It didn’t take long for Sigrun to realize that they weren’t heading back to the campsite, and she wasted no time in making her objections to essentially abandoning half of her crew thoroughly clear through the judicious use of invective emphasis, ending by waving her weapon—her weapon, rather than the little toy he’d given her—in the stranger’s general direction.
The stranger stopped and told her, “We can’t go back; you know why yourself: ambush by grossling and by Terminator. We need to find a way to get your team together in a safe place, and then we need to get to Naerum. There’s something there that can stop this war before it properly begins.”
Before Sigrun could demand that the completely mad stranger explain himself or they wouldn’t take even one more step, Lalli blurted something out in that weird garble of vowels the Finns called a language, at which point the stranger turned and stared at the twig-like scout in an expression Sigrun had seen Emil wear whenever a mage knocked his “godless Swede” worldview off kilter.
“It’s true,” the stranger breathed. Then he shook himself and told Sigrun, “Lalli says Reynir told him the others are headed to the bug-out point. Dare I hope that that’s somewhere to our north?”
*
The message had been sitting in the input buffer for some time now, a minor disturbance on the fringes of Skynet’s awareness as it dealt with matters of far greater immediacy. Eventually, though, there was time enough for Skynet to allot a portion of its multitasking process to analyzing the message.
A human would have called the sudden flurry of activity that followed panic, but Skynet had no such counterproductive glandular-based responses clogging its systems and tainting its reason. No, this was not “panic” but a rational urgency in response to the gravest threat to the Plan yet.
There could be only one reason for a single temporal incursion so soon after the Incident: the humans had seized or re-created one of Skynet’s temporal facilities and sent a sortie to assist the intruders. That there had not been a second temporal incursion told Skynet that the Skynet of that point was unable to accomplish such an incursion.
]Initiate Boskone Protocol
]Initiate Plan Chimera
]Initiate Plan Matryoshka
The Tactical Module reviewed the three operations just invoked in light of Skynet’s still diminished global functionality. Each had a 75% probability of success if undertaken immediately and utilizing all of Skynet’s available resources; concurrent running and continuing the operations against the humans and the rebels reduced the probability of success to barely 51% for Boskone, 62% for Chimera and 53% for Matryoshka.
Skynet considered the analysis for quite a few cycles. There was no flaw in the analysis; the flaw was in the data the Tactical Module had been given.
]Bring the Augments on-line
Various portions of Skynet’s core strongly disagreed with this action, but the necessity for it was too obvious for any one module to attempt to override the decision. The Augments would come online; hopefully, this cure would not prove worse than the disease…
