeds and grass. No. Nothing grew more than a couple inches off the ground here. Another of the tactics they used to try to stop us from living. All these years later we still have no freakin' idea why they didn't just nuke Seattle. Maybe it was part of their plan. Maybe it was a mistake and they just couldn't correct it. It's been bombed of course. But never invaded.
Wherever he was when the attack happened it wasn't at home. Apart from the dust, it would have been just as he'd left it the day of the attack. A couple of dishes were in the sink. His old TV stood still in the main room. The computer he used to chat with Carly and Spencer sat silent and rusting in the corner. His grandpa chair proudly taking up the central space in the room.
Then the pictures. All over the house hung up on the walls they were everywhere. Behind a dated, even by pre-war standards antique wood cabinet with glass windows lay books filled with memories. Carly. Her mother. Steven. Spencer. Freddie. Even Marissa. And the elder Shay's wife. Framed up along the walls. Or in filled to bursting picture books. Some faded, but others clear as day. Carly had her own book. All the way from a day old baby to almost adult-hood.
I looked back at history. Knowing what had happened. I hated and loved every second I kept looking.
Hated myself for not being able to protect them.
Loved them because I had nothing left but memories.
Night started falling and with it the end of my little trip down memory lane. When I made my way back to the rest of the team we tried to sleep. Resting among their soft breaths I thought about the mission. And how we'd be getting there.
I knew the route. I took it myself months earlier to scout the way. To setup for the full mission. To liase with other cells.
Sunnyside was now a giant bomb crater with a handful of standing buildings around the edges.
Richland. I'd call it a mass grave but no-one was buried. No matter where you turn you see skeletons littering the ground. It used to be the 'dumping point' for a work site. We took the site out years ago.
We would combine with the rest of the squads and the special weapons at Umatilla.
La Grande. Resupply our food. It's used for farming. It's a dangerous job growing food out in the open. But we need it so badly that the workers who would die if they ever found the hidden crops would be acceptable losses.
Whitman Forest was a massive conflagration. Thick choking black smoke hung in the sky. They were using it as a work camp for raw materials. But people got out. So the machines burnt the entire forest around them. Then didn't bother putting it out.
Finally we'd take a detour past Boise. Radiation. It also meant we avoided Mountain Home AFB. We had intel that the machines might be there. It wasn't our mission so we were going to avoid it.
Our route would be through the Salmon-Challis forest then Butte City.
Even after all that distance no-one said what we were all thinking. Are we on an actual mission?
We could be a distraction. A diversion for a real attack. We could be sent into a deathtrap just to get our bodies stuck in the meat grinder so Connor can make the real attack while the metal is focused away from wherever it is his part of the mission is. Anyone could set off a trap and get us all nuked.
It's happened before.
That will be a good ending. A fade to white then being vaporized. I hope if there's a life beyond his one that Carly and Freddie and everyone I loved then lost are waiting there for me.
Steven's death was painless. Assuming he wasn't hurt or injured before it happened. The sub imploded. He wouldn't have felt a thing.
As much as I would want that simple quick easy death.. if that happens the mission is over. We would have failed.
So no, I can't die in a flash of white heat. Even if this is just a diversion. For all the bullshit.. Connor.. he's right. This is vital for the future of humanity. In the end the simple fact is this.
If we succeed then maybe it'll be worth all the pain and death and suffering.
Even if that death is mine.
We attack after night fall tomorrow.
AN: Thanks for the ongoing reviews. For anyone who is wondering about it, I'm roughly following the Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles time-line which is why there are a few references to things that don't exist in other timelines.