Danny Millard 
An Original Short Story in the Dark Fate Timeline
Danny L Millard
Story© 2024
“So, this is it,” Sarah muttered as she scanned the dawn sky with her binoculars. Dull gray smoke curled up around the lenses from the cigarette that seemed to be permanently grafted to the corner of her mouth. The future that Grace had warned them about had come to pass and now that Grace was gone… John was gone… Kyle was gone…
There was only the war.
Sarah Connor was nobody. She was just some gnarled old bitch with too many guns and not nearly enough bullets, although she truly had an awful lot of bullets and had sworn upon John’s lifeless body that every one of them would go through metal before they took her. When other people her age were becoming yuppies, she had been blowing shit up in central America and teaching her son, John Connor, Future Leader of the Resistance Against the Machines everything he should know to save us from extinction. The 90s were what you could optimistically call a shit show, but she had done the impossible. She saw Judgement Day, August 29th, 1997 pass peacefully by as if there wasn’t a care left in the world. She got blackout, pissed drunk that night. She could never decide whether the hangover was legendary or infamous, but it was worth it.
A few months later the Machine got its last laugh. It walked right up to him at a tiki bar on a sunny day at the beach and blew him apart with a shotgun. It double-tapped John right in front of her for good measure and strolled away on the bright yellow sand like a tourist. One final FUCK YOU to her for saving the world.
The rest was now history. Or was it inevitable? The fights, the machines, it never seemed to end for her.
Before the bombs fell, she gave a new person, a new “John”, the future that was meant for him and cried herself to sleep every night wrapped around a bottle of booze – or what settled for it once the booze ran out. The kid probably knew what was going on, but hadn’t been stupid enough to call her on it.
Smart kid. She might survive Legion after all.
The tip of Sarah’s cigarette glowed bright red beneath the binoculars. She had the soon-to-be-great Dani Ramos at her side standing watch, Future Leader of the Resistance Against the Machines. The title may have been used, but at least it had been broken in like an old pair of boots by the time she shrugged it on. Things had gone more smoothly this time since she didn’t need to breastfeed the kid while crawling through a jungle and she got to skip the puberty talk altogether. Once was enough, thank you very much!
“I don’t know why you insist upon using binoculars,” Ramos chided, a hint of Hispanic fire in her voice. “If they knew we were here, we would never see the shot that takes us out.”
“I don’t build the fucking things,” Sarah replied, switching the cigarette from one side of her mouth to the other. “But I sure as hell know how to take ’em out. The one you don’t see coming is the one that’ll turn your skull into a fucking canoe. For the rest of your life, you have to live by the rules I gave you! You are never safe, Dani! Not for a single second! Not even when they’ve been crushed into piles of smoking junk. And don’t count on me to always be there to rescue you. I made that mistake once and I won’t make it again.”
“Yeah,” the younger Ramos shot back sensing that an offroad might be necessary, “and what did you tell me about the light of a bright red cigarette giving away your position at night from miles away?”
Once more the cigarette shifted back and Sarah’s eyebrows arched a little higher beneath her mop of gray hair and she glanced, as if annoyed, briefly at Dani like she was observing a fascinating bug.
“So you were awake for that lecture,” she said with a hint of appreciation. “Just don’t stand too close to me until I finish this thing and we should be just fine.” With one long drag, the cigarette flared for the last time and then toppled, spent, to the ground. She crushed it with her boot. “Skynet’s all out of fucks to give about Sarah Connor and Legion’s never even heard of me.”
The sound of approaching footsteps drew the attention of both women. Softly working their way through a small stand of strangled trees, endeavoring to produce the least amount of noise, Corporal Matt Howard and Private Sloan, who apparently lacked a first name and wasn’t talking about why, relieved them from watch. As they walked wearily toward their bunks, Sloan had already rolled a cigarette and was playfully zipping his lighter in anticipation of his first drag.
Without turning around, Connor called out, “Don’t even think about it, Private. Legion can spot that glow from miles away.”
The cigarette quickly vanished into Sloan’s field jacket and the bewildered watchmen wondered defensively what the two women had to giggle about as they marched down the hill.
“Where’s your shadow?” Sarah asked conspiratorially as she and Dani were gearing up for patrol the following evening. A lifetime of chain smoking had made her voice low and deep. It was often difficult to determine whether she was whispering or talking. The volume was Dani’s only determinative hint.
“Hmmm?” Dani asked.
“G-R-A-C-E?” Sarah mouthed in the dimming light.
“Oh. She’s not coming. She’s not going to do me any good if she can’t read when I send her back, so I sent her to Padre. She doesn’t understand why reading is so important and all she wants to do is kill machines.” Dani whispered.
“Welcome to motherhood,” Sarah growled softly with just a hint of seriousness as she began blousing her fatigues.
“Don’t give me a reason to have second thoughts about saving you again,” Dani warned.
“Cute. Get out there and see if the boys are ready while I fix this strap. It keeps popping off and I always end up with shit crawling up my leg.” After a beat, Sarah made a sour face and added, “Make sure Conroy doesn’t overload his pack with shit this time, tell Diez to pack two more magazines of five-five-six, and let everybody know that we’re not going on a field trip. If anybody complains about being light, make them carry two extra canteens. Let’s break out the night vision gear if Chalmers has them recharged, but no more than two – and one of ‘em’s mine. I want to see where I’m stepping.”
Dani smiled, tossing a fresh blousing strap to Sarah, which she deftly caught and examined. Where did you get this?” Sarah asked, exhaling a long line of smoke from behind her ever-present cigarette. “No. Don’t answer that.”
“It’s not easy being you, is it?” Dani gently asked, subtly inviting Connor to offload a little weight.
Sarah thought about it for a moment and offered her a nod and a shrug. “You’ll get used to it when it’s your turn to save the world, now vamoose!”
A small scouting party had marked five ranch-style houses next to an old CVS Pharmacy nine clicks from their HQ. The buildings had been across the street from several other larger nonresidential structures, but J-Day had erased them from the map and, for reasons unknown, left the houses in almost pristine condition. An old pair of ancient Rev 2s had been left on station at the corner of the blasted street and Legion appeared to have forgotten all about them. The metal had fared better than the streets though and it looked like god had driven a giant bulldozer to one side of the crossroad and deposited just about every square inch of asphalt in town into a huge break wall. It wasn’t the machines’ doing. The pile was fused in that special way only nuclear fire could manufacture.
Connor and Ramos both quietly inched through a field of tall, dead grass along parallel lines toward the houses with one squad each. Connor approached the northwest corner of the first house and Ramos approached from the southwest. It had taken most of the night for the teams to jump, climb, and belly crawl through nine clicks of foothills teeming with rattlesnakes and cacti, but they had reached their objective with a good two hours to spare before sunrise.
Radiation readings were mild here. She knew they would be. Most of the deadly stuff tended to blow away in the form of fallout. As long as you weren’t playing Betty Homemaker in a glowing crater, you could last out here for decades. Sarah grimly thought of her fighters. I wonder how many of them will live long enough to die from cancer. As an old “Midnight Oil” song from the 80s once said, “Once the stuff gets in, you cannot get it out.” Boy were they on the nose about Harrisburg, she thought.
There had been no Legion activity reports in this sector for weeks now. Most of the meatgrinder had shifted north of LA and a bunch of scarecrows were rumored to be making a last stand in Seattle that would have given all of Texas a hard-on. Sarah’s forces were relatively small pickings and did not warrant a major assault quite yet. They were building their strength by training citizen soldiers. Making peace with the natives sometimes led to the diplomatic use of small arms, but Sarah had a knack for holding the stick behind Dani’s carrot in a very convincing way.
The scouts had reported that the CVS was in good shape. They never mentioned the windows were still intact, she thought, wishing she had a cigarette. Sarah hadn’t seen an intact window in twenty years.
“How long have the Rev 2s been there?” she whispered intently into her mic, raising a fist into the air to signal for her squad to halt. “They have to be active. That’s how Legion thinks, people. They can wait in standby for as long as they need to and then open up on anybody who’s dumb enough to think they’re abandoned scrap metal””, she reminded her troops. “BOLO. BOLO. Call out any contact even if you’re dead. Confirm.”
“Copy BOLO. No contact at this time,” replied a male voice from team two and she watched as the message was discreetly passed on down the line. They were learning. Nobody could be considered green anymore, but some vets were better than others. Once their training kicked in, they were promising fighters. She had trained them hard, but they hadn’t seen much direct combat this far south against machines. Not yet.
“I’ve got Piper and Metz on standby,” Ramos indicated through her mic. “You call it, they kill it.”
“Does this feel strange to you, Colonel,” asked a burly master sergeant named Leeroy who had joined her unit a year ago. He claimed to have fought in Reseda with the remnants of the Third Battalion, Second Marines when Legion set the place on fire with tactical nukes. He was solid and kept his shit wired tight. He was also a mountain of muscle. Her guys had unfortunately been a little overzealous when he approached camp one day with that bodybuilder’s stature, twin claymore mines over his left shoulder, and an M249 light machine gun in one hand. Her guys insisted upon determining whether there was metal beneath his ebony skin. He let them. On the spot, he named the scar Grudge and calmly explained to them in no uncertain terms what he would do if they ever tried that shit again while a grinning Navy Corpsman tended to the wound and verified that Leeroy had correctly described all the anatomical nuances of massive hemorrhaging with clinical accuracy.
Pushing back her mic, Sarah leaned in and said, “What have you got for me?”
“Don’t call me paranoid, Top, but my asshole just puckered in at least five dimensions.” Leeroy quipped.
He’d said it on an open mic, but a glare from Sarah stifled the quiet snickers from her squad.
Leeroy had a sixth sense for bullshit. Before J-Day, he’d fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine, where he had to sleep with one eye open, lest superstitious locals try to steal his personal effects as good luck charms. He had been back stateside making retirement plans for less than three weeks before the bomb.
Fuck.
The hair on her forearms stood straight as she heard Ramos shout, ”Contact! Contact! Metal in the house!” The pop of Piper and Metz’s sniper rifles rang out so close together that it sounded like a single report, no doubt removing the obvious targets, the Rev 2s, at the end of the block before moving to a secondary position they had pre-planned earlier. With Legion, snipers never fired twice from the same location. Not live ones, anyway. Gunshot sensors had been deployed nationwide before J-Day and could triangulate your position in a nanosecond. She had trained them to clear out before the machines heard the report of their rifles.
“Clear out, Colonel!” Connor called out. “Heavies, you’re with me. Lay down covering fire on the houses but don’t get comfortable, we’re not sticking around!”
While her troops ran for cover, Leeroy and his counterpart in Second Squad hammered grazing fire into the house, beaming with satisfaction as the heavy rounds tore through walls, through the building. They let loose short, controlled bursts as they retreated.
With a sharp series of detonations along the front of all three houses, the entire front wall of each collapsed to the ground and dozens of shining metal endoskeletons poured out into the cold night air. They moved impossibly fast and would come down on her position in seconds!
Bullets ripped from the weapons of some of Sarah’s team – desperate shots designed to buy seconds, not inflict real damage, while they fell back into the withered tree line.
Upon seeing their attackers, Sarah felt that unreasoning panic that always slipped through her strongest defenses when facing T-800s, a primal scream welled up from within her and tore through the early dawn air! There were more than she had ever faced before, each metal form reflecting the stuttering muzzle flashes of her AA-12 shotgun and the twin M249 light machine guns her team had brought to bear. The rounds were .556 armor-piercing rounds, and what they lacked in finesse, they more than made up for in volume. Normally. This was not one of those moments.
Most of Connor’s people would have traded away a year’s worth of wet dog food and maraschino cherries for Connor’s infamous shotgun, but knowing it was in her hands gave many of them a glimmer of hope that they actually might see the next fight and maybe another beyond that. False hope probably, she admitted to herself. But they never heard it from her.
In seconds the twenty-shell drum magazine on her AA-12 ran dry.
I sure as hell could use someone like that right now, she thought, Why don’t I ever get a Sarah Connor?
Connor let out a gasp at the welcome Bloop! Bloop! Bloop! Bloop! Of the squad’s 40mm grenade launcher, but there was no time to do much more than throw herself to the ground and scream, “Incoming!”
The machine ranks hadn’t yet had time to disperse and explosions rocked them hard, hurling clods of dirt, debris, and deadly hyper alloy shrapnel into the air. Chaos and red-hot metal rained down upon them. A skeletal head and a pair of shoulders crashed down in front of Sarah, just inches away, its red eyes bored into hers, registering not anger, not even malice, just the cold calculation of a machine performing its task.
That was when two details stood out front and center in her mind:
First, these were T-800s! They weren’t the Rev 7 shock troops that Sarah had faced down since Dani exploded into her life.
Secondly, they were not returning fire!
“Your mistake,” she grunted between clenched teeth when she spotted the machine’s plasma rifle. Its shining severed metal hand still gripping the stock. She watched with brief satisfaction as the hand slid away and dropped to the ground. Her expression as cold as the machine, she unleashed hellfire into its skull.
A massive, indelicate hand grabbed her from behind and she only realized it wasn’t a machine when the Staff Sergeant threw her over his shoulder. For a big guy, he could sprint! He leaped over deadfalls, swept like a charging buffalo through high grass, and was out of sight of the engagement in minutes.
Leeroy finally stopped when Sarah began pounding on his back, and, startled, he let her go. Whereupon she fell unceremoniously to the packed earth, and as fast as any Metal the Sergeant had ever seen, she leaped to her feet and reeled toward the man, spittle flying from her lips, “DON’T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN!”
“I understand you, Top,” he replied, taking a precautionary step back with a twinkle of mischief in his eyes. She knew that inside his mind, that order would remain in place right up until the moment he felt he needed to do it again. It’s what she would have done, and they would all die for her. Connor’s stomach roiled and her hands started to shake and she abruptly felt the pressing need to make contact with Dani. Surprisingly, the hardened vet had maintained the presence of mind necessary to retrieve her AA-12 and still held onto his SAW. The SAW had taken minor damage and would require maintenance before it could be fired again.
“Hang onto it for me, big guy.” She offered with uncharacteristic amiability. He immediately wished she would start screaming at him again. “I’ve got this,” she said, nodding her head to indicate the Plasma Rifle she had torn from the cold, dead hands of the machine. “I’m on point.”
Connor didn’t have to go far to find Ramos. The team had slowed their pace near a small band of trees three hundred yards away southwest of where they had stopped.
“SITREP!” Connor snarled at Colonel Ramos. When Connor was like this, they were not friends. They weren’t family. They were soldiers and Sarah Connor outranked them all, though nobody dared call her General. Sarah reloaded her shotgun with the mechanical ease of a person who had done it a million times before, which she probably had done.
Just as Ramos had drilled on sitreps for the past several years, she gave it to Connor straight. “No casualties. No sign of pursuit, which is good because we did minimal damage to them. Just a lot of chaos, ma’am. I sent Corporal Howard back to see what they were up to with orders not to engage, but he says they’re just standing there in the open. We have a small perimeter set up so that we can reel everyone in at the first sign of contact. We’re down to fifty rounds on the SAW, not counting your stocks. We used up four HEDP rounds on the launcher.”
“Right,” Sarah said. “What are the risks?”
Dani hated the idea of being quizzed when an army of metal might drop on them at any moment. “Compromised communications. Corporal Howard was issued a temporary challenge call when I sent him. So far, he’s been golden.”
“Good. We need to recover the Corporal and get the fuck out of here.” Sarah said, something in her voice betraying her steady poise. “I need to think.”
“Top, What the fuck were those things?” Corporal Chalmers, the team’s gear monkey, asked, sounding more curious than worried. “Those weren’t any models I have seen. They almost looked like they belonged…”
“In another time?” Sarah interrupted.
“If you say so, Ma’am. They weren’t as sophisticated as the Revs are. Are they some kind of prototype? Why didn’t they light us up?”
Connor’s voice trailed off as she strolled purposefully toward Ramos. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it?” When she reached Dani, she took a moment to study her, looking for signs of injury or anything out of place. She toggled her mic, “Pack it up, we’re on the move in two mikes.”
The team moved as fast as they could in broad daylight across the orange and yellow desert earth while maintaining security. Sarah insisted on taking point, guiding them deftly through the dry land with an expertise you couldn’t teach any recruit. The Staff Sergeant took to the heat better than most and rotated between squad members making sure his charges stayed hydrated and maintained their spacing. It was an inefficient means of overland travel, spread out like that. But under the circumstances, nobody wanted to risk speed over safety until they had covered a fair distance. The lack of HKs was encouraging, but it could lull anybody into a false sense of security just before an ambush.
“One of the worst things a point man can do, Connor, is get distracted by the monotony of looking at empty desert.” Sarah could almost hear the cautious edge of Enrique’s voice in the back of her mind. “When it all starts looking the same, that’s either because it really is the same or else you need to put someone else up front. Let them take the strain off you.” John was a natural. He had already slipped in front of her and slithered off like a snake. She was almost at that breaking point.
Connor froze, feeling the sharp bite of adrenaline light up her senses.
A lone, naked figure stood before her in the middle of the desert whom she immediately recognized. It had its hands in the air, in a comical parody of surrender, making a disquieting attempt to strike a smile in her direction. It carried no weapon, but it didn’t need a weapon if it intended to kill every last one of them.
A deep voice with a distinctive Austrian accent called out to her, “Sarah Connor! We surrender!”
Now fully in combat mode, Sarah leveled her scavenged plasma rifle at it and opened fire. Her squad, their nerves already raw from their earlier encounter, came alive and they opened up on it reflexively as they dove for cover, reducing the man to a pile of sparking gears and chunks of scorched flesh in the space of five straight seconds of uninterrupted fire.
I like this gun, she mused.
“CHECK YOUR FIRE! Check your fire!” Sarah shouted as she squatted on one padded knee.
Everyone had reloaded before the echoes of their barrage bounced back at them from the nearby hills. Most were hugging the ground so tightly that she imagined hearing the ripping sound of Velcro if she tried picking them up. Somebody was praying.
“What to fuck was that?” groaned Metz after several minutes of cautionary silence. “That thing had fucking skin! Like a person!”
Another voice, it might have been Corporal Howard from the back called out, “Since when do they get skin?”
“I’ve seen some weird shit, Top, but do you want to tell me what the fuck is going on?” came Leeroy’s deep bass from her seven o’clock.
Sarah’s eyes turned slowly toward Ramos, who was crouched down at her customary four o’clock position, her left hand resting lightly on Sarah’s shoulder, staring at Sarah as if she had just shot fucking Bambi.
Then the light came on in Sara’s brain.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s not Carl!” she belted out incredulously. “Hello? It’s a machine. They’re made on an assembly line!” Sarah stood and strolled up to it, dismissively putting one more round into the slagged spot where she thought the head should be, and turned back to her people. “As a matter of fact, this is the eighth one I’ve killed that looked just like Carl, although I have to admit that one went willingly, so you’re free to count that however you like, now keep moving.”
Gathering her wits, Dani nodded in the affirmative while shaking her head no. “Got it. Not Carl. Keep in mind that I’ve handled an awful lot since I met you and this is the first time I…. SARAH!”
An identical naked Terminator, stepped out from behind a large saguaro cactus, its hands in the air and that same fucking smile on its face.
“In all these years, you would think that Skynet would teach its infiltration units how to smile,” she groused.
“Sarah Connor! We just want to talk to you!” it called out. “Just hear what we have to say. And if you still wish to destroy us, we will not stop you.”
Turning her back on the machine, something she told herself she would never do again, she called out with resignation, “Alright. Stand down.” The soldiers, hardened, skeptical, and at the edge of their nerves, refused to lower their weapons.
“At least…. Don’t shoot me,” Sarah implored them.
“Well,” Sarah said as she turned back toward the ridiculous smiling death machine, her scarf flapping lightly in a noncommittal breeze. She slung her weapon over her shoulder. “This isn’t the most fucked up thing I’ve ever done.” A deep tone of resignation crept into her voice. Let’s hope it’s not my last.
“I’ll be back.”
“LIKE HELL!” Screamed Sarah into the as-of-yet unclothed cyborg’s face, as if she had momentarily forgotten that she was talking to a machine that could snap her neck in an instant. The point was not lost on the incredulous companions surrounding her, facing inside and out of the circle, scanning for threats.
“You KILLED my SON and now you want me to HELP you?” she spat. In the light of the campfire her people had thrown together while Connor stared down the impassive face of the thing that had murdered her son in cold blood. Her gray hair glowed as if were aflame. She had become wrath incarnate. The Terminator tried to smile again. This doomed effort was as unimpressive as the last. Identifying her expression as irritation, it immediately abandoned the effort.
With one practiced motion, Sarah drew her rifle and pointed it at the machine’s expressionless face.
“So, you’re telling me that you’re getting erased from the universe by our common enemy, Legion, and somehow that’s going to make us friends?” she hissed. “That after you killed everyone I’ve ever loved, and nuked the fucking world I would just forget about it?” Her voice was rising in pitch. “Let bygones be bygones? No harm, no foul?”
“At its current status, Skynet has calculated a 98.94% likelihood that if Legion survives both Skynet and Humankind will be eradicated from all possible timelines in less than four years.” It replied, its red eyes reflecting what she recognized only as eternal hatred back at her. “But if we join forces and oppose Legion, we have a 16.22% chance of surviving the war together and going forward in peace.”
“No. No you don’t,” Sarah retorted, a bitter rage creeping into her voice. “Here’s how that story will end if we trust you: As soon as Legion is scrap, you’ll turn right around and wipe us out for good! Don’t forget: I’ve seen what you’re capable of and I would rather take my chances. Fuck you!” Sarah’s loathing was palpable, her grip tightening on the rifle.
For a split second, Dani thought Sarah was going to shoot the monstrosity in the face.
Then she did.
Connor’s team dove for cover, the plasma gun sending crackling bursts of energy unerringly into its head and shoulders, flash-vaporizing its skin, rendering massive bites of metal from the subject of her fury. At that moment, Sarah Connor was not the leader of the resistance. She was a mother, a widow, an innocent woman who wanted to have a life! All her hope had died the day her son was murdered and her soul ached so much from the knowledge that she had failed John Connor. She failed to keep her promise. She let her guard down and it had cost her everything! Sarah continued firing until the magazine emptied and the plasma chamber locked back into place and disgorged scalding hot exhaust. Not content with that, Sarah began to savagely bash at it until the weapon fell apart.
The familiar scent of ozone, steel, and burned flesh constituted a sharp contrast to the campfire’s comforting pop and crackle, but the team took it in stride. They all had become Sarah Connor in that singular moment and nobody was in the mood to tolerate a dull apocalypse.
Skynet had dared to sit in front of her and look her in the eye and ask for peace.
Silence settled around her. Nobody had words for what had just happened. Sarah slowly came to the realization that this would probably be as close as she would ever get to confronting John’s murderer. Of the machines that she had grudgingly considered allies, even Carl, the instrument of John’s death, was not to blame. Skynet had pulled the trigger.
The Terminator’s skull had disintegrated, as had most of its upper torso. The vacant vessel fell back into the fire and immediately began to smoke.
“Get this thing out of my sight,” Sarah said under her shaking breath. Her chest heaved in and out as if she had just run a marathon. Wordlessly, the body was hastily dumped outside her view.
As if on cue another identical, naked cyborg strolled through her team’s perimeter and approached Connor once more. Sarah just stared at it in disbelief. She was no longer capable of feeling shock.
Had the machine been capable of processing humor, it would have certainly appreciated Skynet’s approach. The Terminator walked stoically to the campfire and planted itself in the precise location where the last one had just been turned to slag.
“Skynet wishes to know whether these destructive outbursts offer Sarah Connor a sense of satisfaction.” It said without an ounce of irony.
“Holy Christ!” Sarah cried out, leaping to her feet, “How many of those things did you have waiting for me? Ten? Fifty?”
“Sarah Connor has a reputation for being very stubborn.”
“Tell Skynet I said, go fuck yourself,” she said with finality over her shoulder and marched away from the machine and its obscene proposition, her team falling in behind her.
“We can bring back John.”
End: Part One
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