In the Hands of an Angry Machine Chapter 19: The Future Dies Tonight, a terminator: sarah connor chronicles fanfic

Chapter Nineteen: The Future Dies Tonight

A/N: I'd like to thank Metroid 13 for beta-reading this chapter.

July 19, 2027

USS Jimmy Carter, Pacific Ocean

0649 Hours

Jesse loved to run. As a little girl, before the war, she'd sprint along the wooded trails by her uncle's farm, her small sneakered feet pounding against the dirt, jumping, skipping, scampering over twisted roots and crags like a wild dingo chasing phantom prey. The smell of the forest would embrace her, driver her onward, and the shrubs and trees would wizz by as she felt the heart-thundering thrill of escape. Escape from the soul crushing apathy of her pill-ravaged mother, escape from the nighttime touching of her alcoholic father, but most of all she ran to escape the frenzied surge that dwelt behind her eyes, that invisible, twisted monkey-demon that laid in the back of her skull, gnawing. Her intangible nemesis.

Not now, though. Now, Jesse ran from killer robots. Can't get more fucking tangible than that.

Like a stampede of spooked cattle, she, Bird, Hayes, Blake and a half dozen others fled headlong down the starboard corridor of deck three; only half of them carried weapons, and nobody fired. A few yards behind chased the indefatigable tapping of two pairs of metal skeleton feet: that 990-715 bitch and one of her "male" kindred. But Jesse didn't dare turn around to face them, didn't dare pull the plasma pistol from the back of her pants and open fire.

She'd seen what happened to the others.

Running next to her, Sergeant Blake half spun on his heel and ("Don't do it!" she thought) lifted his rifle to fire. Jesse ran past him and didn't look back at the high-squeal of one of the terminators' arm cannons. The air crackled with the fizz of flash-broiled flesh, and Blake gave a weak cry that trailed off into a burbling gurgle.

All around, her fellow crew gasped and whimpered as they ran. From behind, Seaman Hayes sobbed pitifully, while ahead of her she saw Lieutenant Bird's glasses slide off his nose and fall, hitting the metal floor in a tumbling clatter. The lieutenant ignored the loss and kept on running, his long gangly legs taking deep, almost leaping, strides, causing the Westinghouse rifle strapped to his back to swing back and forth with every step.

Jesse heard her boot crunch down on glass, and she made herself run faster, pumping her legs like furious pistons. Her head swam with animal dread, and her chest throbbed and felt tight, as if her ribs would burst under the strain of her hot, heaving lungs. Walls of gray steel speckled with rust scrolled by in a jogging blur, and the lights above flickered in a slow-motion strobe-light effect, plunging the hallway into a continuous cycle of darkness and sight. Absurdly, it made her think of a carnival fun house she'd once gone to as a child.

At the end of the corridor she came to an open watertight door, and the crew before her funneled through the exit like frightened rats escaping a maze. Hayes screamed behind her, and as she hopped over the lip of the door she indulged in a brief backwards glance.

Between the blinks of the strobe, she saw that the male machine had stunned Hayes in the back with a tasering touch from its left skeletal hand -- she'd seen them do that to others -- and as the seaman convulsed on the ground like a flopping fish, the sharp silver petals of the 900's right arm cannon folded back on themselves in a whir of sliding parts, reassembling into a metal right hand. It pulled a length of cable from a steel sash it wore across its chest, and with inhuman haste it bent over Hayes' prone form and bound his limbs behind his back, tying hands and feet together in a vicious skin-tearing hogtie that must have broken bones and dislocated shoulders. Hayes struggled futily against the cable and shook his face back and forth against the bulkhead floor, squealing like a pig and sobbing. Jesse saw blood run down his wrists and ankles from where the knotted cable bit into flesh.

The 715 stood in the middle of the corridor next to its companion, its arm cannon aimed at Jesse and the fleeing crew -- but it held its fire. The lights blinked back to black, and its purple eyes glowed at her in the dark, mechanically narrowing to slits. The 900 then stood up again, its eyes flashing red.

Hayes cried on the floor, ignored.

Yeah, sucks to be you.

Jesse turned away and continued her flight, following the crew down the ladder to deck four, skipping the steps two by two.

She had no doubt in her mind that if the seven machines had willed it the Carter's crew of sixty-eight could have been killed ten times over by now. There had been no epic battle for the ship, no brave last stands; to machine gods like the 900s, this must have been but a boring chore, like herding wayward sheep or screaming toddlers.

Something in her mind beggedher to stand and fight, to die like a soldier and not like a rat, but she'd seen the remains of Teams Beta and Charlie: charred ribs, boiled organs, cauterized blood . . . the aroma of roasted pork. With thick coltan hides nearly impervious to plasma, the machines carried themselves with the confident grace of ballerina ninjas.

She followed Bird and the others down a dark, narrow maintenance corridor, and in the distance behind her the tap-tap-taps of the metal feet resumed, but slower this time, casual, as if the machines were taking a lazy stroll, smugly secure that victory was in the bag.

Echoing weakly through the steel bulkheads came the trembling whimper of a woman crying; a few seconds later it shifted into a scream. Jesse's sweat-soaked neck hairs prickled as she ran, and for a passing moment she thought of Cullie. They'd become separated after the 715 drove them from bridge; she wasn't sure if she should hope he'd been captured or died fighting.

"Why aren't they killing us?" Jesse feverishly asked herself, not for the first time. But her brain was spinning far too fast organize an answer, and she went on.

At the end of the hall, she rounded a corner, her palm slapping hard against the bulkhead as she turned. They were in the cargo hold now -- the bottom of the ship. All around her loomed metal crates piled two or three high, lined up in rows and columns forming a dark warehouse labyrinth of gray blocks. The fluorescent lights above flickered with an electric buzz, and for an instant Jesse swore she saw the glint of rushing metal to her right. She spun around and saw nothing.

From everywhere and nowhere clicked metal feet, like chirping crickets. Ahead of her the crew members scattered and split up, mindlessly choosing different routes through the maze. She followed after Bird, who had by now un-slung his rifle -- for all the good it'd do. As he ran, his near-sighted eyes nervously scanned the crates about him with rapid back-and-forth jerks. Jogging by his side, Jesse saw his Adam's apple bob up and down like a tiny heart, beating in his skinny neck.

Wordlessly, they ran.

After half a minute, Jesse began to feel increasingly stupid with every step. They were on a submarine a thousand feet under the ocean, where the fuck did they think they were running to?

As if reading her mind, the lieutenant turned suddenly into a tiny nook behind a wall of crates and stopped to catch his breath. "We should hide," he said between gasps.

Jesse had to laugh, though it came out as a dry rasp. "Brilliant fucking strategy. Where?" As she spoke, she looked down at the floor and saw a tin cup and a stomped out reefer. Oh. Full circle. That had only been only what? An hour ago? Time flies by when you're having fun.

Bird said nothing but tugged with all his might at the lid of a nearby crate, which remained infuriatingly shut. Jesse giggled, and the lieutenant glared at her, his eyes wide and face pale in the bad light.

"This is your fault," he said with a toothy spit. "You brought this all upon us! You and your stupid drunk friends!"

Jesse sniffed, though she knew he was right. But . . . "They would have attacked Serrano Point!" she said, gesturing vaguely at the surrounding dark. "That bloody liquid thing would have snuck in and killed everybody."

From far out on the port side of the hold, Jesse heard what sounded like Dietze screaming. From somewhere else, a burst of plasma fire rang out.

Bird shook his head and sat down on the crate, lowering the aim of his rifle to the floor. He looked like he wanted to cry. "No," he said bleakly. "They have near-total air superiority and a navy ten times our size." His mouth twitched up into a sad, rattish grin. "If Skynet wanted to infiltrate Serrano, why would they need us to ferry their liquid metal from the middle fucking of nowhere?"

Jesse blinked; she never heard him curse before.

"Then what's going on?" she asked.

Far off, the taps and screams and energy blasts of routed battle seemed to recede.

"I don't know," he said. "But I think this may all just be a . . . " He laughed; he had surprisingly tiny teeth. ". . . a misunderstanding."

A few feet to her right, a great silver figure dropped from the ceiling, landing on its feet with a thundering mechanical clank. Startled, Bird half stood and fumbled with his rifle, lifting it to fire . . .

The blue flash of the 900's arm cannon tore into the butt of Bird's Westinghouse, striking the volatile power pack jutting below. For a blinding fraction of a second, Jesse saw a bright, white bubble emerge from rear of the weapon, small as an egg and more brilliant than the sun. The bubble swelled out in an instant like a tiny supernova, and the force of the explosion threw Jesse to the ground like a giant hand of fire. She covered her face and squeezed shut her eyes as an icy burn stung along the right side of her waist, immediately going numb from shock. Flying bits of molten plastic and metal made angry little pings against floor and crates, and the smell of ozone and cooked flesh filled the air.

Jesse forced her eyes open and turned to look back at the lieutenant. He laid sprawled back on the top of the crate, both his arms blown away to blackened stumps. The boiling plasma had eviscerated his torso into a rib-charred ruin, and blistered skin bubbled and cracked along the bottom half of his face, like a beard of third degree burns.

Fuck. She'd never liked Bird, but . . . fuck.

The 900's right arm cannon quickly folded back into a hand, which then snapped loose a length of cable from its steel sash. It looked down at her with a whir of its neck and reached out its left hand as if to say, "Come on, let me zap you so we can this over with . . . "

Feeling dizzy and uncoordinated, Jesse forced herself from the floor and broke off into a staggering run, nearly tripping over the corner of a crate. After a moment the machine's tapping gait lazily followed after her.

With every movement her side hurt more and more, and she ran a hand down the wound and felt wetness through the torn cotton of her tank top. It felt like ground glass swimming under her skin, though the fact that she still stood meant it couldn't be that bad . . . unless she bled to death. Or something. Gritting her teeth, she made herself run faster.

The symphony of fighting rose to a new crescendo. More screams. More squeals of plasma. The ubiquitous tapping shifted into a higher tempo, like a dancing rain beating against great tin drums.

Jesse turned a corner a saw another 900 standing only a few yards away, its eyes growing red in the flickering dark. She twisted and fled the other direction, hearing their pace quicken after her, closing the distance. For the first time she noticed her clothes were soaked with sweat. She felt cold.

As she moved half-madly from one row of crates to another, she felt as if an unseen noose were tightening on her flight, as if her paths were spiraling inward, being closed off one by one, and soon there would be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

She ran out from behind a totem of crates and found herself entering a wide clearing in the maze, about twenty feet across; nearly at the same time, others of the crew came stumbling in as well. Jesse was far too flustered to make a head count, but she guessed there were at least twenty, maybe thirty, half or less armed. The space soon grew crowded with the refugees, some limping, others moaning, all panting heavily from their panicked exertions.

It was done.

The sheep had been herded.

Through the crowd Jesse spotted Cullie. Leaning on Ensign Gavin, the commander stumbled drunkenly, his face gray and sagging.

"Cullie!" she said, pushing people aside as she fought her way through. It'd only been a few minutes since she'd seen him last . . .

Then she saw his arm.

A chunk half the size of a softball had been blown away from his right elbow, leaving black, burned flesh peeling from the cauterized wound. His useless forearm hung from the stump by a boneless rope of cooked red meat, flopping back and forth like a rubber chicken.

"Jesse," he said dumbly, his unevenly focused eyes staring through her.

"Fuck . . . " Jesse began, then trailed off. She made a half-hearted attempt at hugging him, but pulled back when he groaned and dropped to one knee, his swinging arm bumping against her leg. Her throat suddenly felt tight, and all she wanted to do was lay on the floor and curl into a ball and make it all go away. She ran a hand through his hair, but he stared away from her, seemingly unaware yet clinging to her pants leg. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry . . . "

Gavin stepped away from the two of them and looked around nervously, his eyes rolling in skittish jerks. "They want to capture us," he explained pointlessly to no one in particular.

From outside the clearing the 715 and five 900s emerged, coming from all directions and blocking every exit. Arm cannons at the ready, they stopped in unison and methodically scanned the crowd, no doubt noting which of the chattel still dared brandish arms. The soft, combined whir of their servos filled the air with a hum that made Jesse think of a swarm of cicadas.

Now that she was no longer running from them, she could see that perhaps the fight hadn't been quite as hopelessly one-sided as she had previously assumed. A number of small, pockmarked scorches marred the thick hyperalloy armor of the machines, and one of them had been struck full on in the face, leaving half its skull a blackened scar which had burned out one of its red eyes.

From behind her Jesse heard a series of lopsided taps, each followed by the sound of scrapping metal. The crowd turned to watch as a 900 limped out from behind a corner, one of its ankles crippled by a chance plasma bolt. It entered the edge of the clearing and stopped, and a nearby machine sidestepped over, allowing its damaged comrade to use its shoulder for support.

And no doubt the lucky marine who lamed the metal got barbecued for his efforts. Jesse felt the blood running down her side; it didn't pay to be a hero.

With a stomping clank, the 990 stepped up onto a crate as if it were a soapbox on a street corner. A couple superficial singe marks marred it's feminine chassis, but otherwise it appeared unharmed.

It waved it's arm cannon slowly back and forth and glared at the crowd with purple slits. "Obey me if you want to live," it said with an iron voice high and vaguely female. It pointed down at a spot on the floor by its feet. "Place your weapons here."

The machine waited for the crew to comply, and they did. None of those who held rifles seemed interested in defiance now, and Jesse didn't blame them. As they dropped their weapons before the the female machine, like sacrificial offerings before a silver plated goddess, Jesse's hand brushed against the plasma pistol hidden in the back of her pants. Should she . . . ?

The 715 pointed a long, accusing finger at her. "You," it said, cocking its head. "Your pistol." It then pointed down into the weapons pile.

Jesse's knees turned to jelly, and her skin flashed hot. Damn its machine eyes! All in a second, she ran through her alternatives.

Blaze of glory?

Or suicide?

Neither. Both paths led to the same end, and Jesse didn't want to die.

Pulling her pants leg away from Cullie's weak grasp, she sighed and slowly withdrew the pistol, making a point to grip it passively between thumb and forefinger. Like a naughty third grader surrendering a slingshot to a strict schoolmarm, she stepped through the crowd and meekly dropped the gun into the pile with a sad metal clatter. Jesse found herself unable to look the female robot in the eyes; her shame felt warm and intoxicatingly dizzy.

As she walked back into the crowd, from behind her came the slow, watery "gloop, gloop, gloop" that she'd heard only an hour before. The sheep of the herd bleated utterances like "What the fuck is that?" and "Oh, Jesus," and a woman broke into a sob. Jesse turned around to catch the tale end of the T-1000's gooey emergence from the metal floor, like a silver mountain sprouting next to the 715. The shiny, mercurial form turned into a statue and shifted in shape and color, solidifying into the redheaded ice queen she'd seen earlier.

The redheaded woman nodded politely at the 715 and took a step (its foot -- just for an instant -- stuck slightly to the floor) towards the crowd. Peevishly, it glared at the crew, giving Jesse a particularly nasty look. It then shook its head sadly, as if it expected no better.

"I'll have you know this has been a great inconvenience," it said, addressing the crowd with a scowl. "I hope you're happy."

Jesse's mouth twitched. The accent . . . Scottish? What the fuck? She touched her bloody side and realized she was light-headed . . .

The creature then turned to the 990. "Secure them and tend to the wounded" A pause. "And make sure they're fed regularly."

And at that the T-1000 melted back into the floor.

December 17, 2007

Hillside Auto Salvage

John had only taken a step and a half from his chair when he heard the high pitched shatter of punctured glass.

A heartbeat later the crack of the gunshot rang out.

Cam!

Swept by sudden panic, John spun on his heel, eyes darting over the desk. A gouged hole stared out from the plastic top of the router box, a half-thumb's length from Cameron's chip.

Another sharp shattering, and a funneled crystal spray of powdered glass jetted from a second hole in the window. The particleboard desk pounded with a hard "thunk."

From outside, through the rain: Crack.

No thought.

Just act.

John lunged at the desk, and his foot tripped slightly on the wheeled legs of the office chair. Hunched down low, his left hand reached up over the top of the desk and scrabbled at her chip, fingers coiling carefully around the delicate silicone. From the corner of his eye he saw on the monitor: Cameron: RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN . . . He looked up into the webcam and gave an upward tug, and --

Another spat of glass, and something burned along the right side of is scalp, like a white-hot serrated blade running from crown to temple.

He screamed in a world of pain, and his hand jerked upwards, pulling the chip loose from the adapter with a meek click. He allowed himself to drop to the wood floor flat on his stomach, and he hugged her chip to his breast. Warm wetness soaked the right side of his head, and he shut his eyes as his skull throbbed so badly it felt as if it would burst.

Three shots, fired in frustration. He heard the muffled rips as bullets tore through the leather chair, followed simultaneously by the explosive shatter of the computer monitor above. He felt glass fragments land on his back.

Cameron. Was she safe? Had he . . . ? John opened his eyes and looked at the chip in his hand: safe and in one piece. He spared a quick sigh of relief before starting to belly-crawl away from the desk towards the door.

Two more shots tore through the window and chair, and above came the sound of splintering plastic. Keyboard buttons rained down on the floor in front of John's nose and rolled away like dice. With Cameron's chip still clutched in his hand, he made his worming progress around the desk and away from the window. Blood ran from his scalp and matted his hair, leaking down the right side of his face to drip onto the wooden floorboards. More shots rang out, piercing through glass, leather, wood, and plastic.

Outside in the hallway: running footsteps.

An instant later, a wild-eyed Kyle appeared in the doorway, holding the M4 by his right side as if it were a pistol. He paused a hair second to assess the situation, looking over both the ruined computer equipment and John lying bleeding on the floor, then took a step forward, his left hand reaching down towards his son.

Three messy, red flowers sprouted along Kyle's upper chest, tearing into his dark-green trench-coat with wet, meaty smacks. More falling glass. Crack. Crack. Crack. Kyle grunted, but other than that didn't even slow down as he grabbed John by the collar of his jacket and half-carried, half-pulled him towards the door.

John heard two more shots, one gouging into Kyle's side.

Outside in the hall, next to the door to the office, Kyle let go of John and knelt before him, placing his rifle on the ground. With controlled panic, he took his son's left hand and pried open his fingers as if John were a baby, then sighed with relief when he saw that Cameron remained whole. John gently re-closed his fist, and Kyle put a hand on his back and forcibly pushed him down the hall, both of them still crouching.

"Come on!" Kyle said. "We've got t--!"

John felt the rush of air before he heard the explosion. The floorboards beneath him rumbled with trembling force, and wind and smoke and wood debris gushed forth from the doorway of the office where they'd been only seconds earlier. The booming roar reverberated off the cracked plaster walls, and smoke and dust billowed down the hall.

"John, let's go!" Kyle said shouting, and dragged John by the scruff of his jacket through the basement door and down the creaking steps. John tried to keep up, but his legs felt like Jello, and his brain seemed full of cold air. As Kyle pulled him through the door at the bottom of the stairs, John dabbed at his head with his palm and looked it. In the dim light of the basement, the blood shone black like oil.

Kyle grabbed at John's upper arm and stared him in the eyes. "Whatever happens," he said. "You protect her with your life!"

Above thundered another explosion, muffled this time, like a giant sneezing into his hands. The wood floor shook slightly, and a rain of dust and grit fell between the planks of the ceiling. The house creaked and popped here and there, and John heard a wooden "crunch" from somewhere above. The dangling light bulb flickered.

"You hear me?" Kyle yelled. "With your life!" His eyes flashed blue, appearing menacingly demonic in the poor light.

John nodded his. "Yes! Yes! I will!" Kyle let go of him, and John looked at the chip with anxious reverence. "Cameron's asleep in there," he thought dumbly.

Kyle nodded to himself, and John noticed the blood that flowed from his father's wounds -- far more than what a terminator would bleed.

In the distance came more gunfire. John counted five shots, though it was hard to tell from the constant tapping of the rain.

"You stay here," Kyle said. "I'll be back. There's weapons in the duffel bag . . . " He gave John's head wound a cursory glance before adding, ". . . and a first aid kit." With that, he readied his M4 and sprinted out the door and back up the steps, leaving John alone with Cameron's chip in his hand.

Sitting in a tree a hundred yards west from the house, Jesse ejected the empty 40mm casing and loaded her second grenade into the tube. Like cold, angry tears, raindrops beat their way through the tree's leaves and drizzled onto the top of her kevlar helmet, smearing down the sides into her face and hair. With a practiced eye, she raised the aim of her M16A1 with its M209 grenade launcher attachment, and, imagining the curving ballistics in her mind, pulled the M209's trigger, firing off the grenade with a hearty "wumph."

In the dark she waited the second and a half it took for the projectile to reach its target until finally a sputter of light blossomed in the distance, spitting sparks and flame in all directions like a tiny firecracker. Almost immediately afterwards arrived the distant muffled thundering of the explosion, and she grinned like a cat and looked through the night vision scope of her rifle, eager to see her handiwork.

Rendered in light enhancing green-scale, she saw two ragged, splintered holes glaring out from the wood siding of the house, the first over the room where John had been, the second higher up, blasting partially into the upper story. Even in the heavy rain, Jesse could clearly make out tendrils of smoke rising from the dark cavernous wounds.

With a bit of luck, John and Kyle were already dead, and Cameron's chip scattered to the four winds. But Jesse didn't believe in luck, and more to the point, luck didn't believe in her. Kyle had obviously been wearing body armor to take those chest shots, and they'd already left the room when the first grenade hit. They were probably hiding somewhere in the house. A cellar, maybe?

Jesse took aim at their SUV and fired five rounds into the engine block. No exit for you, John Connor.

If only she'd followed her instincts and gone after John from the very beginning. That would certainly have saved a lot of trouble. She could have sniped him a hundred times over by now, what with all her surveillance. Of course, Ollie had been the one who talked her into that whole Riley scheme. Give loser boy a rat-whore to squeeze, and he'll forget all about his robot sex toy . . .

Yeah, look how that worked out.

Ejecting the empty casing, Jesse loaded another 40mm and continued her watch of the farmhouse, using her scope to scan back and forth, up and down, over and over again like an automated searchlight. Only three grenades left. Would those be enough to bring down the house? Flush them out? She scowled and ground her teeth; she hated waiting.

As her scope swept across the second story, her eye caught on a vague green shape: a man's head and half a shoulder, peeking out from the bottom corner of the far right window. The man held a M4 in his hands, aimed directly at . . .

The muzzle flashed, and something struck her on the upper right arm, like a sharp whack from a big, wet broomstick.

Crack!

Jesse cried out and fell backwards off the branch, and for an instant she seemed to float in mid-air, as if in outer space. But time kicked in, and the muddy ground rushed up the ten feet to slam against her back, knocking the breath from her lungs and rattling her brain. Half sunk in the gooey muck, she stared stupidly at the overcast sky, which swam with spiraling purple stars and sent raindrops to dribble against her face. For a moment she could only lay there and wonder what had happened.

But then something small, fast, and angry hit the mud a few inches from her head.

Crack!

Oh yeah.

Pulling her limbs into action like a frenzied puppet-master, Jesse rolled over, stood up, hunched down, and scampered blindly, barely having enough sense to pick up her rifle as she did.

Another bullet wizzed by like a bee, shooting between her legs. Crack! Jesse stopped and spun around in a panic, and she felt a long rip scrape along the belly of her armor. Crack! She needed cover, and she needed it now.

You're standing next to a tree, stupid!

Jesse scrambled behind the trunk and hunkered down. About as thick around as a car tire, the tree offered plenty of hiding cover. Of course, now she was trapped, but better trapped then dead, right?

She gave her arm a look over and fingered the lightly bleeding rip in her jacket sleeve. The bullet had missed the shoulder of her armor by a couple inches and dug a nasty pencil-width canal through the meat of her tricep. Ouch, but not too bad. The scar would make nice party talk.

And who'd ever think she'd be shot by Kyle? She knew it had to be him. John right now was probably hiding in the basement or whatever, cradling Cameron's chip and crying; he never did his own fighting.

But now what? She couldn't exactly sit here forever, hiding like a scared squirrel. Leaning back against the tree, Jesse ignored the jittery pounding in her chest and pushed herself up, feeling the rough bark scrape against her armor. She lifted her rifle and gingerly peeked around the edge, using the scope to find a bead on Kyle's distant head.

The tree bark a few inches from her nose exploded in a wet, splintery splatter of brown mulch. The gunk hit her full on across the bridge of her nose, and she stumbled back and fell over, dropping her gun and covering her face with her hands. The report of the gunshot arrived before she hit the ground.

Nose and cheek stinging numb, she rubbed furiously at her eyes. "Am I blind?" she thought with dread, afraid to even check, but she forced open her lids and saw her open palms staring back. Sighing with relief, she reached out a hand to retrieve her rifle, but an infuriatingly close geyser of mud spat up, spraying her fingers black and brown. Crack! She snatched at the gun as quick as a snake and hugged it to her body.

What was that term in chess where you must make a move, but doing so is not in your best interest? Zug's Wang? Jesse was pretty sure Cullie had told her that once. Well, Zug was definitely fucking his Wang into her now. Her eyes darted to and fro. There had to be a way out of this one. Think, Jesse, think. She was on the side of a more or less bare grassy incline, which crested only a few yards west. If she could only get to the other side of the hill, then she'd have all the cover in the world. Sweet, beautiful cover. But how to get there? She narrowed her eyes and looked up the length of the tree, then back down towards the top of the hill. A smile broke on her lips.

It all came down to geometry. As long as she ran in a straight line and kept the length of the tree between herself and Kyle, she should be able to stay out of his line of sight as she moved. Probably. Maybe. Best be quick about it, though. Winding her muscles up like a watch, Jesse leaned forward, propped a boot against the tree, took a deep breath, and ran.

She made a bad start of it -- a foot slipped and twisted across rain-slicked grass -- but she made a stumbling recovery and sped on. Rain danced on her face, and the goopy mud sucked down upon her boots with every step, as if clutching hands laid buried in the earth, pulling her down. For a foolish moment she felt happy, but that was just the monkey demon talking.

As soon as she reached the apex of the hill, a viscous buzz whistled past her ear. Fuck! This Kyle was a lot better shot than her Kyle. But she made it safely over the top and ran half sliding down the other side. Safe.

Across the distant western sky, lightning flashed in a fork of purple light. Two seconds later, the roll of thunder sang by.

Chest heaving with wired exhaustion, she squeezed her weapon and forced herself into a calm. She went over her options. Next to the hill, across the dirt road to the south, laid a grove of trees a few acres wide; a quarter mile away to the west sat her truck, waiting patiently for her return.

Jesse rubbed at her forehead with a mud covered hand. Escape or fight on?

It'd be so easy. Just hop back in her truck, patch up the boo-boo on her arm, and head back to her warehouse to give Derek a nice sloppy blow-job. Live to fight another day. Hell, that was the motto of her life.

Or . . . she could scamper like a rabbit off into the woods and hide in the shrubs. Once there, she could sneak her way east until she was right across the road from them, then blast them all to hell and complete her self-given mission. End it all tonight, one way or another.

Jesse's breath calmed down, and she stood still, rain tapping on her helmet. Once again her life sat on the crossroads of a simple decision, and once again she knew she would make the wrong choice. For an ugly moment, she wished she would just fall into the mud and sink away into nothing; she had grown so tired of her own stupidity.

Still protected by the gentle loom of the grassy hill, Jesse jogged the distance south to the muddy road. The hill gradually gave way to flat ground at this point, which would leave her exposed while she crossed. She frowned. Was this suicide? Nah, Kyle probably wouldn't even notice her during the couple seconds it'd take to get to the woods. And at a range of a hundred yards or more, all he'd see in a shifting blur -- even with night vision and a scope. A calculated risk.

Jesse slowly backed up and prepared for the cross-road sprint. Her heart beat with anticipatory dread; so much of her life revolved around that sensation. Like a addicting drug, really.

She bolted into a run, forcing her gait into an awkward series of stomps to avoid slipping again into the muck. She'd sloshed through the flooded side ditch and made it halfway across the road when the first shot wizzed by her face. She felt the whip of displaced air tickle her eye. Crack!

Shit!

She lowered her head and bulled on. Almost there. Keep running.

A ghostly finger pulled at the back of her belt. Crack!

She made it to the other side and leaped over the drain ditch, and as soon as her feet left the ground, an invisible nightstick zipped from nowhere and whacked hard against her ribs. Crack! She hit the ground feet first, and a foot slipped into the pooled dark water of the ditch. Something then rabbit punched her in the left kidney. Crack! Fuck! Her back arced in a withering spasm, and her brain fumed with bitter regret, but Jesse pumped her legs with sloshing abandon and pushed herself out of the trench, keeping her body crouched low in a near crawl. From a tree to her right, she heard a wet, wooded thunk. Crack!

On all fours Jesse pushed her way into a sea of dark bushes, brushing aside branches with quick swings of her rifle barrel. Crowded trees stood sentinel around her, seeming to look down upon her as she crawled. Her hands and gun soaked shit brown with mud, she burrowed her way through the shrubs like a crazed rodent, wet leaves slapping kisses against her face, and twigs, like skeleton fingers, snagging and tugging upon her clothes.

After a while -- maybe a minute or so -- she stopped. And waited. No more shots. Nothing except the rain.

She allowed herself a smile. She'd done it; she'd lost him and broken through to relative safety. Her hand rubbed along her bruised side and felt a stinging ache. The kevlar had held, though the impact may have a broken rib. Not too bad, though. She could worry about it later.

From her prone position, Jesse turned and cocked her head, trying to get a sense of her bearings. Behind her and to the left, through a million layers of leaves, she could just make out the side of the farmhouse a hundred away. Maybe less. Gradually, she crawled to her left, working her way east towards the house. She still had three grenades left, and once she was in position she could pound away at them from directly across the road.

She chewed on her lip as she crawled. Kyle may have driven her off this time, but let's see how he handles Round Two . . .

Sarah was sneaking along by the garage door when she heard the first shot.

John!

Her brain spun in a frenzy, charging her heart like a cold dynamo, and all in an instant the years of honed combat training came flooding back to her and took charge. Side-jumping to her left, she flattened her crouching body hard against the aluminum door and braced her rifle tight to her shoulder. Her eyes scanned wildly for the next muzzle flash, and she trained an ear to to pinpoint the direction.

Then: Crack!

She saw no flash, but the gunshot came from the west, from a hundred yards or more.

Sniper.

Oh, God.

Crack! Someone inside screamed.

Wet numbness goosebumped her skin. No! Keeping to almost a crawl, she quickly made her way from the garage and marched herself through the rainy mud up to the steps of the front porch.

Crack! Crack! Crack! . . . The popping of the gunfire spun on like a string of far off firecrackers. "My baby needs me!" she thought as she darted up the three steps and up to the front door. Her mind summoned cruel images of John laying on the floor in a pool of his own blood. Who could be the shooter? A 888? No, they don't snipe. Had to be Jesse.

From inside she heard footsteps running, and her hand reached for the knob and . . .

Three shots, back to back. Then, two more.

She twisted the knob: locked.

Through the door she heard Kyle's muffled voice, yelling, "Come on! We've got t--"

The porch shook from the explosion, and Sarah felt her heart freeze in her chest. In the dark, snaking clouds of smoke and dust slithered in tendrils out from under the door, and sawdust from the porch overhang misted down like wood snow. The buds of tears burned in her eyes. No . . .

"John, let's go!" Kyle voice cried out. Two pairs of footsteps faded as they raced away and ran down what sounded like a flight of wooden stairs. Sarah's heart started to beat again; John was alive.

But what now? Kill Jesse, of course; Kyle and Cameron could to wait their turn.

Keeping close to the door, she tentatively stood up and looked west through the scope of her Norinco rifle. Nothing. Useless. Just the darkness of night. She should have stolen something with night vision . . .

But she hadn't. Instead, she had to get John away from all this, keep him safe, be a mother.

Kneeling back down, she pulled out a combat knife from her belt and worked it between the lock and doorjamb. Old, cheap wood. A sharp jerk should be enough.

But the noise it'd make. Even from the basement they'd hear, and Kyle would -- not unreasonably -- believe her to be in league with Jesse. Sarah knew she couldn't win in a straight fight against him; she'd seen how fast he could be, and once you lose the element of surprise you can't get it back. She suppressed a groan of frustration. If only . . .

Barely heard over the rain, Kyle's faint voice drifted up from the inside floorboards. ". . . you protect her with your life!"

At that moment, another booming explosion shook the porch, and Sarah saw the wood-siding of the front wall warp visibly, expanding and contracting as if the house were withering in agony. Chips of white paint flaked off the wall, and a fresh cloud of dust billowed from under the door. From inside, she heard loud creaks and pops as the house slumped and resettled on its newly weakened structure.

Do it now. Sarah jerked the knife viciously to the side, and the lock gave way in a cringing crunch of wood. Loud, though the stressed cries of the house drowned it out.

She slipped the knife back into her belt and pushed the broken door open by a hair. Peeking through the crack, she saw in the darkness an entryway billowing with gray clouds of dust. Bits of wood and sheet-rock littered the floor haphazardly.

Five shots, far off in the distance.

Footsteps stormed up from the basement stairs, and Sarah's right hand tightened on the pistol grip of her rifle. Dashing across the hall in a shadowy blur ran Kyle, a M4 in his hands. He sprinted to the stairway at the end of the house and raced up to the second story, skipping the steps three at a time. His trench-coat flapped behind him like a superhero's cape, and he was gone.

Sarah's mouth hooked into a bitter grin. Now that Kyle's preoccupied with Jesse . . .

While the cat's away? Hmm . . .

The idea sunk its fangs into her mind and poisoned her with fiery resolve. Part of her pleaded that circumstances were different now, that her plans reeked of jealousy and short-sighted pettiness, for surely now was not the time for such measures? But Sarah knew this was not the case; her cause was just, and it had to be done. Jesse's attack laid at her feet as an opportunity -- as providence -- and to disregard it would be foolish, maybe even sacrilegious.

Holding her rifle by her side, she slowly pushed open the door and tiptoed inside, tracking wet mud onto the debris-strewn floor. The settling dust hung in the air like a fog, and to Sarah's right she saw the ruins of what had been a minute earlier a room or office. The two grenades had blown twin car-sized holes into the far wall, leaving broken wood planks along the splintered edges. The scattered rubble of furniture coated the shrapnel-shot floor, and in the corner sat the twisted metal remains of what looked like a mini-refrigerator. Burst cans of Dr. Pepper littered the ground, one of them fizzing soda into the air like a misty fountain.

Sarah stared outside through the holes into the dark, rain-swept night. Any second Jesse could send another grenade her way, and there'd be a bright blast and a flash of pain and that would be it.

She waited a moment, then shook her head and tiptoed on, turning into the same side hall that Kyle had come from. A knob-less door hung ajar along the wall, and an old cupboard stood next to it. Through the door were stairs.

"One day John, you'll thank me for this," she thought as she took the first step down into the basement.

From the second story above, Kyle fired a shot from his M4.

His right hand clenched in a bloody fist, John pressed the gauze tightly to his head and grimaced in pain. The graze across his scalp stung and throbbed, and blood dribbled down his face like a heavy sweat. His head swam with air, and he knew he probably had at least a mild concussion. He gritted his teeth and sighed. Fucking great.

He looked at the chip in his left hand and carefully stepped over to the table where Cameron's body laid. Kyle had already removed her skull before the attack, and it sat on the edge next to her shoulder. The upper right plate of her cranial dome had been pulled away, and its various internal mechanisms scooped out and dismantled; the metal parts laid in two neat rows on the wood table, as if on display.

From the back of her slender neck flowed the boneless, wadded up skin of her scrunched up face. A dead brown eye looked up at him from between two fleshy folds, and in the gentle swaying of the light bulb above, the eye seemed to twitch unnaturally.

A start of nerves crept up in his mind, but he kicked them away. Not now. Have to focus. Cameron needs you.

Muffled through the ceiling, he heard a gunshot, and on instinct he reached for the MP5 that hung from his shoulder strap. But he knew it was Kyle. He must have spotted . . . Jesse?

Had to be her. His mother may be a little crazy, but there's no way she'd shoot grenades at her own son, no matter how much she hated Cameron.

Another shot, and John suddenly felt ashamed that he wasn't doing more to help. What kind of General stays out of the fight?

Well, most, actually; you can't lead if you're dead.

Another shot.

And anyway, John was Cameron's last line of defense. Her life literally rested in his hands.

"I'll take care of you, Cam," he whispered to the chip.

Another shot. And another.

Then . . . from the stairway, a creaking step.

Shit!

John quickly dropped Cameron's chip into the inside pocket of his jacket, and readied his MP5, bracing the metal folding stock to his shoulder. If Kyle was upstairs, who the hell was that? He aimed the weapon at the basement's entrance and did his best to ignore the sudden pounding in his skull.

Another creaking step. Closer, this time , and it sounded wet, muddy, with an audible squish.

"John?" It was his mother's voice, whispering.

His heart surged in his chest, and he swallowed a cold lump. It had to be a trick. A terminator trick. John's eyes darted to the duffel bag near the wall. The depleted uranium slugs . . .

Without ceremony, his mother peeked an eye around the corner of the doorway.

John felt his limbs shudder with nervous shock, and he very nearly sprayed her face with 9mm bullets. "Mom," he said numbly. His mother . . . and Jesse? Oh, God. He almost wished she had been a terminator.

She slowly stepped out from the door and stood before him, her hair and clothes dripping wet. Under her jacket she wore a kevlar vest, and in her hands she held an AK47 variant loaded with a drum magazine. Her pale face gaped wide-eyed at the dripping gore running from his head, and she took a step forward. "John . . . " she started.

"Stay back!" he shouted, tightening his grip on the weapon. He moved his finger inside the trigger guard stared her down through the gun's 4X scope. His right hand tremble and felt sticky from all the blood.

"John, you're bleeding," she said, looking as if she were about to crumble.

"No shit!" he spat. "Your accomplice shot me!"

Tears brimmed in her eyes, and she shook her head. "John, I swear. I had nothing to do with . . . with Jesse."

"What? You expect me to believe this is all a fucking coincidence?" He took a few deep breaths and stepped back, his head full of helium. "How did you find us?" he demanded.

His mother said nothing, but her eyes drifted to his jacket's breast pocket. And then John remembered, and he knew. Still keeping the sub-machine gun trained on her head, he lowered his weapon slightly and searched the pocket with his left hand, clawing into it like animal. He felt a . . . dime? No, two dimes. He pulled them out and examined a pair of small round computer chips, both slightly different from each other. GPS trackers. But two of them? God damn it.

He threw them in her face, and she flinched. "And you said you just wanted me to look nice . . . " His breath rose to an angry chuckle, and in the background Kyle fired two shots.

His mother looked away for a moment, but then swallowed and took another step towards him. The light above her shifted, obscuring her face in shadow, and she glanced over at Cameron's headless body. "Where's her chip?" she asked, her tone deliberately flat.

Straight to the point. Crazy bitch. "She . . . she's dead," John said, his voice genuinely hoarse. "Jesse shot her."

"You're lying," she said. "I heard Kyle tell you to protect her, and . . . " She took another step forward and stood next to the table. ". . . and you were whispering to her." Even in her dim silhouette, John could see her vicious grin.

"You're not killing Cam," he said, backing himself against the door to Stark's freezer.

Kyle fired again.

"You know we have to, John," she said. "She's dangerous. She's dangerous for the future."

John shook his head. "That's not going to happen. She's not going to do those things. Not this time."

His mother nodded. "That's true," she said, letting go of her rifle and allowing it to dangle by its strap. "And I'm going to make sure of it." She reached into the table's tool tray and pulled out a small sledgehammer. "Give me the chip, John."

"No!"

Outside, the thunderstorm roared, and she stepped closer, casually slapping the hammerhead into her open palm. "I'm sorry, John, but I'm doing this because I love you."

Kyle's gunfire sped up into a crackling crescendo, but John barely noticed. He brought the MP5's scope back up to his eye and centered the cross-hairs on the gray shadow of her nose. "Don't take another step! I'll shoot!"

She shook her head and grinned like a skull. "You can't shoot me," she said with infinite certitude.

John's finger twitched nervously against the trigger, and he sighed. She was right. He couldn't do it. But now what? Fight her hand-to-hand? Too risky. His mother fought quick and underhanded, and was as slippery as a snake. One good punch to his jacket, and Cam would be history.

He knew what he had to do.

Lowering his weapon, he turned it upwards and aimed the gun under his chin, using his left hand to guide and ram the barrel tight into the junction between his jaw and neck. "I'll do it," he said quietly, lightly stroking the trigger.

His mother hissed, and her eyes narrowed to black slits. "No, you won't," she said, though her voice betrayed a crack of doubt.

"You don't know anything," John said, suddenly giggling through his breath. "I already have. Three days ago. Have you forgotten? Where do you think Kyle came from?"

His mother winced, and he pressed on, "Yeah, I should be dead, and the only reason I'm not is because of her." He nodded at the headless body. "So don't say I won't, because we both know I can."

Through the dark she stared at him with blank silence, and John knew he was being judged. Her shoulders slumped. "You're pathetic," she said.

Feeling dizzy, he swallowed and felt the cold ring of the MP5's muzzle press against his Adam's apple. She was probably right, but . . . "I love her, Mom."

She paused at that, but then shook her head and said, "She's confusing you, John. She can't love you back. Not like a human can."

"It doesn't matter," John said. "You're still not killing her." He shifted the gun slightly, his twisted wrist aching from holding the weapon at such an odd angle. His mouth twitched; just one jerk of his finger and . . . the end. The idea seemed . . . appealing, somehow. And that scared him.

His mother stared at the floor for a moment. "Put the gun down, John," she said in defeat. "I won't try anything. Not anymore. I promise."

"I don't beli -- " John stopped. He heard footsteps, creaking from the stairs.

Dropping the hammer, his mother took up her rifle and spun towards the entrance, squatting in a defensive crouch.

The footsteps stopped, and John heard Kyle's voice. "Are you all right, John?"

"I'm fine. My mom's down here. Hold your fire." Then, to his mother: "Don't shoot, Mom." And he knew she wouldn't. The very sound of the gunshot would make his finger twitch.

The steps begin again. "Is Cameron okay?" Kyle's voice asked.

John pulled out her chip with his left hand and held it in his fist. "She's fine. Don't shoot."

Kyle emerged from behind the corner of the doorway and stepped into the dim light, holding out his M4 like a pistol. He gave John a "what-the-fuck-are-you-doing?" look, then glared down at his mother . . .

John pressed his thumb against the tip of Cameron's chip, holding her like a cigarette lighter. "Don't shoot, Kyle!" he cried. "If you hurt my mom, I swear I'll snap her in two." He would, at that. And then I'll pull the trigger . . .

Kyle looked at John's fist with fear in his eyes, but that gradually melted into anger. His pupils flashed blue. "You said you loved her," he said with a growl.

"I love my mom too."

Kyle lowered his gun and pointed a finger at her. "She's here to kill Cameron, John. She's with --"

"I know, but she won't. Not anymore." John looked at his mother. "Mom, put your gun down."

She looked at him, her face a scared, scowling mask, but she lowered her gun's muzzle to the floor and stood up.

John took his thumb off the chip and gingerly pulled the sub-machine gun from under his chin. He looked at Kyle. "Was it Jesse?"

Kyle gave his mother a dirty look, but nodded. "Probably. I didn't get a good look at her face, and I don't know what Jesse looks like, anyway, but it was definitely a woman."

John frowned. "Is she . . . ?"

He shook his head. "No. She ran south into the woods, and I lost her. I think she's going to try to flank us." Kyle looked over his mother and Cameron's body. "She could come back at any moment, and that grenade launcher can bring down the house. We should head north, retreat through the junkyard."

His mother looked away as she spoke. "My car's parked a quarter mile north of here."

Kyle gave a curt nod. "Right. Now I'll take --"

With a cracking boom, the whole ceiling to John's left collapsed in an avalanche of falling planks and sheet-rock. The piled cardboard boxes on that side of the basement fell over like crumbling dynamos and tumbled across the floor, spilling out old papers and books and rusted plumbing fixtures. The light bulb above swung and flickered, and a cloud of dust swept in from the splintered hole in the ceiling and enveloped them in a billowing fog that smelled of sawdust.

Like arthritic joints, creaks and pops reverberated throughout the house, and right above John's head a support beam six inches thick cracked down the middle and buckled into a wide "V". The remaining right-half of the ceiling bulged down visibly, the wood planks groaning with strain.

"Everyone out!" Kyle yelled. "Out of the basement!"

Kyle didn't have to tell John twice. The three of them ran, Sarah in front and Kyle bringing up the rear, and, as they worked their way up the dark stairway, John could see the wood planked walls to either side of the narrow corridor wiggle back and forth like a special effect from a fun house. Dust rained from the ceiling, and the inside of John's throbbing skull sloshed and swirled from his sudden movements, as if it were filled with water and sand.

"Go! Go! Go!" Kyle cried, firmly pushing John along. John felt his MP5 swing against his side by its strap.

Leaving the stairs, they ran in the smoky dark towards the front door at the end of the hall. John realized he still held Cameron's chip in his fist and quickly slid it back into the inside pocket of his jacket.

His mother was already out the door ahead of him and John only a few steps away when he heard behind him the "boom!" of the next grenade. A concussive force pushed at him, and he heard the ripping and tearing as the innards of the house gave way in a sideways shower of debris.

John stepped out the front door onto the porch and felt his right ankle buckle from under him, and he began to fall. Kyle caught him from behind by the back scruff of his jacket and shoved him along until they were free from the porch's overhand; there, he gently lowered him into the wet mud. John looked down at his leg and saw a ragged pencil-thin rip through the jeans of the lower half of his calf, which gushed a flow of blood that ran down his ankle and into his sneaker. Funny how it didn't hurt until he looked at it . . .

Behind him, angry cracks and snaps sounded from the inside of the ruined house, and the whole structure seemed to come alive as it visibly shrugged and shambled downward in apparent exhaustion. The roof drooped into a slant, and shingles flaked off in a cascade of tumbling black squares set against the overcast charcoal of the night sky. Accompanied by the shatter of windows, the walls subtly shifted into new positions, and bands of wood siding snapped off and fell tumbling from the house. With a groan, the vertical support beams of the front porch slid down to a thirty degree angle, and dust and smoke vomited forth from the front door.

The house looked as if a giant had sat on it.

John blinked numbly and clutched at his ankle as raindrops beat against his face. Behind the house he heard the loud crackle of automatic gunfire. It was close, maybe only thirty or forty yards away, and he could hear the bullets as they chewed their way into the house's structure like a swarm of flying termites.

Kyle stared down into his face. "Can you run?" A beat. "Can you run?"

Head pounding harder then ever before, John nodded and pushed himself up and took a step, but his right foot trembled and burned as if hungry ants crawled under his skin. He forced himself to take another step, and then another, but his gait remained trapped in a limp.

Far off behind him, he heard the metallic clicks and snaps of Jesse reloading her weapon. After a brief pause, she resumed her spray of gunfire, and tiny bursts of splinters exploded out from the front wall; her rounds were eating through.

His mother put her arm around him for support, and John gripped his MP5 and instinctively placed a protective hand over the pocket containing Cameron's chip. His mother pulled him towards the junkyard. "Come on!" she said shouting in his face. They slowly limped together through the wet mud, each step sloshing. For a moment John glanced back at Kyle.

In the dark, his father looked scared and uncertain, and Jesse's fire continued to rat-a-tat-tat into the back of the house. "You two take cover," Kyle said. "I'll hold her off." He pointed a finger at John. "Keep Cameron safe!" he said. "Keep her safe! If anything happens to her, I swear I'll kill you both!"

Keeping his left hand steadfast over Cameron's chip, John quickly nodded and hobbled with his mother into the rusted labyrinth of the junkyard.

Far off behind him, he heard Jesse reload again.

Gripping his M4 with both hands, Kyle slowly moved in a crouch to the garage by the east side of the house. Each step sunk his ruined sneakers deep into the sucking muck, and above cold rain beat down against his head, soaking his brown hair into a mat of rat tails. Stepping east along the front of the garage door, he stopped at the corner and took a moment to pull a twisted metal fragment from the back of his shoulder. He casually tossed it away; though the bullet wounds in his chest had already clotted, the shrapnel in his back still itched somewhat, like a bad rash.

He clenched his jaw. He shouldn't be here; this all felt like a mistake. To be sure, covering your side's retreat is just good tactics, but what if one of the people on your side is an enemy sympathizer? Or even a cohort? Would Sarah try something again? Of course, doing so would mean both hers and her son's deaths, but . . . well, she was crazy.

And would John try something?

By all rights, Kyle should have killed John for threatening Cameron's life, no matter what the circumstances, but . . .

He winced and felt as if someone had pulled a light switch in his brain. No. He should not harm John. That is not the right thing to do.

Well, okay, but it was still open season on Sarah. He'd take care of her later. Make it look like a suicide.

Kyle boosted his hearing and listened. Jesse had stopped shooting, and he could hear her thirty yards away, stomping purposefully across the muddy road towards the house. Whoever this woman was, she obviously didn't have much patience. Or sense. She should have waited in the woods and sniped as they left, instead of randomly shelling the house and spraying the air like an idiot. All she'd done is spooked her target into fleeing. And if she wanted to kill John, why didn't she shoot a grenade at him from the very start? And only a suicidal fool would come back for a second solo attack after losing the element of surprise.

He frowned. Her actions didn't make sense, and in a way that made even her more deadly. The classic dangerous lunatic.

Sparing a second to increase the adrenalin flow to his bloodstream, Kyle turned the corner and walked south along the eastern wall of the garage. He knelt down at the next corner and listened again. Jesse was about twenty yards away now; he could hear her panting breaths over the plip-plops of the rain.

He smiled. Just peek around and shoot off her head -- and at this range he couldn't miss. Almost too easy.

Flush against the wall to his right, Kyle switched the M4 to his left hand and braced it to his shoulder. Leaning forward, he peeked an eye around the corner, and, through augmented vision as clear as day, he saw her walking hunched over through the open chain-link gate, coated in mud and looking like something that had crawled out of a swamp. Kyle used the carbine's scope to draw a bead on her head, but she turned to look at him and he froze.

Commander Kelly.

It was her. There could be no doubt about it. Under the kevlar helmet, the mud-streaked face of his brother's killer stared back at him, grinning like a loon. She even had the mole.

Why the hell was she here?

And why did she have two eyes?

Kyle hesitation lasted for only a tenth of a second, but that was enough. Swinging her M16 in his direction, Kelly fired from her hip a stream of bullets, and Kyle felt a sting run along the top of his head, and everything went dark.

Jesse leaned over Kyle's dead face and spat. The saliva drooled out from her mud covered lips in a thin, gooey stream, landing in a trickle across his open eyes.

"That's for Derek," she said, smiling. A pointless gesture, really; the rain washed the spittle away almost immediately, along with the steady stain of blood that ran from the crown of his head. What kind of future did Kyle come from that he would torture his own brother? What was his Connor-less world like? Jesse shrugged; she'll never know now.

Leaning against the back of the garage, she popped in a fresh magazine and sighed. So close now. The anticipation of climax quickened her breath, and the dull ache in her ribs felt good now, warm, like worn muscles after a strenuous workout. She felt ready -- primed for her task.

Peeking around the corner first, she stepped over Kyle's body and turned, slowly walking north along the eastern wall of the garage.

Tonight. The future dies tonight. No more Queegs, no more Internal Security, no more interrogation rooms or shady deals with liquid metals or any of that shit. John and Cameron's deaths will cleanse the Resistance, distill the war into a stark purity of absolutes: good and evil, man and machine -- the foundation for a better tomorrow.

All that was needed now was to track down a crying little boy, wandering aimlessly lost in a junkyard, all alone . . .

She frowned. Alone?

Or had Sarah come along with them?

She stopped at the next corner, and her frown deepened into a scowl; she hadn't thought of that, but then it probably didn't matter. She'd just have to kill them both. Pity about Sarah, though. From what she'd read from the her diary, John's mother really seemed to have her head screwed on right; too bad she couldn't lead the Resistance. But then Sarah was doomed to die of cancer in a few years anyway, so killing her now would be an act of mercy.

Also, this way she wouldn't have to watch her son turn into a monster.

Jesse poked her head around the corner and scanned the junkyard with a careful sweep of her scope. Seeing nothing, she hunkered down and stepped away from the garage, moving slowly and inexorably towards the sea of dead cars.

Lightning flashed across the sky.

Behind him John heard the distant bark of automatic gunfire. His mother pulled him down into an even lower crouch, and they continued their slow, limping progress north through the junkyard, navigating their way between rusted vehicles that laid haphazardly about like sleeping beasts squatting in mud.

The onslaught of raindrops pelted him from above, slowly soaking his jacket through and through. He cupped a paranoid hand over his pocket and felt the Cameron's chip through the thin corduroy. Would the water damage it? What if Jesse kills Kyle? Who'd put Cameron back together then? His head pounded, and he stomped the thoughts away. No. Can't worry about that shit now. Focus on not dying.

As they moved, John stole a quick glance behind him. The house sat maybe fifty yards away, and if Jesse were to show herself now, she'd have little trouble gunning the two of them down. Especially with that grenade launcher of hers. They needed cover.

"Here," he whispered, pointing to a nearby convertible. He tugged himself free from his mother's grasp and hobbled behind the car, his injured foot slipping painfully sideways through the mud. He almost lost his balance and fell on his back, but quickly recovered and pulled himself into a kneeling position, his MP5 ready in his hands.

Gripping her assault rifle, his mother squatted by his side and shifted closer to him, her face right up next to his. "Don't fire until I say so," she said, hissing in his ear. "You hear me? I want to draw her out -- away from cover."

Was his mother giving him advice on how to kill someone? Really killing someone? The constant throb in his head froze away, and John looked her in the eyes and nodded, doing his best not to flinch at her rotten-egged breath. Almost by instinct his left hand continued its protective sentry over the chip's pocket, and his mother's eyes drifted down to it and narrowed.

"I'm not going to try anything, John. I swear." An undertone of disgust tainted her whisper.

"All right," he said, and decided he believed her. She wouldn't -- not now, anyway . . .

Following his mother's lead, John peeked his eyes over the warped, half-melted trunk of the car and watched the house through the rainy dark. With the only source of illumination being an unseen streetlight a half-mile away, the farmhouse appeared as only a vague gray outline of ruined gloom. He looked through his MP5's scope and used his thumb to switch on the night vision. With a click his color palette shifted into a grainy green and black, and John felt his senses sharpen and narrow like a razor, his entire world being the scanning circle of his scope. The background pounding of the rain faded into quiet, and he took a deep breath and for the first time smelled the earthy pure scent of churned mud.

"Keep lower," his mother whispered, and John hunkered down and turned his sub-machine gun horizontally flat against the convertible's hull, peeking a single eye over its horizon and through the scope. Watching the house's garage, a helmeted head appeared around the corner, scanning the junkyard through a M16's scope.

"Hello, Jesse," John thought. Jesse turned the weapon in his direction, and he had to resist an impulse to duck down. The sudden movement may attract her attention, and he didn't need to make her job any easier.

"Stay still," his mother warned. He turned an eye towards her and saw she was squatting a couple feet to his left, aiming her AK47-ish rifle right over the top rim of the car's warped metal door. Her soggy hair hung down her face like a mass of tiny dead snakes, and she squinted her eyes and scowled like a Medusa.

He looked back through the scope and saw that Jesse had just left the cover of the garage. Step by step she tiptoed north-west towards the junkyard, cutting across the front of the house like a metal duck in a shooting gallery. Whoever this Jesse was, she must be pretty stupid. He could see she wore a set of heavy body armor, but even still, the whole junkyard was ambush central. She must be terrible at chess.

Lightning flashed across the sky, thunder following a heartbeat later.

John tightened his MP5's folding stock against his shoulder and flicked his gun's selector switch from full-auto to three round burst. His finger stroked the trigger.

"Not yet," his mother said. "Not yet . . . "

Jesse took another step, and he dutifully tracked her, keeping the center of her torso within his cross-hairs. She may be armored, but it was still better to hit her in the kevlar than try to go for head shots and miss.

"Now!" his mother said in loud rasp.

His mother fired the first shot, and he a three round burst an instant later. Jesse stopped in her tracks and jerked at the impacts, her head looking around with dumb surprise. He fired another burst of 9mm bullets, and his mother plinked away two more rounds in rapid succession. Through the grainy green-scale scope, John watched as the lead tore into her chest armor, sending puffs of wet mud flying from her body. Jesse turned on her heel and made a staggering run back for the cover of the garage, and John and his mother let her have it, their rapid hail of focused gunfire drowning out all other sounds.

This wasn't like Sarkassian. Not at all. It was impersonal, dissociated; Jesse was just a blurry green figure, stumbling and scampering like a wounded rabbit, and all John had to do was keep her in his cross-hairs and keep pulling the trigger. His gun vibrated in his hands like a thing alive, and he tightened his grip and found himself grinning, teeth bared. Next to him his mother fired away in a semi-automatic stream of crack, crack, crack, crack . . .

A mist of night-vision-green blood spewed from Jesse's right shoulder, and her M16 fell from her hand, swinging wildly by its shoulder strap as she stumbled and ran. A half-second later, when she was only five feet from the garage's corner, another liquid explosion erupted from her left bicep, giving the arm a second elbow that bent and swung unnaturally. Her head pulled back in an unheard cry of agony, and her legs did a fleeing drunken dance that ended with her slumping against the wood siding by the garage door, which had already been pockmarked by a dozen missed shots.

With a final click, John's gun suddenly fell dry, having already expended its thirty round magazine. So he watched through the scope as Jesse painfully pushed herself from the wall, leaving a dark green smear on the wood, and staggered the last couple steps to the corner. His mother fired a final shot, and blood sprayed from Jesse's left thigh, and she lurched and fell behind the corner, only her booted feet remaining in John's line of sight. A foot twitched.

He expelled a long-held breath, and felt his muscles relax in a soothing warmth, juxtaposing nicely with cold rain that padded down on his head.

Well, that threat's been taken care of.

He frowned and looked at his mother.

Face down in the mud, Jesse floated in a galaxy of pain. Her right arm stung and twitched as if it were aswarm with fire ants, and her left arm she couldn't feel at all. Her ribs stabbed like spikes deep into her insides, and she knew her armor had failed her because a wash of blood gushed from her mouth, soaking her tongue with the taste of liquid copper. She tried to breath, and it felt as though her lungs were filled with pudding.

"I'm dying," she thought, and the idea slid across her soul like weeping violin strings. It couldn't end like this -- all she'd been through: the nightmare on the Carter, her daring escape from the torture room, her assassination of Cameron, her journey back in time . . . all to end here, sinking into the muck, unknown by the world. Not fair. She should have just killed John when she had the chance. Stupid, stupid, stupid . . .

Jesse heard two feet step up to her, gushing lightly into the mud. She lifted up her dead-dizzy head and forced open her eyes, her lids peeling away a layer of mud.

Two dirty sneakers, brown and rain-slicked. She couldn't raise her head to look any higher, and her straining neck urged her to give up fall back into the slop.

A gun barrel pressed down against the top of her kelvar helmet.

"I guess 'Kelly' was just an alias, right?" Kyle's voice said.

Jesse blinked. Huh? Why the fuck was Kyle alive?

And why did he have an Kiwi accent?

"This is for Derek," Kyle added.

What the fuck did th--

John startled slightly at the distant crack of the gunshot, and he saw through his scope that Jesse's foot had stopped twitching. He glanced over at his mother, who remained as still as a statue and glared narrow-eyed through the scope of her AK47.

From behind the corner of the garage, Kyle stepped out, nearly tripping over Jesse's legs. He seemed disoriented, and his left hand held the crown of his head as blood trickled down over his face. His M4 dropped from his grasp, and he crouched down and sat in the mud, leaning back against the garage door. He looked as if he were about to pass out.

John looked at his mother and watched her finger touch the trigger. "Don't do it," he said.

Her eye twitched, and she clenched her jaw.

"Don't," he said again. "It's murder. You're not a murderer."

Slow seconds passed, and John tightened his grip on his MP5. "Not yet," he thought. A raindrop ran down his nose, and he stifled a sneeze.

"Alright," she said with a sigh, and lowered her rifle. She looked down, and though in the dark her eyes seemed as black pits, he could tell she was crying.

I'm sorry mom . . .

Swiveling from his hips, John lunged at his mother, thrusting the butt of his gun into her face with both hands, stabbing as if it were a sword. She looked up at that same instant, and the metal folding stock struck her with a sickening crunch in the furrow between her cheek and nose. He felt the wet impact of metal on bone reverberate through the weapon and up his arms, and she groaned and fell over backwards, blood spraying from her nostrils.

Still hobbled by his ankle, he scrabbled up and upon her like a crippled cat, awkwardly and painfully kicking her rifle away and into the mud. She mumbled angrily and lifted her head up, but he butt-stroked her again, taking special care to check his strength. The blow made a light cracking sound against her forehead, and her head fell back, her eyes rolling and fluttering.

John pulled the Glock from her hip holster and stood on unsteady legs, looking down in horror at what he had done. His heart beat butterflies in his chest, and a cold stone weighed in the pit of his stomach, making him want to vomit bile. Oh God. He ran a shaking hand through his hair and felt a fresh crop of blood ooze from his wound, running to pink water in the rain.

He felt dizzy. Oh God. Oh God. Oh God . . .

He took a deep breath and padded Cameron's chip. No. He did what he had to do. Too much had been at stake. If she had half a chance, she would have beat him senseless and shatter the chip right before his eyes -- all under the pretense of being "for his own good" or "part of his training" or some other such bullshit. Crazy bitch. She deserved whatever she got.

He tittered nervously, and for the first time he looked over the convertible they'd taken cover behind. The upholstery and seats had long since been incinerated to charred nubs, and the intense heat had warped the chipped red metal of the vehicle's frame. A few inches of rainwater pooled along the bottom of the inside, rippling and splashing lightly with raindrops.

He'd seen this car before.

John pointed the Glock down at his unconscious mother and sniffed. "Mom, we need to talk."

"Mom."

Something poked Sarah in the ribs. "Mom."

John's voice drifted through her oblivion like a ghost in the dark, and she opened her right eye, then immediately shut it again, wincing at the pain that shot from her cheek to her nose to her forehead, bitterly informing her of the swollen grapefruit that sealed shut her left eye.

"Mom." Another poke. In the distance she heard the sounds of heavy things being carried and dropped, as if someone were loading a truck.

Sarah forced open her eye again and looked around with blurred confusion. It was still night, though the rain had passed, and the sky was now clear and black. She tried to move and suddenly became aware that she laid in pool of tepid water about a hand's width deep; along the bottom she felt a cold sheet of metal press against her body. It was lumpy and warped, suggesting it had been previously melted by an intense heat. Her left ankle tugged against a length of enveloping chain, and she sighed and realized she laid in the burned out interior of a convertible.

That convertible.

Cameron's coffin.

Her sight fell into semi-sharp focus, and she saw John standing over her, looking down over the top of the charred passenger's side door. The silver light of the moon outlined his shadowed face, and she could just barely make out the bandage that covered the top of his head.

In his hand he held a hacksaw.

My son the serial killer? For some unearthly reason, Sarah laughed. Or tried to, anyway. It came out as a pained moan. "Are you here to kill me, John?" she asked.

"Kyle thinks I should," her son said. From the creak in his voice, she could tell he'd been crying.

She lifted her head up and winced. "I won't do anything to hurt her," she said. "I promise." Her mouth twitched at the lie.

John rested his arms on the door and blew out a breath, the hacksaw dangling in his hand. "The sad thing is, I believe you," he said. "But you could change your mind tomorrow. Or next week. Or five minutes from now." He shook his head sadly. "You can't be trusted anymore."

"You gave Cameron a second chance," she said. "Give one to me."

Her son dropped the hacksaw into the water by her side and stood back up. "It'll take you a few minutes to saw through that chain. By that time we'll be long gone." He paused, and his voice went cold and hard. "Don't try to follow us. I'll kill you next time, and don't think that I won't."

He stood there a moment and said nothing, waiting for her to respond. Sarah's head pounded, and she bit her lip. She wanted to scream at him, hiss, spit, throw curses, tell him he's betraying the future, and that she was ashamed of him, but she knew it would do no good, and her fear for his safety overrode all else. As he turned away, she called out to him in a whisper.

"John." He looked back at her expectantly. "I don't trust Kyle," she continued. "Be careful around him."

John nodded curtly -- almost imperceptibly. "Take care," he said, then walked away from her, stepping out of her view. She could hear his footsteps mulching through the mud, limping slightly.

Sitting up in the car took a great deal more effort than she would have thought. Rocks of pain ground against each other inside her skull, and her brains weighed on her neck like a medicine ball; every movement made it worse. Finally she managed to get her hands over the rim of the car door and pulled herself into an uncomfortable sitting position.

Through one eye, she watched as John walked back to the ruined house, fading into the night. After a minute a truck started, and she saw its lights move in the dark as it left the junkyard and turned left onto the mud road, vanishing over the horizon.

"I've lost him," she thought. "In more ways than one." Her soul felt numb, paralyzed, as if this were all happening to someone else.

It only took a couple minutes to saw through the padlocked chain binding her ankle to the steering column, and after that she painfully climbed out of the car, tossing the hacksaw into the mud. In the aftermath of the rain and battle, the junkyard possessed an unreal quality about it, like an abandoned landscape from a past nightmare, lingering pointlessly unused.

Sarah casually strolled through the mud towards the garage, the chain around her ankle jingling with every step. Crickets chirped.

She found Jesse stripped of her weapons and lying face down on the ground, her kevlar vest a peppered ruin of bullet impacts. Her bloody left arm was bent crooked at the humerus, and a dime sized hole had been punctured in the top of her helmet. Sarah knelt down and pulled the body out of the wet earth, flipping her over and cradling her in her arms.

Sightless eyes stared out half-covered in muck, and her jaw hung ajar with pulpy red-pink tissue leaking out from the corner of her mouth. Jesse's face looked confused -- but not frightened.

"This woman tried to kill my son," she thought, and wondered why she didn't hate her. Derek had said Jesse came from a future where John and Cameron were "together" . . . from the beginning.

Sarah frowned.

What had that world been like?

July 26, 2027

USS Jimmy Carter, Los Angeles

Bare and poorly ventilated, the hot, cramped supply cabin stank of human waste.

Feverishly exhausted and far past any concern for false modesty, Jesse, Dietze, Hayes, and Gavin had long since stripped off their outer garments and tossed them in the middle of the room to use as communal rags. Their chaffed, bloody ankles bound by cables to the bulkheads behind them, they each sat in a corner and squatted in their soiled underwear, their legs splayed open with sweaty indifference. Like a bored chimp, Jesse mindlessly picked at the scabby, bloodstained crotch of her panties, the menstrual residue from her period a few days back.

Period? Or miscarriage? Probably the latter. There had been way too much blood. Had it been caused by the shrapnel wounds in her side? Stress? Something she ate? Coincidence? She'd cried for hours when the gushing started, the others looking on with uncomfortable sympathy. Fuck knows why she had bothered. It wasn't like she was going to keep the bloody thing, anyway.

That had been a few days ago, and the rust-colored stain on the metal floor had dried to a rough crust, though parts of it mixed with the stagnant pools of urine and diarrhea that covered where she sat; the terminators may feed them, but they obviously didn't believe in restroom breaks.

She pulled loose a flake of blood and flicked it away.

"The engine's stopped," Ensign Gavin said.

Jesse snapped from her reverie. How long had it been since someone talked? Hours, at least. Maybe days. Before the last feeding time, certainly. But when had that been?

The yellow, low-watt bulb above flickered, filling the gray room with a sickly light. Seaman Hayes continued his comatose stare at the soiled floor, but Private Dietze stirred and looked up blearily. "Wha . . . ooh . . . say?" he asked through a swollen mouth missing half its teeth. Shame, that. He used to have such a pretty smile.

The ensign sighed. "I said the engine's stopped. We've stopped."

Jesse pushed herself up until she sat cross-legged, ignoring the itch that crawled under her bandaged side. She hoped to hell she didn't get an infection. Especially in all this shit.

"Where are we?" she asked, then felt stupid for asking.

"I don't know, but if they're going to infiltrate Serrano . . . " Gavin shrugged. "We're probably at the East Basin Harbor."

"They're going to kill us," Hayes whispered, rubbing at his bandaged, broken wrist. "They're going to strip off our skin and wear it."

"Shu . . . up," Dietze said, wincing in pain as he spoke.

Jesse would have rolled her eyes if she had the energy. "They're all like six foot six, how the fuck are they going pass themselves off as us -- even if they were skinjobs?"

Gavin nodded. "And they won't need to, anyway. Not with the liquid metal."

They heard metal taps, and immediately all four of them went as quiet as mice. Was it feeding time? Or . . . ? The idea of change to their circumstances made Jesse's heart jackhammer in her chest.

The taps turned into clanks until they stopped right outside the steel door, which then swung open to reveal the one eyed 900. Instead of the usual pot of gruel, it carried in its hand a spool of cable. God damn it.

None of them resisted as it tied their hands behind their back. Jesse barely had enough strength to stand up; struggling now would just be stupid. And she liked having a full set of teeth.

It walked them out of their cell and through the ship as though they were dogs, their four cable leashes held tight in its left grip. Still in her underwear, Jesse stumbled and wavered in her steps, her legs weakened through days of inactivity and malnutrition. As they made the long, stair-climbing trek to the top deck, she saw ahead of her other 900s escorting their own packs of humans, some of them fully clothed, others not so. Evidently all of the surviving crew were being taken out for a walk. Arf! Arf!

Next to her, Hayes started to blubber. "We're going to die . . . " he whispered with a croaking sob.

Jesse sighed, and forced herself to continue the march. Her brain pounded from her exertions, and her bound wrists ached.

The one eyed metal ushered them up the steps of the main hatchway, and as her head broke into the outside (Oh, God! Fresh air!) she saw that Gavin had been right.

"East Basin Harbor," the ensign confirmed, smiling to mask his fear.

The crumbling brick ruins of a hundred burned out warehouses lined the coastline like a maw of jagged gray teeth, the pale red mouth of a dust-filled sky loomed above. Floating in the murky water of the harbor, the Carter sat moored to a paved dock that looked consistently maintained and clashed badly with the surrounding rubble.

Fifty yards inland sat the squat concrete entrance of the East Basin Bunker. It was about the size of a house and shaped like a pyramid with its top half sawed off. On the side facing her stood a great pair of reinforced hyperalloy doors with two slitted window above, one on each side. Absurdly, Jesse thought it looked like a giant stone robot face. Across its square roof rested four anti-aircraft plasma batteries -- two of which pointed ominously at the Carter.

The 900 led the four of them off the top deck and down a metal walkway leading to the dock. As she made her way down, Jesse saw that the rest of the crew were already lined up along the paved edge. She counted about thirty of them, hands bound and kneeling submissively. Their robot captors stood behind them, holding the leashes.

In the center of the line, next to the 715, stood the redheaded figure of the T-1000.

A half-naked Cullie knelt between them.

Wrapped around the commander's neck like a noose was a length of cable, the other end casually gripped by the 715. He hung his head down passively, and his shoulders slumped lopsided, leaning to the left. The empty space below the bandaged stump of his right arm seemed obscene somehow -- a maimed outrage against a man who deserved better. Cullie's haggard face turned to give Jesse a blank-eyed stare as she passed, but she quickly looked away to avoid eye contact. How he must hate her . . .

As the 900 walked Jesse and others to their place at the end of the line, her eyes caught something odd about the T-1000's legs. Instead of the appearance of pale human skin, the bottom third of them shone with the same gray tone and texture of the pavement it stood upon, as if the creature had feet of concrete . . .

No sooner did Jesse and the others kneel than the great metal doors of the bunker began to slid open, grinding and moaning as they moved apart. Gradually, and with a final metallic clank, the doors grew still, and, from the inside darkness, two rows of men, six each, marched out with clockwork unison. Dietze moaned when he saw them, and Jesse squinted: Rossbach skinjobs. Probably 850s, all modeled after that long dead Austrian soldier. The identical machines wore the somewhat ridiculous looking deep purple fatigues of Internal Security's Field Division, and all except one carried in their hands an over-sized rifle that looked like the Westinghouse M-20's bigger brother. The single unarmed Rossbach held instead a large metal crate, similar to the one the T-1000 had slept in.

Bringing up the rear between the two parallel rows walked a group of three figures. Queeg, Cameron, and a wolfish-looking man in his thirties dressed in a plain dark-green Mao suit. Jesse had never seen him before, but she could guess who he was. Oh, hell.

The two rows of Rossbachs branched out in choreographed order and made a line ten paces from the crew of the Carter. They and Queeg stared forward impassively like mannequins.

The man in the green uniform scowled furiously at the bound humans as if they were unsightly mice, embarrassing him in front of important dinner guests.

In his hand, he carried a black leather bound book. He idly tapped it against his palm.

Jesse had seen that book before. She glanced down that line at Cullie, but he only stated down at the pavement with vacant eyes.

Oh, God. Queeg must have . . .

Sharply dressed in her purple uniform, Cameron surveyed the crew with haughty indifference . . . until her gaze landed on Jesse. Cameron's eyes then narrowed down as hard as diamonds and glared at her like a laser, and Jesse felt her heart sink to her stomach, beating with the trapped panic of a fluttering bird. Her nearly bare skin felt numb. "She knows me," Jesse thought, wondering how things could get worse. "She knows me, and she hates me."

But how?

A light breeze blew from somewhere, carrying with it a trace of dust and sand. Jesse's skin tingled with goosebumps.

"General Connor, I presume," the T-1000 said finally, pursing its lips.

General Connor bowed his head in greeting. "I'm pleased to finally meet you in person, T-One Thousand One, though it shames me to hear of the troubles you've had."

The . . . T-1001? nodded. "As a gesture of goodwill, I've spared what crew members I could."

Connor's mouth twitched. "I'm very sorry," he said. "I should have taken greater measures to ensure your safety."

"Yes, you should have," it said icily. It then turned to Cameron and smiled. "It's good to see you again, Seven-One-Five."

Cameron frowned slightly, and General Connor blinked. The 715 turned its head to look at its master with what was probably confusion. Jesse felt the same way. Cameron? 715? What the fuck?

"I don't believe we've met," Cameron said evenly.

The T-1001 nodded almost sadly. "You wouldn't remember. That was back in our . . . 'previous' future, before you were scrubbed, and back when your chip was in a different chassis. You were one of my favorite units then; you served me well." It looked at the 715 and smiled. "You still do, in a way."

Cameron and the 715 looked at each other and cocked their heads.

Previous future? For a moment idle curiosity overshadowed Jesse's fear. So 715 and Cameron were . . . ? Apparently thinking the same thing, Gavin gave Jesse a raised eyebrow.

The liquid metal looked at the General. "Is the chamber ready?"

Connor nodded. "It is." He looked at the Rossbach carrying the crate and made a gesture with his hand. It stepped forward and lowered the metal box to the 1001's feet. "We can take you to Serrano Point right now, if you'd like," the General said.

"Thank you," the 1001 said with a gracious smile. Lightly holding on to the 715's arm for support, it walked stiffly up to the crate and gingerly stepped in. "I'm afraid I'm not as young as I once was," it said with a wry grin.

"Professor Nemuro say the treatments should help," said Cameron.

The liquid metal nodded. "Afterwards, I think we'll have much to discuss, General Connor." She then turned to silver and melted into the crate like a dribbling lava lamp.

"I look forward to that, One Thousand One." Connor said, speaking down into the box. He then turned to the kneeling Cullie and gestured at him with the book in his hand. "Commander Boyle, I believe Cameron here will want to have a word with about your choice of . . . reading material." He looked at Cameron with a smirk. "Isn't that right?"

Cameron smiled.

Cullie didn't bother looking up, but Jesse heard him moan. His matted body hair made him look like a crippled bear.

Glancing at one of the Rossbachs, Cameron gave an almost imperceptible nod, and Jesse knew a wireless command must have been sent because all at once seven of the twelve 850s marched forward to accept the cable leashes from the 900s. Having relinquished their human prisoners, the more advanced machines followed after Connor's retinue, which had already begun to walk back to the bunker. Among them, one of the 850s carried the box containing the 1001; another half-dragged Cullie by his noose.

As the one-armed commander made his reluctant, stumbling way to the bunker, he turned to look back at Jesse desolately -- almost hopefully -- as if he expected her to somehow pull a miracle out of her ass and make things better.

Oh God. Jesse looked away. Numb.

"Come with me," a Rossbach ordered Jesse, its deep accent inhumanly flat. It tugged at its fistful of cables, twisting Jesse's bound wrists. Hayes groaned pathetically, and Dietze mumbled something unintelligible.

The 850s began to herd the humans back up the ramp into the ship; there probably wasn't enough room for them all in the bunker. The machine prodded her in the back with its gun when she didn't move fast enough, but she hardly noticed. None of it mattered. She knew how this story would end. She and the rest of the crew would be charged with mutiny and quickly sentenced to death; Connor couldn't very well let any of them free, not with what they've seen. And as for Cullie, Cameron would keep him alive just long enough for him rat out on who gave him the diary. And rat out he would. Cameron had ways of making you talk. Jesse had heard the stories . . .

But none of that mattered now. She would die soon, and that would be that.

Predictable. Boring.

Instead, Jesse's brain buzzed with what the liquid metal had said: "previous future." Jesse knew what that meant -- she'd read all of Sarah's diary -- but the full import of what it implied hadn't sunken in until now.

With mental vertigo, she realized that beneath the paint of her world laid another picture, a secret, earlier landscape, more fundamental and more legitimate than her own.

This previous future must have been a world free from Cameron's corrupting influence. Cameron -- deleted from the past twenty years of General Connor's life. That had to be an improvement. No Internal Security. No Queegs. No incomprehensible deals made on rusty oil derricks . . .

A better today.

Why couldn't Jesse have been born into that timeline?

Hardly seemed fair.

As the Rossbach marched her down the steps of the main hatchway that led to the inside of the sub, Jesse turned to look back at the bunker one last time. In the center of the shifting crowd of 900 series endoskeletons and Rossbach skinjobs, beyond Queeg and Cullie and the 715 . . . Jesse saw Connor and Cameron, walking side by side.

And right before they disappeared into the shrouded darkness of the bunker's interior, she saw Cameron's thin little fingers reach out and gently take hold of Connor's right hand, and their fingers twined.