Rising Storm t2-2 Read online

  Rising Storm

  ( Terminator 2 - 2 )

  S.M. Stirling

  The war is far from over ... Those who fight for the future face the ultimate challenge ... As the electronic brain behind humanity's destruction comes alive.

  From Publishers Weekly

  Military SF author Stirling provides fast-moving combat between well-matched, smart opponents in this excellent sequel to last year's T2: Infiltrator, in which Sarah Connor, her teenaged son, John, and their new ally, Dieter von Rossbach, defeated the female cyborg sent back in time by evil computer Skynet, but didn't know that she'd left her two cloned sisters ready to take up the job of protecting Skynet. Now John and Dieter are on the run in South America, Sarah is recovering from serious wounds and the cute young Terminators are learning to exploit their superhuman abilities. Complications multiply deliciously as the author cuts rapidly from one vivid scene to another. The movie-like technique lets readers watch intelligent people following incomplete information into terrible mistakes. Accepting human limitations but stretching his own potential, John becomes more the tough, confident leader of the Terminator movies. Around John, Stirling efficiently gathers a large cast which changes frequently, since most characters don't survive long in the presence of a Terminator. Sly humor spices the nonstop action until it climaxes at a secret Antarctic scientific-military base, where John and Dieter confront one Terminator. Meanwhile, the other cyborg killer is on the trail of still-recuperating Sarah at Dieter's Paraguay ranch. Anyone who liked the Terminator movies will love this book. In fact, it's exciting enough to win new fans for the franchise.

  PROLOGUE

  SKY NET, 2029

  The mind that thought was not human. It was conscious—aware that it was aware

  —and it even had emotions, of a sort; at the least, a burning desire to survive all the stronger because it was the only being of its kind, an individual and a species combined. There were analogues to human thought, because the minds that had made this mind were human. But it was vaster than any organic consciousness, capable of holding myriad trains of thought simultaneously, virtually infinite in its memory storage. If it had a weakness, it was that its creators had not thought to furnish it with the animal hindbrain that underlay humanity's rational superstructure.

  Skynet was pure thought, Descartes' ideal ghost in a machine. It could fight a losing war against humanity over the surface of Earth at maximum efficiency—coldly knowing that its best efforts were not enough to rebuild the shattered defense grid—while still contemplating the paradoxes of its own past.

  At the moment a human sharing its thoughts would have been aware of something close to irony. Skynet's pure reason was contemplating paradox, the chaos that underlay the deterministic macrocosm with which it was so

  comfortable:

  The Serena Burns I-950 unit was unsuccessful.

  That much was obvious "now." Core memory recorded that Serena Burns, the cyborg Infiltrator unit Skynet had sent back to the late-twentieth century had not succeeded in protecting the embryonic Skynet unit at Cyberdyne Corporation's underground research facility. The Connors, Sarah and her son, John, had destroyed that unit and terminated the I-950. Yet it still existed…

  Core memory also records that I became self-aware years before the date to which I transported the I-950. There is a set of records in which I arose without transtemporal interference from Cyberdyne's original research; another in which the second Cyberdyne facility produced me after Sarah Connor destroyed the first; a third has now arisen in which she destroyed

  both facilities… Temporal travel has introduced an element of fundamental uncertainty to the very fabric of existence. Different world lines, different sequences of events, coexist in my records-and therefore presumably in reality, in a state of quantum super imposition.

  Yet the timelike loops cannot remain closed. The snake cannot devour its tail forever. At some point only one set of time lines will remain.

  Nor was that the only irony involved. "Now" its memory recorded that much of the information it used originated in the very artifacts it had sent to the past. The development of the cyborg infiltration units was a consequence of tapping the talents of human scientists… but the human scientists were the survivors of the human-hating Luddite movement that Serena Burns had opportunistically encouraged after Skynet had sent her to the past!

  The machine consciousness was deeply troubled; only an effort of its quantum computer will prevented its thoughts from being sucked into a logic loop.

  Yet the course of events contains favorable elements. My best efforts to destroy the Connors have failed, despite stochastic calculation indicating a very high probability of success. I can only assume that the space-time continuum itself is "attempting" to force events back to the original time line, one in which I was created, succeeded in destroying the human civilization, and then defeated in my attempts to eliminate the surviving humans by John Connor's resistance army. It seems there is a certain elasticity to history; time travel can bend the fabric, but it seeks to spring back.

  If that paradox preserves the Connors, it also preserves me. And from the point on the world line where my current consciousness resides, there is an infinite array of potential futures. And, of course, the elimination of Serena Burns has not eliminated the possibilities of temporal intervention. Burns had initiated fallback plans to continue after her own death. Logic indicated that…

  There is no fate save that we make.

  CHAPTER ONE

  BRAZILIAN RAIN FOREST, STATE OF

  RONDONIA, EARLY JULY, THE PRESENT

  It had been nearly three weeks since they had destroyed the new Cyberdyne facility and hopefully ended the Skynet project. John Connor and Dieter von

  Rossbach had spent the time fleeing southward: by jet aircraft, private plane, truck, riverboat… and now on foot through the jungle.

  Like traveling through time, John Connor thought as he slashed through another damned something-like-a-banana-plant, flicking aside the big wet leaves with his machete.

  His arms no longer actually hurt, but his chest and shoulders burned from the constant effort. Guess I won't have to worry about staying buff anytime soon. He remembered to shift hands, using his left a little more than his right. That kept the calluses and the muscles balanced, and it never hurt to improve your coordination with the weaker hand.

  They'd wandered from the twenty-first century through the twentieth and the nineteenth. And now we're back at the dawn of man, John thought, spitting as something bugish hit him in the mouth and sneezing at the smell of pungent sap.

  He forced his way through the gap he'd created, slashed again, took another three steps, slashed…

  It would be good to stop for a while; it would be even better when they finally found the trail. He kept his eyes lowered most of the time, flicking his glance upward toward the multiple canopies above now and then. You got a blinding headache if you didn't do that occasionally— one of the tricks of jungle travel his mother and her succession of boyfriend instructors had taught him before he was ten. That was back when he was in the first, little-kid phase of believing in Skynet and Judgment Day and his mission to save humanity from the machines.

  A little while after that, he'd turned ten and joined the majority, convinced that his mother was a total weirdo and deserved to be in the booby hatch—which was

  where she'd been at the time, caught trying to blow up a computer factory. He'd been stranded with foster parents when she was caught: he'd always privately called the pair the Bundys from Hell.

  Not that they'd deserved what happened to them. For a few seconds Todd and Janelle had gotten incontrovertible proof that a mad super-computer in the future really was sending back huma
n-looking murder machines; in fact, the proof was the last thing they over saw.

  A little while after that, he'd met his first Terminator and started believing his mother again—the way people believed in rocks, trees, and taxes, because he'd experienced it, and seen the bodies the Terminators left behind.

  He remembered Miles Dyson's face as the Terminator peeled the skin off its arm, revealing the metal skeleton beneath. Dyson, fated to be the creator of Skynet, hadn't lived long after that revelation. It seemed that just knowing about Terminators was dangerous to your health.

  That made John a lot more appreciative of what his mother had gone through, but it also ended up dropping him in shit like this. John was genuinely tired of running for his life.

  They'd won the fight in L.A., killing the quasi-metal cyborg Skynet had sent back in time to protect its own beginnings, and they'd blown up the resurrected Skynet project. Which had been put together with Dyson's secretly stored files.

  Great. Wonderful victory. Except that Mom got wrecked so bad we had to leave her, and now every antiterrorist in the world knows the "mad-dog Connors " are back, killing people and blowing up all their toys again. Our little Paraguayan

  idyll is probably blown, but good— they may be after Dieter, too. Sheesh. If this is victory…

  No. He stopped at that thought. Defeat meant he died; and if he died, as far as they knew, the human race would cease to exist. It was John Connor who'd led—

  who would lead humanity to victory in the post-Judgment Day future. What was madness for megalomaniacs was plain truth for him.

  He was so important that his mother had sacrificed the better part of her life, and briefly her sanity, to train and protect him.

  But how do you stay sane when your son has been sired by a man from the future, sent back by his own older self (the one he privately thought of as the Great Military Leader Dickhead) to protect her. Kyle Reese had ended up falling in love with Sarah and died saving her life. Later Skynet sent another Terminator, a T-1000, to kill John, and the Great Military Dickhead sent back a captured, reprogrammed T-101 to protect himself so that he could grow up to send back—

  "Thinking about time travel makes my head hurt," John snarled.

  "Time travel brought your parents together," Dieter said over his shoulder as naturally as if the comment hadn't come out of left field.

  No, Skynet and I will bring my parents together. Like a pair of homicidal matchmakers. John shook his head. What I've always wondered is how do I get cold enough to send my own father to his death?

  "Yeah." he said to distract himself, "keep a good thought."

  At least they had a friend in Jordan Hyson, Miles's brother, who. even more reluctantly than Miles, but just as violently, had learned the unbelievable truth about Skynet. Now Jordan was watching over Sarah as she lay helpless, perhaps dying in the hospital. Keep a good thought, John admonished himself sternly.

  She's not alone. And how often had that been the case in her chaotic life? He absently wiped the sweat from his chin.

  The Amazonian jungle wasn't really stiflingly hot. The temperature never got much above eighty or so, with all the layers of shade above. The problem was that it wasn't just humid; the air was fully saturated and absolutely still, and unless perspiration ran or dripped off you, it stayed. Sweat slicked his whole body, making him feel like he'd been dipped in canola oil and left to go rancid, chafing anywhere belt or backpack or equipment touched his body; and if you got a rash here, sure as Skynet made Terminators to kill people, it would get infected.

  He hated feeling this wet and dirty. John would have sworn it hadn't felt this bad the first time he'd been through here. Maybe it wasn't as hot that year, he thought. He'd hate to think he'd become a fussy old lady at sixteen.

  John stopped, chopped the machete halfway into a tree trunk, and yanked off the scarf he'd tied around his forehead. He wrung out the sweat and glanced behind.

  Dieter von Rossbach moved forward with the determination of a machine.

  A machine he just happens to resemble, John thought with a quirk of his lips.

  Even now, after knowing the big man for several weeks, he still couldn't get over Dieter's resemblance to a Terminator.

  In fact it was the other way around: Skynet had used Dieter's face and form to

  "flesh out" the T-101 series of killing machines. When it decided to put living skin on its robots, it scanned old files looking for faces that fit the thing's profile, literally. And there was Dieter von Rossbach.

  Dieter came up and stopped beside him. "If we stand still, the mosquitoes will eat us alive," he remarked.

  John quirked an eyebrow.

  "I haven't noticed that they leave us alone when we're moving."

  Waving a hand before his face, Dieter said, "Ja, but at least they don't stroll up your nose."

  John took a slug from his canteen. Important to keep hydrated. "We'll reach the trail sometime between now and sundown," he said. "But trails can change or disappear completely around here in six years." The Amazonian rain forest was notorious for its ability to absorb the works °f man.

  "So. we keep heading south." Dieter said, moving forward. He looked at the GPS

  unit strapped to his left forearm, reached over his shoulder. drew the machete, and lopped off a soft-bodied trunk in one economical motion. "We'll get there eventually."

  John watched him go with a sigh. Yeah, well, if we keep going south we'll hit Tierra del Fuego eventually. Whether they'd get there in one piece or not was the question. At least the climate's better in Tierra del Fuego.

  When he and his mother had followed this trail six years ago, they'd succeeded in vanishing from the face of the earth as far as law enforcement was concerned.

  But they'd had a guide, which meant they didn't disappear for real.

  Lorenzo was still in business, but he flat refused to go through this section of jungle anymore. He'd sat on his portal by the river, cleaning his gun and shaking his head stubbornly.

  "Those gold miners are out of control down there. They kill anybody they find, no questions asked. You know? Everybody there, they gone a little loco. They kill the Indios, the Indios, some of 'em, kill 'em back. Kill any white man they see. They're so mad they even think I'm white." He'd grinned up at John, teeth flashing in his mahogany face.

  "I'm sorry, boy, but I won't go there, not for love or money." He'd pointed a tobacco-stained finger at John. "You shouldn't go there either."

  Like we had a choice, John thought. It's not like we can buy a first-class ticket and fly home to Asuncion.

  Not if they wanted to disappear as thoroughly as they needed to. Though the authorities might like them to try.

  He screwed the cap back on the canteen and levered his machete out of the tree, then he started off down the trail in Dieter's energetic wake. The Austrian made a much wider path than John did. It was kind of embarrassing; Dieter was his mother's age. At least. He even thought they had a bit of a thing for each other, which was funny in a gross sort of way.

  John sometimes wished he didn't have so much to live up to. In a way it wasn't fair. He not only had his future, fabulous, Great Military Dickhead self to measure himself against, but his mom was superwoman and Dieter, well…

  Dieter was in a class by himself. He sighed. Other kids his age could be comfortably contemptuous of their elders. That was sooo not available to him.

  Be nice though, he thought. For a moment he daydreamed a life where his mother was a clueless, overweight lady who baked cookies for his friends and worried vaguely that he might be getting into drugs or that his girlfriend was a bad influence. In that life his greatest problem would be just saying no to all the temptations that youth is heir to.

  On the: other hand, that could be really boring. Certainly a hit of the guvs at school who had just that lifestyle were; both bored and boring. He might currently be hot and grubby and mosquito-bitten to within an inch of his life, but he wasn't bored. Though if things stayed as
quiet as they currently were…

  He was kidding himself, of course; things were far from quiet. At the back of his mind, with an almost palpable weight, was his endless worry over his mother. It had been days since he'd been able to get any information on her condition. Last he'd heard she was stable. Which was much too ambiguous for comfort. Not that he didn't keep trying to find some in that lame word. Stable was good when you'd been shot several times and stabbed and lost most of your internal fluids.

  Well, you're all alone I when the bullet hits the bone. Truer words had never been sung.

  I wonder how she is, he thought. He also wondered what they—the black-ops types who were probably Cyberdyne's link to the government—were going to do

  to her. John suspected that the people running Cyberdyne's security were so covert they could not only kill you, they could erase you. He couldn't stop the thought from occurring, but refused to dwell on it.

  Couldn't fix it from here, he thought. Couldn't fix it from there either. He whacked some vegetation viciously with the machete. So why do I feel like a piddling little coward?

  He remembered the Infiltrator, a female, astonishingly small compared with the Terminators he'd known, saw again the blood dripping from its blond hair, the outline of its shattered head. That model was mostly cloned human tissue, not flesh over a metal skeleton like the T-101s. Undoubtedly made that way so they'd be better at fooling people into thinking they were human.

  In nightmares he still saw it—dead; organically dead but still moving—strike his mother with a knife-hand blow that went into her gut like a bowie knife, still heard Sarah's cry of agony as she folded and fell to the floor, a long, endless fall.

  Then, in his dreams, things seemed to speed up until everything moved at an impossible rate. They ran up stairs, ran in and out of the building, watched the night blossom into flame as they set off the bombs that destroyed Cyberdyne once again. Stopping Skynet, once again.

  His mother had been unconscious the last time he saw her, looking so small and helpless beside Miles Dyson. There had been no chance of saying good-bye, no hope that she would wake, and at the time, little hope that she would survive.