Terminator Salvation: The Official Movie Novelization Read Online Free PDF Page B

its swivel mount.
    Reaching into the cockpit, he fumbled at the controls, working from practice and relying on memory. Equally unbalanced, the Terminator lunged at him. Connor jerked to one side and the stabbing claw-hand just missed his face.
    Recovering, the T-600 re-triangulated its apparently helpless target and came forward again. As it did so, the human used his other hand to swing the barrel of the gatling hard around. The muzzle slammed into the Terminator’s faux human jaws as Connor yelled and activated the trigger.
    A shriek of metal-piercing rounds blew the T-600’s head into a hundred pieces of scrap metal. Breathing hard, Connor slumped back against the side of the chopper. Small flames from ignited circuitry flared from the neck of the decapitated machine—Terminator terminated.
    When the voice reached him the shock of it was nearly as great as the reappearance of the T-600. But this was a recognizably human voice. The source was the helicopter’s radio. Garbled at first, the transmission gradually became fully intelligible as the operator at the other end worked hard to clear the frequency.
    “Bravo Ten, come in,” the exhausted Connor was able to make out. “Bravo Ten, this is HQ. Anyone there? Respond, come back.”
    Reaching inside the cockpit, he located the compact mike, brought it to his lips, and switched it on. What should he say after what he had just been through and had just witnessed? What could he say?
    “Here,” he gasped.
    There was a pause at the other end, as if the caller was trying to derive whole reams of information from the one-word response.
    “Who is this?” the mike finally crackled afresh.
    “Connor.”
    “John Connor?”
    “No. Lucy Mae Connor.”
    That prompted another pause, followed by a query voiced in a stronger, no-nonsense tone.
    “Is the target destroyed?” When Connor didn’t respond, the voice tried again, more forcefully. “Connor! You’re in a hot zone! You have no time. Acknowledge. Do you copy? I repeat—is the target destroyed?”
    Gathering himself, Connor gasped out a one-word reply.
    “Affirmative.”
    The radio voice turned from demanding to anxious.
    “You have a location on General Olsen? We can’t raise him.”
    This time Connor took a deep breath before replying.
    “Olsen’s dead.”
    A longer pause.
    “Proceed to ex-fil point. We’ll send pickup. How many survivors are there?”
    Straightening, Connor regarded the new valley that had appeared where formerly there had been flat desert and a few low, scrub-covered hills. Still settling dust continued to obscure the view. The vast satellite array, the rest of the Skynet center, all the poor, pitiful human prisoners, every one of his comrades—dead and buried as the ages. Remembering that he was isolated only physically, he lifted the mike once again.
    “One.”
    The voice on the radio came back much subdued.
    “Repeat—please.”
    “One!” Connor snapped.
    Perhaps surprisingly, nothing further was heard from the mike. After waiting to make sure the connection had been cut, Connor put it down, straightened, and started limping away from the chopper. Not because he had a destination in mind—he wasn’t even sure exactly where he was. Not because he feared a resurgence of the T-600 he had finally and definitively put down. He started walking because, if nothing else, he desired to put the scene of colossal devastation and destruction as far behind him as he possibly could.
    If he was lucky, he mused as he trudged toward an increasingly stormy horizon, maybe he would find a lizard. In the world in which he now found himself, any companion not made of metal and circuitry was one to be cherished.
    ***
    The storm brought darkness to the desert sooner that it would otherwise have arrived. Frequent flashes of lightning illuminated the scorched and shredded fragments of the day’s reckoning: bits of bone, limbs both human and metal that had been divorced from their owners’ bodies,