Trial By Fire by Timothy Zahn - Preview

CH A P T E R O N E

His name was Jik.
That wasn’t the name his mother had given him,
back in those quiet, peaceful times before the horror of
Judgment Day. But it was the name everyone had always
called him, ever since his first week in school. It was
what his classmates had called him, and his teachers,
his friends, and eventually even his college professors.
Everyone called him Jik.
Even the thing that was stalking him through the
tangled woods of the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains
called him Jik.
The thing that was trying to kill him.
“Jik?” the gruff voice called through the fading light of
evening. “Jik? Come on, friend, this is ridiculous. I’m not
going to rob you—I promise. All I want is to talk.”
You’re not my friend! Jik wanted to shout back. But he
knew better. Making any noise, giving any hint of where
he was, would be suicide. Besides, his throat still hurt
from that branch he’d run into two days ago. Pressing
his back a little harder into the thick bole of the tree
behind him, he tried to think.
There really wasn’t much thinking left for him to do.
There were just the two of them out here in the forest.
The thing back there wanted to kill Jik. Jik didn’t want
to die. All very simple, all very cut and dried.
Jik swallowed hard around his sore throat as he
resettled his grip around the big handgun that was all
that stood between him and death. This particular section
of mountains hadn’t suffered much from the missiles
of Judgment Day, and the trees and shrubs were thick
enough to give him plenty of cover.
Unfortunately, plenty of cover for him also meant
plenty of cover for his stalker.
“Jik?”
Jik hunched his shoulders, wondering for the
thousandth time what the hell kind of Terminator that
was back there. It wasn’t a T-600—that much he was
sure of. The rubber-skinned T-600s barely had faces, let
alone voices. It wasn’t a T-700, either, the nightmarish
dark-metal skeletons that Skynet used these days as their
basic ground troops. This was something new.
“Jik?”
Jik peered up through the canopy of matted tree branches
above him. The cloud cover was a mottled gray-white, and
had gotten visibly darker over the past half-hour as the
sun continued its slide behind the mountains toward the
distant Pacific Ocean. In other circumstances, darkness
would be a friend, giving him a chance to slip away.
But darkness wouldn’t help against a Terminator.
Darkness would just be one more enemy.
Which meant Jik had to have this out right now.
He lowered his eyes, focusing once more on the gun
pointed toward the sky in front of him. It was a Smith &
Wesson Model 29, an eight-inch barrel wrapped around
a .44 magnum cartridge. More like a small cannon
than a regular gun, really, a copy of the weapon Clint
Eastwood had carried in Dirty Harry and which had
been the pride of his father’s collection. A single round
could probably take down a small buffalo, if there were
any buffalo nearby that needed taking down. Hopefully,
a single round could also take down a Terminator.
If it couldn’t, he was in trouble, because he only had
three rounds left.
“Jik?”
Jik grimaced. From the direction of the voice, it
sounded like the Terminator had moved to the base of
the small defile that Jik himself had climbed earlier, a
deep crease in the earth’s surface that led up to the tree
Jik was currently hiding behind. On both sides of the gap
were trees and thick stands of bushes, impossible to get
through without making a lot of noise. If the Terminator
back there was smart—and so far it definitely seemed
smarter than the T-600s Jik had tangled with back in Los
Angeles—it would probably move up the pass instead of
trying to climb the bank.
But not until it was sure Jik was up there.
“Jik?”
Taking a deep breath, keeping as quiet as he could, Jik
worked his way back up from his crouch into a standing
position. Getting to the next large tree should make
enough noise to attract the Terminator’s attention, while
still leaving Jik able to cover the top of the defile. He
stepped away from the tree.
And suddenly a figure burst into view, charging up
the defile toward him, its feet scattering dirt and rock.
Spinning around, Jik squeezed the trigger.
The blast hammered across his ears, the recoil of
the gun jamming his arm back into his shoulder. The
Terminator’s charge stopped in mid step with the impact
as the big bullet slammed into its chest.
It was as Jik fired his second round that his eyes caught
up with his brain, and he saw that his pursuer wasn’t a
Terminator at all.
It was just a simple, normal man.
But the horrifying realization had come an eternity
too late. The slug slammed into the wide-eyed human,
boring through the hole the first round had blown in his
chest and pitching him backward down the defile. He slid
halfway down and then ground to a halt, the tips of his
scuffed shoes still visible.
Jik stared at the man’s unmoving feet, his breath
coming in little gasps of relief and bitter shame. His
knees fluttered and gave way, and he dropped into a
crouch amid the soft matting of dirt and pine needles, his
stomach churning and wanting to be sick.
He’d just killed a man.
Minutes passed. Jik never knew afterward how many.
Enough that his knees hurt when he finally straightened
up again.
He’d killed a man. Not deliberately, really. Certainly in
the belief that he was acting in self-defense. But the fact
was that a human being was now dead, and Jik had done
it, and there was nothing he could do to change that.
All he could do now was give the man a decent burial.
That was what made men different, a Resistance fighter
in LA had once told him. Terminators left their fallen on
the streets. Human beings buried theirs.
Sliding the .44 back into its holster, he walked tiredly
over to the dead man. The human had landed flat on his
back, his arms flung over his head as if he was trying
to surrender. His chest was soaked with blood, and Jik
could see the ends of a couple of broken ribs sticking out.
If the man’s chest was a nightmare, his face was even
more so. There was a long jagged scar trailing out from
beneath his right eye, and the entire left side of his face was
a splotchy, sickly white, as if he’d been burned by acid.
Maybe he’d absorbed a massive dose of radiation
during the hell of Judgment Day, though how he could
be walking around after a jolt like that was a mystery.
Still, radiation poisoning might explain the insanity of
his trying to chase down and kill a perfect stranger.
And then, Jik spotted a glint of metal protruding from
the gaping wound.
He leaned closer, his heart suddenly starting to pound
again. He hadn’t imagined it: the broken rib ends weren’t
made of bone. They were made of metal.
What the hell?
He snatched out the Smith & Wesson again, pointing it
at the body as he knelt beside it. Gingerly, he pulled back
the layer of skin and peered into the wound.
There was a heart in there, all right, or at least there
had been before the .44 slug had torn through it. He
could see a pair of lungs, part of a stomach, and what
seemed to be a somewhat truncated circulatory system.
There were blood vessels going upward from the heart,
which implied there was a human brain tucked into the
skull behind those staring eyes.
Or maybe not. The T-600s got along just fine with
computer chips for brains, and there was no reason he
knew of why this thing couldn’t do so as well. The skin
seemed real, too.
But between the skin and the organs, everything else
was metal. Metal ribs, metal plating behind the ribs,
metal spine, metal shoulder blades.
Jik had been right the first time. The thing chasing him
through the mountains had indeed been a Terminator.
Some chilling hybrid of man and machine, straight from
the back porch of hell.
He looked up at the darkening sky. He was still a couple
of days out from the little mountainside town of Baker’s
Hollow that was his goal, the town where his uncle had
once lived and where Jik had spent a couple of weeks each
summer when he was a boy. If the town still existed—if
Skynet hadn’t already found it and destroyed it—maybe
someone would remember him and let him stay.
He looked at his watch, then slid off his backpack and
pulled out the precious radio he’d lugged all the way
from Los Angeles. It was nearly time for John Connor’s
nightly broadcast to the world, and there was no way
that Jik was going to miss that.
The message tonight was brief.
“This is John Connor, speaking for the Resistance.
We’ve won a major battle, struck a vital blow for
humanity against the machines. I can report now that
Skynet Central, the enemy’s big San Francisco hub,
has been utterly destroyed, as have large numbers of
Terminators.
“But this victory has come at a horrendous cost. Now,
more than ever, we need you. Come to us—look for
our symbol—and join us. Humanity will win. I promise
you that. All of you who are listening to my voice, you
are part of us. You are the Resistance. Stay safe, keep
fighting, and survive.
“This is John Connor, for the Resistance, signing off.”
Jik waited a moment, then shut off the radio and
stowed it away in his pack, his eyes drifting once again to
the abomination lying in the leaves and twigs beside him.
The difference between humanity and the Terminators,
the words whispered through his mind, is that humans
bury their dead.
Ten minutes later he was on the move again, picking
his way through the growing darkness, hoping to find
someplace hidden or at least a little more defensible
where he could spend the night. The body he left covered
by a thin layer of dirt, stones, and leaves.
Maybe the saying was right. But the dead man back
there wasn’t one of theirs.
Not anymore.