Barnes grunted and straightened up from the peepholes. His bald head glistened with a week’s worth of sweat, his clenched teeth glinting through two weeks’ worth of beard stubble.
“So what’s the plan?”
“We run on our timetable, not Skynet’s,” Connor replied. “If we can buy a few minutes, I can—”
Barnes nodded.
“Got just the thing.”
With that he pulled open the door, and fired.
There was a soft chuff as the grenade shot skyward out of its tube. Biting down hard on his tongue—I can get more men here before you engage—Connor stepped quickly to the other side of the doorway and looked out.
In the faint starlight he could see eight towering, human-shaped figures picking their way carefully across the treacherous ground. One of the T-600s looked up at the sounds from the bunker, and Connor caught a glimpse of glowing red eyes.
And then, with a brilliant flash, Barnes’s grenade exploded.
Not in the midst of the approaching Terminators, but in the doorway of the half-collapsed four-story building immediately to their right. There was a stutter as the grenade’s shockwave set off a line of smaller charges embedded in the pockmarked masonry.
And with a horrendous crunch, the entire wall gave way, raining blocks of concrete and rebar and broken glass across the street, toppling and burying all eight of the Terminators.
“That how you wanted it?” Barnes called to Connor over the echoing roar.
“Pretty much,” Connor said. So much for giving the group as much time as possible to make their escape.
On the other hand, if Barnes hadn’t blown the building when he did, the eight Terminators would soon have passed that particular trap, and Connor’s fighters would have had that many more enemies to deal with.
“I’ll send you some backup,” he added, moving away from the doorway. “Hold for ten minutes, or as long as you can, then pull back to the tunnel.”
“I don’t need no one else,” Barnes growled, throwing a contemptuous glance at the shaking sentry. “You just get the people and stuff out.”
“I’ll send you some backup,” Connor repeated, making it clear it was an order, and headed back down the corridor. Barnes was probably one of the best ground fighters in the entire Resistance, but this wasn’t the time for lone-wolf tactics. If indeed there ever was such a time.
If anyone had needed extra incentive to get moving, Barnes’s wake-up explosion had apparently done the trick. The whole bunker was alive with people, many of them still scrambling into their clothing as they ran toward the supply room and the emergency exit beyond.
A few of the faster dressers had taken up positions in doorways along the way, their weapons pointed toward the front of the bunker, ready to sacrifice themselves if necessary to slow down the machines once the outer defenses were breached. Connor grabbed two of them and sent them up to the entrance, gave everyone else the same ten-minute warning he’d given Barnes, then headed back to his room for anything he or Kate might have left behind.
He made especially sure that he grabbed his new G’n’R CD.
Most of the fifty-odd people of the team had made it to the supply room by the time he arrived, with only a few stragglers still coming in. Kate was in the center of the activity, coolly pointing each newcomer to the boxes, bags, and packs she’d selected for the must-save list.
“How are we doing?” Connor asked as he picked up two ammo satchels and slung one over each shoulder.
“Another ninety seconds and we’ll have everything we can carry,” Kate told him, threading a bungee cord between the satchels’ straps and fastening them together across Connor’s chest so that they wouldn’t slip off his shoulders. “They took Piccerno’s body down,” she added more quietly.
Connor nodded. He’d noticed that on his way through.
“Have Blair and Yoshi been through? I didn’t spot either of them, but it was pretty dark and I wasn’t exactly taking roll.”
“Blair’s here,” Kate said, waving to a pair of latecomers and pointing them to a stack of ration boxes. “She said she’ll go out with the rest of us and make her way back to the hangar. Yoshi’s already there, or at least he’s supposed to be.”
“We’ll need to get the ground crew out, too,” Connor said, grimacing as a low vibration tickled at the soles of his feet. “Here comes our company.”
The words were barely out of his mouth when one of the younger women dashed in from the direction of the sentry post, nearly running down an eight-year-old boy in the process.
“T-1s,” she announced breathlessly. “Coming in from all directions.”
“Are they heading for the main door?” Connor asked.
“No, toward here. I saw them through the—” she faltered a little “—where Piccerno was. Maybe a hundred meters out.”
Connor nodded. T-1s were heavy, splay-armed fighting machines mounted on heavy treads, slower than the humanoid T-600s but more heavily armed and even harder to take down. The plan was probably to roll them up onto the roof near Piccerno’s sentry post in hopes of collapsing it by sheer weight and trapping the group in a pincer.
“Go to the front and tell Barnes and the others I said to pull out now,” Connor told her. “They’re to collect the rest of the backstops along the way.”
The girl nodded and took off down the corridor at a dead run.
“Tunney?” Connor called, looking around at the heavily laden men and women.
“Here, sir,” Tunney called from the side wall. He and the other lieutenant, David, were standing beside the dark opening that led into the bunker’s emergency exit. Like Connor, each man was loaded with two shoulder bags of ammo or grenades, but instead of just a submachine gun each of them also carried a grenade launcher and flame thrower. “Time to go?” he asked.
“Almost,” Connor said, squeezing Kate’s shoulder briefly and then crossing to join them. “Now it is,” he said. “I’ll take point; keep a three-meter spacing between us.”
“I believe it’s my turn for point, sir,” Tunney said, his voice low but firm.
Connor shook his head.
“My team; my job. Stay alert—if Skynet’s found the far end, we’ll have some unpleasant surprises waiting.”
He looked back at the group, to find them silently watching him. Watching, and trusting.
“Stay as quiet as you can, and don’t stop moving,” he said, keeping his voice as calm as if this was just another training exercise. “Once you’re through the tunnel, depending on what’s waiting out there, we may decide to split into small groups of two or three. Everyone knows where Fallback One is?”
The room bobbed briefly with nodding heads.
“Then I’ll see you all there,” Connor said. “Good luck.” Nodding for Tunney and David to follow, he headed into the tunnel.
The group referred to the emergency exit as a tunnel, but a real, hand-dug tunnel would have taken far more time and manpower than the group had had to spare over the past few months. The route was instead a mostly natural pathway consisting of half-crushed hallways, basements, and service corridors. Connor’s people had cleared out the blockages, propped up the ceilings, and dug short connecting shafts where necessary until they’d created an exit route that could take them invisibly a good three blocks from the bunker.
But there was always the chance that one of Skynet’s endlessly roving machines had spotted the route, and Connor felt his nerves tightening with each step as he made his way through the darkness.
There were dozens of places where the roof had eroded through to the outside world, allowing in some badly needed starlight but also precluding the use of any lights by the escapees. Worse, the longest straight-line segment anywhere in the tunnel was about six meters, with everything else being a collection of zigzags, right-angle turns, and occasional backtracks. A T-600 waiting in the darkness around any one of those corners could have Connor and his vanguard dead before they even knew what had hit them.