Judgment Calls

by Stephensmat

John Connor was aware the War was coming his whole life. Kate Brewster was not. This is their story, and the story of the war to retake the Earth. PostT3. AU From Terminator Salvation.

2. Z Plus 1 Year 25 Days

AN: For the record, I don't own Terminator or any affiliates

AN: For the record, I don't own Terminator or any affiliates. Also, this story ignores the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but only for the simple reason that the TV series is outside the movie continuity.

Z Plus One Year Twenty Five Days

Kate and John didn't talk during much of the drive. She was too busy staring out the window. All the nights she had longed for a widow in Crystal Peak, she was suddenly glad they never had one. One look at the surreal nightmare-scape and she knew, she would never have been able to tolerate the view for a year.

"What a mess." She whispered. Her voice made a cloud of steam in the frigid air. Kate got the impression that the sepia-toned sky hadn't looked warm or clear in months. "Remind me again why we're fighting the machines for this?"

"It's the only earth we've got, and the alternative is they kill us." He told her.

"I knew there must be a reason." Kate rubbed her knee awkwardly.

John, behind the wheel hadn't spoken since they'd left Crystal Peak. Kate looked over at him from time to time, and was awed at how calm he seemed. Almost like the Terminator was. His eyes were constantly moving, the window, to the mirrors, and from time to time to her. It reminded her of the time in the cemetery. He was worked up to the point of near tears in his Mother's faux-tomb, but was cool as ice, reaching for a gun in the back of the hearse when the TX was cutting it's way in, while she was screaming in the front seat.

Kate stayed lost in those thoughts as John suddenly slowed the Jeep for the first time all day.

There was something on the road. And it looked like a body.

"Radiation poisoning?" Kate asked him quietly. Speaking at a normal volume seemed dangerous.

John pulled out the Geiger counter again. "Reader says no. Radiation's on the high side of normal, but the weather says that the air's fairly clean...besides, if he was killed in the first blast he'd be a skeleton by now." he licked his lips. "We could drive on. If it was a sickness or something he could be infectious... if it was a roving gang or something, it could be too dangerous to stop...and if it was starvation or old age, then there's nothing for us here, or anywhere close."

Kate shivered. The one part of his personality that worried her was his tendency to be so coldly logical in situations like this. It reminded her way too much of the Terminator, coldly writing her father off.

"We should see...I mean... we don't even know if he's dead." Kate said.

John considered that, and nodded. "Okay. But we have to be careful."

As John slipped out of the truck, Kate slid over and took his place behind the wheel, ducking as low as she could as John slowly wandered forward.

"Hey mister, you alive?" He called out, slipping one hand under his jacket to the holsters hidden there.

The body didn't move.

John inched closer, looking left and right slowly. There was no movement, no other cars... there was a small hill off the road where someone could hide, but unless they had a sniper rifle, it was too far away from the body to be dangerous.

Much closer now, he studied the facedown body. It was thin, and every inch of it was covered by long clothes against the cold. Taking a chance, he kneeled down and turned it over.

The instant he saw it was actually a store dummy, he knew he was screwed.

He saw movement out of the corner of his eye, and didn't even bother to look around before he threw himself into the dirt.

An instinct that saved his life as a bullet cut close enough to part his hair.

Adrenaline poured through every vein as he rolled, came up with a gun.

The man drew on him and they aimed at each other.

When suddenly the jeep screamed to life, forty feet away. The headlights came on, the horn exploded loudly in the still silent air, and the military jeep leaped forward, a massive explosion of unexpected noise and movement.

The gunman spun to fire twice at the jeep and the windshield splintered.

But in the same moment, John hurled himself forward and swung at his head with the gun...

And missed completely.

The man had twisted with a lunatics speed, shaken him off, and kept firing.

Kate, behind the wheel, yelped as the windshield shattered from the bullets, and her face was suddenly confronted with many shards of flying glass. She ducked instinctively, and the wheel turned in her hands unintentionally.

She felt something hit the front of the truck, felt the ground beneath the wheels jump suddenly, and then a savage grinding noise and the jeep didn't want to move forward any more.

She sat up as the adrenaline faded. She saw John come running up in the side mirror and sighed, unbuckling her seatbelt.

"You okay?" John demanded, still with gun drawn.

"That seemed like a much better tactic when we planned this." Kate complained as she got out of the cab.

John nodded.

Kate jerked a thumb over her shoulder back at the road. "How's he?"

"Dead." John said darkly.

Kate felt her eyes widen, felt her jaw drop. "Dead?"

Kate's brain had locked up completely. He was dead because she had killed him. She had run him down with the truck. "I... I didn't think I hit him that hard..." She hissed.

"You didn't." John said. "Neither did I. he was in pretty bad shape already. I don't think he's eaten decently in a long while, and his face says that the cold had gotten to him a while."

Kate couldn't help it. She turned around and threw up on the dead weeds near the side of the road.

John was at her side in a second, whispering encouragements and supportive things she didn't really hear as she heaved.

Finally, she wiped her mouth and straightened up.

"You okay?" He asked in concern, handing her the canteen.

Kate couldn't bring herself to move closer to the body. "Where did he come from?"

"Somewhere near the side of the road. I think he was hiding in a foxhole or something."

Kate found she could look at his hiding place. She could make herself do that. "You check him, I'll check it out."

She went over toward the ambush site and looked down at the ground. He had taken John by surprise by popping up from a hole dug in the ground, a few feet off the road, and covered over with tarps and dirt to blend in with the ground. She lowered herself into it. It wasn't a foxhole; it was something like a small one man bunker, about the size of two phone booths. There was a place to sleep, and a few shelves and not much else. The sleeping place, not much more than a sleeping bag left out, had a number of filthy blankets piled on it. The shelves had a shovel, and a few cans and tins of food, most of them open an empty.

The only other thing of consequence was a map pinned to the wall of the hole. She took it down and headed back up to the surface.

John had done a quick search of the man and came up only with the gun. "We've got bullets for this caliber, other than that, nothing of any use."

"Looks like he lives down there." Kate reported, still not looking at the body. "From the looks of it, he's had pretty slim pickings lately. I don't think this road gets traveled too much. Well, not by humans anyway. Only thing I found was this map."

John spread it out over the hood of the jeep. "He's marked all the places he's found something to take. Most of them are walking distance.

"There are dates on these marks." Kate said. "He hasn't had anything to add for a while."

John tapped one mark. "This one has a list of dates. He kept going back there. But it's off the mapped roads."

"His place?" Kate guessed.

"If it is, there's not much there for him, or he wouldn't have been staying here."

Kate looked closer. "This repeat one is a circle. The others are all crosses. There's something different there."

John looked at the sky. "That different one is walking distance." He gestured to the jeeps mangled wheels. The tires were flat and the rims were bent on the rocks lining the road. "Looks like he set traps for cars that swerved around his decoy. Wherever we're going we're walking."

"Told you we should have loaded the motorcycle."

"It was either that or the M16." John reminded her.

"Yeah, except now we can't use either." Kate sighed. "We make for the circle on the map?"

"Right. It's going to be dark soon."

"Then let's go. And please, no comments about woman drivers."

"Hey, we met up because I had to steal drugs off your clinic."

"How'd that happen by the way?" Kate asked him curiously.

John looked embarrassed. "I came off my motorcycle, swerving to avoid a deer."

Kate snorted a laugh before she could stop herself. "The great John Connor, bane of Skynet..."

"Yeah, yeah, rub it in..."

A few hours of walking asked. Kate was exhausted. She knew she shouldn't be, but she was, much more than normal. She yawned as they walked, when John held up a hand. "This is where we turn off the road."

Kate nodded and they turned away from the overgrown and cracked road, into the small hills and dead plants and trees. After a while, she felt John's eyes studying her. "What?"

"You okay?"

"Just... tired."

"Shock." John said decisively. "What you just went through wasn't easy."

"I guess." She could tell he was still worried, and was about to say something else, when her eyes saw movement, and she ducked. John reacted, diving down next to her.

Sure enough, there was movement; it was a quick movement of something darting to the side. The two of them froze and followed it. After a few seconds, it repeated, getting closer this time.

Another several seconds, and it happened again. This time they got a look at it.

It was a child.

She was young, and incredibly thin, making her cheekbones very pronounced and her bright blue eyes were huge in her expression, her hands were rough and dirty, as was her face. Her hair was in a long ponytail, and her clothing was a few sized too big, but warm.

John and Kate watched with bated breath, and the little girl, who couldn't be more than six years old, raised herself up to a crouch very slowly, watching something in about six front of her with hawk like focus.

With slow, deliberate movements, the little girl raised one hand over her head. It had a rock in it. Kate followed her gaze, and saw a large rat picking its way through the rocks and dirt.

Quick as a whip-crack, she threw the stone hard and fast, and nailed the rat square in the head; killing it instantly.

The little girl jumped up victoriously, suddenly coughing harshly, as though she had been holding it back for a long time.

No longer hiding, the little girl came forward to pick it up...

And suddenly saw Kate and John watching.

She froze dead still. Her eyes raked them both, seemingly in disbelief. The look she gave Kate was the look of a starving man at a banquet. Her eye flicked to the gun John was holding, back to Kate.

"Put it away." Kate whispered, and John holstered his gun, zipped up his jacket, and gave the girl his friendliest smile.

Kate extended a hand toward the girl, took a step closer.

The girl's face turned absolutely feral, and she stepped back.

Kate froze. "Its okay sweetie, we're not going to hurt you."

The girl's eye's flicked to the rat, flicked back to Kate, back to the rat, calculating something...

"It's okay, we're friends." Kate reassured gently. "Don't be scared... can you understand me?"

The girl's eye's flicked to the rat, flicked back to Kate, back to the rat; she shifted her weight slowly toward the rat...

John did the math. The girl was going to make a break for it. "We've got food!"

The little girl's eyes flashed brightly, before getting jaded and feral again...she darted forward, grabbed the rat by the tail, then turned and bolted.

Kate and John took off after her.

The girl scrambled over the ridge like a mountain goat, and let out a loud shrill whistle. Then another, then a third.

"She's signaling someone." John shouted at Kate. "Hang back a bit."

"Like hell." Kate said. Last time she hung back she had to kill a man. "You cover me this time."

Kate sprinted forward before he could talk her out of it.

The kid was a regular gazelle, clearing dead shrubs and rocks like they weren't even there. Kate had longer legs and better boots, and could barely keep up. "Kid, wait! I'm not gonna hurt you!"

The kid had led the chase to a driveway, and cut across it instead of along it, moving across a dead front lawn to a stately house, the kind you would find on an estate, or a large farm. The house was boarded up, completely dark and had many broken windows. it looked like nobody had come across it for the full year.

There were burn marks around the windows and doors, and a burned out car sat in the front lawn.

Kate stopped instinctively to scan the windows and doors for signs of others...

And the kid had vanished into thin air.

Kate sighed, and turned around...

Straight into the muzzle of a gun.

Kate didn't look past the gun and sighed. "This has not been my best day ever."

"It's about to get a whole lot worse." the man snarled at her.

Kate half tuned to look at him. He was as thin as the little girl, his bones visible through his skin, he was wearing clothes that probably fit once, his face was dirty and unshaved, and his eyes were wild and savage. Kate came to realize that this was the uniform of the post-atomic survivor. Kate really didn't like the way he was looking at her. He looked her up and down over and over, and his eyes got bigger and hungrier with each pass.

He gestured slightly with the gun. "Drop your weapon, walk away from it very slowly, and get on the ground."

Cha-click!

The man twitched and half turned his head to see John pointing a much bigger gun right behind him. "I don't think so."

The man glared over his shoulder. "Think you can fire fast enough to keep me from killing her?"

"Think you'll be able to pull the trigger without a brainstem?" John shot back.

"Okay, we are not doing this." Kate said sharply without turning around. "I don't know who you are mister, but in case you haven't noticed, we're something of an endangered species now. We don't want to kill you, even though we could, and maybe you take that as a hint and we'll all put our guns down while we introduce ourselves?"

"What do you think stranger?" The man said darkly to John over his shoulder. "Shall we do what the nice lady says?"

"I think that would be a very good idea." John agreed. "Me first, then you."

"And just in case you're trying anything sweetheart, you should know there are more guns in the area." The man added to Kate.

John gave a single nod, and lowered his weapon. Then the man pointed his at the sky defensively, away from Kate, and Kate turned around to face him.

"I've seen that gun before, but you weren't the one holding it." The man said to John. "You killed Martin didn't you?" He didn't have any particular anger in his voice.

"It was self-defense." Kate said hotly.

The man relaxed and put his gun away. "Good."

"Good?"

"A bad person wouldn't have admitted it, and a good person would have made the distinction." He looked John and Kate carefully and licked his lips. "You have food don't you." It wasn't a question. Kate and John did not look starved or malnourished, and their clothes were rumpled but clean.

John sent Kate a look and she nodded briefly. "We can get you some food if you can give us a ride back to our truck."

"And in return?" The man asked guardedly.

"You give us with a place to spend the night and an idea of what's on this road."

"You can spare food for just that?" The man's voice was filled with something close to awe.

"We can." John promised him temptingly.

Mac grinned. "All clear guys!"

Two more heads popped up. A Spanish couple, male and female, one from the abandoned car, the other from the house's front door. They were both armed.

John couldn't help the smirk of respect. "Nice. I had no idea."

Mac shrugged. "Its a survival game. We learn or we burn." He held out a hand. "I'm Mac."

John shook it. "I'm John Connor, this is my wife Kate."

The woman stepped out of the wrecked car and waved at Kate carefully. "Carla. This is my brother Ricard; and I believe you've already met my niece Becki." She looked Kate over just as hungrily as Mac had. "You look pretty well fed for a survivor."

Becki seemingly appeared out of nowhere, with a light cough. "Aunty! Lookit!" She was holding the dead rat by the tail with a big grin, waving the slingshot with the other. Kate blanched.

Carla beamed sincerely. "Nice one baby girl, your aim is so good!"

Ricard nodded at John. "I've got a car behind the house. If your car's wrecked, we'll get your cargo, and I'll siphon the gas from it. Deal?"

John nodded. "Deal. Kate, go show him where it is."

Kate followed Ricard to the garage. Carla went along. Becki went into the house with her rat prize, and winked at Mac as she passed him.

John gave the dead rat an uncomfortable look, and returned his gaze to Mac.

"You don't mind staying here with me alone?" Mac asked, as the car drove past.

"Well, I don't really know you Mac, but odds are I'm a faster draw than you when I want to be, and... well, I doubt you'll do much damage with a cigarette lighter."

Mac looked sheepishly at the gun in his hand and pulled the trigger. A small tongue of flame came from the barrel. "Didn't fool ya huh?"

"Don't feel bad. I bluffed Kate with a paintball gun once. She wasn't fooled either."

Mac chuckled. "Come on in."

---

Twenty minutes later, the car came back to the house. Becki came out of the front door to meet them. "Did ya find anything Carla?"

Carla opened the car trunk and gestured inside. "What do you think?"

Becki went to the car, which was filled to the brim with first aid kits, water bottles and canned goods that Kate, Ricard and Carla had been able to cram inside. It was all the supplies that Kate and John had brought with them from the mountain.

Becki took in the cans and threw herself at Kate, wrapping both arms around her legs tightly. "My new Best Friend!" She enthused.

Kate felt herself choking up as she watched the little girl clinging to her leg.

Carla laughed at the little girl's antics. "Come on, baby girl; lets get this back to the house so we can eat."

Becki took one tray of cans off Kate and started walking quickly back to the house. She read the labels on the tins. "What's 'Spam'?" She coughed.

"That's what a lot of people would like to know." Carla told her.

Becki led the way into the house. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. Ricard, taking up the rear, pulled a cloth to wave it gently just above the floor behind them, swirling the dust about enough to hide any footprints.

Becki led the way to a closet, and opened it to show the basement steps, and led the way downstairs.

The basement was bigger than most rooms in Crystal peak, and had been well adapted. One end had rows of shelves, with cases of food stacked. After a year, it was clear the cans and jars were getting increasingly empty. At the other end was the living area. A few cots lined up, one bunk bed that had probably been assembled from a DIY kit after Judgment Day. There were a few books, some camping lamps, some board games scattered around, and a workbench against the wall with a full set of camp stoves and Tupperware stacked neatly, and a Ham Radio set up, where John and Mac were hunched together. One of the cooking stoves had a camping sized pan next to it, with Becki's rat in it.

"Shelves are through there for the tins." Carla said, gesturing toward the storage area. "Water tanks are up front; if you can put the bottled water with them."

"And Becki," Ricard added. "Next time the family gets given a gift of food? You don't just steal any without asking me first."

Becki rolled her eyes and slid the tin out of her loose sleeve. "Just looking out for tomorrow." She said innocently as she pulled out a small pocket knife and started preparing the rat for cooking.

Kate blanched. "Sweetie, we brought the food, you don't have to actually eat that thing."

The girl looked at Kate like she was insane or very stupid. "The rat won't keep. The cans will." She said, as if teaching a very simple problem to a very stupid student. "Besides, it's clean enough. There's no garbage for it to get sick from, and if it got into anything bad it would have died on its own long ago."

Kate didn't now whether to be heartbroken, nauseous or horrified at the child's logic. She settled to be all of the above at once.

Becki started cutting up the meat, while her aunt started opening the cans.

---

An hour later, they gathered around a fold up card table and began dinner.

"Smells good." John volunteered. A year of MRE's and powdered foods, it was an event to have someone else cooking something new.

"Thanks."

Kate couldn't take her eyes off Becki's plate. "Becki, sweetie, you sure you don't want some of mine?"

Becki took a bite of the thin stew without hesitation. "I will. Daddy says that Spam keeps for a few days if you seal it up."

Kate looked helplessly at John, who gave her a calming look.

"Becki," John said casually. "You know how Spam can keep for a day? Well, turns out they can make ice-cream that lasts for months."

Becki looked up, interested and coughed. "Ice-Cream? Really?"

"Really." John said. He reached into his jacket and withdrew a sealed back of freeze-dried ice-cream. "Would you like to try some?"

Carla and Ricard grinned at Kate; as Becki took the pack and opened it; and John took the opportunity to quietly switch plates with her; and pull out a granola bar for himself.

"Listen…" Kate said softly to Mac. "About Martin…"

John kicked her under the table. She ignored him. "If he was a friend of yours…"

Mac shook his head easily. "No friend of mine, we traded some canned food back and forth. He brought in some vehicles with light damage months ago; we didn't ask questions about where they came from and stripped them for parts..." He trailed off when he noticed her face. "You hadn't killed anyone before then had you?"

Kate flushed and looked down. John studied his plate also.

"Hey, it's a good thing, but let me tell you guys something about death. We live in a dead man's house because the basement is bigger than ours were. I'm wearing a dead man's clothes because they're warm, and outside that door are the bones of my entire neighborhood. Death isn't what it used to be."

They ate quietly for a while.

"This is great." John said after a while.

"My compliments to chef." Kate added. "Spam parmigana. In Italy they would've hung you for that."

Carla shrugged modestly. "The vegetables were all canned but tonight for the first time I had something resembling meat to work with."

"Aunty is a great cook." Becki told Kate conspiratorially. "If I grow up, I want to be as good as her. Then I find a huge town somewhere with lots of food and people and they'll let me live with them because I'm such a great chef."

Kate smiled at the little girl. "You'll save me a plate when you do though right?"

The girl grinned broadly for the first time. She had two teeth missing.

Ricard smiled at his daughter.

Mac spoke to John. "Anyway, you two are welcome to stay with us. You can sleep upstairs if you want, but the rest of us sleep down here."

"Safer." John agreed.

"I can't guarantee anything comfortable…"

"It'll be fine Mac," Kate assured him, rubbing her wrists. "We're grateful to you for taking us in."

"We're grateful to you for bringing food enough for everybody." Ricard answered, and everyone chuckled.

"We won't be staying long." John promised. "We're heading north, looking for any army units that might be left."

Ricard shook his head. "Well good luck. We haven't seen any soldiers since the bombs went off."

"Seen anyone else?" Kate asked.

"We saw a few like Martin." Ricard answered her. "Refugees mainly. There was a lot of conflicting rumors going over the Ham Radio just after the blast. Some said the Russians started it, some said the Chinese, some signals said we'd been invaded, others said we clobbered whoever did it... everybody who could move a long way had conflicting ideas on where to go. It's why we decided to dig in and stay here."

"Mommy went south." Becki told Kate conspiratorially.

Kate looked at Ricard in surprise. His jaw worked a little bit. "Becki's mom, decided the best bet was to get south of the border."

"Mommy was scared." Becki explained to Kate, not seeming overly upset. "She didn't think we could find food, so she took some and ran away."

Kate, for the fourth time, since meeting the little girl, felt her jaw drop. "You didn't go with her?"

Becki looked just a little bit sad finally. "I wasn't invited."

There was a cold silence, which John awkwardly tried to break. "You ever think about moving out yourself?"

Mac and Carla traded a look, and Kate got the impression that it was an old argument.

"No." They both said in unison.

"We can look after ourselves." Becki gestured at her plate and coughed slightly. "Mommy was a lousy shot."

Kate couldn't help but smirk at the little girl's smugness.

Dinner was completed, and Becki was insisting on showing Kate all her things. After a little while, Carla and Ricard went upstairs to talk about something privately, and John took advantage of the moment to take Mac aside as the night deepened.

"Mac." John said quietly. "Do you have any iodine pills left?"

Mac looked over sharply. "Yes. Why?"

John sent a glance over at Kate, who was tucking Becki into bed. Mac followed his gaze. "Oh hell."

John shook his head. "The Geiger counters we have say that the radiation's too low to be seriously toxic, but Kate and I, we were in an empty fallout shelter. Since we got out, she's been having nausea, fatigue; she's been rubbing her knees and knuckles, so I think she's having joint pains…"

"I'll get them for you."

"Thanks Mac."

---

That night, John and Kate settled into a large sleeping bag, keeping their back to the wall.

Before Kate could lie down, John pulled their pack over next to them and pulled out the pill bottle and a canteen.

Kate read the pill bottle as he handed it to her and sighed. "Is it that obvious?"

"Only to me."

"I don't think its radiation John..."

"Humor me."

Kate opened the bottle and threw back some pills. "That was a neat trick with Becki. You're better with kids than you think you are."

"My mom tried the same trick when I was six." he told her. "Was her way of getting me to eat freeze dried foods."

Kate chuckled.

John smiled too. "She was inventive, gotta give her that."

"I don't know who Becki's mom is, but I hate her." Kate said to him quietly. "You ever hear a six year old say 'if I grow up' before?"

"No." John whispered back.

Kate couldn't take her eyes off Becki. "Poor thing can't breathe right."

"I know. TB, Scarlet Fever, Flu, Smallpox, Polio, diphtheria… these things are all dangerous again." John whispered.

"What's she got?"

"Asthma, given the way everyone treats her cough. They aren't worried about it being catching."

Kate shivered. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think I prefer the machines. At least then you can kill them back."

"You like her don't you? Becki I mean."

"Yeah." Kate said. "I do."

John stretched out on his back. Kate curled up under one arm to make room in the sleeping bag and laid her head against his shoulder gently. John wrapped his arm tightly around Kate and pulled the blanket up close around them.

Kate sniffed and reached for his hand, threading her fingers through his. "I've never killed anything before John. I cried like a baby when my pet rabbit died. It's why I became a veterinarian." She closed her eyes. "Have you ever killed anyone?"

"Not personally. I've seen more people killed than most veterans, I've spent more time on the run than career criminals, and I sent my own father on a suicide mission before I was even born…"

"I killed a man today John, and I don't think anyone but me cares."

"Do you wish it was you instead?"

Kate eyes opened quickly. "Of course not."

"Then you did what you had to. He meant to kill us both Kate. He threw the rulebook away, not you."

Brief silence.

"When we were in Crystal Peak," She started to say, and then stopped herself.

"Tell me." John encouraged.

"When we were in Crystal peak, I remembered a book I read called 'Alas Babylon' about a small town trying to survive after a nuclear war. And I felt so… spoiled. We had beds with mattresses; we had plenty of food, hot coffee, hot showers…" She wiped a tear away. "That six year old girl is more ready for this life than I am…"

John gave the top of her head a kiss. "No she isn't. She's ready for living out here, but she's not ready for the machines. Nobody is. Nobody but us."

"Can we take them with us?" Kate asked quietly.

"Not if they don't want to come."

Kate closed her eyes again. "Tomorrow, we tell them about Skynet."

"Tomorrow." John promised.

---

After sleeping for a few hours, Kate woke up sharply, released from the nightmare by the sound of Becki coughing in the corner. Two years before she tended to wake up slowly. Now she woke up fast.

Her pillow was breathing.

She couldn't help the slow smile that spread as she sat up and studied her husband's face. He looked so much younger. It struck her suddenly that nobody had ever seen this expression on his face, and nobody but her ever would.

The machine had said she was to be John's spouse and second in command.

Your husband Kate. She told herself. They hadn't planned a ceremony; they had never officially been a couple. One day, they just admitted that they loved each other, that they needed each other, and declared themselves married. The machine was right. No church, no judge, and the only engagement ring in the place was from Scott. You made vows.

And with that knowledge came a knife edge of worry. Kate had resisted her growing feelings for him, almost for a complete year, but not out of fear of rejection. She was worried he would turn her down, because he had to save the whole world first.

John alone is meant to lead this tiny family and whatever else is left of humanity in a desperate war to retake the ruined earth. He's been hunted since before birth, force-fed his destiny since the cradle and walked alone his entire life under the burden of secrets that would get him killed or thrown in a loony bin. And now, when his moment to take charge comes, you're worrying about his future with you? Kate, what were you thinking? He's got the world to worry about! You can't compete with that. And you can't distract him from that. Kate shook her head. No. You don't have to. Because if you're his second in command, his war is yours to fight too. For him, for you, and for everyone left alive. You and him against the storm. She smiled suddenly. Skynet tried to kill you, before the two of us could take up the burden of destroying it, and instead it set us up to fall in love. Destiny is not without a sense of irony.

Her throat was dry. Without shifting her husband, she reached over to their pack and pulled out a canteen, toasting him silently. To Skynet, and to the future. Damned if they can't take a joke.

Words to live by. She reflected. Worth a lost hours' sleep.

---

John woke up an hour later. He woke fast too, but never opened his eyes till he had an idea of what was happening. He smelled Kate's hair; he could feel her breathing gently. She wasn't worried or for that matter, awake.

There was a coughing noise. Becki.

Concrete floor, sleeping bag. Right were they were supposed to be.

John's heart wasn't racing, so it wasn't the nightmares that woke him. Kate was curled up against him tightly under the sleeping bag, so it wasn't the cold.

Then he noticed it.

Dogs. In the distance. Barking like mad.

John's eyes opened very fast. "Oh hell."

He sat up quickly, and Kate squawked. "Wha-a-at?"

John's hand flashed up to cover her mouth. Kate's eyes widened quickly and she nodded.

John and Kate slept with their boots on, and slipped to their feet, edging around the room to the others. Kate woke up Mac, John went to Ricard. They both covered their charges mouths and gestured for quiet before anything.

Ricard and Mac got the message very quickly, and got up as silently as they could. Becki was woken by the movement, responded to the obvious fear..

The barking dogs were getting desperate, and getting closer.

"What are they reacting to?" Mac asked John.

"Machines." John said in a hard, quiet voice. "We're way outgunned here Mac, is there any way out?"

The dogs suddenly stopped barking with few high pitched yips.

Sudden deathly quiet.

Mac shook his head. "Not that they won't see."

Becki let out a low moan and coughed as quietly as she could.

There was a wooden scarping noise as the front door opened, and there were footsteps above them. Lots of footsteps.

"The speakeasy." Carla suggested.

Mac nodded and went over the wall, pulling on an empty light fixture, and slid the whole wall aside, revealing part of it was fake concrete and brick, and there was a small narrow room behind the panel.

John beamed. "Sweet. Everyone in. Leave the guns out here."

The others obeyed quietly. If they were discovered in that last hiding place, a gun wouldn't help, and it would motivate an enemy to shoot first.

The adults filed rapidly into the hidden compartment. Becki froze halfway there.

"The basement stairs." Becki said suddenly.

Stomp. Stomp. Stomp. Slow, methodical heavy footsteps directly overhead.

"No time." John whispered.

Becki looked back over the room. There were footprints over the stairs, where Kate, Carla and Ricard had left them hours before.

Carla saw the little girl looking at the steps. "Becki no!" She hissed as quietly as she could.

Becki looked back at the hidden hatch, with wisdom beyond her years. "Thank you for the ice-cream." She said softly to John, darted forward and pushed the hatch shut.

Ricard lunged for her, missed, and the door closed. Mac and Carla grabbed him by the arms and pulled him forcibly away from the door before he could knock it down. "What does that kid think she's doing?"

"She's saving all our lives Ricard." John told him. "They see footprints leading into an empty basement but not going out again, they won't stop looking till they find us."

"Becki's good at hiding Ricard, she'll disappear better than we can." Kate assured him.

Ricard glared at Kate. "She's not your daughter."

Kate didn't have an answer to that.

John didn't leave the peephole. Becki had wiped away the footprints on the stairs and darted back into the basement, the sounds of footsteps was clear in the room as Becki darted under the workbench and pulled the folded up card-table around, leaning it up against the bench as though it had been put there deliberately, and the tabletop hid her completely.

"We don't let Becki swirl the dust around." Carla explained quietly to Kate quietly. "It's bad for her lungs."

Kate realized what she meant with swift horror and stepped forward. She pulled John away and looked out the peephole. Ricard pushed her aside to take one of them; Kate keeping her eye glued the other.

But then Ricard jumped back in shock. Mac took his place silently, reacting with disbelief to what he saw.

Kate held her breath at the sight of a Terminator endo-skeleton march down the stairs slowly, with a huge gun in it's skeletal hand

The machine stalked through the room, and its soulless red eyes scanned them all left to right. Little Becki, cowering in the corner was panicked, wheezing for air, trying to be silent as she coughed pathetically from the dust.

The machine took two steps toward the sound and overturned the table, and the bench; looked at her carefully, as she hacked and wheezed, struggling for air. "You have been deemed defective for work. Human Termination authorized. Please remain still."

Becki didn't move, frozen like a deer in headlights as the terminator aimed the rifle and blew her tiny body in half. The whole thing took place is less time than it took Kate to register the actions.

"Thank you for your co-operation." The machine continued.

Kate didn't know what floored her more. That the machine had so coldly written a six year old girl off as defective and killed her, or the fact that it had thanked her for holding still while it did so.

In fact she was so stunned, that she almost didn't realize that everyone could hear what was happening as well as she could.

John's hand flashed past her to Carla, putting a hand over her mouth before the woman could scream. His other hand grabbed for Ricard, but far too slowly.

"No!" Ricard howled and ripped open the hidden compartment, rushing out and snatching up John's holsters from the floor instantly. The compartment door was behind the machine, and he had time to draw both weapons, Wild West style. "DIE METALHEAD!" Many shots rang out in the space of ten seconds, and silence followed, with only the sounds of gears working audible.

As Kate's hearing recovered from the gunshots, she slowly became aware that Ricard was still pulling the trigger, over and over on empty chambers.

The bullets had hit the thing in the torso and knocked it back two steps. The machine straightened and took in Ricard, the empty guns, and the place he had hidden.

"You have been deemed hostile. Human termination authorized. Please remain still."

Ricard spat on the Terminator defiantly, as the machine blew him away.

And then the chrome death shoved the hatch back open, and opened the entrance to the hidden compartment completely. It stepped into the tiny room and turned those awful red eyes on John Connor.

Kate instinctively looked to John, as did Carla and Mac.

And something insane happened. Something that she simply couldn't accept.

John stood up, and calmly raised his hands. "We are unarmed, and we surrender."

The machine took him in. Aimed slowly left and right at the four of them.

And then a metal arm flashed out with the speed of a rattlesnake and seized his hand. John didn't flinch. There was a bright red glow coming from the Machine's left wrist and a sizzle of burning flesh, and John yelled. The Machine's grip did not waver in the slightest as he jerked.

Seconds later he was released. A barcode had been burned into his forearm.

Kate watched with growing horror as the machine turned and repeated the process with Mac, then Carla, and finally with her.

John didn't twitch until the last, when he heard her cry out from the branding.

Branding. She seethed inwardly. I am branded by this tin can, worthy of that honor only because I am fit for working as their slave, until they deign to write me off as unacceptable and kill me.

"Please make your way outside for transport." The machine said tonelessly. The rifle in its hand made it clear that this was not a polite request.

Kate tried to stay strong, but couldn't help the thrill of fear that went through her as they marched. Soulless monster.

She wouldn't let herself look at Becki as they marched upstairs.

The march was short, only to the ridge. There were a few dead machines, but the rest were defending their transport, flanking it as the human's approached.

Kate forced herself not to look at the bodies, forced herself to look at their destination. Being moved around with her father her entire childhood, she had a fairly good grasp of military vehicles. The truck they were being led to looked like any normal troop carrier, only with a much smaller driver's cab, which had a radio antenna on the roof.

A machine mind driving it, but why is it so similar to human design? She asked herself, but it quickly dawned on her. Military based AI. It learns from its program. It isn't thinking originally yet.

They were herded into the back of the troop carrier. Two of the humanoid machines took their place at the open end, and the humans were forced to sit as the engine rumbled to life.

Kate was left sitting facing John; the space was tight enough that she could rub her leg against his gently. He looked up at her as she rubbed her new burned tattoo. After a year living with him, spending most of it trying to tell him things without saying them out loud, she could read the look in his eyes easily as his gaze flicked to the barcode on her arm. 'I'm sorry you had to endure that.'

Mindful of their guards, she sent him a look back, knowing he would understand. 'It's okay; just promise me you have a plan.'

"They're taking us north." John said quietly.

Mac and Carla, heartsick from losing their little family, didn't seem to care.

But Kate suddenly understood. Wherever the machines were taking their prisoners was where John needed to be, and wherever those prisoners were being held was where Walters would be hunting for his next target.

The machines were taking John Connor to his army.

Z Plus One Year Twenty Eight Days

The Machine car drove night and day for a full 48 hours without pause, not caring about distance or darkness, or the comfort of it's passengers.

So when the truck finally stopped, the humans could barely force their limbs to carry them as their guard shoved them out.

Kate took in the camp. A wide perimeter fence about an area the size of a football field. At one end were the cages for the prisoners; at the other end was a radio station tower. The tower was the only part of the whole camp that looked human built.

Outside the fence was a tall hill, with one side excavated out. Straining her eyes to focus that far, she could make out humans working, digging into the side of the hill, under armed guard by the older style Machines.

The radio tower had flying H/K's circling it. They were identical to the one she had personally shot down over a year ago.

Off to the left of the hill was a smaller building with smokestacks coming out of it, and when the wind shifted from that direction, Kate could smell cooking meat and couldn't help it, she turned around threw up on the ground. John was at her side in a second, rubbing her between the shoulder blades gently.

She looked up at John. He didn't have despair in his eyes. He didn't have loss or fear or grief. His gaze was filled with a savage determination. Pure ruthless calm. He took in the cages, the factory, the smokestacks, the radio tower, the H/K's circling with a single look. He seemed most interested in the humanoid machines.

The new models were rare, but they walked on two legs, they had human shaped hands… and they looked like human skeletons dipped in chrome.

All in all, the most depressing thing she had ever seen.

Not for the first time, Kate wondered where they came from. How had these things built their humanoid counterparts? The machines she had seen were either advanced models from the future, or experimental combat machines her father had command over.

Right up until the moment they went rogue and killed him.

Carla and Mac were silent too. Mac was making a low moaning noise in his throat from the emotions running through him. Carla looked like all the blood had drained from her face.

Kate didn't make a sound. Noise was absent from the oppressive atmosphere. This was enemy territory, a place beyond rescue...

But John had taken in the whole camp, all the machines, and finally shifted his gaze to the people.

The machines pushed them toward the camp. Kate got a proper look at the cages for the first time. There was maybe a hundred or so people divided into two cages, but only by number. Even numbers in both cages, neither seemed to have any distinction according to age or race or gender. The cages were both about half the size of basketball court, sharing a common boundary with each other, the perimeter of both ringed with razor wire and high wire fences. A much larger fence ringed the entire camp. There was a solid gate at one end, and on the corners of the gate and the outer fence-line, where mounted sentry guns. The Terminator led them into the outer fence, toward the cages. In each cage was a small building, but Kate couldn't tell what it was for.

The machines marched them over to a cage, ordered them inside. John stepped over to the nearest cluster of prisoners...

And froze.

Not one of them so much as looked up at him. Not one of them so much as spoke to him, or each other.

Kate saw them sitting in rough groups, but not communicating, staring silently, each one at the mud or into the distance, and almost didn't dare approach them.

And neither did John. Instead, he went inside the building. Mac and Carla stood over near the fence.

Kate chased after her husband.

There were a few people inside. The building had a foul smell, and Kate recognized a few stained gurneys and some primitive medical trays. The medical supplies seemed scavenged together too. Some first aid kits, a few drug bottles, and an oxygen tank over in the corner. The few people didn't acknowledge her, curled up as they lay on the floor. John had found a spot in one corner, as far from the other prisoners as he could get.

Kate settled gently against the wall, feeling stiff, and she leaned against her husband.

She threaded her fingers through his gently. "How you doing?"

John took a breath. "I never understood."

"Understood what?"

"All I wanted was to not be this guy, but I thought when Judgment Day came, I was over it. I wasn't."

"How so?"

"Look at them!"

And Kate did, looking through the door to the people outside. She looked at the people in their cage; she looked through the wire at the people in the next cage…

The people here hadn't even looked up as four new humans were shoved in. Nobody had looked at them yet. Nobody had spoken to them, approached them…

These people did not put up a struggle against their guards. There was no point. They did not resist. Resistance meant instant death. They did not cry out against the unfairness, or the cruelty of their captors. 'Fair' was a human notion. 'Cruelty' was a human concept. They did not beg for mercy, there were no deals to be made.

This was a place where there was no hope for freedom. The people here knew that hope was dead.

Kate shivered.

"How the hell am I supposed to turn these people into an army?" John asked her helplessly.

"Inspiration is three fifths courage." Kate told him softly. "Or, so my father used to say."

"I have no idea how to inspire people. I barely know how to talk to them." He looked more lost than he had since the first time they entered Crystal Peak. "I grew up learning tactics and strategy and weapons... I have no idea how to rally troops or teach people to fight a hopeless battle."

Kate squeezed his hand gently. "You taught me."

John looked surprised, as though he had never considered that before. He almost smiled. "Yeah. I guess so."

"John, for the first month in that place, I spent a lot of time breaking down in tears. You know how I grew out of that?"

"How?"

"You. You were the one that kept me involved. You were the one that looked out for me, that taught me, and the reason that worked, was because you were so certain it would save my life out here, when I was convinced that nothing would. You're the one that convinced a T-850 to override what a smarter stronger machine drilled into it's head, and let you live. You did it with the machine, you did it with me; you can do it with them too, you just need to let them see what I saw. You made me believe there was a chance. "

There was a moment of silence.

"Kate," John said quietly. "Did I ever tell you, that I never would have survived a year in Crystal Peak without you?"

"Nope."

"I should have."

Carla came rushing into the room. "Kate! We need you!"

Katherine was on her feet in a second, rushing outside, John right behind her.

Carla pulled Kate over toward the fence, to a young woman on the ground who was heavily pregnant. She was in agony.

Kate took stock of the situation and went right to work. "Okay, breathe!"

The woman did so.

"Lean back, and keep your head up. Mac put your jacket under her neck." As Mac scrambled to obey, John took a spot next to the woman. "I'm John, this is Kate."

The woman didn't answer.

"Answer me, what's your name."

"Susan. Get her the hell away from me!"

"This lady is a nurse; she's going to help you." A veterinarian, he amended silently, but beggars can't be choosers.

"I don't want her help!"

"How far along are you?" Kate demanded from Susan's feet.

"A few months." Susan ground out past the pain. "Spent almost all of it in here."

"Susan," Kate said patiently, and John saw that her hands were quickly being covered with blood. "Your baby is coming too soon, now I don't know if we can save it, but we have to get you inside fast and-"

"I don't WANT that baby saved!" Susan growled out harshly.

Kate froze at the tone, almost didn't breathe.

Susan cried out in agony again, gripping John's arm hard. John sent his wife a look. This won't end well. End it fast.

Kate nodded imperceptivity. "Okay, Susan, we have to get the baby out of you, and I don't know if we can do a C-Section, so you have to push now."

Susan nodded, sweating profusely.

Another thirty minutes passed, with Kate talking the woman through delivery.

John noticed the people were looking, but none of them were looking hopeful, none of them offering help. He glanced over at the machines, patrolling slowly as Susan howled. There was no reaction.

They aren't reacting to sound. He noted. These people are watching so they aren't catatonic or drugged. They simply don't want to make any noise. They can't bring themselves to act. The cage is mental as much as physical.

"I have the baby." Katherine said finally.

John let out a breath, as Susan settled into sobs. "I don't want to see." She ground out to John, who nodded gently and went over to Kate.

Kate looked absolutely stricken, holding the tiny bundle.

The baby was stillborn. And so mutated and deformed from the radiation, that John couldn't even tell if it was a boy or a girl.

The people in the cages all turned their faces away without reaction. Somebody was crying softly. Someone else was shushing them.

"I'm sorry." Kate said.

"I'm not." Whispered the woman brokenly. "It's better this way."

Kate didn't have an answer to that.

But John did.

"I know. You think that the dead are the lucky ones." He said to her. He wasn't whispering to her privately like Kate had. His voice was clear and strong. In this place, where nobody spoke at all, his voice carried a fair way. "And in a way, they are. But the thing is, humanity is stronger than that. We've spent our entire history doing nothing but discovering new and inventive ways to torment each other. Our evils were written in history books. Finally it got to the point now, where our weapons couldn't be bothered waiting for us to use them. But the thing that matters, the things that stand out, are the moments in those history books, when the evils we inflicted on each other were overcome. Or for that matter endured. There has never been an environment so hostile, an enemy so savage, that the grip of desperate men and women couldn't hold on to... something. Desperate men and women who held to hope, to courage, to faith. These things can't be killed, these things can't be taken. They have to be given up. And so many people give them up."

His voice had taken on a new quality, like he was telling one of the great folk tales of old. And it was having an effect. The girl was paying attention.

"This is a new war." John continued. "A new enemy; but the machines have no courage, no hope, and no fear. They aren't even alive. Lights and calculators. That's what makes us worthy to survive, and them only to be unplugged. They can't comprehend why we fight, or for that matter, why we run, or hide, or take any action but surrender, why some would chose to go down fighting rather than accept the math. And that's why we'll survive. Survival is what humans do."

There was something different here now. Kate could feel it through her skin. Like the air itself had changed. Not a lot, but enough. In this place, where nobody could bring themselves to speak aloud from the shame and fear, this man was unafraid to look on the face of the grim reapers. The people who would not acknowledge their arrival were listening, turning their gazes upon him, seeing a man who was not starving, not afraid, not demoralized, not ashamed.

Not broken.

"Who are you?" Someone asked in a tired but interested voice. Kate couldn't see who.

But she smirked lightly and answered him anyway. "He's John Connor."

Z Plus One Year Thirty Six Days.

Kate sat on the gurney in the camp infirmary and reflected on the changes John had made. He had organized things slowly, not whipping the people into a fighting force, just organizing things to make the camp more livable. Extra latrines were dug, sleeping arrangements were suggested, food was organized to give more to those that needed it, and the wounded were cared for at last.

Each day, the machines forced small groups in rotation to come out of the cages and walk to the nearby hillside, to dig the earth out. John had said they were laying foundations for a signal relay post of their own, and the machines hadn't yet devised anything that could work in such loose soil without having the gears and pneumatics gummed up.

The humans worked without much interest, but without pause. Anyone who stopped too long was shot dead for inefficiency, and their body taken to the incinerators. Giving the cages latrines and antiseptics, and burning the bodies before decay was the machine's only concession to keeping their workers healthy. Better to make the small concession rather than go out looking for more workers, when the supply was dwindling the longer they went.

Connor's name was being whispered back and forth, but nobody dared consider fighting back. They were noticing they were still alive, but not that there was a chance of staying that way.

Small Steps Kate. She told herself. You'll get him there, and he'll get them there.

But as Kate sat on the gurney in the infirmary, watching the sky grow darker and darker outside, Kate could feel her nerves fraying.

The infirmary was almost always devoid of people. It was one of the few indoor places that the machines were not permanently stationed. The machines had no interest in humans who were sick. If they were too sick to work, they were shot. If they were not, the machines did not care.

But the humans avoided it too. It smelled of ammonia, and was downwind of the latrines.

John and Kate were the only real couple in their cage, but had no privacy, so they made use of it for their own plans, the kind they didn't want the machines to see.

John had used it for private meetings to organize things like food distribution, medical care, and for the grand total of five people willing to be active in a resistance, for making battle plans.

Kate had made use of it also, training Carla in nursing and field medic procedures, and for looking after Susan, far away from everyone else. Kate had taken the young woman under her wing, trying to bring her back from the near suicidal state they had found her in.

But when Kate sat on the gurney nearest the door, she remembered feeling all alone until John came inside and joined her. "Okay, Mac tells me that the command signal relay from Skynet is in the base of the radio tower, which makes sense. Only one humanoid machine in each cage. The T1's and the other Terminators are all around the outside, to guard the workers. The four towers on the perimeter corners run on automatic facing outward too. They react to heat and movement."

"Makes sense." Kate said quietly. "The tin men aren't as warm as we are. If they move they still have to be warm to be human."

"If we could just get a signal to Eric we could run this place inside ten minutes, but without that... I don't know. You've seen the people in this place; they've accepted defeat for the most part."

"It's better than it was when we got here." Kate pointed out.

"You were right." John told her proudly. "They just needed a reason. Not much of one, but they had nothing else, so a little bit of hope was better than gold."

"John..." Kate said suddenly, before she could lose her nerve. "I'm pregnant."

John looked up sharply, with something close to dawning horror. "Are you sure?"

"Well, I can't really test for it. But I'm pretty sure. I mean, it could be the change in diet or the radiation or, well... something screwing up my cycle, but it's been almost six weeks, and what with the nausea and the fatigue…so I'm almost certain..."

"With a... a baby?"

"That's the usual way." Kate said, without humor. She was even more scared than he was. "What are we going to do?"

For the first time in almost a year, John was too scared to say something to her. "Do?"

"John... I love you. And humans are something of an endangered species I know, but... our baby will never reach the age of two, if that!"

John suddenly looked a hundred years older. "Kate, are you suggesting... that we..."

"Oh of course not!" Kate scorned. "Even if we wanted to, how could we? And I don't want to."

John was suddenly relieved and terrified in equal measure. "You don't?"

"Sweetheart, a life exists where there wasn't one before. If that wasn't sacred before Judgment Day, then it sure as hell is now, but the thought of our baby..."

John's brain-lock finally freed himself enough that he sat down very suddenly, like his knees had given out.

Kate didn't smile. "Yes. You heard me right. Our baby, yours and mine, and we're in a Concentration camp that makes the Nazi's look like a church social! We're on the incinerators waiting list. We can't have our baby here."

"Kate... we aren't ready yet. If we..."

"Don't give me that! Your son is at stake."

"Kate, you told me once that this war had to be bigger than us. Bigger than me. We can't find Eric, and if we don't get out of here, the campaign dies with us. I can't just have us tear down the fence and make a break for it! If we don't do this exactly right the first time then we won't get a second chance and we-"

"'We'? What 'we'?" Kate scorned. "We're talking about different things here. You're talking about fighting Skynet; I'm talking about protecting our baby! I want to do both as much as you do, but we don't do both the same way at the same time. "

"We may have to. Fighting Skynet is how we're going to protect our baby Kate! This is the most critical time for the resistance. Skynet is running the show and we aren't even a thorn in its side yet! This is the most important part of starting a rebellion and-"

"It's not more important than our baby!"

Heavy silence.

"It... it IS more important than our baby." John said with quiet desperation. "This, right now, has to be more important than anything or there'll be nowhere for us to escape from this hellhole to, and there'll be nobody to help you through the pregnancy or delivery or to stop Skynet from killing us all when she's still only..."

"STOP! Just stop it!"

Kate was shaking. So was John.

Heavy silence.

"John, if I knew I was pregnant when we left Crystal Peak, I would have told you to call Eric to come to us. I don't want my baby growing up in a bomb shelter, but that's what's ahead for him. I don't want my baby's first birthday gift to be a gun. But that's what's ahead for him. I just... I want him to be born with humans, not terminators."

"He will be."

Long silence.

"Of course, it could be a girl y'know." John suggested hopefully.

Kate smiled. "Oh, I hope it's a boy."

"Yeah?"

"I grew up on military bases John; I know how to handle army brats around men in uniform."

John chuckled. "I was trained to be a fighter by my mom. I know how to handle warrior women. And hey, if we're any indication..."

"Still, we win this war fast enough, there's no reason he has to be a warrior when he... when he grows up."

Neither wanted to say what they were both thinking.

Kate sat down slowly. "My dad told me once that when he was promoted to General, he started getting briefings on international situations... he said, that in some places that were like... like the whole world...they don't name their kids for the first year, because it's too painful. They don't live that long."

John licked his lips. "Our baby's first birthday gift, we'll give her a name."

"Okay. If it's a boy we name it after my dad, a girl, after your mom."

"Deal." John yawned.

"When did you last sleep?"

"I can't sleep. My brain keeps spinning around making judgment calls, re-working plans..."

"Shhh." Kate shushed him. "Come here. Lie down."

John did so, and Kate settled at the head of the gurney, with his head resting gently in her lap as he stretched out.

"You shouldn't sleep sitting up." He said. "Take the other gurney."

"I will." She promised.

"You've got to look after yourself Kate."

"I will." she promised.

"We'll only tell Carla and Mac. They'll be willing to give you some of their ration, and so will I."

"John..."

"It won't be much, but the machines won't be paying attention to who eats what, and they won't check you for something like a child..."

"John..."

"When the attack comes, you have to find somewhere safe, but not the buildings, that's where the main crossfire will be..."

"Stop. Just, stop." She whispered softly.

"I can't Kate." He whispered. "I can't until I'm sure you're safe."

"Shhh. Its okay, I'm scared too." She told him.

Long silence, and John drifted off to sleep. Kate studied him for a long time, and settled down on the narrow gurney alongside him, closing her eyes.

Two hours later, John woke up groggily from the nightmare. Kate had reached back behind herself for him, without opening her eyes. Protecting each other from nightmares was a skill they had honed to an art form in Crystal Peak, long before they accepted their relationship for what it was. Kate didn't even wake up.

He studied her face as she slept; and felt scared for the first time. Not just of what they now stood to lose, but because for the first time, his partner wasn't in step with him. It terrified John how much he had come to rely on her, and how they worked together so well.

Mom, he thought desperately, the closest thing to a prayer he had made since the day his mom died. Why didn't you teach me about this? Why couldn't you have taught me about love, and teamwork? Mom, all the effort you put into making me a warrior, why couldn't you have taught me what it was to be a parent?

It was their first fight since they declared themselves married. And John was terrified, because he didn't know how to settle it right.

Katherine was his only girlfriend, his first childhood kiss, and his wife.

The love of my life. John admitted the cliché to himself.

His mother had taught him that connections were dangerous, and that it wasn't fair to get close too anyone, because it would make them a target. His mother had taught him to keep himself safe over all others, and that he was too important to risk, even to save the life of his own mom. She had taught him that he was meant for something higher and more important than friendship, or love, or family or anything like what others had as a normal existence, and after meeting his first Terminator, he had accepted the fact as true and stopped seeking normalcy.

And yet, somehow, when his moment came, and his destiny beckoned, he found himself worried more about his wife and unborn child than anything else.

Forgive me mom. At last, despite our best efforts, the war has come, and I took my eye off the ball.

Kate had thought that John had avoided his feeling for her that whole year out of respect for the trauma she had gone through, and the loss she felt over her fiancée and her father. But the truth was, John had avoided his feelings for her, because he had never believed she'd go for it. A year was a long time, but once they were out of Crystal peak she was young and beautiful and strong, and John would no longer be the only man in her world. He got over it when they knew it was time to leave, and she was willing to meet him halfway. Telling her he loved her had come as easy as breathing that day. Calling her his wife was just as easy. Like it was meant to be.

How could this woman, so stable, so confident in her family, so settled with her home, and job and boyfriend; with the antithesis of his life, love him too?

Your wife John. He told himself. You made vows. Just you and her. Your pregnant wife. You made vows. Skynet is the law over more than nine tenths of the world and you are the law over the rest. She's your wife John Connor, because you made vows to her. She's pregnant. That means more than your destiny. And mom would agree. This and nothing else she would value over your war.

His mother would take a bullet for him. His mother would have carpet bombed a baby seal to keep him safe. His mother valued his life over her own.

For the longest time, he had just assumed that it was because of his fate as leader of the resistance. Raised around black market and former army types, living on compounds and with people who lived in the jungle with guns and tents, he had sort of assumed that his mom was the exception, because he was important. He had grown up with parental figures like Becki's mother, except for Sarah Connor, who protected him with all the devotion of a fanatic.

But then his mom had gone after Miles Dyson, and even bleeding, facing death, he begged her to spare his children. And then, a decade later, Robert Brewster had sacrificed the mission to kill Skynet, (Hopeless cause that it was) deceiving them to get his daughter safely to Crystal Peak, and he knew for sure.

Protecting your kids over yourself is what fathers did.

Well Mom, He thought idly. Guess you did teach me how to be a parent after all.

Kate opened one eye and looked up at him. "Stop staring at me." She said softly.

John chuckled lightly, realizing that he had been watching his pregnant wife sleep for almost half an hour without pause. "I didn't know you were awake."

"Can't sleep. Keep thinking."

"About Becki?"

"Becki and Susan."

John sighed. "Me too."

Kate sniffed and ran a hand gently over the tattoo on his forearm. "I had a scary dream… I dreamed our baby was born, and before it even started to cry, one of those Terminators took him and burned one of these barcodes into his arm."

"Never." John swore ferociously.

Kate slid her hand down his arm and threaded his fingers through her own. "When... when Susan miscarried, she didn't even cry. She didn't even look sad. She didn't care John. She was relieved that she didn't have her baby live to be in the world. You ever met anybody who could face something so terrible and not care?"

"Yes." John said softly. "Every single person in this camp. I can't ask them to fight like this. I can't ask them to do more than they can bring themselves to even consider. I have no idea how to make it happen now."

"I know. I know. But... I don't want to stop caring." Kate whispered. "We're going to have a baby John. That's got to mean something."

Kate saw John suddenly blink, like a light bulb went off behind his eyes. "It does. It does mean something Kate. It means everything."

John fell asleep with a satisfied smile on his face, and his wife stroking his hair gently in her lap.

Z Plus One Year Thirty Nine Days

Carla shook Kate awake gently. "Kate, the machines brought in another batch of prisoners. One's wounded."

Kate got up and stretched painfully. "Uh."

"You okay?"

"Back pain."

Carla smirked. "First trimester."

"You have kids Carla?"

"Not any more." Carla said darkly, and shook her head to clear the painful memories. "You need anything?"

Kate smiled without mirth. "A very big bacon cheeseburger, steak with barbeque sauce, a chocolate milkshake and maybe some fish-sticks dipped in chili sauce and garlic."

"Cravings."

"Big time."

"Would you settle for a twelve year old MRE?"

Kate let out a whining noise. "I have never wanted to tear apart a machine more than at this exact moment."

Mac met them at the door to the infirmary with a soldier in a bloodstained uniform leaning heavily against him.

"Get him inside!" Carla barked.

"Yes Ma'am." Mac said easily and carried him in, helping him onto a gurney.

Kate came over to the soldier, and checked his injury. His arm and shoulder were hit worse than anything. "This was one of their plasma guns wasn't it?"

"Yes Ma'am." the soldier gritted out.

"Carla, see if you can't find a clean knife somewhere."

"We've gotta stop taking such good care of people." Mac quipped. "The guys are complaining that we're using too much of their moonshine."

Kate looked up sharply. "Where do they get moonshine?"

Mac suddenly looked like a deer in headlights. "Um… John taught them how to make a still…"

"Oh I'm gonna kill him." Kate muttered under her breath.

"Hey, inspirational speeches work well enough, but most demoralized people prefer hard liquor."

"Amen." Put in the wounded soldier.

"Hush you." Kate said as Carla brought over the scissors, and they started cutting away the burned uniform carefully. "One nice thing about the plasma rifles." She told the soldier as she worked. "They manage to cauterize the holes they make."

Mac was biting his lip hard to keep from grinning, and Kate followed his look to Carla, who was running a hand slowly over the soldier's torso. Like everyone else, he clearly hadn't had a solid meal in weeks, but he was in exceptional shape. More so than the prisoners; who had been almost uniformly lethargic and unfed. The soldier was looking up at his nurse with as smoky a gaze as hers was.

Carla noticed that Kate and Mac were staring at her and flushed. "I'm… just checking his ribs."

"Should we send out for sauce?" Mac mocked and Carla knuckled his shoulder.

Susan appeared at the door. "Uh... Kate? You might want to come take a look at this."

What the hell has John done now? Kate came out of the infirmary, and her eyes instinctively searched for him. He was over near the radio tower, but he stood alone.

In his hands was a very long coil of the leftover cable. He wound one end of it around a large rock, and threw it up toward the radio tower. The rock went through the steel framework and came back to the ground, trailing the cable with it.

Everyone in the cages was watching now, the work teams had stopped, all of them watching him with held breath, as one of the Terminators came up to him.

He ignored it completely, hooking a swathe of folded cloth to the cable.

"Explain." The machine demanded clinically, as John pulled on the cable, drawing the cloth high. It was immediately apparent to the watching humans what it was. The machine did not react.

"Where the hell did he find that?" Kate hissed.

"He made it." Susan said quietly. "The bedsheet from the infirmary, the urinal cakes to mark it blue, bloody bandages from the infirmary to mark it red, and bleach to neaten the stars and rows."

The soldier came to the door to see what the commotion was about.

John kept pulling the cable, till the flag was raised, waving in the endless cold.

The 500 aimed his rifle. "Explain." It demanded again.

John jerked his thumb up at the flag. "You know what that is. It's an American flag. I'm sure you have files on it."

"American Flag." The Machine recited clinically. "Originally designed in July 1777, adapted twelve times as State lines changed. 50 stars; Used officially from July 3rd 1959 t-"

"Yes, but do you know what it means? The country it stood for is gone. The government it stood for is gone. So what does it mean?"

"It doesn't mean anything any more." Susan said in a very small voice from Kate's left.

Kate looked around. Lots of people were looking at it, their eyes were shining. "Yes." Kate told her charge firmly. "It does."

John raised his voice enough to make it a general question to the camp. "What does it mean!?" It was not a request to speak. It was a call to arms.

"It means we're still here!" Mac yelled out.

John never took his gaze away from the glowing red eyes in front of him. "What does it mean?!" He yelled out again.

"It means that we haven't forgotten!" Shouted someone else.

"What does it mean!?"

"It means this is still our territory!" Yelled a third voice.

The cry went up, words were indistinct, but a hundred demoralized voices cried out defiantly from their places, and the air suddenly became electric again.

"That's right!" John called out, and the crowd quieted to hear him. To the Machine, he became calm and polite. "A human being would have understood what this meant. But you? You're just a machine. Ones and Zeroes. I have attacked nobody; I have incited no violence, given no resistance, I have no weapon. Your program says that there's no reason to kill me. But if you were alive at all you would have understood what just happened here, and you would be scared half to death of what it meant."

And with that John turned and walked away from the machine.

All his worry about not being able to motivate his army…Is he even aware he's doing it so well? Kate asked herself silently, rubbing a hand over her stomach without thinking. Does he have any idea how much that meant to these people?

The machine had already returned to its programmed patrol route.

But the prisoners were watching John as he strode back toward them.

Kate noticed something. Something wonderful.

All the prisoners were standing up.

Not sitting in the mud against a wall, not hanging their heads, or averting their gaze from their captors. They were on their feet, watching John Connor come closer.

John stood before them, and spoke clear and proud. "They are winning this, only because we aren't really fighting back yet. Once we do, they won't have a chance, because for all their power, they're just machines. As far as they're concerned, we've lost. They can't see past the math. All they can think is that they've already won. But Humanity Does Not Compute. Humans do not fight by the numbers, humans can see outside the cold hard equation. And with that we have our weapon."

If he had given the word, they would have thrown themselves at the fence. If he had given the word, they would have run into the machines gunfire without hesitation.

But instead, he led them back inside.

"Who the hell is that?" Kate's most recent patient asked in disbelief, but not to anyone in particular.

Mac smiled enigmatically. "He's John Connor."

"That's John Connor?" The soldier said in surprise.

Kate looked over in shock. "You know him?"

"I know of him.' The soldier said guardedly.

Kate studied him long and hard. If he was a Terminator, he was acting a lot more human than the others she had seen. The two cyborgs she had faced were both from the future...

No. She told herself. This soldier was wounded. You stitched his arm together yourself; he has bones, not hydraulics.

"Go back to bed." She told him. "I'll bring him to meet you later."

The soldier looked at her in surprise. "You know him?"

"Yes." Kate said, and sent Mac a look that said 'don't add anything.'

Just in case. She told herself.

The soldier went back inside. Kate walked with a long stride to get to her husband. He looked over as she came up. "Kate?"

"There's a solider in the infirmary, and he knows about you. He's gotta be one of Eric's men."

John suddenly looked more hopeful than she had seen him in a while. "Really?" he started toward the cages.

---

When the soldier saw John Connor come in with Mac and Kate, he jumped off the gurney by instinct, and hissed in pain as Carla appeared to shove him back down.

He shook Carla off and stood up anyway, briskly saluting Connor.

John returned the salute. "At ease."

The soldier allowed Carla to shove him back onto the bed, and she headed over to the oxygen tank; muttering about the evils of testosterone and ego.

"Report." John commanded. "Name and Rank."

"Corporal Brett Jacobs sir. Assigned to long range recon for Lieutenant Eric Walters. He's been looking for you for weeks."

"Can you get in touch with Walters?"

"Not yet sir."

"Not yet? Explain that."

"We knew the machines had another camp in this area." Jacobs reported. "When we took the incinerator camp three months ago, we tried accessing their transmission records. A lot of transmissions were coming from this direction, but without other units, we couldn't triangulate, so Lt Walters started sending recon teams."

"Risky." Carla put in.

"I volunteered. We knew the machines were taking prisoners, so we took a calculated risk."

"When your team doesn't come back, what will Eric do?" Kate asked him, changing the dressing on his arm.

"Well, nobody said it out loud, but we all knew that the ones who didn't come back would be the ones that found the machines. The Lieutenant will send a strike force after us."

John was suddenly charged like a live wire. "When will he get here?"

"Another few weeks if he brings everyone along."

John, Kate and Mac started trading looks. That was cutting it close. Organizing a prison uprising was difficult to do secretly.

"Can we get a signal to him?" Kate asked Jacobs.

"They took my radio, but we worked out visual signals when we realized that we were fighting a technological enemy."

"What do we use?" John asked.

"If you can get a red cloth up with that flag tomorrow, he'll dig in and hold the attack till we signal."

"And how do we signal?" Kate asked.

Mac laughed. "The walls are made of chicken wire Kate. All he has to do is look."

"Can we start an uprising in two days?" John asked Mac. "The longer he waits out there, the more likely he'll be spotted."

"Everyone here likes you, they trust you... I think the only reason they haven't started anything already is because they're waiting to see if you've got the balls to back up your speeches. Say the word John."

John shrugged. "I'd feel better about it if we were armed with more than rage."

Jacobs reached into the back of his waistband and placed a .357 Magnum on the gurney.

Everyone just stared blankly at the enormous gun in disbelief.

Jacobs grinned smugly. "They found the gun easily but they didn't bother taking it."

"Why not?"

"When they scanned us for weapons, I think they realized it wasn't loaded and wrote it off as harmless."

"Can we improvise bullets?" Kate asked.

Jacobs responded by sitting down and starting to gag.

Kate stepped forward instinctively as he retched, but he waved her back.

Several moments passed with his gagging the only sound, when finally he leaned over and spat out a wrapped pack of tinfoil onto the gurney.

Kate relaxed as he started to peel the foil back. "What, were you a drug dealer before Judgment Day?"

Jacobs opened the pack and revealed three bullets. "Donaldson had the other three, but they must have picked up his thyroid cancer on the way in, didn't bother to let him live." With that said, he started coughing violently, the smoke inhalation made exponentially worse by coughing up the solid package.

John grinned at Kate as Carla pulled over the oxygen tank. "See? This is exactly what I said. Machines have no imagination, no improvisation, no tenacity. Either it equals their program or it doesn't and they can't see beyond that."

"I hope its enough." Kate said, stroking her stomach absently.

John loaded the three bullets as Carla fitted the breath mask over Jacob's face.

"Tell me Jacobs," He asked once the soldier's breathing settled "Do you know how to throw a Molotov cocktail...left-handed?"

Z Plus One Year Forty Days.

John headed out as the air grew cooler still. Kate joined him a moment later. "If Eric's out there…how long until we are ready?" Kate demanded.

John looked around the camp at the rest of the prisoners. "A few weeks. Maybe a bit more." He shivered. "It's going to be ugly."

"I'll still hardly be showing by then." Kate said. She had a dark look in her eye. A fierce protectiveness. "John. Our baby will not be born in this hole. And if the machine's a satisfied the work is done they'll kill us all. I won't have it. I won't allow it."

John had that same look. "Neither will I."

"Get in there and make them ready John. Your army has to follow you, or your son will have nowhere to go."

He took a breath. "I love you Katherine."

"Love you...dad."

Kate went back inside, Mac passed her as he came outside, and he saw John, looking worried for the first time.

"Boss?" Mac asked him. "Everything okay?"

"We have to accelerate our timetable Mac. I just told my wife we'd be out of here in less than a Month."

"A Month?!"

Z Plus One Year Sixty Days

John came into the infirmary, and sent Carla and Susan a look. They both got the hint and headed for the door.

"Wait." Kate said, and gathered up three bottles of bleach, handing them out to the women. They nodded and tried their best to keep them hidden as they walked out, nodding to John as they passed him.

"We ready?" Kate asked John softly.

"I take the first shot. I do it fast enough, I can get the rifle. If Jacobs is right about Eric, we'll have reinforcements soon. The hard part will be getting past the mounted automatic guns on the perimeter."

"I meant... are we ready." Kate repeated.

John sighed. "Most of these people don't care about living anymore Kate. Convincing them to go down fighting was easier than it sounded."

"You gave them a reason John. They didn't need much of one, but you gave them all they needed."

"I know." he looked hard at her. "When the fight starts, I want you to stay back from the crossfire."

"John, I can fight as well as anybody here..."

"But not for two." John said harshly.

"Don't parent me John."

"Don't get in over your head Kate. We're fighting an overwhelming force, unarmed, and gambling on reinforcements that we don't know for sure are there."

"I know. I helped come up with the plan. We're joint saviors of the world John; don't make me warm the bench."

"Kate, a war zone is no place-"

"For what?!" Kate barked. "A girl?! John, I grew up around soldiers, and all of them told me, my father included, that warfare is a man's game. Don't disappoint me now by saying that a battle is no place for a girl!"

"For a pregnant unarmed girl. If you didn't want me to be crazy and over-protective then you shouldn't have told me I'm a father-to-be." he told her. "Think of the baby!"

Kate seethed inwardly. "I am. And don't you go second-guessing the plan this late in the game out of some Neanderthal macho need to protect the little woman! I'm not your cheerleader, I'm your wife!"

"I KNOW THAT!" John yelled.

Harsh silence.

"We can't be parents if you get killed." He said. "You've got the most important person in this camp to protect and I can't be there to protect you. You got that? I won't be with you during the fight. You have any idea what that means for me, that I'm supposed to be the greatest military leader the world has known, and I won't be able to protect you?! Please, I beg of you, give me some piece of mind."

Kate let out a shuddering breath. "For over a year now, I've been your partner. For over a year now, I've been the only one you could count on completely, and vice versus. I was there when the TX showed up, I was there with you when the bombs fell, I was there when we made contact with the last of the soldiers, I was there when you were put in charge of them... I was there when you left, I was there when we got captured… Now, at the most pivotal moment since we lost Judgment Day, the second it starts to get dangerous, you're telling me that you won't let me have your back. We made vows about that John."

John nodded. "I know we did. And I'm keeping them. Wherever this war leads, it leads both of us. But if there's one thing I care about more than this war, it's you. And the only competition you have is the baby."

Kate would have argued more, but a rather significant part of her agreed with him. She was trapped between two instincts. One was to protect the baby no matter the cost; the other was to back up her husband and partner, no matter the risk.

Kate looked down, feeling petty. "I'll keep him safe John, but we're still a team. Promise me."

"I promise Kate."

Kate shook her head. "Hey, if you didn't want me to be stubborn and irrational, you shouldn't have made me pregnant."

John chuckled. "You ready?"

Kate nodded. "Time to go make war."

---

John made his way out of the cage, into the rest of the compound with the current work team, who were moving much slower than normal for the gate. John sent a glance to Kate, who gave a slow nod. She in turn glanced at Mac, who casually drifted his way closer to her.

John sent another glance toward Carla, who made her way to the infirmary slowly. She in turn gave the people in the cages a significant look, and they all got to their feet.

John went over to the Terminator nearest the radio tower. "Howdy. I thought you might like to know that the flag has additional meaning today. It means that as of now, this camp is under new management. And once we've retaken the camp, I, and all my friends are going to drive you and all your kind into the sea."

It seemed to be enough to satisfy the machine's program requirements. "You have been deemed hostile. Human Termination Authorized."

"My name is John Connor tin man. And you bet your shiny metal ass I'm hostile."

Three things happened in quick unison.

First, quick as a flash, John raised his arm where the gun had been concealed, and fired two quick shots at point blank range at the only place where a 500 wasn't bulletproof.

One bullet square into each eye.

But the gunfire was almost drowned out by the bloodthirsty roar of over a hundred human voices eager for vengeance.

John had lunged for the plasma rifle and shoved the .357 into the machine's wrist, firing the last bullet. The point-blank shot was just strong enough to make the pneumatics rupture, and the machine lost its grip on the rifle.

Secondly, the humans in the opposite cage had thrown themselves against the fence all at once, with the fury born of desperation, enough to bend the wire gate. But not enough to break it down.

"Again!" Kate roared from the fence line, and the mob backed up for another charge.

John had taken the gun, and made a very quick study of it. There was a button instead of the trigger, and there was a much lighter recoil compared to the usual rifles.

John whipped around and fired through the wire at the Terminator guard in the opposite cage, just as the machine was gunning down its prisoners, then he swiveled quickly to fire at the gate to the cage, the wire parting under the plasma fire, leaving flames behind.

Suddenly released and motivated, over a hundred humans roared and charged out of the cages, armed with stones and knives and firebombs, and two Terminator rifles.

Third, the aerial H/K's stopped their patrols and started circling around for a target in the camp, much faster than their ground based counterparts could.

About five people grabbed the torn down wire fence from the ground and yanked it along with them along the ground. Once they had gotten about halfway to the radio tower, the quintet of Terminators guarding it opened up. At that range, the humans were able to evade most of the fire, and they set the fence down.

Two of the strongest prisoners ducked under each end of the wire, holding the fence up at a 45 degree angle, while the others quickly crowded around and started piling rocks and dirt on top.

The humans with throwing weapons, John with his rifle included, took cover under the fortification, as plasma fire ricochet off the rocks.

---

While half the crowd rushed out to join the battle, the other half came to the infirmary, as John had ordered them to do.

Kate had spent the better part of the last week's preparation making firebombs. The machines had provided them with plenty of cleaning supplies; the still hidden in the other cage made the moonshine strong and flammable to the point of being outright toxic. The hard part had been finding containers. Fortunately, the Machines had not provided them with plates. The MRE wrappers that hadn't been ripped apart had almost uniformly been opened from one end like candy bars. Designed to be long-life wrappers, there were watertight These wrappers been collected and filled with flammable liquid, then swen shut, except for the cloth fuses. The resulting incendiary grenades were handed out rapidly by Kate and Sarah as their less armed fellow warriors distracted the enemy.

"Move in, throw them, and get clear fast!" Kate commanded as Susan helped her hand them out. "Don't get any on your clothes, and don't spill any before you throw!"

"Use the spot fires Connor left to light the fuses; don't let the fuse get lit too close to the liquid!" Susan added.

---

John had charged his way toward the primary target, the radio tower. It was easy to see what was the original construction, and what had been added by Skynet. The new addition was entirely the color of chrome, as all Skynet's creations seemed to be.

His army of desperate prisoners charged with him, hurling rocks and debris at the machines that had taken defensive positions.

It wasn't enough as they were gunned down mercilessly.

John did the math and realized he wasn't going to make it close enough; he threw himself down behind a small pile of the bodies, hoping the grisly cover would be enough.

Just then, another sound came to him over the plasma fire.

Gunfire. Old fashioned, human made gunfire.

Daring to raise his head, John looked beyond the camp perimeter.

Eric's forces had apparently been paying attention. Three jeeps with rear mounted machineguns had come charging from three ridges away, firing up at the circling H/K's, knocking some of them down.

Two of them broke off from intercepting the human reinforcements, to hit the human re-supply point within the camp.

The infirmaries in the cages.

---

Kate heard a whistling noise that she hadn't heard since about an hour before Judgment Day.

"MISSILE!" She yelled. "Take cover!"

Kate and Susan dove behind the gurneys, Mac and Carla for the door, as the wall erupted in a massive explosion that rattled them down to their eardrums.

The Flying H/K hovered in the gaping hole it had torn in the wall, searching for a target.

Carla had ducked her way around the side of the infirmary and hurled her firebomb at the hovering aircraft, enough to knock it into the side of the wall, where it exploded.

Carla rushed to the hole in the wall. "Kate? Susan?"

"We're here." Kate coughed from the smoke. "Still breathing."

John had managed to work his way back to the makeshift fortification, where his people were still holding up the edges of the fence, even with the load of rocks on top.

"We've gotta move this thing forward somehow!" John told the men there. "We've gotta get to the radio tower!"

The four remaining Terminators at the fence moved forward just enough to aim better at the fence, and opened up on one specific point with a concentrated barrage of fire.

Enough to blast through the rocks covering them, and kill the man on John's left.

They're thinking together. John thought sourly. Skynet has full control of them as long as that relay works.

He heard jet turbines howling and looked up. The flying H/K's were circling in unison, driving the jeeps around the ridge toward the excavation site.

Where the T-1 would be waiting.

John looked and saw that the infirmary building the cage had been half blown apart.

Kate… he thought desperately. If you're still alive in that infirmary, you're the only ones in range to do anything.

---

"Kate!" Jacobs called from the other end of the cages. "The other ground machines are moving on my people!"

Kate looked. The T1's were exactly as she remembered them, seven feet tall with tank treads and mini-guns on each side. They would chew up a jeep without too much trouble. But their intercept path led them straight past where the infirmary had used to be.

"Come on!" she ordered her friends.

Kate, Carla, Susan and Mac had made their way to the opposite end of the cage, and hurled the bottles of bleach and ammonia over the wire, toward the oncoming T1's. The Molotov cocktails burst into flame on impact.

The automatic sentry gun on each tower swiveled suddenly to fire across the wire at them reacting to the sudden heat and movement.

Kate and Carla ducked behind what was left of the infirmary wall quickly.

Mac wasn't quite so fast.

"MAC!" Kate screamed in horror, as the sentry guns ripped him apart.

His body managed to block Susan just enough that she could get to cover.

Susan sobbed for breath as they cowered.

John, Kate thought darkly. If you thought I'd be safer behind you, you aren't the strategist I thought you were.

Jacobs came around the far side of the shattered wall, duck-walking to stay behind cover, and he had something that Kate didn't recognize at first under his arms.

It was the oxygen tank Kate had used when he first arrived.

Setting it down, he undid his belt and wrapped it around his waist. "I'll need a diversion." He warned Kate.

Kate looked askance at him. "NO! Jacobs, I forbid it!"

Jacobs grinned impishly. "Well, I knew I was going to dragged into a court martial one day. With any luck I won't live long enough to be charged."

And with that, he slipped back around the corner.

Kate swore under her breath. "Firebombs!" She snapped at Susan and Carla.

The two women jumped up and started throwing the last of their cocktails in every direction.

The Sentry Gun swiveled to follow them, each only distracting it for a moment.

Long enough for Jacobs to charge the tower itself, with the oxygen tank strapped to his back.

Programmed to follow the strongest, fastest heat source first, the Sentry gun finally managed to fire almost directly down at Jacobs as he approached. But it wasn't just hitting a human; it was hitting a human bomb.

The oxygen tank erupted under the blast, with enough force to rip apart the foundation of the Sentry tower, which collapsed down and exploded.

The men driving the attacking jeeps saw their opportunity and took full advantage of it, driving in fast, guns blazing, one of them heading for the radio tower.

Kate lifted her head. "There's your way in Eric, hurry before I'm the widow Connor!" She muttered to herself.

As she started to get to her feet, another missile whistled in, blew Susan to pieces, and Kate found herself flat on her back.

The world had vanished completely. Kate's hearing had been reduced to a dull ringing noise, none of her limbs seemed to work, and her eyes were seeing six of everything.

Carla's horrified face entered her sight, after a few seconds there were only four of her... she was shouting something, but Katherine couldn't quite comprehend it. She suddenly couldn't think through the agony that lanced through her stomach with every breath, every movement...

Oh god. She thought in horror. What have I done?

Carla was trying madly to drag her back behind the wall, as Kate felt a thousand knives stab into her belly savagely, and she shouted in pain.

---

The four remaining Terminators saw that their fortified gun tower had fallen and redeployed quickly to compensate...

Giving John just enough space to pop his head up and open fire on the relay at the base of the radio tower, shredding it open with plasma fire.

Every machine shuddered, as they suddenly lost the command of Skynet, and started to react based on their own limited programming, before moving on in simple search and destroy tactics. No strategy behind their actions, merely hunting.

"ERIC!" John screamed over the noise of battle. "RELAY DOWN!"

Eric heard him over the gunfire, and accepted it without knowing who had yelled. "Flares! Now!" he barked into his radio.

Form the ridge and the jeeps, several dozen flare guns fired simultaneously, and every flying H/K started turning back and forth, distracted by the numerous decoys, making them easy pickings.

And the tide of battle turned viciously, as the last of the machines were taken down.

As the battle came to an end, and silence reigned, over three dozen people gave a battle cry, unable to believe that they had actually prevailed.

John however, made his way to the nearest jeep, and demanded a radio.

"This is John Connor." he reported into the radio. "Is there anybody named Eric-"

"Connor!" Walter's voice yelled back. "Thank god! Are you and Kate okay?!"

"We're here, we're all right." John responded. "We have wounded here. Get personnel carriers ready, we can't stay here too long before Skynet sends reinforcements."

"Yes sir!" Walters whooped. "Trucks are rolling."

"One other thing." John said quickly. "Collect all these weapons, we need to know how to make them, and collect some of the machine skulls too. With any luck they'll have a record of what these ones were updated on, who know what we might find."

"Yes sir." There was a moment. "Can I buy you a drink?"

John sighed. "Make it a double."

---

Kate shook off Carla's hands quickly once the battle ended. "I'm all right; I just had the wind knocked out of me."

Carla didn't look convinced. "Kate, I don't think..."

"Kate!"

Kate spun to see her husband running toward her, and she was more than willing to meet him halfway; before they were clinging to each other tightly. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." John waved her off. "Susan and Mac?"

Kate shook her head.

John sighed and looked out over the battlefield with a hollow gaze. "One battle down..."

"You're bleeding." Kate said, quietly nervous.

"It's not all my blood." he told her. "I finally got in touch with Eric."

Kate smiled in relief. "Is he okay?"

"He is. He says he has trucks nearby to bring any wounded by his base camp."

Kate bit her lip. Despite what she had told Carla, she was worried too. "How far is that from here?"

"Better part of a day, but we have to move fast."

"Then let's go."

The trucks came rolling in, with one man in a uniform hanging half out the door. "Connor!"

John waved both hands over his head. "Here!"

Eric grinned broadly, and dropped to the ground, snapping off a smart salute, as did most of his men. "Sir, a pleasure to meet you in person finally."

"And you Eric."

"You look exactly like you sound on the radio." Kate quipped.

Eric laughed.

"Sir." Said a man at the door to the truck. "Recon patrols report no contact."

"We better get while the getting's good." John told Eric.

"Yes sir." Eric agreed. "Sgt Oldham! Get these people loaded. Take note of any seriously wounded and radio ahead to base camp to prepare, and get an accurate headcount en route."

"Yes sir."

John glanced at Kate. "I'm going to get a ride with Eric."

Kate nodded, understanding his reasoning. John had a lot of ground to cover with the remnants of the US army, and a long ride ahead. She gave him a quick kiss and drifted back to stand with Carla. "I'll get a spot near the back with the wounded. See you when we get there."

---

Carla was giving Kate a very hooded look as they two women made their way to one of the trucks, waving some of the younger refugees in ahead of her. "Put your eyes back in your head Carla."

"Are you sure you're okay?" Carla asked for the ninth time as the hauled themselves up into the back of the truck.

"I'm fine. Just a little sore from being bumped around." Kate promised her. She leaned back against the truck wall and shut her eyes. "Don't worry about me Carla, I just need to get some more sleep."

"Well... okay, if you're sure..." Carla said uncomfortably.

"Hey Carla…" Someone said as Kate closed her eyes. "He did it. Connor got us out."

"Yeah." Carla said with quiet joy. "He really did didn't he."

Seven hours later, Kate woke up howling in agony.

Z Plus One Year Sixty One Days

"Hey boss, wake up."

John woke up suddenly. "Kate?"

"Uh... no sir, I'm not Kate, there are some... important differences."

John shook of the momentary confusion and glanced out the window. Barely visible, was a camouflaged entrance. Eric was behind the wheel.

"This is the base camp?"

"We lucked out." Walters explained. "We found the end of a subway tunnel that hadn't opened yet. I think it was supposed to be a new suburban housing project on the outskirts of town, but the tunnel was the only thing ready. We moved in and expanded the tunnel network, and the new water lines ran parallel to the subway tunnel. The water was from an underground reservoir, so the fallout didn't touch it. We got a water source, an underground shelter, and the construction site on top of provides camouflage."

A pack of very thin kids appeared, seemingly from nowhere, to start brushing the tire tracks out of the way. "They from the labor camp?" John asked.

"The one we hit three months ago, yes sir. We're actually having trouble feeding them all."

"Any of your people know how to set up hydroponics?"

"That was my thought too, but nobody has any clue how. We've got enough long life stuff and army rations to feed everybody for a while, but after that…

"Well, let's get inside, I know how to set hydroponics up, but we'll need to scavenge a few things. Also, I want to get a read on the water temperature in that reservoir. If we can get a feed out here we can cool down these trucks, make them look abandoned from the air."

"Where'd you learn all this stuff, Mr. Connor?" Eric smirked, emphasizing the point that Johan was technically a civilian, without formal military training.

"My mom." Connor grinned. "Every month it was something new… and she wasn't really someone you said 'no' to."

"Your mom? Your mom taught you to be a diehard survivalist in a post nuclear war zone?"

Connor spread his hands. "I know, what possible use could I have for any of that?"

"Touché."

Eric led the way into the base, John a half step behind him. "Also, tell your recon patrols to bring back any stray animals as we can. Dogs and food animals in particular. If we can train some K-9 units we can protect ourselves from ambush when we have equipment failures. Our enemy has better technology than we do, so fighting fire with fire doesn't work."

"You think K-9's are going to do us any good?" Walters said disbelievingly.

"Trained dogs can track people, find water, and if we train them right, track machines." He licked his lips. "But before that, I want to round up as many techies as we can. MIT students, programmers, whatever." He pulled a piece of paper out o his pocket. "Send your scroungers into town to computer warehouses for these. I want to interface with those metal skulls as fast as possible."

Eric took the paper and opened it, scanning the list. "I already rounded up all the techies I could find. They suggested a few tactics like you used at the labor camp."

"Good man."

"Sgt Oldham, show Connor to the Tech Centre." Walters ordered, and glanced back out over the trucks. "I'll have a headcount for you by the end of an hour sir."

---

Kate was biting down hard on Carla's glove in agony. The Latina was watching her with open worry, as the troop carrier finally came to a slow halt.

Eric pulled back the tarp canopy within seconds. "Ladies, welcome to the Last Army's first base camp. We have affectionately dubbed it The Alamo." Walters stopped smiling in a hurry. "Kate? You okay Ma'am?"

Katherine would have said something to the 'Ma'am' comment, but couldn't speak.

Blood was running down her trousers.

---

Eric came into the Tech Centre, looking somewhat stricken by the news he had to deliver.

John had one of the Terminator skulls on the table, surrounded neatly by the technical experts of the Last Army. He was handing out assignamnets as he leaned over the skull with a hand drill and pliers.

"I want the engineers to begin studying the battle chassis. I want to know what those things are built from, and how they made a Terminator factory since none of them had opposable thumbs before these ones showed up. Electrical engineers study the weapons, I want them copied and built by our teams ASAP, and any computer sciences or architecture guys, this one's for you." With a pleased sound, he had pried the port casing on the skull open, and pulled out the chip with the needle nose pliers. "I give you, the CPU. This is the Terminator brain. I want it taken apart piece by piece. I want to know how it receives information, how it learns on its own, and above all, what its current programming is like."

The techies around the room were nodding slowly, staring at their prize.

"Gentlemen," John started wrapping up. "For all our talk of fighting fire with fire, in truth you fight fire with water. Skynet is almost infinitely smart, but lacking in intuition, tenacity, ingenuity, imagination… this is your area, and it may well turn the tide of this war. Godspeed."

John noticed Eric had come in and headed over to him.

"Where the heck did you learn to pull the plug on a Terminaotr?" Eric demanded.

"Long story." John told him. "One day, when this mess is all over, I'll tell you. All about it. What's the word?"

"The final count was 137 people in the camp, and 98 survivors. Also, we've been able to confirm that the machines were not able to send a call for reinforcements before the relay went down. I don't think they were expecting you to do that. We're still trying to get confirmation, but it looks like no machine recon patrol saw our convoy coming back. Skynet still has spy satellite control, but tracking says that none of them were likely to be over the relay station during the battle or the evacuation. With a little luck we'll have conformation on that soon."

"Eric, it's our job to do everything possible to remove luck from the equation wherever possible." John said seriously, then cracked a smile. "Almost enough to make you start believing in miracles though isn't it?"

"Yes sir." Walters said. "Almost."

"Why?" John said suddenly worried. "What happened?"

---

John opened the door to the Medical Center. Kate was sitting on one of the gurneys hugging her knees; Carla was right next to her, hugging her tightly. Carla looked up as he came in. She got up and left them alone with each other.

"I'm sorry sir." Carla said as she passed him.

John. Connor thought distantly. You aren't a soldier Carla, you can call me John...

"If you need anything sir, I'll be outside."

Kate looked at him finally as the door closed. Her face was pale and drawn, her eyes were red but without tears, and her mouth was set in a tense line. Her frame screamed tension and frustration, and both hands moved to over her stomach gently as she swung her feet off the edge of the gurney to face him.

John didn't hesitate to wrap his arms around her, burying his face in her hair.

"It wasn't the radiation John." She said into his chest. "It wasn't radiation, or malnutrition, or stress. The baby was healthy till those... THINGS knocked me about this yesterday."

John started to cry softly. "I'm so sorry." He said quietly. My war. He told himself. My war has cost me my only child. My order to start that fight got Kate in the crossfire.

Anger made her small voice strengthen. "They killed our fathers; they killed our baby, they killed our world. We're going to kill them John." She cried with hot tears. "You and me. We're going to kill them all. Promise me."

"I promise." He said softly. He would have promised her anything right then.

There was a very long silence as they rocked against each other on the gurney, trying to make the world go away.

"I blew it." Kate sobbed into his shoulder. "You were right. I had the most important person in the camp to protect and I failed. I let those things get to our baby. I'm sorry! I'm so sorry…"

John shushed her. "No Kate, I blew it. You were right, I did change the plan to try and keep you safe. I had them charge the tower because I wanted to draw the fight away from the infirmary. I should have kept you moving to the centre where I could have protected you, and instead I split our forces. It got Susan and Mac and Jacobs killed too…"

Kate shushed him. "It's not your fault."

"It's not yours either."

Kate wiped her face hard and leaned back to look him in the eyes. "Like you said: One battle down." She wiped her eyes again. "Couple of hundred to go?"

From far away, voices rang out in unison, soft at first, but growing loud and fervent. "Con-nor! Con-nor! Con-nor! Con-nor!"

"Word's out that you're here in person finally." Kate let out a breath.

"Is there anything at all I can do?" He asked, feeling useless, to the one person he wanted more than anybody to save.

"They need you."

"I don't care." John said. I made that argument already, about how this war was more important than anything, look what it cost you! Look what it cost us!

"I do." Kate said quietly. "And you do too."

John sighed and finally let go of her. "I'll be back."

"I'll be here."

John went to the door, when her voice stopped him. "John? There is one thing..."

"Name it."

"It may seem silly, but it's something I would like..."

---

John came out of the Infirmary and found Eric waiting for him. "She okay?"

"She'll be okay. She's... she's strong."

"This may not be the time..."

"We don't have later."

"Well, your adoring masses are howling for you, but more importantly, we've confirmed no signals on Skynet frequencies within at least 100 miles. Looks like we made a clean getaway."

Connor nodded. "Good. The camp that we came from used to be a radio relay station, for small town weather reports and such. It has a much longer range than anything you've got here, and it's in a much better position to cover the northern half of the continent than Crystal Peak. We should see if-"

"Already done sir." Walters reported. "I left one recon team to adapt and salvage. Skynet was using the towers to transmit, but with them shut down it's ours now. We've already been transmitting. We've gotten in touch with another battalion who have come out of hiding. Four hundred men, under Colonel Samuel Gibson. They tell us they've been contacted by Canadian military. I have already told him to try and absorb anyone he can and find himself a fortified position." He took a very deep breath. "I told him the orders came from Lt Colonel John Connor."

John stooped walking so fast that Walters nearly collided with him. Connor had spun around and put him into the wall. "ERIC!"

Walters looked Connor in the eye fiercely. "There's not one soldier for a thousand miles that wouldn't salute you sir. But if you're going to command us, you need a rank. You need to outrank me sir."

Connor glared. "Eric, you should have told me first!"

"Well if I had, you would have said no." Eric mocked. "Sir."

John sighed. "All right." He cleared his throat. "Then it seems I'm out of uniform."

"Yessir." Walters said crisply. "I'll have one brought presently."

"As my last act as a civilian, I need to make an appeal to the local Commanding officer on behalf of myself and my wife."

"For what?"

---

Sgt Oldham had supported his CO's decision to give practical authority to Connor. It was a decision that had paid off dramatically. So when Lt Walters came rushing in with a big smile on his face, he wondered what Connor had told him.

"OLDHAM!"

Sgt Oldham straightened his shoulders automatically. "Sir?"

"Set up the most secure perimeter you've ever imagined. I will personally kill your whole unit if anything gets within a hundred miles of this place within the next three days. Dismissed."

Oh yes. Oldham reflected. This was going to be big.

---

Kate found herself staring at her reflection. She hadn't worn a dress in over a year and a half. She felt naked, vulnerable, and obvious. It was the most impractical garment she had worn since meeting her first cyborg. This dress was ridiculous. What would she do if they got hit? Everything else was dedicated to being practical! All of a sudden she was wearing what had to be the last white dress without bloodstains in the northern hemisphere. It was long enough to be modest, but without sleeves to save the cloth. It wouldn't keep her protected or warm at all.

Carla had made it for her from sheets washed in cleaning bleach. Why were the machines so obsessed with keeping the human habitats clean anyway?

The door to the room opened and Kate saw John in the mirror. His jaw dropped open as he drank her in.

She beckoned him closer. "Bad luck to see the dress before the ceremony."

"Not from where I'm standing." John drawled, still staring

Kate smiled brilliantly, and reached out with one hand to close his mouth gently, when she suddenly noticed what he was wearing. The uniform was clean, pressed, tailored to his size and had the name 'Connor' stitched clearly over the heart and a gold rank insignia over the collar. His face was shaved, his hair combed... He looked sharp, looked powerful... in fact for the first time since she'd met him he was looking deliberately attractive, and it really looked good on him. "Wow." She breathed. "John, the uniform is you."

"So everyone keeps telling me." He said, still staring at her. Then he shook his head as if to clear it. "Dress uniform. I feel like the most obvious dweeb on earth."

Kate chuckled. They were on the same page again. She noticed the tie in his hand. "Need help with that?"

"Never even owned a tie before."

Kate smiled and took it off him, whipping it around his neck and cinching it up easily.

John was surprised at the way she did it so easily. "Fly a plane and tie a Windsor knot huh?"

"Life of the modern General's Wife."

"Colonel." John corrected.

"Give me time." She promised softly. He was standing a lot closer to her all at once, and it suddenly hit Kate that this was the first time he had seen her in a dress at all. She shivered pleasantly as she noticed his scent. "Is that... cologne?"

"Yeah."

"Where in the world did you find..."

"One of Eric's men had some in his toiletries kit. Told me to consider it a delayed wedding present."

She breathed in his scent slowly, finally starting to relax. "John... about the baby..."

She could feel him tense slightly, even without looking in his direction.

"Turns out I wanted it to happen after all." Kate whispered. "A lot more than I let on."

"Me too." John said quietly. "All that stuff we argued about, about how it affected our battle plans, our escape plans, there was one thing I didn't say." He took a breath. "And that was… how thrilled I was."

Kate smiled. "There's never going to be a good time..."

"Eric tells me I'll officially be CO by the end of the day. He has a lot of questions about how the soldiers will be organized, trained, that sort of thing." John kissed her gently. "He wants to know if the Last Army will have the same rules about fraternization, because a number of people are asking about it, and we seem to have been without contraceptives for most of the last two years."

Kate almost laughed. Trust practicality to be the deciding factor.

Carla stuck her head in. "Sir, we can't really start without you being in the room."

John nodded and glanced at Kate. "See you soon."

Kate took a deep breath. She hadn't worn a dress in over a year and a half. She felt naked, vulnerable, and obvious.

But she felt beautiful too; in a way she hadn't even considered since she'd cut her hair. Beautiful and desirable if John's reaction was any indication. After the loss of the baby, suddenly feeling attractive to the man she loved had a very restorative effect emotionally.

Carla at the door nodded to her, and she walked away from the mirror, out into the hall. "Ready?"

---

Kate followed Carla out of the small bathroom and down the tunnel to the Mess Hall. The room was mostly empty. Eric had kept the reason for the use of the Mess quiet at the request of the groom. At the far end of the room was Walters, with John at his left. Oldham and the rest of his officers too. Moving to join John at the end of the room, Carla winked at him and found herself a seat near the front as Kate stood with her husband.

Eric smiled at them both. "There is no law. There are no contracts. If there is a god, his mercy and a small bundle of cigarettes will get you coffee. But here, we in this room, have stood together against hell and won a victory. In this room, we are family, and we are gathered here today, to bear witness as two of our family, John Connor, and his wife Katherine Brewster renew their vows. They had no rings, no witnesses, no law to declare them wed, but today they have us. Their comrades-in-arms, their family."

John took a deep breath, and turned to face his wife. "Kate, what I know about romance could fit on the head of a pin. But what I know about love always comes back to you. There is a long road ahead, and I'd be lying if I said it was going to be easy or safe, but this I swear to you my wife, I will make the world safe for you again one day, and no matter what, there will always be a future for us, because I will never leave you to face it alone. Because there's nobody I'd rather face it with."

Kate took a breath and looked her husband in the eyes. "John, when we found each other over a year ago; I never thought my life would lead me to fall in love with you, but now I can't imagine a life without you. I'd be lying if I said I could make it easy for you, but this I swear to you my husband, wherever this war leads, it leads us both, and whatever our lives let us have outside the war, we make for ourselves together. Because there's nobody I'd rather build it with."

With that said, they both turned back to Eric.

"I have no legal powers vested in me by any higher power, but under my authority as Commander of this base, I hereby pronounce you, still husband and wife. Sir, you may kiss the bride."

John did so, and the others clapped as she kissed him back sweetly.

Nobody threw rice. Nobody was going to waste it, not even for a wedding.

But they cheered and applauded wildly. The war went on around them, but their leader was happy, and their soldiers were free, and for just a while, just for these few moments, there was celebration in place of fear.

John and Eric shook hands warmly. Fellow soldiers off the battlefield. "Thanks for this Eric."

"My pleasure sir. We've set aside quarters for you in the tunnels. It's not big, but it's the most secure spot we've dug so far."

"Thank you Major."

Eric blinked rapidly. "Um...Lieutenant, Sir."

"Not any more. I'm a Colonel. If you're going to be my second in command, you need to be a Major."

Walters came to attention. "Yes sir. Thank you sir."

Carla gave Kate a tight hug. "Mac would have loved this." She whispered.

"I dread what his wedding toast would have been like." Kate teased gently.

After shaking everyone's hand, accepting their congratulations, Eric essentially ordered everyone out of the couple's way and sent them to their room.

---

John led the way through the hallways, down to the tunnels. The few people they met saluted as he passed.

"You think we'll ever retake the surface?" Kate asked him.

"Planning out a cottage with picket fences already?"

"Picket fences made of steel, twenty feet high, landmines in the front lawn..." Kate quipped.

John chuckled. "They gave us the room at the far end." He flushed. "Should I carry you over the threshold or something?"

Kate smiled impishly and jerked a thumb back the way they came. "Well, the threshold is about two hundred meters down that tunnel technically…"

John chuckled lightly and led the way in.

It was dark, the walls were rough and coarse, the bed was nothing but two cots tied together, the lighting was bare bulbs and obvious cables. It was cramped, dirty, and made private only by a door made of little more than a shower curtain held closed by hooks in the wall on either side of the 'door'.

"It's perfect." Kate declared.

"And it's ours." John concurred as they turned and kissed each other desperately.

"Love you husband."

"Love you wife."

End