In her lair in the security room Clea was silently agreeing with her. John Connor was doing everything right. And he was taking a damn long time doing it, too.
I'm glad the lab is only halfway down the corridor. Otherwise he'll be at it until the generator runs out of fuel. And she wanted to know, with a very human curiosity, what the girl was for.
At last John came to a door marked K. VIEMEISTER, the name of the man who'd taken over the Cyberdyne project. This could be it, he warned himself. If the Terminator was anywhere in the facility this was the logical place. He took a deep breath and flung the door open and himself into the brightly lit room. He peeked over a counter and looked around.
Clea laughed out loud at his expression; she looked forward to showing Alissa the recording. Even her too-solemn little sister would find this funny. She watched him check every inch of the room with exquisite care; it was obvious to her that he placed the safety of his companion above his own. Interesting, and possibly useful.
John came to the door and gestured Wendy in. "Okay, sweetie, I'm gonna finish checking the other labs; you do your thing. Lock the door after me and don't open it unless I can answer a personal question about us."
"A personal question? You mean like—"
He quickly put a finger across her lips. "Something only you and I would know,"
he said sternly. "They can imitate anyone's voice. I've heard them."
She nodded, wide-eyed. "Okay, I'll think of something."
"You do that." He pulled her to him and kissed her, caressed her hair, and turned to the door. "Remember, lock this," he said over his shoulder.
"I will, I will," she said, smiling.
"And get to work." His eyes were already roving up and down the corridor.
"I will, I will," she repeated, closed the door, locked it, and went to the computer bay.
Clea spit the feed, watching Connor fruitlessly check the labs while his "sweetie"
got to work. The girl stripped off her bra and slid a pair of microdiskettes out of
a slit in the lining. Not bad, the I-950 thought, amused. She watched fascinated as the girl put the disk into its drawer and began to work.
The I-950 was reasonably confident that the security protocols they'd installed in the Skynet program could defeat any worm that this child could come up with.
Viemeister might be a prick, and he hadn't yet made Skynet intelligent, but he was no slouch in the security department. So this material would be shunted into a buffer, where the computer would evaluate it.
At first she was puzzled by what she was reading. Then she sucked in her breath in amazement. This was it! This was the key to Skynet's living intelligence. Why would their worst enemy deliver it to them?
And then she understood; they would enumerate every possible path that led to sentience and then program the machine to ignore any paths or commands leading to that result. Unless the programmers knew those codes were there, they could batter their heads against an impenetrable wall of cross-commands for a very long time.
Viemeister might figure it out eventually, but probably not before his funding ran out. Or his patience. He wasn't the kind of human who clung to a project that didn't work out. Well, there was the Nazi thing, but he was really involved with that more to annoy people than for any sincere belief.
Clea rose from her chair. The girl had brought two disks; she had to stop her before she installed whatever was on the second one.
Dieter studied the GPS unit and it told him that he was very close to the base, possibly within ten minutes if he could keep up this pace. Good. he thought.
Because he suspected he was getting a nice little case of frost-nip on his toes and face.
He'd turned the balaclava around and made tiny holes on the solid back surface in hopes of protecting his eyes from snow blindness, and now that the wind had turned, he hoped it would keep them from freezing all together. It felt like his lungs were raw right to the bottom, not that he could breathe that deeply. He held his arms tight around himself to keep his ribs as still as possible, which wasn't very, and tried to ignore the pain. He had so many to choose from by now that it was almost easy.
There was a copper-penny taste in the back of his throat as though he was bleeding, and he was very thirsty. Ice kept forming on the wool around his mouth and nose, making his lips sore and increasing the likelihood of frostbite.
All in all, not one of my better days.
He slogged on as quickly as he could push himself. When the first of the base's sheds came into view, he said a heartfelt "thank God!" and hurried toward it.
It was small on closer examination, obviously a storage shed, but by then he could see a larger building looming up, and headed for it. Off to his right a moving shape came toward him and he paused, thinking it must be someone from the base. It was almost upon him before he could make out what it was.
"Oooh, no! Not another fucking seal!"
The creature barked and stretched its neck out at him, teeth bared.
With all the strength that frustration, desperation, and outrage could lend a man,
von Rossbach hauled off and belted the exhausted animal. It made a small sound and collapsed at his feet, rolling onto its back with flippers extended in a limp V-shape. Dieter swayed in the wind, looking down at it for a moment, not quite believing it had been that easy. It stayed down.
"Good," he said with a satisfied nod, and headed for the largest shed.
Burns, Tricker thought, must save Burns. No, not Burns, Bennet. Bennet was the asset. Burns was an asset to Cyberdyne. And she had assets. She'd tried to use those assets to vamp him. But she didn't try very hard, he thought regretfully. He frowned. Bennet, not Burns. Have to save Bennet. Bennet wasn't Burns. But she might be. Two peas in a pod.
He blinked and shook his head, regretting it instantly as it rang like a carillon.
"Shit!" he said aloud. He tried to move and found himself well and truly bound.
"Shit," he said again, with much more resignation.
What had he been thinking about? Oh, yes. Burns and Bennet and how much alike they looked. The two women might be identical twins. What were the odds of that, two unrelated people looking exactly alike except for hair color. Which could easily be handled by Lady Clairol.
And what the hell did it matter? He had to get out of here and down to the labs, where the action was. Tricker started to pull his belt around. One edge of the buckle was especially sharp, something that came in handy for times like these.
Then he heard the outside door open and slam shut.
The shed door was unlocked and Dieter entered, slammed it behind him, and slid
down its surface to rest on the floor. To him the room was pitch-dark. Didn't escape the snow blindness entirely, he thought, disappointed. But at least he wasn't going to freeze. He pushed back his hood and yanked the soaking balaclava from his head. Next time he was going to get one of those fleece ones.
Better yet, he thought, next time there's not going to be a next time. He knew now, right down in his bones, how close he'd come to dying out there. If the wind had been just a little worse…
"Hey!" a voice called from another room. "Who's out there?"
With a mental sigh Dieter got himself to his feet, then cautiously moved farther into the room. "Hello?" he said.
"Who is that?" the voice called. "Viemeister?"