"Terminator 3" (Terminator Dreams) - Softcover

Allston, Aaron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765349108 ISBN 13: 9780765349101

Verlag: Tor Books, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

John Connor is a young man who, together with Kate Brewster, the daughter of the man who sets Skynet into motion, leads the human resistance determined to free humanity from the terrifying threat of extermination by the killing machines. Working with their subverted machine cohorts to defeat the inexorable Al that would destroy their world, they are living on the edge. When resistance fighter Danny Avila begins to have dreams of the past, John Connor realizes that his nightmares might somehow be connected to the events leading up to Judgment Day. In a bold, dangerous move, the resistance attempts to thwart the deadly plans of Skynet. If they're successful, the future could change. If they fail, even more people might die.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Aaron Allston is the author of a number of science fiction and fantasy novels including the Doc Sidhe books, The Star Wars New Jedi Order novels Rebel Dream and Rebel Stand, among a number of novels, original and tie-in. An award-winning game designer as well an SF writer, he lives near Austin, Texas.

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C.1
 
 
August 2029
San Rafael, California
Population 0
 
It wasn't exactly a jungle, but in the decades since Judgment Day, trees had forced their way up through street pavement and sidewalk concrete; grasses and weeds had overrun lawns and medians. Now, where on a normal afternoon traffic sounds would have once drowned out every other noise, John Connor could hear only the summery rise and fall of insects calling to one another. That, and the occasional bang or clank or curse from the crew working behind him.
He stood at the open loading door, looking out into the overgrown parking lot. There were still some cars, here, left behind when the world went to hell decades ago, but they shared the lot with aggressive waist-high weeds and, wonder of wonders, a lemon tree that had taken root at the corner of the property.
John felt a bit like the parking lot. His wife still told him his face was handsome; that his upright posture, his camo-style uniform, all projected the image of a leader of men, grayed but unbending. But on days like this he could feel every injury that he had sustained in his fifty-plus years--every gunshot wound, every broken bone, every burn. Scars, new and old, marked his body like weeds marked the parking lot, and there were more every year.
Even so, he needed to lead the occasional mission in the field. He was the leader of the Resistance, and decades of experience made it clear to him that the men and women he commanded would lose faith in a commander who always sat safely in his hardened underground bunker at Home Plate compound, dispatching others to their deaths. To keep spirits up, to keep himself from becoming some sort of distant, unattainable figure who never met and therefore could never inspire the troops elsewhere, he had to expose himself to danger a few times each year.
He couldn't complain. There were men and women in his forces--including his own children--who exposed themselves to danger several times a month. There were some who almost never had the opportunity to relax, to feel safe.
"Hey." The voice was female. He glanced over his shoulder at the speaker.
She stood a few feet behind him, just beside the angled column of light spilling in through the loading door, and it took his eyes a moment to adjust so he could make out her features. She was of average height and build, but he didn't find her in the least average. Her nose was just a little too broad to be considered elegant; but that, her round face, and her mouth--made for smiling--added up to a combination that was impossibly attractive. Her eyes were dark brown, her hair graying from the same color. She wore a camo uniform like his, though she'd set aside the belt with its holsters and pouches.
He modulated his tone to that of an office lothario. "Hey, yourself," he said. "Are you new?"
She grinned, taking on the cuteness of a teenager. "First day here."
"What are you doing after work?"
"I was thinking about a long moonlit drive with a bunch of sweaty freedom fighters."
He offered her a mock shudder. "Well, I guess a girl's got to do what makes her happy." He dropped the act. "How's it going back there?"
"They'll be ready for the fourth truck in about two minutes. They wanted me to tell you to send out the call."
"Will do."
She turned away, toward the dark interior of the loading dock. He reached out and caught her by the shoulder, dragging her back to him. Off-balance, she fell into his grasp, simultaneously grinning and scowling up at him. "What?"
"Kate, you know the price for approaching this checkpoint."
She leaned up to kiss him. "There. Does everyone who passes this way have to do this? Earl? Warthog? Crazy Pete?"
"I dunno. It's a brand-new policy."
Laughing, she shrugged free of him and headed back into the manufacturing facility.
John stared after his wife for a moment, savoring the bare minute of privacy they'd shared, perhaps the only minute they'd have this day. Then, reluctantly, he turned his mind back to business.
The building they were pillaging, a sprawling, nearly windowless single-story edifice larger than a football field, had once been decorated with a sign that read, EOSPHOR TECHNOLOGIES. Before Judgment Day, it had been a circuit board manufacturing concern, a subcontractor that built boards for companies that sold munitions components directly to the government. The sign had fallen, possibly on Judgment Day, possibly many years later. For whatever reason, the interior of the building had survived unpillaged for decades, and one of Connor's scouts had discovered it a few weeks ago. Two days ago, Connor's advance team had arrived and begun preparing selected pieces of equipment for transportation.
They couldn't take everything. A rough estimate of the amount of equipment here suggested that it would take a convoy of forty trucks or more to move every item of machinery, all surviving chemicals, all fabrication supplies. He had five trucks, a massive and vulnerable convoy by the standards of the Skynet-controlled world. So they had to be selective.
The equipment his technical team was dismantling and preparing for transportation included computers that his programming adviser Ávila had said still worked, still contained diagrams for hundreds of varieties of circuit boards. There was a room-size plotter that could transcribe those circuit board plans onto sheets of silver-coated Mylar at photographic levels of reproduction, for use in exposing circuitry images onto copper-clad fiberglass laminates. There were photographic exposure units, some merely oversize and ungainly, some large enough nearly to fill the back of a two-and-a-half-ton truck. There were rugged, hardy screen printers for use in silkscreen processes, usable both for circuit board manufacturing and more mundane tasks such as cloth decoration. Last of the primary haul, but certainly not least in size, were laminate presses that turned individual layers of laminates into multilayer circuit boards.
Less crucial to circuit board fabrication but still useful to the Resistance were control computers for sophisticated drill processes, laboratory equipment, tools, components for setting up partitions and metal cage walls, and parts scavenged from dozens of machines.
The booty from this haul, augmented by equipment that John's technicians would assemble on site, would allow the Resistance to set up two entire circuit board fabrication lines. That meant two sites that could produce radios, targeting systems, even computers someday. The lines would be much slower, much less efficient than those operating before Judgment Day, but they'd be a tiny edge in the favor of humanity, a fraction-of-a-percentage improvement in mankind's chances for survival. The Human Resistance had other circuit board fabrication sites operating, but every additional one they set up increased their available resources.
And with luck, the Eosphor Technologies building would go unnoticed by Skynet even after their departure. A few months from now, perhaps a year, they might be able to return and pick up even more equipment.
He pulled his field phone from its belt pouch. Shaped much like one of the walkie-talkies he'd known from his youth, it seemed cruder, more unfinished than the commercial products of the twentieth century. Its surfaces were black-painted metal instead of molded plastic. A cable ran up from a jack atop the device to the headset John wore and the microphone on his lapel.
With his thumb, he popped open the protective faceplate, revealing a small LCD screen and an alphanumeric keypad. He keyed in the following commands:
 
TRANS STARLING ALL<ENTER>
AC 4T<ENTER>
OFF<ENTER>
 
This operation was code-named Starling, a random word generated by a computer program back at...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tor Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0765349108
• ISBN 13: 9780765349101
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 352
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Procter & Gamble Service GmbH, Braun; https://in.pg.com/contact-us/; ; Sulzbacher Str. 40-50; Schwalbach/Ts.; 65824; Deutschland