Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes Read Online Free PDF

anyway.
    “And get clear of the door!”
    The words were barely out of her mouth when the silence of the night was shattered by the thunder of automatic weapons fire.
    But not the drawn-out stutter of an HK’s miniguns. It was the slower, higher-pitched sound of a Galil assault rifle.
    Like the one Barnes had been carrying over his shoulder.
    Blair swore under her breath. Leave it to him to pick a one-man fight with a flying weapons platform.
    “Forget the winch!” she shouted to Yoshi as she bounded up the ladder and dropped into her cockpit. “Blast and burn.”
    “Right,” Yoshi called over the gunfire as he headed for his own plane. “You or me?”
    “Me,” Blair shouted, punching for engine ignition. “Go as soon as it’s clear.” There was no time for her to do a proper flight checklist. She would just have to hope Wince and Inji had done the prep right.
    They had. Even as she pulled the canopy closed she could feel the vibration of the twin GE
    turbofans behind her coming to life. Flipping up the safety bar on her stick, she raised the muzzle of her GAU-8 to point at the center of the hangar door and squeezed the trigger.
    A normal door would have simply disintegrated at the center of fire, leaving the bulk of it still sitting there, blocking the way. But this particular door had been carefully warped most of the way out of its guide rails and fasteners, and its center had been heavily reinforced with large pieces of superhard alloy, scavenged from wrecked HKs and T-4 tanks. The result was exactly as planned: even as the door’s center began to shred in the face of Blair’s onslaught, the sheer impact of two-pound shells striking it at a thousand meters per second blew the whole door out of its housing and hurled it in a twisting arc across the open area outside. Blair caught a glimpse of an HK
    swooping down toward the spot where she’d left Barnes—.
    And with a teeth-tingling screech of metal against metal, the flying door slammed into the HK’s tail.
    The HK nearly lost it right there and then, as the impact threw it violently to the side. Its left tail fin hit the ground and dug in, spinning the whole aircraft a quarter turn around the pivot point.
    But the computer controlling the craft was faster than any human pilot. Before the HK’s nose could slam into the tarmac, it managed to pull up and out of its spin, its engines revving madly as it tried to regain its equilibrium.
    It was still trying when Barnes sent a final burst of fire squarely into its nose, igniting its fuel and munitions and blowing the whole thing to scrap metal.
    The fireball was still billowing skyward as Blair snagged her helmet and jammed it on over her head.
    “Jinkrat: go!” she barked into the mike.
    “Roger,” Yoshi’s voice came back. The hum of his engines became a sudden roar, and Blair’s plane bucked beneath her as the backwash blasted against the rear wall of the hangar and bounced off again in all directions. Yoshi’s A-10 lurched forward, rolled up the ramp, and turned sharply right as he made for the pockmarked runway and the relative safety of the open air.
    17
    Blair grabbed for her safety straps and started pulling them on as she peered through the dust and fire and the pieces of raining metal. Wince and Inji were on the move, weaving their way through the buffeting turbulence of Yoshi’s backwash as fast as the weight of their backpacks and shoulder bags would allow. Another few seconds and they should be out of the way of her own exit.
    Until then, here she sat in an open hangar, as vulnerable a sitting duck as could be imagined.
    Apparently, Yoshi had the same kind of imagination.
    “Hickabick, what’s the trouble?” his voice called through her headset. “Get your butt out of there.”
    “Can’t—penguins are still on the move,” Blair told him.
    “The penguins may just have to hump it,” Yoshi warned. “You’ve got three bandits on the way; repeat, three on the way.”
    “Check,”