Chapter VII - Part I

"Every morning in Africa, a Gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn't matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle... when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."

Hewitt, Los Angeles, CA

January 15, 2007

Tucker DuPuis studied the assembled ordinance spread out over the kitchen table with a frown as deep as the Grand Canyon. He did not have anything to criticize, not really. The weapons and equipment they had acquired was as good as the money they had could get them on the black market without drawing too much attention to them. Still, DuPuis had not stayed alive for so long by being reckless. The New Orleans native of African-American descent had a keen eye for problems and danger, and he intended to keep his men out away from both as good as possible. That foresight had been instrumental in letting him rise to the rank of Captain in TechCom's forces in the turbulent years after Judgement Day when it had looked as if Skynet was on the brink of victory. His military experience as a sergeant in the United States army had opened him doors and career opportunities in an environment where significant parts of the national military infrastructure had been destroyed in the nuclear exchange. A US government had re-installed itself in Pittsburgh, pretending to exert some kind of control over what was left of the continental states, even trying to hold elections - elections! - a year after the bombs had fallen, but for all intents and purposes it had been John Connor who ran the war effort. His ad hoc coalition of militias, national guard remnants, volunteers and members of the armed forces had been the nucleus of TechCom and all that stood between mankind and its extinction for the first years.

DuPuis brushed his fingers through his short hair as he leaned on the table with one arm. He had met the general once, and he had left a deep impression on him. John Connor had been a gaunt man with hollow cheeks and deep-set eyes. Young, but appearing a lot older than his actual age, with a haunted look in his eyes and the presence of someone who knew fully well how much rested on his shoulders. When he talked, he did so in a deep and steady voice, each sentence a concise, sound statement that more than once had reminded DuPuis of something the man had precisely weighed in his mind before uttering it.

There had been times when soldiers had begun to question Connor, for the man seemed to disappear from the face of the Earth for months and only be available for his closest command staff, but DuPuis had understood very early on that the war they were fighting needed a man like Connor, who carefully weighed all risks and opportunities and spent sometimes weeks on plans more than it needed loud-mouthed braggarts who constantly roused the people. He knew this war was different, a 'cerebral' war, and it had to be fought differently.

Though he had had no idea how different until he had been sent back in time. There were three more TechCom soldiers with him, and they had a job to do.

Thirty-five years old Elizathbeth 'Beth' Shiawaze was his second in command, a TechCom lieutenant from the East Coast who had been a teenager on a camping trip when the bombs had fallen. Short-haired, athletic and tall only her face indicated that a part of her heritage was Asian. Tough as nails, Beth had survived the disastrous Denver Offensive of 2016, and she had been with his unit ever since.

Corporal Dillon O'Malley was ex-US Army, a gruff forty-two year old veteran who had been on leave from Afghanistan in Seattle when all hell broke loose. Even though he claimed his family had been in the US since the early 1800s he was as Irish as booze and potatoes. The computer specialists had served with Beth before, and DuPuis was pretty certain the two had 'rekindled' their relationship since he had been transferred from the 216th and made the jump back.

The fourth in their group was Sergeant Damian Wiess, the youngest member of the team. Had it not been for his hair cut short in a military fashion he would have had the appearance of a tanned, dark-haired college boy. The silent explosives specialists and expert marksman was an enigma to DuPuis. He did not talk about his past unless he had to, but he had come to him on Connor's recommendation with a distinguished combat record and all the hate for Skynet his eyes could contain without becoming blazing orbs of fire. Strangely enough, even though he had had the least pre-war exposure to life in the United States he had adapted the best since their arrival.

TechCom Special Tasks Unit 10-21 had been sent back in 2025 with no pre-defined, singular task but with a wide range of operational freedom. DuPuis' orders had been to scout for Skynet activities and to interdict them at his own discretion. For the past months they had lain low, setting up a small network of safehouses and acquiring weapons and money that allowed them to operate within the blissful consumer society they had found themselves in without creating ripples that would have stirred the attention of forces on the look-out. By now the secretary of Homeland Security should have been Michael Chertoff, and the whole nation should have been in a lull from six years without serious terrorist attacks, but the man had been replaced after the combined might of the federal law enforcement apparatus had failed to find the perpetrators of what was called the 'San Diego Massacre'. His replacement was a hard-ass, and under his auspices the FBI and ATF were watching what happened on the black market with eagle eyes. Getting guns, even automatic rifles, had still been comparably easy. Buying explosives, however, had proven to be difficult and extremely costly. Wiess had built them some home-made grenades, but the plastic explosives had cost them in the tens of thousands.

"All right, everybody pack up," DuPuis heard himself say, and the room sprung into action, everybody checking their weapons one last time, putting grenades and equipment into their duffel bags. It was past ten in the evening, and they had an objective, one that smelled like a trap two miles against the wind, but an objective nonetheless. Beth jumped ahead of them, starting up their van, a rusty old Chevy that was so nondescript a sight on California's streets that the police probably would not even have bothered to stop them even if they had known the car was stolen. O'Malley and Wiess jumped into the back, and DuPuis ran shotgun as the amazon resistance fighter took off with screeching wheels. The part of Hewitt they had set up shot in was not exactly the best part of town, so nobody cared about the noise. Their route took them westwards, to L.A.'s sprawling corporate down town area.

"This still reeks of a trap," O'Malley muttered after a long period of silence in which the only sounds had been those of the old V8 engine. "I mean, 'Skynet Technologies', seriously? The fuckin' machines are many things, but terminally stupid never was one of them. 'Skynet Technologies'," he airquoted the name, "that's like painting a bullseye the size of Chicago on your ass. So it has to be a trap."

"Shut yer piehole, O'Malley," DuPuis' order was said in a bored, disinterested tone as the captain watched the buildings outside pass by in a flurry of light and sound. "We've been over this a dozen times, and we've scouted the damn place as good as we could. There's too much activity there for it to be just a trap for a bunch of guys with terminally bad luck." At least that was how he rationalized the whole affair. Even for something as megalomaniac as the machine side of the war, just having a forty-something stories office tower in the middle of L.A. for the sake of attracting Resistance commandos was over the top, ergo there had to be more there, ergo they had a target. "We go in quiet, but we leave with a big bang!" he flashed his white teeth in a dangerous smile."So whatever Skynet is building in there, we blow it to kingdom come. Hell, maybe we can blow up the fucker itself!"

There were vigorous nods in the car, but Damian Wiess only aquiesced superficially. It was every TechCom soldier's wet dream to be the one to finally kill Skynet, but the twenty-seven year old Nebraskan had another target. Damian Wiess wanted Jordan Gray dead.

xxxxx

Half an hour later, Wiess, DuPuis and the other two TechCom soldiers knelt on a concrete floor fifteen stories above ground level and studied the tower that faced them less than fifty metres away. There were lights in some windows on that other side, but they were few and far between. A hundred feet or more below them, a concrete wall, clad in fancy, polished black marble twelve feet high separated the dark office tower behind it from the street in front of it. A silver-lined blue logo clung to it in large letters: SKYNET TECHNOLOGIES. A more stylized version, really and emblem, looked back at them almost at the same height as they were at that moment.

Small shadows slowly criss-crossed the spaces below them, looking like toy soldiers from such a height, but DuPuis and his team knew they were very real. They patrolled the whole perimeter, armed to the teeth. Unit 10-21 had first tried to come up with a plan that would allow them to enter through the spacious underground parking garage, but the whole ground level they had to pass was literally covered in surveillance cameras. Getting in there would have been an exercise in futility – or a suicide attack.

Not that he felt a lot more confident in their actual plan, Wiess thought as pushed the butt of the gun against his shoulder and pulled the trigger. The hook left the barrel with a dull 'thud', pulling the cable after it in a wide arch through Los Angeles' night sky. The soldier let out a sign of relief as the spearhead buried itself deep in the thin strip of concrete he had aimed for that lay between the wide windows. Without waiting for orders he latched a spring catch onto the cable and hung himself and his gear onto it. Taking a deep breath before that one final step, he took a few paces of run-up and threw himself over the edge with closed eyes and clenched teeth. Wiess felt the wind push him around and slap his face as the metallic whirr of the catch rasping against the downward-tilted cable carried him across the distance. He forced himself to open his eyes again, a voice in his head reminding him not to look down. Fuck, he hated heights like this.

The wall on the other side came closer a lot faster than Damian Wiess had expected. He tried to bring both his feet up, but their hardly professional rope-way construction left one little chance in the way of balancing. Sergeant Wiess only had a second to brace for impact before he crashed sideways against a wide window which did not budge one damn bit. Pain shot through his arm and shoulder, but the feared sound of breaking bones failed to materialize. He just hung there for a few seconds, trying to catch his breath again.

"Wiess, are you okay?" DuPuis' voice echoed through his headset's earplug. "Damn it, Wiess, come in!"

"I'm all right," the sergeant answered with a suppressed moan with a start, balling his left fist. It hurt, but he could move the hand. The pain was enough to numb his fear of heights, for when he checked his pockets and looked down, all he could think about was to not drop anything – especially not a detonator on which just conveniently a piece of C4 stuck!

Carefully he took three of those out of his pockets. They were small things, indeed smaller than the palm of his hands by a good margin, and pressed them against the window so that they formed an almost perfect triangle.

"Ready!" he whispered, even though two hundred feet above the ground and suspect to the winds racing in between the urban canyons nobody would have heard him below even if he had talked loudly.

Back on the other side O'Malley pulled a small remote from his pocket and pushed the single button on it. Almost immediately the alarms of half a dozen cars parked in a side road went haywire, honking and beeping wildly.

Wiess pulled himself back from the glass front and turned his head aside, closing his eyes. A hardly noticeable flash accompanied the explosion as the four small detonators blew the thick window inwards with a dry crack, littering the carpeted floor inside with shards. Putting both his feet through the opening, he pulled himself inside.

"I'm in," he whispered into his headset. "Everything's quiet. Get your asses over here, I'll cover you." After a pause he added sourly: "And be careful with the run-up."

One after another they sailed into the dark corridor, O'Malley cursing profanely as he had a hard time getting through the opening and off the hook, being the smallest soldier of Unit 10-21.

"Keep it down, soldier," DuPuis ordered him calmly, his face and beard now hidden behind a black sky mask. O'Malley glowered at him for a second, but pressed his lips together before pulling down his mask, too. They all knelt together in a half-circle, and the captain pulled out a flashlight to illume a rough sketch he placed on the floor. "We move to the centre, where the elevators are. There are still people working in the building. That means they are still running. There'll be a floor plan near the elevators, so we can check where our target is located," he looked each of them in the eyes. "Keep your eyes open, and be stealthy. No macho-hero bullshit in my unit," he warned them sternly, "and God willing, we'll walk away from this alive and unharmed."

Beth, O'Malley and Wiess nodded in silent agreement. The group drew their guns from their duffel bags and headed deeper into the building.

xxxxx

Michael Decker looked up from his hand and slightly tilted his head.

"I take your twenty and raise by another fifty," he pushed three bills into the centre of the table, causing two of the other players to wince and the one directly in front of him to groan.

"If you keep this up, DiFranco, Decker'll strip you down to your pants, and you can walk back home from 'Skynet Central' in your undies," a guard leaning against the wall of the staffroom remarked mockingly, drawing on his cigarette. The room was full of cigarette smoke despite the air conditioning's best efforts to the contrary.

"Shut up, Miller," DiFranco, the man sitting opposite Decker retorted sharply, "the cockroaches in your apartment have a better idea of poker than you do!"

"No, not his pants, Mr. Miller. Mr. DiFranco is not my size," the terminator answered in a perfectly even voice the others mistook for humour.

"Check!" DiFranco added seventy dollars to the pot, and one of the other men at the table took the last card from the stack, revealing it to be the nine of spades. DiFranco frowned and knocked on the table again, thus stating he would not add more to the pot.

"All in," was all Decker said motionlessly, pushing the stack of coins and dollar bills in front of him into the middle of the poker table.

All eyes in the room expectantly latched onto DiFranco who stared at the two cards in his palm, then threw them away with a resigned sigh.

"Fold," he announced. "Now let me see that hand of your's, sir," he demanded.

Decker placed his cards on the table for everybody to see. He had nothing.

"Son of a...," DiFranco muttered, shaking his head. "That damn man is as unreadable as a rock," he pointed at the terminator and threw his hands up, addressing the rest of the room.

"Yeah, and the rest of us realized that a couple of weeks back already, DiFranco," another man in the back of the room hidden by a haze of cigarette fumes snorted derisively.

"Oh yeah? And what do you know, you lousy SAS wanker from..."

Michael Decker didn't pay any attention to the banter of the PMCs as a priority wireless comm session was established by the tower's security system. Compatibility between the two systems was limited, but it was sufficient for the exchange of very basic messages. He tilted his head to the right and frowned the slightest bit.

"I believe we have a situation, gentlemen," he announced calmly, causing the competition of insults to die down immediately, all heads turning towards him. Only moments later the red light in the staffroom that symbolized the system's silent alarm began to blink, and everyone scrambled to their feet.

"I swear, the boss' got something like precognition," Martin DiFranco whistled, grabbing a carbine from a locker.

"Another reason not to play poker against him," Miller stated dryly while inserting a new magazine into his gun.

DiFranco glowered at his back only for a second before he followed the British ex-SAS member and the rest of the tower's ready team. They came together in the ground floor's lobby, twelve guards and Decker forming a half circle before the subterranean security centre linked itself into the situation via radio.

"We have four armed intruders inside the building," the men in front of the screens down there informed Decker and the others. "They're in Elevator 3, going up, towards the primary server banks."

"Understood," Decker responded. "Reroute their elevator and send it down here. We'll take care of them," he ordered them, then turned to the men around him. "Our first priority is to take them alive," he informed them. "Miller, Hendricks, get your tasers ready. The rest, cover them."

xxxxx

The elevator was spacious enough for three times their number, Wiess thought for the second time since he had stepped into the box of chrome and polished wood racing upwards. Even though he had acclimatized pretty well to his new environment it still were the small things that made him remember that he had spent most of his life in the world created by Judgement Day. There had been so few people in that world that it had been a small miracle to stumble across a band of survivors numerous enough to fill something as mundane as this elevator. There it had-.

The elevator abruptly came to a halt, then started to move again - down! The change in momentum was strong enough to make his stomach heave, and for a moment he thought he'd have to say good-bye to the burritos he had eaten for dinner.

"What's happening?" DuPuis snapped, his face looking a tad bit paler than usual.

"We've been found discovered, Cap," O'Malley sounded as calm as if he was talking about the weather even though he began fumbling for the assortment of small tools he carried around in his pockets. "They're sendin' the box down by remote control."

"Stop them!" Captain DuPuis ordered him with a frown.

Wiess and Shiawaze both held their weapons in a tighter grip than just seconds before while O'Malley pried the panelling over the elevator controls open with a screwdriver. Except for the Irish-American everyone's eyes clung to the LED display that seemed to be edge towards ever-smaller numbers like a countdown with fate. Mumbling and cursing, the small, stocky man applied a second screwdriver to the electronics panel he had unveiled, then pressed a short piece of wire in a port he had pried free.

For the second time in less than two minutes the elevator jerked to a violent halt, catapulting each of them off his feet. but O'Malley grinned at them triumphantly. The display above showed a blue "12". DuPuis helped him onto his feet.

"I'll save the praise for later, O'Malley," he muttered, pointing towards the box's ceiling. "Let's get the hell outta here. Give me a leg-up."

Beth pushed the captain up after he had opened the elevator's hatch, and DuPuis pressed himself through the opening with both hands. It was dark and quiet in the shaft. Beth was the next to go, Tucker pulling her athletic frame up with him. Wiess was the third in line. As he leaned down to give O'Malley a hand something gave the cage a sudden jolt that let him tumble. The Irish-American below landed in the corner of the elevator and cursed.

"Get off the cage!" he yelled. "They are overriding the clamps!"

"Bullshit!" Wiess heard himself say. "We're TechCom! No man gets left behind."

Beth had already started to climb up the shaft's service ladder. DuPuis was shortly behind her, his duffel bag preventing him from turning around so that Wiess could see the expression on the captain's face. The cage jolted a second time, and O'Malley's plea was more frantic this time.

"Fuckin' move it, Sarge! Get the job done, that why we've come 'ere!"

He heard the snapping sound of the last clamp and hurled himself against the ladder as the manual override came into effect. The cage raced downwards, into the darkness.

xxxxx

The display above the elevators doors of Elevator 3 had begun to change again, the numbers decreasing rapidly now.

"We're controlling the cage manually," central informed Decker over their secure channel. "They disabled the on-board cameras, be prepared for everything!" the guard on the other side added a warning.

Michael Decker, six foot six tall, tanned and broad-shouldered, pressed the butt of his G36 carbine against his shoulders. If he had to shoot the gun, his internal servos and his strength were more than adequate enough to compensate for any kind of recoil the 5.56mm bullets would be able to create.

"Miller, Hendricks, get ready," he ordered the two guards with tasers, and the former soldiers crouched closer to the doors of Elevator 3, each man setting himself up at a slight angle to the cage's entrance.

The elevator announced its arrival with the soft ting of a bell, then the two doors slid apart. An assault rifle bellowed, the cacophony of its onslaught amplified by the confines of corridors of concrete and steel. Decker saw the muzzle flash before his audio sensors received and processed the staccato created by the reactions of trigger and burning cordite propellant. The salvo mowed from left to right, from Miller to Hendricks without pause, tearing through both men like a scythe before any of them could react. With the two of them down, however, the line of fire was no longer obstructed, and the remaining guard detail repaid their attackers in kind. Assault rifles barked all across the lobby, dozens of bullets impacting in and around the cage with sparks and small fountains of dust where they hit the concrete behind the delicate wooden panelling. The firestorm ebbed off after only a few seconds. Skynet's human guards were all ex-soldiers, many of them from some special force of another, and the last thing they needed to be taught was fire discipline. Needing no orders, two of them crouched closer to the cage, guns erect, while the others drew Miller and Hendricks out of the zone of danger.

"There's only one body in here!" one of them yelled. "Miller looks bad," another added amidst a painful groan whose source Decker identified as Hendricks. The man was conscious, his right leg bleeding badly from two gunshot wounds.

"Get the medics up here," he ordered them calmly. "Central, we have one confirmed dead here. The others most have gotten off the elevator. Check all levels since their last stop, I want them found!" he demanded a bit more forcefully then, turning to the rest of the unit with him.

"There are three more of them on the run within the tower. I want every level checked and sealed. If you encounter them, pin them down and disable them, if you can get close to them," he informed them. "Otherwise, kill them! We're moving out!"

xxxxx

The sounds of gunfire had echoed up the elevator shaft loud and clear to all three of them. O'Malley was dead by now, Wiess knew. All he hoped for was that the team's oldest member had at least taken a few of those bastards with him.

"What now, Cap?" he pushed his head back and asked DuPuis who pushed himself up the ladder a couple metres above him.

"There's a secondary server hub on the fifteenth floor," the New Orleans man told him and 'Beth' between taking breaths. Their duffel bags and carbines really felt like millstones pulling them down here. "We blow that up and get the hell outta here as fast as we can," he growled. "If we keep it up, we can be there in three minutes."

Wiess looked at the big, red "8" painted at the side of the shaft where he clung to the ladder. Three minutes. Yeah, right. They pushed themselves higher, as fast as their aching arms and cramping legs permitted them to, always expecting one of the elevator doors they passed by to open, assault rifles ready to fire facing them. But the doors remained shut, and the only sounds in the otherwise empty elevator shaft was their panting breath and the squealing of the rubber soles of their boots on the rounded runs of the ladder. They stopped at a maintenance platform sunken into the wall on the fourteenth floor, gathering their breath.

"You guys are my responsibility," DuPuis announced in a voice that accepted no protest. "I'll go ahead and check if the coast is clear." Determinedly, the black soldier pushed himself up the ladder and crawled through a service hatch that ended in a maintenance room on level fifteen. Shiawaze flashed him a brief smile as she pushed herself after DuPuis. He heard the captain's voice from above.

"Lights are out, the level seems empty," he informed them. "10-21, get your asses up here!"

Wiess looked up again as 'Beth' pushed herself through the fifteenth floor's hatch. She was ten years older than he was, but she had quite a nice ass. He frowned instantly. What a stupid thing to think about in such a situation! Wiess followed her up and leaned down to squeeze himself through the hatch.

"If we go north from here, it's just thirty metres to the servers," he heard DuPuis explain before a soft, bell-like sound announced the arrival of another elevator.

"Fuck!" Beth yelled and immediately let her assault rifle handle the following conversation. The captain's weapon joined the fray, but so did at least four other automatic firearms. Through the narrow opening all Wiess saw was the movement of shadows before a round, metal object landed no five feet away from him on the ground and his eyes widened. Biting down a curse and shielding his face, the blast of the grenade he himself had made kicked him off his feet and almost off the railing. Grappling for something to hold onto, his duffel bag slipped off his shoulders and vanished into the blackness of the elevator shaft, following the M4 carbine the explosion had slapped out of his grip.

There were more people coming up outside the hatch. The muzzle flashes dipped the shaft into an eerie twilight. With horror he realized he had no chance to link up with the others again with Skynet's bloody security detail between them. And all he had was his sidearm. He wanted to howl in frustration. The whole plan had started so well for them! Wiess weighed his options, then silently said good-bye to DuPuis and Shiawaze. He knew he would not make it out here alive again, but there was at least one thing left he had to try, for himself. Taking a deep breath, he began climbing up again, away from the sounds of gunfire. Up, to where Jordan Gray was.

xxxxx

Gunfire still echoed through the concrete innards of the Skynet Technologies tower when Damian Wiess, Sergeant, TechCom Unit 10-21 kicked in the maintenance access on level 32. The way up had taken him less than five minutes now, and that either DuPuis or Beth - maybe even both of them – was still holding out below filled him with grim satisfaction. He put his head through the opening to take a peek, holding the grip of his pistol tight in his hand. The other side was empty, silent. Wide-spaced offices for the middle management, all with wide glass fronts with real curtains, polished wood furniture and the best in office electronics money could buy filled most of the level, all empty at that time of the day. Time was racing closer to midnight, and he crossed the floor unhindered towards his target.

Jordan Whittaker, or 'Gray' as he called himself now, resided in a large office one could only reach by passing through a corridor lined with paintings – each and every from a renowned master – and a an ante-room where usually his personal assistant would work and wait for his orders. Light shone through the narrow gap between door and floor. He crept closer and pressed his ear against it, trying to steady his own breathing enough so that he could hear more than the blood and adrenalin pumping through his own veins. After a few moments, the sound of his beating heart declined enough for him to pick up the sounds from behind the door. People, groups of people, invariably made some kind of noise by there very existence, even if they tried to remain hidden. Terminators could lay still for days without ever moving even an inch, as the Resistance had painfully learned when the first T-800 infiltrators had been introduced. But if Skynet here had possessed terminators, it would have used them already, and not unreliable human auxiliaries. If anything, the AI he had been familiar with as an enemy had not exactly been the most subtle opponent.

The room on the other side lay silent. Nonetheless, he checked his pistol one last time before he took a deep breath and threw the door wide open, rushing inside. Jordan Gray's office was a wide, square room with the appearance of a cross between a video conference centre and a club lounge. It was dominated by a comparably plain, white desk in the centre behind which Gray sat, studying the display of one of three computer screens on it. And he was not alone.

A young, dark-haired woman in a suitably appealing black skirt and blouse stood on the corner of the desk, a Blackberry in her hand, listening to Gray. She was about his own age, Wiess noticed. He suppressed the desire to grimace. His beef was with the man behind the desk, not some most likely innocent corporate hottie.

Gray looked up from the screen, eyeing him more annoyed then afraid, cocking an eyebrow at him.

"What do you want?"

Gray pushed his chair back and straightened in it, his voice a level baritone that most people would have found pleasant to listen to. A tiny part in Wiess noticed the immaculate looks of the man and unfavourably compared him to his combat- and sweat-stained own.

"Jordan Gray, is it? Or should I rather say, Jordan Whittaker?"

If the man was surprised by what Wiess had just said he did not show it. Gray's dark, unwavering eyes stared right into his own.

"Both would be correct, Mr. …?"

"Wiess, Damian, Sergeant, TechCom Unit 10-21," he flashed his teeth in a wolfish grin. "The Resistance says 'Hello'!"

He raised his gun, ready to pull the trigger, but instead of trying to evade him, Gray just folded his hands and looked at him.

"Mr. Wiess, why do you want to kill me?" he asked calmly. "We have never met, nor have I personally ever done anything to you, as far as I know."

Damian stopped his index finger from bending and pushing the pistol's trigger. A part of him called him a fool for doing so, but another, just as vocal part of his subconscious demanded him to justify himself.

"I once had a wife and three daughters," he told him cautiously, not taking his eyes of that uneasing, ice-grey stare. "In twenty-twenty-three, Skynet caught them and brought them to Salt Lake City, into one of the extermination camps you were running for the machines." Wiess could feel the cold anger burning inside of him, that, and the despair over the loss of his loved ones. he had not thought that talking about it would be so hard.

"Another me did that in another time line, Mr. Wiess. The man you want to kill? He's not sitting behind this desk. He was killed, in 2024," Gray looked at him, his eyes cool, calm ponds. "But you know that, don't you?"

Wiess gritted his teeth.

"Yes, but not by myself," he admitted regretfully. "You took them from me then, and now, you're working with the same machines, again, Whittaker."

"There is more at stake here than you know, Sergeant."

"I won't let that happen once more," Wiess ignored what Gray had just said. "This time, you won't be able to become the 'Butcher of Utah'. This is for my daughters," he exclaimed, raising the gun.

Had it not been for combat instincts honed in years of warfare in the post-apocalyptic ruins of America, Wiess would most likely not even have noticed how the secretary who until then had remained remarkably still - too still!, a voice screamed - swirled to face him while at the same time throwing herself between Wiess and Gray. A black object flashed in her left hand, and the gun in the sergeant's hand changed its bearing towards her.

He felt something hitting him in the chest, a brief surprise taking his brain just a microsecond to process, then the pain simply overwhelmed him. Paralysing electric currents shot through the taser cables, making Wiess lose his weapon and collapse in agony, writhing on the floor before the soft embrace of unconsciousness welcomed him.

xxxxx

15th floor, usually holding nothing but the secondary server hub as well as one half of Skynet Technologies' accountant division, was a battlefield. The staccato of automatic weapons echoed through the empty offices and corridors. Men huddled behind corners, taking cover from the barrages, while others tried to draw wounded comrades out of the lines of fire. A couple of grenades had gone off already, sprinkling pristine white walls with shrapnel and soot. Given the ferocity of the exchange, nobody tried to use the tasers they had brought along any more, and Decker did not intend to make them.

The fire from the Resistance came in short, precise bursts that kept them at bay and conserved the enemy's ammunition. They had cornered them at the edge of a corridor that ended in a T-crossing, two figures shooting down into the hallway with the human PMCs unable to reach them any time soon. Michael Decker also had reached an impasse: the walls here were solid concrete he had little means to break through, and even if so, that would have completely blown his cover. Skynet gave some considerably amount of trust and leeway to his human subordinates, but that did not mean that it was already willing to share all there was with them, including the existence of Decker and the Praetorians.

"Miller's hit," a sweating DiFranco yelled from across the other side of their T-crossing of this level's corridors. "Got shot through the leg, and keeps bitching like the British pussy he's always been," the merc snorted, keeping his own head down while another three round burst exploded into the wall behind them. "We got them pinned down real good," he added. "They oughta run out of ammo real soon."

"Correct, Mr. DiFranco," Decker nodded all too calmly for the situation, "but there's only two of them as far as we know. The initial intel referred to four intruders, meaning that one of them is still on the loose within the premises of the tower. I want you to keep your flanks covered."

Aware of the new thread, the merc quickly ordered two of the five other PMCs on his side to guard their collective backs. In a way Decker was glad something like this attack was happening, for it allowed a thorough review of security procedures and the internal surveillance efficacy of the building once it was all over. Still, the longer this situation was allowed to continue, the bigger the chance became that the Resistance team actually managed to terminate something - or someone - of importance.

"On my mark, you throw a smoke grenade into the corridor to cover me, DiFranco," Decker ordered the merc while peering down the bullet-hole riddled office floor. The smoke would do nothing to obstruct his IR vision feeds, and those were nearly as good as his standard optics. "I will go in alone. One man makes less of a target than all of us entering that bottleneck together," he explained after noticing the sceptical look on the man's face. That was probably the worst of it, constantly having to explain himself to humans who, in his eyes, were all too slow on the uptake.

"Ready, sir," the lead merc whispered, and on Decker's sign he rolled a smoke grenade into the corridor. With a hiss, white fog began to pour from the soda-can sized object. The terminator waited until it had filled the whole eight feet of the level's height before stepping out from his cover. Two heat signatures waited for him, both hunched behind the corners of the outer office wing. He ran an optical feed in the background to keep track of the smoke, but even though both intruders - there was no doubt they were Resistance fighters - seemed tense to the point of bursting, no shots were fired. They were listening for his steps, listening for signs.

A gust of wind from a shattered window blew parts of the smoke away, unveiling Decker's torso for a few brief seconds to DuPuis and Shiawaze on the other side of the corridor, and both immediately began to fire. A whole slew of 5.56mm rounds hammered against his chest, their momentum leaving no effect on his approach aside from an increasingly worthless bullet-proof vest.

"Metal!" the female yelled from the right, and almost instantly their fire intensified. Decker ducked into another gust of fog, momentarily evading their fire while accelerating his approach. He raised his side-arm and squeezed the trigger, just once. The precise shot went through the male's - he was the one on the left - ankle and made him drop to the ground with a scream of agony.

"DuPuis!" Decker heard the female cry out, followed by a mumbled order even he could not filter through all the background noise. "I'll buy you some time," the man now tagged as 'DuPuis' yelled back right as the terminator ran towards the Resistance fighters. DuPuis rolled around the corner, his weapon's underslung grenade launcher barking a hollow 'thud' before a 40mm grenade impacted right where Decker had stood only a brink of a second ago.

The explosion was strong enough to throw even something as massive as a coltan endo-skeleton aside, leaving part of the clothes on his backside smouldering. As he darted back to his feet and out of the office the explosion had thrown him into, guns barked again, but this time the fire was uncontrolled and off target by - for a terminator - wide margin. Glass shattered in an explosion, and one of the thermal contacts left his field of view as if it had been sucked up by a whole in the ground. The shooting stopped for brief seconds, and before the wounded Resistance fighter could fumble a new clip into his weapon, Decker, six and a half feet tall and build like a professional athlete, was onto him, kicking the gun out of his hands. He placed his other foot on the man's wounded ankle and applied light pressure, forcing DuPuis not only to wince in pain but to also focus on him instead of on the instinctive search for another weapon.

Decker quickly surveyed the scene. The other intruder had blasted open a windows and escaped with what he figured out to be a harpoon gun. He maxed his optical and IR sensor amplification and caught a fleeting image of the female attacker driving past the compound behind the wheel of an old van. The angle made it impossible to get a lock on the license plate. He focussed his attention on the man on the ground.

"Your wound is not lethal, DuPuis," Decker commented stoically. "If you cooperate, you will be treated well."

"Fuck you!" the black man hissed through his teeth, and a frag' grenade hidden in his palm rolled from his hand, a last, defiant glitter showing in Tucker DuPuis' eyes before the device exploded, killing the Resistance fighter.

When Michael Decker got on his feet again only moments later, his human subordinates had closed in on him, DiFranco leading the team.

"You're hit, sir," the PMC remarked worriedly, pointing at Decker.

The terminator followed the man's outstretched hand to the bullet wound on his shoulder. He had not even registered the impact.

"It's a flesh wound," he told the man, ignoring the thin trickle of blood that stained his military fatigues, and the PMC took his eyes off the injury.

"Do you want us to pursue them?" he asked, staring out into the darkness, into the same direction he believed the van to have driven off.

Decker slowly shook his head.

"It will be difficult enough to keep what has happened here a secret without adding a high speed car chase and gun battle on the highway to it. I will consult my superiors," he added, an almost invisible frown creeping on grime-covered face. Part of the building's wyfy network had collapsed, and he got no response from Lewis' transponder signal.

"Are you allright, sir?" DiFranco gave him a questioning glance.

Decker looked at the merc, than down at himself.

"Yes, DiFranco. But I need a shower and a new outfit," he gave the man his best idea of what constituted a brief smile before turning towards the elevators. "Get our wounded to the command level, then activate the clean slate protocol for the whole area." He did not wait for the man to confirm his orders - humans were unreliable, but not that unreliable - and stepped into the elevator cab, still telling his logic subroutines that all he intended was a routine check on Alessa Lewis' situation and not that his learning neural network had brought a new facet into its calculations: worry.

xxxxx

Wiess woke in a bare, polished metal room lit by an array of neon lights to the mad rhythm of a drummer he dimly realized was playing his piece inside his head, compounding the throbbing pain in his neck and the after effects of his cramping muscles. The light hurt in his eyes, but Damian Wiess was a professional soldier who found it easy to discipline himself in the most obscure or dangerous situations. Well, for the most part, a scornful voice in his mind remarked, reminding him of his blatant failures to kill Gray and to identify his "secretary" as a threat.

Speaking of the devil, the woman sat on the edge of a metal table hardly three feet away from him, observing him with a quizzical smile frozen in the corners of her mouth. Dark, black hair that had not been cut for a while and only hinted at a stylishly short hair cut framed an attractive female face with elfin features and bright, green eyes. Her physique was an ideal trade-off between a thin build suited to her overall appearances and very subtle, enticing female features. There was something about her which made shivers run down his spine, and it had nothing to do with the taser she had placed besides herself on the table. She watched him stoically, silently as he regained consciousness.

"So, here you are again," she mused, her head tilted slightly to one side as she crossed her arms before her chest. Her voice was calm, laced with a hint of sweetness and amusement. Under basically every other circumstance the soldier from the future would have found her extremely attractive, and Wiess was certain she knew more than enough about her impact on the opposite sex. Still, he was not inclined to open up wide for such blindingly obvious means of influencing him. This was an interrogation, there were no doubts about that. He squeezed a fake smile from his still aching muscles. The pain was slowly receding, gradually changing from having a disabling effect to one of enervation.

"Wiess, Damian, Sergeant, TechCom Unit 10-21," he told her. "That's all your going to get from me."

She leaned closer.

"Pleasure to make your aquaintance, Mr. Wiess. My name is Alessa Lewis – and for your sake I hope you'll revise that stance of your's," she told him in a tone of mild reproach, patting the taser on the table besides her. The wall on the opposite end of the room flared into action, its metal dullness being replaced by a full-screen video feed.

"Two of your comrades have been neutralized," Lewis narrated while stills of two bodies flickered across the screen, "one has escaped."

Wiess felt the knot in his stomach cramp, even though it was somewhat reassuring to know that at lest Beth had been able to get away. He tried not to show his interrogator his satisfaction about that small victory, but the smug smile appearing on the black haired woman's face alerted him to his failure.

"Her escape is temporary at best, sergeant. There is still some discussion going on whether we should take this whole affair to the police. You do realize how sensitive the authorities have become to industrial espionage and domestic terrorism after that incident in San Diego?" she asked him innocently. "Oh, the video footage we have of her, and of you. Terrorism, accessory to murder, oh, that's just to top of the iceberg, isn't it. If I handed you over to the police, the prosecution would lock you up and throw the key away. Or, if you told them who you really are, and where you came from, they would lock you up and drug you till you were nothing but an oozing bag of puss," she flashed a bright grin that was completely too joyful for the occasion.

"Wiess, Damian, Sergeant, TechCom Unit 10-21," he repeated, then, to his own surprise, added: "And from where should that be?"

He searched for a hint, for a sign of insecurity in her eyes, but what he found was... nothing. Wiess audibly made his mouth shut, his jaws pressing on each other to the point it hurt, and he felt his heart jumping, pounding in his chest. The TechCom soldier suddenly knew why what was wrong with his interrogator. The bright, attractive green eyes that studied him lacked life.

As if a switch had been flipped, her cheery attitude vanished. Raising her legs enough so he could get a good look beneath her short, black skirt, she deliberately placed her shoes' heels on his thighs, right on the thickest muscle tissue, and all so slightly leaned forward. It was as if a bulldozer had started to run over his legs in slow motion. Wiess did not scream, but cold sweat began to pour from every pore of his body.

"Fuckin' metal bitch!" he spat out between rash breaths.

"We know that you are from the future, you admitted just as much. What we want is a date."

Wiess gritted his teeth, and to his surprise he imagined there was a flicker of annoyance running across the machine's face.

"We do not have the time to toy around, Mr. Wiess," Alessa Lewis stated matter-of-factly. "Your little attack has failed. Even if you had succeeded, you know what you'd have destroyed?" A map schematic of the building replaced the video feeds on the wall behind her. "Our accounting server hub. It certainly must have served the Resistance well to loose two operatives to make our accountants and controllers miserable, if only for about half an hour."

Wiess eyes flickered. "What...?" They lost O'Malley and the chief for the data of a bunch of financial transactions?

"Let me be honest with you, Damian," her voice had changed again, now back to a soft, enticing charm. "We have been here for almost a year, and we have not gone after the Resistance. We have not gone after future enemies, and we have not gone after John Connor. So I ask you again," the pressure on his legs receded a slight bit, "when are your from?"

"You're not getting anything from me!" he growled defiantly.

"Not even something as innocent as a date?"

If he did not know it any better he would have sworn the metal sounded amused at his retort. Whatever it did pretend to feel, the pressure was back on his legs.

"The others are dead or gone," he managed to chuckle. "Whatever track you are trying to follow is already cold, and I swear to God you're not getting a word out of me!" Beth was a smart girl, a fighter. She'd have no trouble finding other Resistance cells and linking up with them, and then they would bring this house of cards down. Maybe they could even prevent it all from happening. That had been his secret hope ever since he had been chosen for the TDE by General Connor himself.

With an almost remorseful smile, the metal placed her heels on a different part of his legs and pushed in. This time, Wiess howled in pain. Gracefully, the metal leaned forward. She brushed his sweaty hair back and almost placed her cheek against his. He could hear her sniff, could feel his pulse accellerate, could feel the iron in her grip. Some weird corner of his psyche found that quite... arousing. Being face to face, she licked the tip of her index finger and smiled mischievously.

"You believe you are so strong," she whispered. "Human hubris never ceases to amaze me. You believe you are fooling me with that stoic facade of yours, Wiess, Damian, Sergeant, TechCom Unit 10-21," she mockingly threw his own line back at him. "You are not. The adrenalin, the enzymes, the pheromones... you are an open book to me, Damian Wiess. This is neither the past nor the future that you know, and I am not the kind of machine you know. But fine, have it your way." She leaned back, turning her head to the wallscreen behind her, then flipped off the table and off his legs. The picture switched to something Wiess easily identified as satellite imagery.

"This is from a NSA spy satellite currently passing over the south-western seaboard," she explained calmly. "While you were unconscious, we took the liberty to mine some data, Mr. Wiess. This," the picture zoomed in rapidly, "is Woodruff, Arizona, and guess who we found there?" A yearbook picture from an elementary school interleaved with the satellite imagery. "I have to say you are no longer quite as chubby-faced," she commented. "And there we are, mom and dad and you and your two brothers," a very clear picture of a house taken from above replaced the previous pictures. "And this is the predator drone we have diverted from Edwards Airforce Base to terminate them. It'll be within firing range in less than five minutes," she turned back to him. "So, when were you from again?"

Wiess could feel an ice-cold lump form in his intestines.

"What does it matter to you?" he asked bleakly.

"Well, let's assume I was from twenty twenty-three and you were from twenty twenty-eight, or vice versa, would that not make for some awkward conversations?" she replied in an eerily chatty voice. "And on how much up to date I would have to bring you."

He looked at her for a few silent moments as the metal pin slid into the palm of his left hand. "We're from 2025. You're from later, you're too... advanced," he furrowed his brows, and once again the hint of a smile appeared on the metal's face. "I answered the question, now call back the drone!"

"And return to where we started, Sergeant Wiess? I think not." She shook her head. "Three and a half minutes till the target area. There's no need to not use that time, is there?" Alessa Lewis swung around to face the wall again, on which four mugshots of Damian's team were given equal space now. "Have you made contact with other Resistance cells?" she looked back at him over her shoulder.

Wiess just shook his head.

"That's a shame. Really, it is," she turned her attention back to the screen. See, where I come from, both sides have used the TDE so often it has become increasingly difficult to send someone back." Lewis crossed her arms before her chest. "The technical data is not available to me, but put in simple, human terms, the more often you use the TDE, the higher the necessary amount of energy is while the returns are diminished. In a way, for each of the hundreds of different time lines created by either you or us going back, there is a finite amount of available jumps back before it becomes impossible." The best explanation Lewis had for herself was that their time war was horizontally expanding, but vertically locked. "But indeed, it is a shame. Makes it all a lot more foot work, and we both have little time to loose."

The metal must have seen his confused stare at that remark as she emulated a soft chuckle.

"Yes, both of us, indeed. How about we keep up the yes/no questions for a while? You see, I can tell whether you are lying or not with those. Body language, vital signs, pheromone output...," she tipped her finger against her skull. "Very easy to read for me."

"What are you?" he questioned her, his voice not quite as steady as he had wished.

"The end of the line," she answered confidently. "Now, we still have about a minute left before it's human barbeque time at Woodruff. Impress me, Mr. Wiess: Where is John Connor?"

He grimaced while his fingers worked carefully behind his back.

"I don't know. But even if I did, you know damn well I'd rather watch my family die than to tell you, of all people!"

"Your statements are, again, correct. It seems we are making some progress here, Mr. Wiess. It's only fair you ought to be rewarded," she turned to the screen on which the course of the drone was illuminated. It was making a hard turn as she spoke. "The predator has been recalled to Edwards."

Wiess did not hesitate for a second. The hand cuffs rattled to the ground, and the soldier threw himself forward, his hand grabbing the taser. Ignoring the cries of protest from his muscles, he brought the weapon up and pulled the trigger. The terminator moved with a speed and fluency that made Wiess think of a flash of mercury. The very moment he had unshackled the cuffs her head had jerked around, and then, the [i]thing[/i] had lunged itself into the air, backflipping and changing its centre of mass in such a way that it seemed as if it ran on the wall towards him - while wearing high heels. The moment right before the two cables hit the machine it had fully reverted to what Damian Wiess had come to know of his arch nemesis: a blank, determined mask of flesh, only mimicking a true human, and created for only one purpose, to kill.

Two little darts with barbed hook endings, pulling cables behind them, buried themselves in the artificial tissue that covered Skynet's terminators. Wiess knew that the machines were susceptible to induced electric overloads, a fact that had helped the first resistance movements made up of former National Guard units and remnants of the regular forces against the machines when they had deployed scarce stocks of pre-war EMP weapons. Terminators forced into overload shut down for a short time, but more often that not, that time had been proven to be the thin hair by which victory could be achieved.

He noticed that something was different the very moment he had pulled the trigger. This terminator did not shut down immediately. This terminator [i]screamed[/i]. Writhing on the ground as he kept sending electric currents through the cables, the small terminator's voice changed almost every microsecond, switching from female to machine to stutters to something that sounded like a modem and back. Wiess hated the machines, hated Skynet for all it had cost him, but he had never been a man who enjoyed inflicting pain upon others. There were enough of those among the Resistance, and many had their reasons, but Damian Wiess was not one of them. And yet, he kept his finger on the trigger. But the metal did not shut down. He could not bear the screams.

Undecided what to do, watching the twisting form on the ground he was taken by surprise as the door suddenly flung open, revealing a the features of a huge, muscular man in military garb. Dried blood was on his right shoulder where the body armour and uniform were torn, and cold eyes measured him disapprovingly for the brink of a second before they moved on to the form on the ground.

If anger, hate, fear and pure rage had ever featured in a T-850ies normally so stoic face, they now did on Decker's. The four-hundred pound war machine lunged across the room, picking Wiess up as if he was nothing but a toy, slamming him against the nearest wall. All air left his lungs as he hit the wall, and his head was ringing like the bells of a church, his vision blurred. He had gambled, and he had lost. Knowing the the killing blow was about to come, he found comfort in the knowledge that at least his family had escaped their death, for now, when a thunderous command echoed through the interrogation chamber.

"Stop!" That one word pierced through the terminator's screams as easily as it did through the fog in which Wiess' mind was buried. The terminator above him also seemed frozen in the middle of his movement, the artificial tissue on his face twisted in rage.

"He is needed," the unseen voice continued, talking to the machine above him now, "needed to advance the plan, Michael Decker. Take care of Alessa Lewis, Michael Decker, and leave that one to me!" The voice was itself was a commanding presence, coming seemingly from every direction at the same time.

Only grudgingly the raised fist over him was lowered, but the machine never let him out of the focus of its eyes. If a terminator's eyes had ever been alive, this one were full of hate. Slowly, the machine backed off, before it knelt down before the other one and carefully, tenderly picked the twitching form up, pressing it against its own massive form. It was the strangest and most deeply disturbing act of compassion Wiess had ever witnessed. If the machines began to care for each other, what did that mean?

The metal, a T-800 series by its looks, slowly backed away from through the door, locking it once it had passed through. Damian Wiess was alone, until the voice came back.

"I have failed to introduce myself, Sergeant Damian Wiess. I am Skynet."

xxxxx

Decker held the - to him - tiny form of Lewis against his chest as he descended deeper into the bowels of the office tower. His neural network was aflame with conflicting thoughts and emotions he had never experienced before, not like this. He wanted to go back and kill the human, but not in the usual terminator fashion, no. One subroutine almost subconsciously was running through the most painful variants of killing a human being. However, halfway down to the vault she opened her eyes, the light in it flickering. Her usually so wonderfully modulated, soft voice was a garbled mess, the artificial muscles in her face twitching uncontrollably. The sight... touched Decker in ways he did not understand, and he lifted her wiry body higher and closer to himself. The light in her left eye stabilized itself for a moment, and there was recognition in it. Her right arm reached up.

"It's...you," her voice rasped metallic as her fingers brushed his cheek, just once, before the lights began to flicker again, then went out.