Tyler looked at the data on the computer screen and analyzed it. Their best option to enter the ZeiraCorp building undetected was to pose as maintenance workers. It was a plan that would need some more thinking and some more careful planning. He could not afford to make another mistake. It had to be flawless.
He closed his eyes and thought about the mistakes he had made since arriving in this time. From the moment she had spotted him to his younger self getting shot and then infected with the nanoattrioids. Mistake after mistake, and another one could prove to be fatal for the future. He knew the reason for his stupidities. Still too human, too little like the Tyler before him who had been ruthless and unaffected by his emotions. It wasn’t the truth; the Tyler before him had been human too, had been clouded by unspoken and hidden emotions too, but the other Tyler had been better at hiding it all.
He worried about the effects the nanoattrioids would have on his younger self. Only sixteen and already compromised by the micro machines. He had thought that he had been invincible and had gone looking for trouble to put that theory to the test, knowing that his death lay not in the future but in the past present. Death had knocked on his door countless times, and he had only survived by miracles. Two times he had been injected with nanoattrioids to keep him from dying. Now his younger him would follow in his footsteps at a very young age.
Very aware of the side effects of the nano-infections, he could paint a picture of what was going on in TJ’s mind. The incredible burning sensation that would drive him closer and closer to insanity. He remembered the worries he had had after the first exposure to nanoattrioids; how each day had been a battle to keep his mental sanity, how scared he had been to flip and go on a brutal rampage among the people he had vowed to protect and defend.
The second time he had been exposed, he had no longer cared about the dangers that came with it. In fact he no longer cared at all. All he had ever cared for, he had lost. Convicted to guilt and regret, it had consumed his soul.
“I wanna see you,” he whispered while he brought his hand up to her chin and turned her face back to him. “I wanna see you and remember,” he whispered, cupping her face in his hands before kissing her softly again. “I love you, Connor. I always will,” he breathed.
She opened her right eye and looked at him: “Promise me, Ty,” she said softly.
“Anything,” he said sincerely.
“Promise me that you will tell me,” she sighed. “Don’t become him in that sense too.”
He rested his forehead against hers and took a deep breath before saying: “I will.”
The memory of that bittersweet moment in time forced its way to the front of his thoughts. Even then he had known that it had been an empty promise; he could never ever tell her. Burdening her with this knowledge would taint her and would hold severe consequences for TJ. He had changed the future enough already.

TJ leaned against the door post and studied the man he was destined to become. It had been two days since the blood transfusion and the inevitable infection, and already he had come to understand the severity of the situation. This had not supposed to happen. Yet it had and it was a consequence they would all have to deal with.
He wasn’t a boy who had his heart on his sleeve. He did not speak his mind too often and in general he thought that he was well-behaved and well-spoken. However he could feel the nanoattrioids change him. Embedded in his brain and nerve system they put pressure on certain points that made him act more like the man he was observing and less than who he had been his entire life.
For now the headaches had subsided but he held no illusions about them staying away forever. The machine was inside of him and it would become a daily struggle to keep it contained. The question of controlling the machine and summoning it when most needed rose to mind. Could he be the one to do it? And had that been why he had been put on the brink of life and death by fate? Is that why Skynet was hunting him?
He folded his arms across his chest and leaned his head against the door post. It was hard to imagine that one day he would look like that man, that he would be that man, but deep in his heart he knew that it would happen. Closer than ever by the nanoattrioid infection. It had only been a brush with it, but it had changed him forever.
How long would it be before the machine would surface in him too?

Sarah heaved a deep sigh while she watched them both. It was the strangest sight to see the young man and the man he would become together. Worlds apart. The young Tyler, unmarred by war, at the beginning of a lifelong war. The old Tyler, ripped apart by war, at the end of his journey in life. She did not cherish hope that the fighter future John had sent back would live long after his mission had been completed.
A sharp stab of sadness threatened to undermine her composure. All this because of her, because of her son. She had died a thousand deaths in the years after the first machine had come across time to kill her, and each time she had been revived and had reinvented herself, until she had become the person she was today.
She was a soldier first, mom second and somewhere at the end of the line she was a scared woman, who tried to do the things to her best knowledge. Over the years she had made mistake after mistake in being a mother to her son, but she knew that she had prepared him as a soldier, a leader, the best way possible.
Yet when looking at the older Tyler, she wondered if she had not failed. The war had still come. Judgment Day had left the world in ruins. Hopes and dreams had been scattered in the infernos that had swept across the surface of the earth.
He was so extremely hard on himself, on everybody else. A necessity, and still there was something kind in him left. When he granted her a chance to look him in the eyes she could see a gentle man, who had been forced into this lifestyle.
She was happy, now that he was around more, that the raw sexual tension between them had ebbed away. Not wanting to know how deep his feelings for her ran, it was all for the best. Looking from the older Tyler to the younger one, she realized that it was never for him, but for the young man he had once been.
It was a ridiculous idea that that loudmouth would step back and let the future take its course. It wasn’t in his nature to do so. He was top dog, ready to fight at any given moment, to prove that he was the best. Stepping back for someone else to take the glory was probably the last thing he would do.

“Where is he?” Robin O’Conlin stormed into General Connor’s office.
“Where’s who?” John looked up, tears shimmering in the corners of his eyes.
“My dad!” She growled.
“He went m.i.a., O’Conlin. I don’t know where he is or if he is still alive.”
“Right,” she seethed. “Ain’t that convenient? The war’s over and my dad just disappears! He was still a threat and you killed him.”
“He was my friend, and no, I did not,” he started to grow impatient.
“People disappeared, C,” she said boldly. “The war ends, and a lot of people suddenly disappeared. Baxter, the Reese boys, Miss Tin Can, my dad. All m.i.a., no doubt! I want the truth, C!”
He rose to his feet and leaned over his desk, his knuckles resting firmly on the top: “First off, only a few people are allowed to call me C, and you are not one of them. Second, almost all people who went m.i.a. were people I cared about. Why would I kill someone I care about?”
“You still had an axe to grind with my dad because he failed to keep your mother safe.”
He shook his head: “If I had wanted him dead, I would have left him to die at IT. And since when do you care about your dad?”
She kept quiet for a while and he could see a lot of his lost friend back in her. She really took after him, and in a way it was a comfort to him to know that part of Tyler lived on as Robin O’Conlin.
“He’s all I had left,” she answered in a firm voice. “And with the war over-”
He began to laugh: “You really think that he would have played daddy to you? He was an instrument of war, O’Conlin. He lived for love of battle.”
She stood perfectly still, a deep frown creasing her brow as if she was remembering something: “Is that why he and your mom had a very healthy sex life? Why they spent every spare minute together? Because of his love of battle? And not because he did actually love her?”
He heaved a sigh of exasperation: “The fall of IT changed him,” he began.
“No, you changed him. You made him the laughing stock of the Resistance. Nano’s. A cyborg arm. And you did nothing to stop people from badgering him. Not an order. Not a request. He became an instrument of war because you made him one.”
To emphasize her words, she pulled out her Beretta and aimed at his head. He sighed: “I wish you hadn’t done that, O’Conlin.”
“You killed my dad, admit it!”
He shook his head in disagreement: “I did not… I sent him on a mission and he went m.i.a..”
“A suicide mission, no doubt,” she seethed, cocking the hammer of her gun.
“It is a mission from which he can never return, true. But he is safe,” he lied.
“He left? Voluntarily?” She asked while a look of sadness appeared on her face. “He wouldn’t leave if you forced him to.”
“He asked for that mission, O’Conlin. He has known about that mission since his teens. When we beat Skynet… He asked me to either kill him or send him on that mission already.”
“What mission? And how could he have known?”
“It’s complicated, but it has to do with time travel,” he answered.
“Time travel,” she echoed, her voice marked by contempt and ridicule. “Ha, you lost it, C.”
“If you put down the gun, I’ll tell you all about it and after that we will forget all about this little incident because of your father… I owe him that much,” he said calmly, knowing that she already had given him enough reasons to shoot her dead on the spot.
The sad thing was that she hadn’t been the first to barge into his office and demand answers in such a fashion. Now that the war was over, he was seeing more and more of it. Captain Ethan Scottsdale had warned him about the post war stress syndrome that was building among his old troops. People, who were too young to remember the old world, who had been born into this world, whose lives had only known war, death and destruction. People like Robin O’Conlin.
For some reason he had always thought, with her genetic background, that she would not fall victim to it. However the fact that she stood there with her sidearm pointed at his head proved him wrong. He wanted to give her an out and not have her shot like a so-called traitor. He was still General John Connor and threatening him with a loaded gun was just about the stupidest thing she could have done.
She was a smart kid, maybe just as intelligent as her father had been, and she looked an awful lot like him, which had been the reason for his mother to tell Tyler about her before he could have used her as leverage to trigger the machine slumbering inside of Tyler. He knew about the strained relationship between father and daughter. It was why Tyler had sent her to Home Plate, after she had screwed up an important prisoner mission.
He felt sorry for her; having to live in her father’s shadow, constantly compared to him by the people who knew about it. It was something he wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with. For years he had lived in his mother’s shadow, in the shadow of the legendary Sarah Connor.
However he knew that that was not what was bothering her. She had honestly thought that with the war over, they could salvage their familial bonds, that she would have a father who could help her process all the horrors of war she had seen. It practically broke his heart to know that she was sadly mistaken.
Tyler could never adapt to a normal society, to a normal life. The years of continuous war had made him socially handicapped. He suffered from reduced startle reaction, which made him practically incapable of feeling fear. Added the nanoattrioids embedded in his brain and nerve system, it was a recipe for disaster. In a normal society he would have the makings of a psychopath, in need of thrills to feel alive. And John knew that, even though Tyler had a strong conscience, Tyler had killed already and it would not be an obstacle to kill again. The first one was always the hardest, a lesson John had learned when he had snapped Sarkissian’s neck in a blind rage.
He watched as Robin lowered the gun and secured it. It was a good sign that she was willing to listen. The last thing he wanted to do was to kill her for insubordination, if not for her, then for the memory of her father.

Agent James Ellison rummaged through the evidence box again. He had no idea what he was looking for but he was sure that he would know when he would find it. West Highland Police Department. CyberDyne Systems. Miles Dyson. Skynet. Sarah Connor. John Connor. The metal man. Doctor Silberman. Bar code tattoos.
He entered a search query in his computer and all open and closed cases involving a victim or a culprit with a bar code tattoo appeared on screen. All case files of the past thirty years had been entered into the system and it made for an easy search and comparison.
A lot of John Does on both ends of the tally. His eye was caught by a name he had not paid attention to before: Robin Baxter. He double-clicked on the file name, expecting it to be a man and being surprised it turned out to be a woman. Two assault and battery charges and an ordinary high speed car accident. He read the two counts of assault and battery charges carefully before skimming through the accident report. It appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary, until he caught the names of the relatives: Thomas and Tyler Jess ‘TJ’ Devlin. He pulled the police file on Robin Baxter and clicked on the pictures until he found what he had been looking for. A distinct bar code tattoo on her right forearm. He made a print out of each victim and culprit’s bar code tattoo, put the name on the paper and placed them on the floor. Like they had been numbers, instead of humans.
He scratched his goatee. Numbers, not beings. He searched through the papers on his desk until he had found Sarah Connor’s psychiatric file. Presumed she had died in the bank heist, he had been able to get it. He flipped through the file until he found the descriptions of her delusions. Rants about infiltrators, machines, Skynet, Judgment Day. Nothing about why a person was a number and not a being. Was it a dead end?
Robin Baxter, Tyler Jess Devlin the old, Tyler Jess Devlin the young. He had secured the glass John Doe had drunk his water from and had let a few DNA tests be run under the false pretence of it being trace. It had confirmed his suspicions that he had been dealing with Tyler the old. It also immediately explained how a missing boy could end up at a drug house.
He looked at his computer screen again and heaved a deep sigh. These were only the known cases. Who knew how many more there were out there? Dead or alive? If what Sarah Connor had been ranting about held any truth, this thing was bigger than he had ever expected and he could forget about ever cracking this case. Maybe the time had come that he should reconsider his career with the FBI or consider other options?

Robin looked at the faces of her squad members and smiled vaguely. Almost all Rooks, and she had to lead them into enemy territory. Not two hours ago, communications at Home Plate had received a report on a secret base, requesting an extraction team to check it out.
The war was over but everyday they discovered new strongholds, new factories and new hidden bases. The machines were dead, frozen in their place. Statues of metal, reminders of the war. She hadn’t been there when the General and his elite troops had reached Skynet’s last stronghold in Topanga Canyon. She hadn’t been there when they had claimed victory after unplugging the supercomputer responsible for billions of deaths.
She had been near the Ruins and had watched in awe when the aerial recon units had started to tilt, spiral out of control and crash nose first into the ground. Ground assault units had come to a sudden halt. The sudden silence had been deafening and time had seemed to come to a complete halt. The war was over.
She remembered the looks of disbelief being replaced by euphoria and victory. Cheers had risen to the sky. Mankind, close to going extinct, had survived and been victorious. And they all owed it to one man and his elite troops.
However now that the dust had settled and the euphoria had passed, people were starting to get disgruntled and disillusioned. They expected John Connor to rise to the occasion again, telling them how to rebuild the world but he was a military strategist and not an anthropologist. The past three months there had been more attempts on his life than in the entire sixteen years this war had lasted.
She held no such expectations from the General. She didn’t think it was his task to rebuild the world. He was a military genius, occupied with disabling and disassembling the last of Skynet’s buildings and with putting together an army that would enforce law and order.
“Sarge?” A Rook named Cranston asked her.
She shook her head to stop her thoughts from wandering too much. Still it was amazing that the General had let her off with a slap on the wrist and not executed her on the spot. He wasn’t a man of second chances. If you blew it, you were dead. Of course she had her father’s legacy to thank for her life being spared.
“Are you okay, Sarge?” Cranston asked with a look of concern on his face.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” she answered slowly but with a smile.
She knew where her father was. He was out on a mission from which he could never return home, and she wished him luck in thoughts. Their relationship had been extremely strained from time to time, but deep down she knew that he had always meant it well. He had sucked as a father and yet he had saved her life by banning her to Home Plate after she had screwed up as a Rook.
“Check your kit and move out!” She ordered.

TJ looked at his reflection in the mirror. A gawky looking kid with wavy hair that reached his shoulders and a teen five o’clock shadow, dressed in a Brazilian soccer shirt, jeans and white sneakers. It no longer fitted who he had become overnight. He had changed on the inside and now it was time to change his appearance.
He picked up the bag with clothes he had bought earlier and emptied it on the floor of the bathroom. Combat boots, black army pants and a black sleeveless T-shirt with a V-neck. If he was going to be Tyler Jess Devlin, he better start right now.
Ten minutes later he emerged from the bathroom and almost ran into Cameron who stopped in her tracks and looked at him for a good while with her head tilted a little.
“What?” He asked slightly irritated.
“Nothing,” she answered and continued with her round.
“Oh, look. I have a wannabe,” he heard someone say sarcastically behind him and he turned around quickly to see Tyler leaning against the wall with his right shoulder, his arms folded across his chest.
“I’m not a wannabe. I am you,” he countered.
Tyler chuckled and his eyes sparkled with amusement: “Says who?” He taunted.
“Says our matching DNA.”
“Right, kid,” Tyler said patronizingly. “Despite our matching DNA… You’re not me. Looking all tough. Ha, what a joke!”
He winced when he felt a sharp electric shock in his head. Like he had expected anything different from Tyler. Approval or recognition? Hell would freeze over sooner, he knew. Yet it had triggered something in his head. Something he had no control over. For the past few days he had suffered tremendously from headaches in which it had felt like his brain had literally been on fire, but this was new.
“Enjoying the built-in electroshock therapy, kid? The nano’s must been rearing their ugly metal heads now that you haven’t found the recognition you were looking for. Try Connor. She might have one or two nice words for you, but you won’t be getting any from me. Goddamn wannabe,” Tyler smirked while he turned on his heels and walked into the direction of the kitchen.
Now was his chance: he ran up to Tyler and jumped on his back, trying to hit him everywhere he could.
“Kid,” Tyler said eerily calm. “I’d advice you to let go of me.”
“Why? So you can continue to treat like I’m some goddamn idiot?” He seethed through gritted teeth while he punched Tyler with every word. “I don’t think so!”
“I said: let go of me.”
“NO!” He shouted at the top of his lungs. “You are NOT the boss of me!”
“LET… ME… GO!” Tyler growled dangerously as he reaching over his shoulder with his left hand to grab him by the shirt.
All of a sudden he felt a firm tug at his shirt and his stomach became lodged into his throat when Tyler sent him flying. The wall creaked at the impact of him crashing into it. Dust fell from the ceiling. The air got knocked from his lungs and his back and left shoulder felt like they were on fire, but the pain combined with the electric pulses in his blood pushed him onward. He wasn’t out for the count yet.
“Don’t, kid,” Tyler warned him when he jumped to his feet. “You really don’t want this.”
“Stop calling ME kid!” He hissed before he jumped at Tyler again.
“Why, kid?” Tyler smirked, easily dodging his wild attack by sidestepping him. “So far you’ve done nothing that convinces me to call you something else.”
“Why, you son of a bitch!” He shouted fully enraged.
“Now that’s no way of talking about our mother, kid,” Tyler remarked with a wry smile. “Now if you’ll excuse me… I’ve got more important things to do than to listen to some whiny kid venting his anger at me,” he stated smugly while he turned to leave for the kitchen again.
He saw red with rage, the electroshocks increasing in strength and number. The fantastic tales that turned out to be the truth instead of fantasy. His father murdered. Tyler trying to strangle him. The scorching pain of bullets piercing his body. Severe headaches after the blood transfusion. The retreating form of Tyler was the perfect target for all the pent-up anger brewing inside of him. Beside himself with rage, he jumped on Tyler’s back again and started punching him again.
Tyler heaved a deep sigh of annoyance: “You just had to do this. You couldn’t walk away, could you?”
"You wouldn’t have either!” He roared before he pulled his forearm against Tyler’s throat with all his strength in one desperate attempt to choke him.
“Kid,” Tyler growled impatiently. “This won’t help.”
“What the hell is going on?” John asked loudly. “Mom?!? Tyler’s about to kill TJ!?!”
“Well, good for… Wait? What?” Sarah exclaimed. “Goddamnit! Tyler?! TJ?!” She grumbled while she came running from the kitchen and separated the two.
“Let me at him!” He yelled frustrated, trying to break free from Sarah’s firm hold on him.
“TJ, kitchen. Now!” Sarah ordered sternly, dragging him with her to the kitchen. “And I wouldn’t look so smug if I were you, mister!” She snapped at Tyler when they passed him. “Sit down, TJ,” she said in a friendly voice after she pointed at a chair. “Now calm down… I know that he is a jackass, but a jackass who can snap your neck like a twig if he wants to do so.”
“It’s not him. Not this time,” he sighed. “I went looking for a fight, and I got one,” he said with a grimace while he rubbed his sore shoulder. “Human versus wall. Wall wins.”
She sat down across the table from him and smiled a little: “That was stupid, TJ. Really stupid. Of all the people in this house you had to pick him. Why?”
“I don’t know. He got on my nerves?”
She rolled her eyes, then looked in the direction of the hallway: “He gets on everybody’s nerves… It’s his special skill.”
Now it was his turn to smile. She hadn’t said a word about his change in appearance. Maybe she hadn’t noticed? Or she simply didn’t care because it was skill that mattered and not how a person looked? Still it was good to know that she was on his side and not Tyler’s.

Use of deadly force against the machine and collaborators is authorized. It was the first rule you learned as a Rook at the Resistance boot camp. It had not been too long since Robin had been there but it felt like an eternity ago with all that she had seen in the four years that lay in-between. Now she was a sergeant and leading an extraction team to check out a hidden Skynet base.
She caught Rook Cranston glancing shyly at her and she suppressed a chuckle. It flattered her ego that he had taken a shine to her, but she wasn’t interested. Besides it was a bad idea to get involved with members of your own squad because it always lead to unnecessary complications, especially if you outranked them.
Slowly, while making sure the surroundings were clear, the team made its way to the entrance of the hidden base. They were met by another Rook who had been ordered to wait and inform them.
“Ma’am,” the girl saluted her. “Rook Wojlinsky, White Shield unit.”
The White Shields were the successors of IntelliTech. They were less sophisticated, less informed but all that mattered was that they got the job done. Without the threat of being overrun by killing machines there was no reason to be the best of the best for many. It wasn’t like reckless behavior would get you and your unit killed nowadays.
Robin knew better. Still everyday people died or got severely injured because they were ignorant and reckless. People thought that the machines were good as gone with something to think for them. A theory that had been proven right in many ways, but it did not mean there were no exceptions.
Sometimes they went bad and almost nobody knew why. Her father had known. Wanting to know everything about his enemies, he had extensively studied and examined ‘captured’ enemy units. A tiny oblong box, easily mistaken for a metal pin, underneath the breastplate hid a backup chip with the most primary mission objectives: power supply reroute and terminate everything in sight. Even with Skynet gone, the metal endoskeletons still posed a threat. Daily reroutes were triggered, and the steel statues turned out to be less harmless than most people thought. She had seen a reroute or ten since the end of the war and each time she had gotten away with her life because she was always careful but she had lost team members that way.
“O’Conlin,” she said gruffly, trying to hide her annoyance from her voice. “Sit update?”
“Surroundings secure, ma’am. No radiation. No air pollution. Infrared shows no sign of life. It’s another Skynet base,” Rook Wojlinksy reported.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
It could also very well be a former or raided pocket instead of a Skynet base. Secure, clean surroundings did not entail a secure, clean building. She sighed; not knowing what it was made it difficult to come up with the right plan. Ninety percent of the time former pockets were rigged so if the machines would come, the place would blow sky-high. Raided pockets held no such threat, only the foul stench of death and the sight of fire-blackened skulls and bones. Skynet bases, despite the countless frozen endoskeletons and other machinery, were the easiest.
She couldn’t take any risk and decided to treat it like a former pocket. No need to chance her life or that of her team members. Should she radio it in and ask for a member of the Delta Company to help them with disarming possible booby traps?

Sarah sent TJ a crooked smile as encouragement before asking: “Or was it your plan to get yourself killed? Wanting him to finish the job?”
“No,” he replied sullenly. “He just got me so mad. Treating me like I’m some random idiot, calling me kid, telling me that I’m some goddamn wannabe. How can I be some wannabe when I’m him?”
She shrugged: “I don’t know, Teej. You are him, but you’re not him. He’s been fighting this war ever since he was your age. It makes him different from you, I guess. But it’s not just him you are mad at, right?”
He shook his head and stared at the empty glass in front of him.
“I got a headache… When he was taunting me, I got a headache and I could not stop myself. Like I was watching from the sidelines,” he mumbled embarrassed.
“Maybe you were,” she sighed.
“It’s the nanoattrioids, isn’t it? They made me lose control?” He asked sadly.
“I think so, Teej. Do you remember anything?”
She was curious to know since Tyler had told her that he never remembered anything from such headaches.
“Just that it felt like someone was literally short-circuiting my brain. After that… It’s all a blur.”
She reached across the table and placed her hand on top of his, giving him a gentle squeeze of comfort. At least Tyler hadn’t been lying when he had said that he didn’t remember, that it hadn’t been him who had tried to kill Kyle in the future. Her heart sank when she realized what kind of threat TJ had become now. Could she help him beat the machine inside of him? Or would her hand be forced and she would have to send him away?
“So he could’ve snapped your neck and you would never have known it? You could have taken it out on anyone in this house, and it just had to be him?”
“Who else?” He countered glumly. “Can’t yell at my mom for not telling me it was the truth instead of make-believe. Can’t hit my dad for ending up dead… He’s the only person I’ve got left in this world.”
“You’re not alone, Teej. You’ve got Derek, John, Cameron and me,” she offered, hoping it would make him feel better.
“Why should I take it out on you? Derek’s from the future too. John, it wouldn’t look good on me if I were to beat up the future leader of mankind. Cameron is a machine and you… I’d rather take my chance with Tyler,” he said with reverence.
She took it as the compliment he had meant it to be and gave his hand another squeeze for comfort. She had no idea what the nanoattrioids were doing to him, would do to him, but she knew that he needed to feel, to hear that she still thought that he was human and nothing like the Devil.
One thing she did understand about the nanoattrioids; they were intrinsically connected to emotions. TJ had been frustrated and furious, and it had triggered a small nanoattrioid attack. At least she hoped it had been a small one. It was a grounds of worry to her, because things would not get easier as the dark future approached.


“If it isn’t O’Conlin,” she heard a familiar voice say that she couldn’t completely place and she turned her head to see who had said that.
She heaved a deep sigh of annoyance. Lucien ‘Lucky Luke’ Tanner. He was about the last person she had wanted Delta Company to send. He was an arrogant loudmouth who depended more on luck than on skill. And the problem with luck was that it could run out.
“Lucky Luke,” she smiled wryly, knowing he hated that nickname.
He rolled his eyes and took off his backpack.
“Situation update?”
“No radiation. No air pollution. No sign of life.”
“Skynet base? You called me out here for another goddamn Skynet Base?” He asked irritated.
“It’s what I said,” Rook Wojlinksy chimed in.
She glared at the young girl who looked at her with an I-told-you-look. A know-it-all troublemaker, just what she needed. She rubbed her eyebrows tiredly. Her gut feeling kept telling her to take no risks. “Always trust your instincts,” her father’s voice echoed in her mind.
“I’ve got news for you, O’Conlin… The war is over,” Lucien taunted.
“Oh, shut up,” she growled through gritted teeth. “Look at the surroundings. Does it look like a place where Skynet would build? It doesn’t make sense that it’s a Skynet base.”
Lucien shrugged his shoulders and packed everything back in his backpack: “I’ll let it slide, O’Conlin. Next time just make damn sure it’s a pocket, or I’ll make sure you won’t get off with a simple slap on the wrist.”
She turned back to her team and avoided any eye contact. He had questioned her in public and no doubt she had lost some of her authority with her team. She glanced at Rook Cranston who was inspecting his plasma rifle.
“Anyone who wants to go, can go,” she sighed.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Lucien said while he hoisted his backpack on his back.
“Can I hitch a ride?” Rook Wojlinsky asked him.
From the eight members of her squad, only three remained behind: Rook Cranston, Private First Class MacCartney and her. So much for loyalty, she thought darkly.
“What now?” MacCartney asked.
“We’re gonna go in, check it out and report back,” she answered.

“Get me D.C.[1] on the line!” John barked at the Private who had given him the message.
Not two minutes later, Lieutenant Colonel Jones appeared on the video screen.
“General Connor, long time, no see,” the middle-aged man smiled.
John glared at him: “Lucien Tanner?”
“Sent him on a demo-job.”
“I know. O’Conlin asked for the bomb squad when she thought that she was dealing with a pocket and not a Skynet base… Guess what?” He asked darkly.
“What?” Lieutenant Colonel Jones asked, looking insecure.
“She was right. It was a pocket, with the emphasis on was. Now it’s a fucking hole in the ground,” he growled furiously.
“Casualties?” Lieutenant Colonel Jones gulped nervously.
“Sergeant O’Conlin and the two team members who stayed behind,” he answered coldly.
“Tanner reported back in, said it was a Skynet base and there was no danger. All standard D.C. protocol.”
“When he gets in, send him to Home Plate,” he said before killing the connection.
He looked at the ceiling and blinked away the tears: “I’m sorry, my friend. Tanner will pay for his mistake.”
It felt like he had failed Tyler and O’Conlin. Maybe he had? He should have reviewed and revised all standard protocols months ago, but things were still as hectic, if not more, as when they had still in battle with Skynet. He shook his head and sighed sadly. Now he had lost all whom he had ever cared for.
Why hadn’t she followed her instincts? Why had she insisted in going in if she had suspected it to be a former pocket? Most former pockets were rigged to deal damage to machines coming to raid it. She was stubborn like her dad, always wanting to do things her way if she was in the lead. Had she knowingly chosen death? Or had death finally caught up with her?
In a minefield death was only one step away.