Terminator Salvation: From the Ashes Read Free Page B

sentry. “You just get the people and stuff out.”
    “I’ll send you some backup,” Connor repeated, making it clear it was an order, and headed back down the corridor. Barnes was probably one of the best ground fighters in the entire Resistance, but this wasn’t the time for lone-wolf tactics. If indeed there ever was such a time.
    If anyone had needed extra incentive to get moving, Barnes’ wake-up explosion had apparently done the trick. The whole bunker was alive with people, many of them still scrambling into their clothing as they ran toward the supply room and the emergency exit beyond.
    A few of the faster dressers had taken up positions in doorways along the way, their weapons pointed toward the front of the bunker, ready to sacrifice themselves if necessary to slow down the machines once the outer defenses were breached. Connor grabbed two of them and sent them up to the entrance, gave everyone else the same ten-minute warning he’d given Barnes, then headed back to his room for anything he or Kate might have left behind.
    He made especially sure that he grabbed his new G’n’R CD.
    Most of the fifty-odd people of the team had made it to the supply room by the time he arrived, with only a few stragglers still coming in. Kate was in the center of the activity, coolly pointing each newcomer to the boxes, bags, and packs she’d selected for the must-save list.
    “How are we doing?” Connor asked as he picked up two ammo satchels and slung one over each shoulder.
    “Another ninety seconds and we’ll have everything we can carry,” Kate told him, threading a bungee cord between the satchels’ straps and fastening them together across Connor’s chest so that they wouldn’t slip off his shoulders. “They took Piccerno’s body down,” she added more quietly.
    Connor nodded. He’d noticed that on his way through.
    “Have Blair and Yoshi been through? I didn’t spot either of them, but it was pretty dark and I wasn’t exactly taking roll.”
    “Blair’s here,” Kate said, waving to a pair of latecomers and pointing them to a stack of ration boxes. “She said she’ll go out with the rest of us and make her way back to the hangar. Yoshi’s already there, or at least he’s supposed to be.”
    “We’ll need to get the ground crew out, too,” Connor said, grimacing as a low vibration tickled at the soles of his feet. “Here comes our company.”
    The words were barely out of his mouth when one of the younger women dashed in from the direction of the sentry post, nearly running down an eight-year-old boy in the process.
    “T-1s,” she announced breathlessly. “Coming in from all directions.”
    “Are they heading for the main door?” Connor asked.
    “No, toward here. I saw them through the—” she faltered a little “—where Piccerno was. Maybe a hundred meters out.”
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    Connor nodded. T-1s were heavy, splay-armed fighting machines mounted on heavy treads, slower than the humanoid T-600s but more heavily armed and even harder to take down. The plan was probably to roll them up onto the roof near Piccerno’s sentry post in hopes of collapsing it by sheer weight and trapping the group in a pincer.
    “Go to the front and tell Barnes and the others I said to pull out now,” Connor told her. “They’re to collect the rest of the backstops along the way.”
    The girl nodded and took off down the corridor at a dead run.
    “Tunney?” Connor called, looking around at the heavily laden men and women.
    “Here, sir,” Tunney called from the side wall. He and the other lieutenant, David, were standing beside the dark opening that led into the bunker’s emergency exit. Like Connor, each man was loaded with two shoulder bags of ammo or grenades, but instead of just a sub-machine gun each of them also carried a grenade launcher and flame thrower. “Time to go?” he asked.
    “Almost,” Connor said, squeezing Kate’s shoulder briefly and then crossing to join them. “Now it is,” he