Value

Life was cheap.

It wasn't a creed of Terminators, nor some kind of opposite modus operandi to what the Resistance used. But designed with the sole purpose of infiltrating the ranks of Skynet's enemy and dealing death, occasionally one following the other, the concept of murder had no place in a Terminator's CPU, even as one as advanced as the Terminatrix. Machines dealt with facts, not vague, sentimental ideology. And although its operational life had only been a few days so far, travelling back twenty-nine years through time aside, the T-X hadn't seen anything to convince it that the Resistance's belief that every life was sacred had any substance to it.

If life was a God-given gift, surely the deity would have stopped the infiltrator from slaughtering the soldiers who tried to stop it from entering the time displacement sphere. If life was some glorious, sacred thing, there would have been something to stop her from acquiring clothing and a pistol upon arriving in Los Angeles, two human lives ending respectively. And if the right to life was possessed by all living creatures, then Judgement Day would never have occurred. If humans were so keen to end their own lives by developing weapons of mass destruction, not to mention artificial intelligence systems to unleash them, why should she give a damn about the three billion lives that would end in a few minutes time?

The T-X didn't. And even if it did, the Terminator had more important things to worry about.

Admittedly, "worry" might have been a misnomer. Limited emotions aside, the T-X rarely had any need to worry, being practically invincible to any weapon humanity or Skynet possessed. But trapped under a helicopter while her targets headed into the depths of Crystal Peek as part of some vague attempt to prevent the inevitable was a cause for concern. Despite its strength, it couldn't tear through a blast door, especially with half of her body trapped under the helicopter's skids and her mimetic polyalloy systems damaged beyond repair. Still operational, but in a manner that would prevent her objectives from being completed.

Unacceptable.

Growling in a combination of what passed for hatred and frustration, the T-X crawled. How the two future leaders of the Resistance had survived this long was beyond her. It was as if some kind of malign force existed, trying to disprove the fact that life was cheap. A force that was perfectly willing to let the T-X drive through Los Angeles terminating targets in plain sight, but was unwilling to let Connor and Brewster die, even after using everything from her plasma cannon to nanomachines. Well, no matter. Even without the lower part of her body, she could crawl faster than they could. And bringing her metal fist around Connor's leg, crushing the bone without resistance. Calcium, marrow...next to nothing against a hyper alloy combat chassis. Skynet had spent a proverbial fortune on her development and now, after numerous termination attempts from her and her predecessors, her creator's enemy would finally fall.

Error. Error. Error.

Or not.

Something was wrong, the T-X knew that much. Its grip on Connor was loosening, courtesy of something having a grip on her. And swivelling her head back to the source of this resistance, past the smoke and flames of the fallout shelter, she found the answer.

Impossible.

A Model 101 T-850. The same T-850 that was an obsolete model yet had somehow kept her targets safe over the last twelve hours and through some strange twist of fate, was the same model that the Resistance had sent as a protector to 1995. Did the humans have some kind of fetish with 101? Were they compelled to ensure that a single model out of thousands was there every time Skynet tried to change history? It was as if this war through time was on show to a higher power who demanded that the same character existed in the various battles. And as the T-X knew, if she didn't put her targets out of their misery soon, there might well be a fourth.

It certainly seemed that way, with her grip from Connor being broken...

Not possible! her CPU told her. Not possible! It's impossible for the target to escape again!

But it was happening, the future leaders of humanity heading beyond the blast door, down to the depths of Crystal Peak. And caught in the grip of an outdated Terminator, there was nothing the T-X could do about it. Despite life being cheap, despite there being no fate but what one made for yourself, it seemed that history was indeed fated to go down the same path as it did before. Appealing in one sense, given the coming nuclear apocalypse, but not so much considering that Skynet had lost in the end...

And the T-X had lost too. Despite all the odds, she had lost and only now, with the T-850 inserting a hydrogen fuel cell into her mouth and uttering "you are terminated!" she understood why. Human life was cheap. But the 'life' of a Terminator was even cheaper. That's what came from being created rather than born.

And as she screamed as her circuitry overloaded, the T-X realized how cheap her own life had become...

A/N

The idea for this oneshot was when a certain fellow author mentioned that one of the pros of Salvation (based on trailers) was that (paraphrased) that the T-600s behaved like proper Terminators, advancing silently rather than screaming like the T-X did before being destroyed. While the issue of screaming didn't really bother me for the T-X, or even its T-1000 predecessor, it got me thinking.