Terminator - T3 01 - Rise of the Machines Page 8

  including those for the fuel, ignition, power steering, and automatic braking systems.

  Next, she reprogrammed one more of the half dozen ambulances that had arrived to rescue the expected victims of such a large fire.

  Radio cars and ambulances could be stopped by any number of conventional means at the disposal of the various police units on-site.

  She needed something larger. Something so large that she would not have the inconvenience of being stopped and having to change vehicles.

  She scanned the ground transport units available in the immediate vicinity, her eyes lighting on the huge mobile crane parked behind the National Rentals security fence. The word champion was painted in blue on its yellow boom that was telescoped over the cab of its massive blue tractor.

  T-X brought up a file on the machine. It was a hydraulic truck crane weighing more than fifty metric tons, capable of making eighty kilometers per hour, fast enough so that the police couldn't stop it.

  She skirted the rows of emergency vehicles and briskly walked to a service gate in the security fence.

  The police were busy with crowd control, and the

  firemen were intent on battling the nasty blaze. No one noticed as T-X twisted the padlock off the gate and slipped inside. The shadows were deep in the storage yard, and it was not likely that she would be spotted and chal-lenged.

  She trailed her fingers along the truck's enormous

  front bumper, her head-up display overlaid with the electronic and mechanical schematics for the truck as well as the crane's separate control. The truck was driven as a normal semi from the front cab. But the crane's functions were controlled from a computerized console at the rear.

  She went around to the back, climbed up to the control platform, and for a few milliseconds studied the pedals, levers, and indicators, which she optically registered as a match with her head-up display.

  She drilled a small hole directly into the control panel, and moments later transferred a stream of data from her system into the crane's computer.

  When she withdrew her data transfer probe, a soft blue haze played in and around the crane's controls like a delicate fog backlit by a blue neon sign.

  The sky was beginning to get light with the dawn as T-X climbed down from the crane, walked to the front of the cab, and climbed up behind the wheel of the tractor.

  She studied the driving controls, which, except for the transmission levers, were not much different from those of a police vehicle.

  She brought up twin overlays in her head-up display. To the left she studied a street map, and to the right were four rows of symbols. Two controlled the pair of ambulances she had reprogrammed, and two the pair of police cars. From this point she was in ultra-high frequency contact with each of the vehicles via a downlink with a military communications satellite 22,500 miles out in a

  geosynchronous orbit over the Pacific Ocean that already was coming under Skynet control.

  She drilled into the truck's steering column next to the ignition switch, transferred a few hundred bytes of data, and the truck's engine roared to life.

  Simultaneously, the engines in the two ambulances and two police cars revved up.

  Terminator's eyes suddenly opened and he looked up at a very startled Logan Ballinger, who reared back as did his partner, Eric Kraus.

  The man was dead. Now he was alive. They'd heard about stuff like this, but they'd never seen it.

  "I must go," Terminator said. He sat up, straightened his sunglasses, got to his feet, and strode out of the hard-ware store, leaving the two paramedics with their mouths banging open.

  On the street, Terminator picked up the shotgun from where he'd dropped it, and optically catalogued the cur-rent situation.

  Police and fire units were busy at work, as were paramedics emerging from the clinic with sick and injured animals in their arms.

  A crowd had gathered beyond the police barriers, but there was no sign of either John Connor and Kate Brew-ster, or of the T-X.

  More sirens were converging on the scene as Ter-

  minator processed the available data overlaid with probable scenarios and suggested courses of action.

  John Connor and Kate Brewster were gone. The T-X would pursue them. It was only a matter of finding one or the other.

  Which suddenly happened.

  Two police cars and two ambulances roared to life and peeled out in the same direction Connor had gone with the pet van. But no one was driving.

  Cops and firemen scattered out of the way.

  A police officer ran up to one of the squad cars, and made a desperate grab for the steering wheel, but he was thrown dear as the unit burned rubber accelerating.

  Terminator's onboard electronic emissions detector immediately pinpointed downlink signals to the four emergency vehicles, but he was not capable of tracking the source to the specific transmitting satellite.

  A powerful diesel engine roared to life, and Terminator turned in time to see the huge Champion crane leap forward, crashing through the chain-link fence.

  It turned ponderously in the same direction as the police units and ambulances had gone, emergency personnel scrambling to get out of its way.

  As it accelerated up the street, Terminator caught a brief glimpse of the T-X behind the wheel. He deduced from available information that she had sent the radio cars and ambulances out as scouts to track John Connor and Kate Brewster.

  He would follow the T-X.

  Terminator stepped out into the middle of the street

  as a motorcycle cop came around the corner, followed by another fire engine.

  The cop tried to avoid a collision, but Terminator gabbed the bike's handlebars and swung it around like a

  toy.

  "I'll drive," he said as the cop skidded across the street on his back.

  The motorcycle was an Indian, with a windscreen and wind deflector. Capable of speeds in excess of 130 miles per hour, it would do the job.

  In one smooth motion Terminator stashed his shot- gun in the saddle rack, hopped aboard, and hammered the throttle to its stop as he downshifted into second.

  The motorcycle took off as if it were shot from a cannon as the mobile crane, still gathering speed, lum-bered around the corner at the end of the block.

  c.13

  Valley

  In the back of the pet van Kate was desperately trying to pry open the rear door, but the latch was jammed.

  They'd hit something and Connor had stopped. She could hear a man shouting. He sounded very angry.

  "You did something to the doors," she screamed at

  Connor. "I can't get the back open."

  The man said something else she couldn't quite make

  out. But it sounded like he was closer than before. Right in front of the van.

  "Help!" Kate shouted. "Let me out of here. Help!"

  "What's going on?" the man shouted, and Kate could

  hear him plainly now. He was just a few feet away. "What are you doing?" he demanded.

  "I'm being kidnapped," Kate screamed. "Call the po-

  lice. Call nine-one-one."

  The man was right next to the driver's side. "What?

  Who's there?"

  "Help me!"

  Connor was trying to start the pickup truck's engine but it didn't want to catch.

  "Where do you think you're going?" the Mercedes's driver yelled. "Hey! I'm talking to you! Get out of there!"

  "Help! Let me out of here," Kate cried. "For God's sake, someone please help me."

  "What's going on in there?" the Mercedes's driver demanded. He thumped the side of the van. "What are you doing?"

  The pet van's engine suddenly roared into life. Connor threw it into reverse and the pickup careened away from the Mercedes.

  "Hey!" the driver shouted. "Get back here!"

  Kate was thrown against the rear door as Connor dropped the pickup into drive and jammed the gas pedal to the floor.

  "Oh, God," Kate cried
weakly. It was never going to end. "Oh, God—help me."

  In Connor's estimation they had spent way too much time screwing around at the accident scene. Unless he missed his guess, that machine at the clinic was something new, and Terminator wasn't going to have an easy time with it.

  One thing he was absolutely sure of, however, was that the new cyborg would not stop coming after him until he was dead, or it was destroyed.

  He had been down this path before. There were no other options.

  The only question in his mind was how the hell the

  new machine, and Terminator, had traced him to the animal clinic. That part wasn't making any sense to him.

  Kate pounded on the rear window. "You can't do this to me!" she raged. "Pull over and let me out. Now!"

  Connor reached over his shoulder and slid the window open. "I can't let you out. You're just going to have to trust me."

  "Yeah, right," Kate said. She was totally frazzled, at her wits' end, frightened.

  Traffic was starting to pick up with delivery trucks and workmen making their sleepy way to early shifts. Connor had to dodge in and around the slower traffic, while all the while he kept checking his rearview mirror. At any moment he expected to see something behind him. The cyborg would be coming. He would be willing to bet money on it.

  A big ball of flame and black smoke rose in the sky around the corner a couple of blocks behind him, and Connor's gut tightened. It was happening faster than he'd

  feared it would.

  Suddenly he could hear sirens. He glanced in his rear-view mirror again in time to see a pair of black-and-whites screeching around the corner, lights flashing. If the cyborg caught up with him and Kate, it would not hesitate to kill them on the spot. But if they were stopped by the cops, arrested and tossed in a holding cell, the end result would be the same. The machine would

  track them down and kill them.

  "That's the cops," Kate shouted over his right shoul-der. "Now you'll have to pull over."

  "Yeah, first chance I get," Connor said. He pulled around a slow-moving UPS truck and jammed the gas pedal to the floor.

  They were still in a commercial section of the city, lots of warehouses, big buildings, shops, and parts stores.

  "What? You think you can get away from them? Are you crazy?"

  The first of the two cop cars was right on Connor's tail. It pulled up beside him, and he glanced over, nearly losing control of the pet van and running it up onto the curb.

  No one was driving the squad car. There was no one behind the wheel. No one in the passenger seat, or in the rear. The car was driving itself.

  The black-and-white swerved right, slamming into the side of the pet van. Connor had just time enough to lean out of the way as part of the squad car's door entered the pet van's cab. He hauled the pickup truck hard to the right, just missing a pair of parked cars, bumped over the curb and up onto the sidewalk, the van's shocks bottoming out with a bone-jarring bang.

  The second squad car roared up on the sidewalk behind him, smashing into his right rear fender, metal crunching, glass and plastic breaking.

  Connor had just a split second to see that no one was driving this cop car either, before he skidded over the curb and back out onto the street The pet van's left front tire dug in, nearly causing them to flip over, before he regained control.

  This was nuts. But he knew damned well it was some-

  thing that the new machine was somehow orchestrating. He'd seen this kind of weird shit before.

  Something else crashed into the rear of the pet van, this time one of a pair of ambulances, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Connor didn't have to look to know that neither of them had a driver behind the wheel.

  He just hoped that Kate was somehow okay in the back.

  Abruptly the ambulances dropped back Connor hauled the pet van around a corner and stomped on the gas pedal.

  "Hold on back there," he shouted to Kate.

  Terminator hung a few meters off the Champion crane's left rear bumper. The ponderous machine thundered like an express train down city streets, taking out cars, trucks, and anything else in its path.

  Moments ago the T-X had crushed a car, its gas tank igniting with a big ball of flame and black smoke. Terminator barely avoided the fireball.

  He could see the T-X's reflection in the broad driver's side mirror. She turned and spotted him, their eyes locking for an instant. Terminator registered an extremely brief dilation of the T-X's pupils, indicating a mild form of what could be classified as AI surprise.

  The T-X had expected that he had been destroyed in front of the animal clinic.

  It was a mistake. The T-X was not infallible after all.

  The pair of driverless ambulances dropped back in front of the crane, like a shark's remora, and then slid back along either side of the big machine.

  Suddenly the Champion's huge boom lifted off its cradle and began to extend, while rotating to the left.

  The ambulances dropped back on either side of Terminator, then swerved inward, trying to crush him between them.

  At the last possible moment, Terminator slammed on the bike's front brake. The rear tire lifted high off the pavement, but the Indian stopped nearly in its tracks, just managing to clear the rear bumpers of the two ambulances as they crashed together.

  The crane's boom continued to extend and swing around, taking out electric wires and transformers above the street in showers of sparks.

  Terminator grabbed his shotgun. When the ambulances separated, he hammered the throttle, pulling a wheelie. He roared between them, firing over his left shoulder at the nearest ambulance, taking out one of its front tires.

  It dropped back, but did not drop out

  The Champion crane surged forward.

  Behind T-X was the T-850 that Skynet expected the human resistance would send back, along with the two ambulances that were working the problem.

  She was helping that element by using the extended

  boom to lay down a continuous debris path that might slow the obsolete model warrior/cyborg.

  Ahead of her was the target, John Connor. His van was damaged, and she could sense the heat signature of an overworked engine that was leaking lubricating oil from a rear seal in the aft section of the main mass of the block.

  Two LAPD remote units were harrying Connor, but to this point they had not been completely effective. The human showed the unusually strong resilience and inventiveness that Skynet had programmed her to expect.

  T-X punched a hole in the windshield, morphed her right arm into her plasma weapon, and quickly charged the unit.

  Her head-up unit displayed a reticle roughly centered on the pet van. Her target-acquisition stabilizing circuitry popped up and the reticle locked on the pickup truck.

  Her weapon indicator showed fully charged as the pet van and flanking police cars raced through a red light, just avoiding collisions with two automobiles.

  T-X fired at the same instant a semi tractor-trailer entered the intersection, filling her targeting frame.

  For an instant nothing seemed to happen. But then

  the semi was engulfed in a blue plasma charge field and exploded with an impressive flash-bang that sent flames and debris hammering off the fronts of the commercial buildings on either side of the street.

  The Champion crane plowed through the debris like a hot knife through soft butter, and on the other side, T-X glanced in her rearview mirror.

  Terminator, his motorcycle laid over on its side, skidded through the flames, then shot upright, apparently unharmed.

  Behind it, the first ambulance ran headlong into a major piece of the semi's frame and disintegrated, while the second ambulance emerged from the fire, leaving behind twin vortex swirls in the dense smoke.

  A huge explosion obliterated the intersection behind Connor. He looked in his rearview mirror in time to see the Champion crane crash through the fire and debris, followed a second later by Terminator on the police bike, and one o
f the ambulances directly on his tail.

  It was Terminator! Somehow he had caught up.

  They weren't out of the woods yet, but Connor felt a small measure of relief. He and Kate were no longer alone. Terminator might be an older model of cyborg, but he'd been there in the past for John, and it looked as if he would be there again.

  For the briefest of instants, Connor wished that his mother were here. But then he put that thought out of his mind.

  First, he would have to survive this trouble.

  The driverless cop cars still flanked him. And it wouldn't take much more for them to finally box the pet van in and run it off the street.

  "Hold on," he shouted to Kate in the back.

  He slammed the brake pedal as hard as he could,

  locking up the pet van's wheels, smoke pouring off the tires.

  The cop cars shot past, and Connor made a sloppy but effective four-wheel drift to the right, just missing a delivery truck at the corner.

  The pair of cop cars locked up their brakes in unison and made perfect 180s, jumping back on Connor's tail as quickly as they'd been thrown off.

  The Champion crane took the corner wide, the extended boom taking out the entire side of a building, brick and wood and plastic exploding in every direction.

  Whatever kind of weapon the cyborg had fired had been big enough to take out an entire semi truck. One hit, even a near miss, would make short work of the pet van.

  Connor kept checking the rearview mirror as the huge crane actually gained on him, rolling over cars whose drivers weren't quick enough to get out of the way, whereas he could only weave in and out of the slower-moving traffic.

  But the ambulance and Terminator were still back there, along with the cop cars in some kind of a crazy Fourth of July parade complete with fireworks.

  There was a large hole in the Champion crane's wind-shield and something jutted out from inside.

  Connor swerved hard to the right, nearly sideswiping a row of parked cars, and then swerved sharply left, laying on his horn for cars to get out of his way.

  Kate was being thrown from side to side in the back. He could hear her body slamming against the cap.

  "Stop it!" she screamed in desperation. "Stop it!" But he could not. Their lives depended on his driving. He could see a bright blue glow around whatever it was sticking out of the crane's windshield. It was the cyborg's weapon. And it was ready to fire again.