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flair for understatement.
    “Where would the next nearest Skynet center be?”
    “San Francisco was the nearest command hub,” Oxley said. “But if Connor was right about that one being gone, I don’t know what’s left. There might be another hub in Missouri, or there might not be anything until the east coast.”
    “Could something that distance away even get a signal this far?”
    “Oh, sure,” Oxley said. “Shortwave would do just fine. Never fear—Skynet’s in complete control of any Terminators it’s got left out here.” He grimaced. “And will continue that control straight through a massacre of Baker’s Hollow, should it decide to go that route.”
    “So what do we do?” Preston asked.
    Oxley shrugged. “We wait.”
    Preston peered out into the darkness.
    “And meanwhile let whoever’s out there walk into a trap?”
    “I know,” Oxley said heavily. “But the only other option is to try to take out the T-700 ourselves. That’s not easy to do.”
    “So I’m told,” Preston said, eyeing the unmoving machine. So it had finally come. The confrontation he’d been afraid of ever since the fires of Judgment Day died away and the first rumors of killing machines began to drift up to their little refuge in the mountains.
    Their town’s isolation had protected it for a long time. But the reprieve was over. Skynet had found them, and every man, woman, and child in his care was now in deadly danger.
    Including his own daughter.
    “You haven’t asked the obvious question,” Oxley said carefully.
    “You mean whether or not you and your friends might be the reason for this visit?” Preston suggested.
    “That’s the one.” Oxley hesitated. “Do you want us to leave?”
    “Depends,” Preston said with a shrug. “You think your presence in town would hurt us, or help us?”
    Oxley snorted. “Even asking such a question presupposes we were more than just cogs in Skynet’s giant machine. Unfortunately, we weren’t. As a matter of fact, if Skynet thinks of us at all it’s probably as deserters. Or whatever term it uses for humans who drop off its grid.”
    “Most likely the same term it uses for all the rest of us,” Preston said grimly. “Dead men walking.”
    Oxley sighed. “Sounds about right.”
    Preston nodded, watching the other out of the corner of his eye. Oxley had always been vague as to what exactly he and the other two scientists had been doing down in that big underground lab. Lajard and Valentine had been even more tight-lipped than Oxley, saying only that they had been part of Skynet’s vast contingent of human labor.
    But that had never rung exactly true to Preston. All three of them had the kind of high-class scientific credentials that should have lifted them well above the general mass of humanity they had described as being down there. Had Skynet put them to work doing something else? Some job they were too afraid or too ashamed to admit to?
    Or maybe Skynet simply didn’t care about high-class scientific credentials. Maybe to it, all human slave labor was created equal.
    “Well, whatever we end up doing, we’re not doing it tonight,” Preston decided. “Let’s go sleep on it. Maybe by morning we’ll have thought up some better options.”
    “Maybe,” Oxley said. “You might want to post a guard here, though. Just in case.”
    “I already have,” Preston said. Though what a lone guard could do against a T-700 he couldn’t guess. Probably little more than be the first of them to die. “Let’s get back to town.”
    It was after midnight, and Blair was trudging her sixth weary and leg-aching walk around the perimeter of their camp when she heard a sound that chilled her even more than the cold desert air.
    The sound of a distant Hunter-Killer.
    She froze in her tracks, her right hand dropping to the grip of her holstered Desert Eagle, her head turning slowly back and forth as she tried to locate the noise. Somewhere to the northeast , she decided.
    She was