Terminator Salvation_ The Official Movie Novelization - Alan Dean Foster [79]
Detecting the presence of an organic creature in the forbidden zone, the automated gun emplacements made no distinction between a small feathered avian and a trained member of the human Resistance. Programmed to destroy anything carbon-based that entered the zone designated as Skynet Central, they responded to the intrusion with typical machine overkill.
The relative still of the evening air was shattered as the weapons of both turrets let loose with a barrage of intersecting rounds that utterly obliterated the intruder. When seconds later they quieted, there was nothing left of the passing passerine. Not even a single black feather survived to reach the hardscrabble ground outside the wall.
The solitary figure that emerged from the stream advanced in silence through the surviving trees that lined its banks. Wright knew he did not have far to go to reach the outer limits of Skynet’s death zone. Assuming he succeeded in crossing that boundary in one piece, then things would really start to get interesting.
It was just as the information from the Resistance people had indicated: there was the enormous wall, the integrated gun emplacements, the sensors spotted along the length and breadth of the structure—and not a moving shape in sight.
Well, that was a lack easily rectified.
Taking a deep breath, he stepped out from the trees and deliberately exposed himself.
As speedily as they had trained their muzzles on the unlucky bird, both massive turrets now swiveled around to bring their weapons to bear on this new profile. If they fired once, it would all be over. All the confusion and hurt he had suffered since being revived would vanish in a single explosive inferno of fire and destruction.
A part of him wished for it, hoped for it, desired it. No more wondering about what he had become. No more speculating on how it had come to pass. There would be peace, at last.
But not for a while yet, it seemed. The guns remained trained on him for several seconds. Then they shifted back to their original watchful positions, once more awaiting the appearance of the unauthorized. Wright slumped. Plainly, that did not include him. Within the exposed portions of his upper body a vast variety of mechanical components hummed softly, helping to keep him alive.
Alive, he thought solemnly, but not human. Not necessarily machine, either. Having crossed Skynet’s boundary, passed the test, surmounted the critical obstacle, he found (somewhat to his surprise) that he was after all glad to still be living. The corollary to that quiet elation was that he was disappointed in the reason he still was.
The automated turrets continued to ignore him as he hurried across the intervening landscape between forest and wall. Reaching the base of the massive barrier, he tilted his head back and regarded it thoughtfully. It was a long way to the top and there was little in the way of visible handholds.
He went up it like a spider, periodically using his fists to punch holes in the sheer wall where none otherwise existed.
Though he hesitated before topping the obstacle, he needn’t have worried. There were no sentries pacing the crest, no ambulatory patrols, no razor or barbed wire. There was no need for such traditional defensive fripperies. Not with the high-powered instantly reactive automated cannons mounted in gimbaled turrets that protected Skynet Central. They would detect and annihilate anything organic that attempted to violate the perimeter. Only machines could pass, and then only those that continuously broadcast their assigned identification according to recognized Skynet protocols.
That realization had already told him far more about himself than he wanted to know.
Dropping down the far side of the wall, he rapidly