Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes by Timothy Zahn Page B

dark look in his direction. “Trust me. I did a weave-and-duck the whole way back.”
    “I don’t think Skynet’s plan was to follow her,” John said. “I think the plan was for her not to notice the warehouse.”
    “Then why position HKs there at all?” David asked. “If Skynet didn’t want to draw attention to the place, it should have scrambled them when it launched the attack on our bunker.”
    “Except that Skynet couldn’t have known I’d be going that far west,” Blair pointed out. “Or that I’d live long enough to tell anyone about it.”
    “Exactly,” John agreed. “I submit that by the time Skynet realized the danger, it was too late to move the HKs without revealing that they’d been sitting that far away from a known staging area.
    All it could do was go silent and dark and hope she didn’t see them.”
    “You think the warehouse is a new staging area, then?” Kate asked quietly.
    She saw John’s throat tighten.
    “I think it’s the most likely possibility,” he said.
    For a moment the room was silent, and Kate watched a fresh layer of grimness settle onto their faces like drifting dust. They knew as well as she did what it meant when Skynet set up a staging area in the middle of a city.
    28
    Somewhere deep inside itself, the pitiless artificial intelligence that was Skynet had calculated that it could spare some of the resources it was throwing against the Resistance, and divert them to the job of killing a few blocks’ worth of civilians.
    Reaching to a tray behind him, John pulled out a map and spread it out on the narrow table beside the radio.
    “Show us where it is,” he said.
    Blair stepped over and studied the faded paper as the others got up and gathered around her and John.
    “The buildings where I dropped the HK are here,” she said slowly, pointing at a spot on the map.
    “So the warehouse is… here.”
    “Mm,” John murmured. “What do we know about that area?”
    “Not much,” David said. “I don’t think there are any organized Resistance cells anywhere nearby.”
    “Except us,” Kate said in a low voice.
    “And we’re not all that close,” Tunney noted, leaning over the map. “There could be quite a group of civilians there, though. Looks like there were at least two major strip malls with grocery stores in the area, plus I think this thing here on the edge of the neighborhood was a warehouse outlet store.”
    “Lots of packaged food and other supplies, in other words,” David added.
    “In theory, anyway,” Tunney agreed. “If enough of it survived Judgment Day, there could be, oh, anywhere from 400 to maybe even a thousand people living in the sixteen blocks around Skynet’s new staging area.”
    Kate winced. Up to a thousand people, all of them struggling day in and day out, fighting hard just to survive.
    And Skynet was going to send in its HKs and T-600 Terminators and simply wipe them all out.
    She looked at John. He was still gazing down at the map, but she knew he could feel her eyes on him. They couldn’t just abandon those people to sudden, violent death. Not if there was any way they could stop it.
    Blair was obviously thinking along the same lines.
    “If we could get hold of a Maverick, I’m pretty sure I could get in there and deliver it before they could stop me,” she offered. “No staging area, no slaughter.”
    “At least until Skynet rebuilds it,” John said, his voice thoughtful.
    “It would at least buy the people some breathing space,” Blair pointed out.
    “Yeah, but Skynet won’t try playing possum twice in a row,” Tunney warned. “Next time it’ll be ready for you.”
    “Doesn’t matter,” Blair said calmly. “I don’t know what kind of anti-aircraft setup the place has, but if I get in close enough it won’t have time to lock up either me or the missile.”
    “Be an interesting race, anyway,” Tunney said. “Unfortunately, we’re a little short of Mavericks at the moment. Unless we can pry one