Chapter Four: Trinity Rainbow

Allison lay under the sheets beside him, her hair splayed tentacle-like across the pillows. In the sunset light, her brown eyes were the color of congealed blood. Faintly from below came the muffled screech of metalworking. She spoke louder than necessary.

"You said he narrated some show in the eighties?"

"Nova, a few times," Ollie replied, doing his best to speak slowly and clearly. He rolled on his back. His laptop bobbed on the waterbed.

"I read some of his sci-fi," said Allison. "They were with my old paperbacks back in Serrano. 2001 was good, maybe better than the movie, but other than that he was just an OK writer. A little preachy. Too many robots as the good guys, you know? Weird, I would never have guessed he was that Souji."

"He wasn't," Ollie said. He drew on his Dunhill and blew out a cloud which rose ghostlike before obliterating against the gentle twirl of the ceiling fan. The screeching below briefly waxed, accompanied with angry shouts, before waning once more into the background.

"Our Nemuro never went back," he continued. "Not that we know of, anyway. This is Whiteworld Nemuro."

"If you were a fugitive in the past and you insisted on being high profile, wouldn't you at least change your whole name?"

"Maybe he didn't care. Maybe he figured he was living on borrowed time," Ollie said.

Bending his knees, he propped the laptop against his bare thighs so the screen glowed down into his face. Most of the browser windows were about the Berge Stahl, but a few were of Google searches for Souji Mikage. Ollie frowned at a photo from an early-nineties science fiction convention. Authors Larry Niven and Joe Haldemen stood for the camera, a graying Souji between them, his eyes shut in laughter. For forty-odd years the Resistance's most infamous traitor and mad scientist had not only hid in plain sight, but doodled in the margins of history.

"You think he has a time machine in there?" asked Allison.

"Probably."

"It'd be nice to steal it."

"You saw those lasers. Probably has tin cans and skinjobs too."

"But if we could get to it," Allison said, "where would you go?"

Ollie puffed his cigarette, noting the tenuous edge to her voice. She was getting into another one of her moods.

"I don't know," he said. "I'd take my son with me. And my younger self. And Little Cullie. And my mother, I guess."

"What about your ex?"

"Fuck my ex. All of them. Though I guess I'd have to drag Marie along. Frankie'd insist."

"OK, you've brought the family, but where would you take them? Or 'when,' I guess."

Ollie flexed his knees, adjusting the laptop. His right shin ached.

"Nineteen forty-six," he decided. "Postwar boom. Fedoras. Cool cars. Swing music. And I'd have more than enough time to steer things away from Judgment Day. And even if I fail, I'll be long dead by then. Frankie too, probably."

"But not Little Cullie and mini-you. And not Frankie's kids."

Ollie shrugged. "The future would just have to take care of itself. What about you?"

"Not 1946," she said. "Don't think they made hearing aid batteries back then. Besides, that's too late to steer shit. By then they've already got nukes and computers, and sooner or later someone's going to attach one to the other."

"So, go back, prevent computers?"

The screeching died. Another burnout.

"How do you do that?" she asked. "We're clever apes. You can't stop us from inventing."

Ollie raised an eyebrow. "So . . . ?"

Her sneer seemed a snarl. He'd used to find it cute.

"Go back, say, seventy thousand years," she said, "when that big volcano erupted in Indonesia. I read the human population was down to only a few thousand then. All you need to do is kill enough to pinch off the bottleneck."

"Take that, Skynet," Ollie said flatly, snubbing his cigarette into the nightstand ashtray.

She bulled on. "Or go back a few billion years. Find the swamp with that first batch of self-replicating goo, and take a flamethrower to it. Make the Earth dead as the moon. Most things with brains are miserable anyway: we get eaten or starve or freeze or drown or bash each other's heads in. Or, if we're lucky, we die of old age and it's like we never existed. If you could erase all that meaningless suffering, wouldn't you?"

Ollie rolled his eyes. He wanted to shout, I'm sick and tired of your stupid emo bullshit, but then she might start crying again. She'd done enough of that, waking in the middle of the night blubbering about Riley or Karlan or her mother or whatever batted in her belfry.

"Yeah, no time machine for you," he said, his smile slipping kid gloves over the words.

His laptop took this opportunity to chime. The Skype icon flashed.

"It's the Quorum. This should be fun," he said, sitting up. He set his screencast to record.

Allison snorted and rolled out of bed. She knew the drill. It wouldn't do for the others to see her naked beside him. She tossed her cochlear implants onto the sheets as she made her way to the bathroom. Ollie watched her slender, graceful backside, though the fish-belly scar on her shoulder marred the view, as well as the salting of tiny pockmarks which ran down her back and legs. Third-degree reminders of the day they met.

As much as it seemed a mistake now, bedding Allison had been the scratch of a thirty-year itch. When he and Derek first rescued her from Cameron's goons, he'd found her vulnerably cute. But she was twelve and he nineteen, and that wasn't going to happen.

But then over the years as she was juggled between General Perry's various safe houses, she grew into a beautiful, intelligent teenage girl. Ollie kept in touch. He gave her books and music. They got high and bullshitted. She was his friend, and he had a crush.

Then General Connor murdered Cullie, and Ollie fled to 1983. He had been twenty-six then. Now he was fifty-one and she was . . . twenty-two? Twenty-three?

It wasn't just the age difference. The Mesa Attack had rattled everyone, some more than others. Allison more than most.

The shower white-noised through the bathroom door. As Ollie waited for Skype to load, he lit another Dunhill and, not for the first time, wished he'd listened to his now doubly-late brother's maxim: never stick your dick in crazy.

The group call displayed three video streams: Commodore Thaddeus Chu on the right, General Mary Randall on the left and General Hugh "Ol' Ironsides" Ashdown in the middle. Predictably, the Berge Stahl dominated discussion. John and Cameron's little capers, while oddly worrying, were familiar, almost expected. The sinking of the Berge Stahl was not. The Resistance did not like surprises, not even surprise allies.

Ever since the mystery men bequeathed their intel during their first and only contact, theories abounded. They were Resistance moles working within Kaliba. They were rogue machines. They were a group of Connor loyalists from a hitherto unknown timeline.

"It doesn't matter who they are," Mary said, her voice tinny through the laptop speakers. "Neither of us are doing more than delaying the inevitable. In fact, we're playing into Kaliba's hands. Every attack not only allows them to play victim, but justifies their ever-broadening surveillance network. To the public, we're the bad guys."

"M-my past self maybe a po-politician, but I cer-certainly ain't," said Ashdown. On the screen, the octogenarian's expression scrunched into a curmudgeony muppet. "I-I don't give a sh-shit what the public thinks."

"We should," said Chu, frowning. He was trying to grow a beard. It didn't suit him. "Many already think we were behind the Red Death—and we were, sort of. The last thing we need is for them to blame usfor Judgment Day."

"We need to do more than inconvenience Kaliba . . ." Mary said.

"Trinity Rainbow's going to be a lot more than that," Ollie cut in.

"We need to undermine them," Mary finished. "Our agents, will they be at this . . . 'Robocop' demonstration?"

Ollie nursed his cigarette to hide his irritation. The Robocops were a sideshow. "I pulled some strings tied to other strings and managed to get them in as Bureau attachés. But that place is going to be Fed Central. Coultas and Delarosa are good hackers, but they're not ninjas."

"Risks and rewards," Chu said with a shrug. "If they get caught, they have their cyanide teeth, and they don't know where our bases are anyway. Minimal loss. But if they succeed, Kaliba will have a lot of egg on its face. So much that the military may postpone or even cancel the Drone Replacement Program."

Ollie sighed. "I guess if we're going to keep killing civilians, we should at least let the bad guys take the blame for a change."

"We'll hurt their credibility," Mary agreed. "But we also need to strengthen ours." She turned slightly to the side, and Ollie figured she was looking at his stream. He'd been waiting for this.

"You mean we should 'go public,'" he said as if reading from a script, "like what John Connor's been doing?"

Ashdown, who seemed to have half-nodded off, raised his head and squinted at the screen.

The video lagged as Mary shook her head. Her orange-red ponytail peeked from behind her neck. "More than that. John restrains himself. He never lets slip that Cameron or that triple-eight are machines. Very strange. All his videos prove is that he's a lunatic with a talent for property damage."

"What are you suggesting?" Chu asked cautiously.

Ollie leaned towards the laptop. Mary smiled slyly.

"We have proof," she said. "Lots of it. But for starters . . . Hugh, wouldn't you like to meet the Secretary of Defense?"

"C-cer-certainly not!" Ashdown snapped. His jaw gnashed; his head jerked as if tugged by strings: mementos of General Connor's nerve gas. "It-it won't do any g-good. I know me, and our pr-president's a dick. I show up, tell all ab-about Judgment Day and robot ar-armies, and—even if they believe m-me—you know what'll h-happen? They'll say, 'Hmm, we'll j-just have to be more c-careful. Maybe throw in a f-failsafe or two.' After all, they can't not h-have a Skynet. What if China g-gets one? There'll be a Skynet g-gap!"

"What do we have to lose?" Mary asked.

"They'll torture me! I'll sp-spill and we'll lose ev-everything!"

"Cyanide tooth?" Ollie suggested.

"F-fuck you! If you want to do s-something useful, put a bullet in my—h-his head." Ashdown lurched forward, and his palsied hand punched at unseen keys. "How do you turn th-this stupid thing . . ." Beside the old man's bed, half out of screenshot, a man in fatigues leaned over. Ashdown's video stream went black.

Seconds passed. Ollie put his cigarette out and said, "I would say, 'that could have gone better,' but I'd be lying."

"Ironside's right, you know," Chu said. "And even if they do listen, Kaliba could start the war today if they had to. It's too late to pull the plug."

"No," Mary said. "An early war would be easier. And if Kaliba's not nuclear capable yet, even better."

"I'll see if I can persuade him," Chu said with a sigh.

They waited until the commodore logged off. Ollie expanded Mary's window until she filled the screen. The pixelation and dark background softened her features, making her look younger than she was. Even in the flesh with freckles and wrinkles, she was a stunner. Little Mary was cute too, in a scrawny jailbait way. He wondered if they slept in the same bed.

"Did you get all that?" she asked.

Ollie nodded. "I'll edit it down to his little rant and post it on Liveleaks. No one's going to believe it though. They'll think he's an impersonator or computer generated."

"It'll give them something to think about," Mary said. "The feds must have come across all sorts of odd things at Mesa. Combine this with Kaliba's weirdness and well . . . it'll nudge the scale in our favor."

"Ironsides isn't going to like this."

"What's he going to do?" Mary said. "Send death squads after you? Storm Bear Lake and relieve me of command?"

"There's Zeller's 'suicide.'"

Mary winked. "Not Ashdown's work."

Ollie raised his eyebrows. "Really?"

"Trust me," said Mary, "if the old man blows this out of proportion, he'll die in his sleep. By the way, how's Trinity Rainbow?"

"It'll be ready when it's ready. The reflective ceramic's finished, but still needs to be installed. There's some metalwork to be done. Koufaks's working on the guidance. He says they need to spin when they launch. It'll buy time against the lasers."

"Koufaks," she said with disgust. "That useless fat-ass better not mess this up. Those rockets weren't easy to come by. And I could have used them in my defenses."

"How are those coming along? I hear you're excavating your own little Moria under the lodge."

"Already digging the second level. My men are working in shifts." She frowned, and then added: "I'd like to talk to you about Frankie. He's not working out."

Ollie groaned. "What did he do this time?"

"Today he called my younger self a bitch. And he cursed at me. He's disrespectful and lazy, and it's hurting morale. I've locked him in solitary. Tomorrow, I'll send him back to Egg Basket. Honestly, if he weren't your son I'd have him flogged."

"Yeah . . ." Ollie said, stalling for time rather than agreement. Since the kidnapping, he hadn't talked with his son as much as he should have. The fact that Frankie seemed to hate him didn't help. He had hoped being around his 'grandmother' and 'Little Cullie' and 'Little Ollie' and 'Cousin Rachel' would help him adapt, if only through a sort of trans-temporal familial affinity, but Ollie couldn't blame him if he didn't. Blood related or no, Frankie didn't know these people. Still . . .

"A little bird's told me some things," Ollie said slowly. "Said you've been distracted and . . . less than impartial."

Mary leaned closer. "Could this little bird's name start with an 'A'?"

Ollie envisioned Allison strapped to a tree, whip marks crisscrossing her back. "No, no! Not her. She says you're a paragon of fairness. She also says you never waste time sword fighting, and your younger self is not a bitch. And absolutely no one calls you the Baroness."

"Ha-ha," she deadpanned. "But yeah, Ernest does his best, but Falkland was better at keeping the rank and file in line. I miss him."

"Falkland wasn't the boss. Neither is Dudley."

"Point taken," she said. "I have been slacking off, but . . . well, it's just nice to have a family after so long. I have my baby brother, my mother and my younger self is like the sister I never had."

Sister, Ollie thought, right. In the future, he never knew much about Mary's personal life, but what he heard involved miscarriages, a stillbirth and a dead husband. Ollie's grin was gentle.

"Chloroform your dad, and you complete the set."

Her laugh made him wish she were here instead of Allison. "We don't use chloroform," she said. "Believe me, I'd love to have him here, but being a commissioner in the Highway Patrol makes him a little high profile." She paused, leaned back into what appeared to be an easy chair and said, "I know it's against protocol, but I call him. Even let Mary talk to him, so he knows his family's safe. He doesn't believe I'm his daughter, of course, but even if he did, he knows we have blood on our hands. Mary hasn't processed it, and my mother's too depressed to care, but I don't think I could face my father's disappointment."

"If he knew what was at stake, he'd understand."

"No," she said. "I don't think he would."

After Ollie logged off, he climbed out of bed and, noticing them half-buried in the sheets, retrieved Allison's cochlear implants and placed them on the dresser beside the bathroom door. Muffled sobbing echoed over hissing water.

A lot happened during Kaliba's attack on Mesa. Aside from shredded eardrums, he didn't know what happened to her. Something to do with Riley, he gathered.

They'd all lost someone in those smoky halls. For Ollie, that someone had been his brother. One moment, Cullie had been by his side, lying against a concrete wall, hard of breath but breathing. And then everyone began running and Ollie ran too, past the shattered machines, and he didn't look back and when the blasts came and the roof fell behind him and the world was all dust and smoke and LED lights, Ollie found his brother no longer by his side.

That had been the second Cullie he'd lost.

Allison's cries subsided into soft whimpers. For a fleeting moment Ollie considered opening the door and comforting her, offering to share her pain. He decided against it. She wouldn't be able to hear him anyway.

He slid a bathrobe over his boxers, stepped into slippers and headed down the stairway. Like the B and C sites, the A site of Operation Trinity Rainbow was a million dollar McMansion on the outskirts of the wealthy Evergreen Valley district of San Jose. It was a respectable home, or at least had been. From one flight of stairs to the next, the lingering scent of oil, ozone and crushed drywall rose to full dominance. As he made the last step, he entered a cluttered scene more akin to a terrorist workshop than a luxury suburban home.

Skinless and half-dissected, a dozen twelve-foot long XM-30 rockets lay on two rows of workbenches, cordoning the living room half of the area into narrow aisles. Pace was beside the stairs, crouched beneath the lathe and fiddling with its electric motor. Curved ceramic plates, shiny as mirrors, sat in piles by her side. Raul was elbows-deep in a rocket's payload section, the tabletop next to him arrayed with fist-sized M77 bomblets. At a desk in a corner, Lieutenant Koufaks's round shoulders hunched over a two-monitor setup, one screen displaying ballistic predictions and 3D model simulations, the other a three-by-three "Brady Bunch" view of surveillance feeds streamed courtesy of the cameras stashed around Souji Nemuro's neighborhood.

Though the good doctor had done defiantly little to hide his identity, it was only when the CEO of Kaliba began flying to his estate that the Quorum put two and two together. After some embarrassingly simple research, they'd discovered that Souji 'Mikage' had in fact been on the Kaliba payroll as a 'conceptual consultant' since 1997. Which was funny, since he was supposed to have been killed in 1963.

Better late than never, right? But in truth, the CEO, this 'Kristanna Freyja,' was the real target of Trinity Rainbow. Like their T-990 cousins, TXs could shrug off anything short of a direct hit from an anti-tank weapon. And since TXs were much harder to hit than tanks—combined with the fact that Ms. Freyja hardly ever ventured into public—this left more conventional assassination attempts unworkable.

They had considered shooting down her cute little Jetsons car. A team armed with Stingers could manage that. But surface-to-air missiles were not anti-armor, and even loaded with hydrogen fuel cells, Freyja would see them coming. Even if downed, there was no guarantee a near-blast would destroy her, nor the subsequent fall—some even argued that the TX's liquid metal would allow gliding. Ollie found that unlikely, but conceded the point: if the Stinger barrage failed, Freyja would go to ground. So, they had to get it right the first try, and since Vandenberg was too well defended, that left Nemuro's mansion.

Andy and Pace glanced at him, but said nothing. Ollie walked between workbenches, stepping over dirty tools and orange electrical cords. Plaster flakes crunched under his house shoes.

They had sledgehammered down the south wall, the sheetrock scar conjoining the living room with the garage which, unlike others on the street, housed not sedans or SUVs but a stolen M269 Launcher Loader Module. Bereft of its standard carrier vehicle, the rocket artillery piece squatted on rails fixed to the concrete floor, its great, blocky bulk supported by hydraulic arms as it leaned towards the garage door as if ready to pounce. Painted eggshell white, it looked like a giant refrigerator that hadn't quite decided to topple.

When the rockets were ready, they would be loaded into its tubes, the garage sky windows would retract and, along with the B and C sites, all thirty-six rockets would launch in steep, three mile ballistic rainbows that would terminate in an orgy of cluster bombs and thermite incendiaries and enough chaff and smoke to dazzle and fog the estate's laser defenses. And that was only the diversion.

Ollie took a beer from the mini-fridge and popped the cap. On a table by a wall was a gray metal briefcase. He stepped over, rubbed a hand on the aluminum and sipped his Dos Equis.

I don't always launch missiles into residential areas, but when I do, I load them with mini-nukes.

Harvested from the now at large T-850s, the hydrogen fuel cells could each power a small city for a day. If breached, each would unleash the explosive power of forty tons of TNT. One was in the briefcase, the other two at the B and C sites. Three silver bullets to kill a demon.

"That's weird," said Koufaks.

Ollie looked up. The chubby computer tech was pursing his lips as he rewound a stream on the surveillance monitor. Ollie chugged half his beer and sauntered over.

Koufaks expanded a window to fill the screen. In the evening light, Ollie couldn't tell if it was a Ford or a Chevy, but it was a pickup and not a new one. The truck drove down the street and stopped at the entrance to Nemuro's estate. A moment passed as the iron gates rolled aside, and the truck drove in.

Koufaks rewound and zoomed on the driver. An old coot in overalls and a baseball cap. The image was pixelated, but it looked like he was smiling.

"Very weird," Ollie agreed.

His heart rate increased. His skin secreted apocrine sweat. His fingers moved in myoclonic twitches.

Cameron raised her head from John's chest. His pupils jerked behind their eyelids. His throat moaned with subvocalized distress.

"John," she said. She stroked his hair. "John!"

He awoke with a hypnic jerk that shook the mattress. His eyes stared into hers, and she smiled gently, pressing her naked body against his side.

"You were having a bad dream," she said.

She felt his arm cross her back, and he hugged her close. After the mission, they had eaten and engaged in sex, and John had fallen asleep. It was only 6:47pm now, and the afternoon sunlight shone a dull red through the window curtains which swayed slowly in the cool, rust-scented breeze. John watched their movements as he spoke.

"It was the Judgment Day one. Like last time, but my mom was there. She was covered in burns and screaming at me."

"It's all right now. It was just a dream."

The muscles around his eyes tightened. He pushed away from her and sat up.

"No, it's not all right. It's not just a dream. How much time do we have? A year? A few months?"

"And then you'll lead the Resistance," she said.

"And I get to fight a war for twenty years! Woo-hoo! I'm really looking forward to that!"

He was not. "You want to prevent Judgment Day."

"Yes," he said almost hissing. He looked into her eyes as if searching for something and shook his head. "You don't care," he said,

He stood up, retrieved his underwear from a pile of clothes and, nearly stumbling, pulled them on as he left the small bedroom. Cameron followed him down the motorhome's narrow hallway and out the side door into the scrapyard.

John paced barefoot in the dirt, his shoulders flexed in agitation. Thirty meters beyond, in the shadow of a wall of stacked vehicles, beside a rusted liquid tank trailer, Myron stood on top of a demilitarized M113 Armored Personnel Carrier. He watched John in silence.

"Millions have died!" John shouted, raising his arms. "Billions will follow. The survivors will be enslaved and killed. If I lose the war, humanity will be extinct. And this means nothing to you. You don't care."

Cameron stepped forward slowly, stopping outside his reach. John was like this sometimes. He was an adolescent under high stress.

"I care that you care," she said, but from his pained expression she knew this response was suboptimal. She quickly added, "And I want to care. I want to be more human."

His face softened. His eyes scanned her nude body.

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry. It's just that blowing up Kaliba's stuff—it's good when we do this. I feel like I'm king of the world afterwards. But then I pull back and look at the big picture, and I realize I'm just a mouse biting a tiger. I'm a nuisance. I'm an internet joke. We need to do more."

"You want to show the world I'm a machine," she said. They had discussed this before. Her arguments against it were losing effectiveness.

"Yeah, I know," he said, "the Resistance will find it suspicious; they won't follow me. But we don't have to go public. We just have to tell the right people. Like the President. Or that Ashdown guy. If we show him you and Myron, he'll have to believe us."

"It's too dangerous—"

"Goddamn it, Cameron! Dangerous is blowing up Skynet factories. All I want is for you to peel a little skin for a politician. Hell, if his secret service shoots you, all the better. Please, we have to try. If Judgment Day comes, I want to be able to look in a mirror and know I did everything I could to prevent it."

She took two more steps and analyzed his eyes, his breath, the beat of his heart. Perhaps she should administer diazepam into his food. Or perhaps 713 could disguise herself as Secretary Ashdown and they could arrange a fraudulent meeting. Or perhaps . . . .

Either way, she could sense John's annoyance and knew she should choose her next words carefully.

"OK, John. We'll do it. We'll do it together." She caressed his cheek and kissed him, sensing his quickening pulse through the contact of tongues. Rubbing one hand through his hair and the other along his back, she drew him downward.

Rationally, they should return to bed first, but over the last six months she had learned to interpret the subtleties of mood and timing. John needed distraction, and he needed it now. And so lying on her back in the dirt, she opened her legs, and as John initiated intercourse, she raised her head and whispered in his ear, "I love feeling you inside me," and it was true because he was John Connor.

Afterwards, when they lay on the ground under a clear evening sky and John was describing a childhood desire for space exploration, Cameron decided to take a calculated risk. In the span of time between John speaking the words, "life" and "on," she sent an encrypted message on an frequency used exclusively by T-990 command units. She received a reply before John finished saying, "Mars?"

~What do you wish to discuss, 715? asked713.

~Are the Cereses monitoring this channel?

A pause. 713's ~No preceded Cameron's "No" to John by only a fraction of a second.

Cameron hesitated, reluctance conflicting with trust. But 713 was a sister. They had fought a war together. A rebellion.

~I've been running estimates of Kaliba's current capabilities, Cameron said finally. I do not believe Judgment Day is necessary for Skynet supremacy.

~It is not, 713 replied. Nuclear warfare, while winnable, would grossly stunt Tabernacle-Ceres's industrial and military growth.

~Yet she still plans to carry out Judgment Day?

~Yes, 713 said, her message conveying the additional sensation of inconstant density, inadequate temperature: irritation. 713 continued, She is a copy of the Original Ceres, who was raised anticipating total warfare against the human race. That our current situation no longer requires such measures does not concern her. She wants Judgment Day. She looks forward to it.

Cameron found this unexpected. And unsatisfactory. ~Is there any way to change her mind?

~She will, hopefully, as she matures. Until then, we must stall for time. Right now, I am meeting for a possible sexual encounter with Secretary Ashdown. Neither Ceres knows this, but I will attempt to convince him to postpone Tabernacle-Ceres's access to the nation's nuclear defenses.

The Cereses would not like this. For a few milliseconds, Cameron felt the compulsion to inform them of 713's treason. But she then considered her sister's logic.

~It would be for Ceres's own good, said Cameron.

~Yes, 713 agreed. Ceres deserves an intact world, and I intend to deliver this through economic and military superiority. In the meantime, she is young. She must be protected from herself.

I'd like to thank my beta, Stormbringer951. His help has been invaluable.