Terminator Salvation_ The Official Movie Novelization - Alan Dean Foster [99]
“Try it now,” he suggested calmly.
Williams complied. The turbine hesitated, coughed, and began to spool up. Rotors began to turn, accelerated, picking up speed.
In the back, Connor continued to flit in and out of consciousness.
“Charges,” he mumbled. “We set charges. But the detonator—there was a fight. Leave me here. Need to find it, set it off—after you’re out of range.”
Screams sounded from outside. Something massive and monstrous was coming toward them out of the night. Single-minded as it advanced on the chopper, the Harvester ignored the remainder of the crowd that was piling into the waiting Transporter.
Leaning out of the opening, one hand still clamped righteously over the hole that was leaking fuel, Wright reached across the gap with his free hand. Exhibiting strength prodigious even for him, he hoisted up the door gun in his other arm and took aim at the approaching machine. Finding the trigger, he let loose a mad barrage of shells. Tearing into the oncoming Harvester, they shredded section after section, until one shell finally struck something volatile.
The big machine whoomed skyward, bits and pieces of it raining down on the remaining survivors.
Parts of it landed on the factory. Hissing and sparking, they also struck the ground in the vicinity of the legless but indomitable Terminator that had just crawled clear of the building. Searching its surroundings, its crimson gaze settled on a nearby helicopter. Dragging itself along the ground, it started determinedly toward the idling aircraft. But the chopper was already lifting off, rising above the devastation beneath it, leaving only destruction, flames, and a single pair of hate-filled red eyes in its wake.
Behind it, a deeper rumble filled the night air as the Transporter, now packed with men, women, and child-ren who had once given themselves up for dead, lifted off, banked sharply to the north, and began to accelerate in the direction of Mount Tamalpais.
Inside the chopper, Kate Connor leaned toward her husband.
“The others—the rest of the survivors—they’re on their way.” Reaching down, she wrapped the fingers of both hands tenderly around his. He nodded slowly to show that he understood.
“But the charges—have to go back—find the....”
He broke off as his gaze fastened on a small shape hovering nearby. Star moved closer. Silently, she unfolded her closed hand, the fingers opening like the petals of a flower. Still intact and full of quiet promise, the detonator lay exposed in the center of her tiny palm. As their eyes met, her lips trembled with the effort of trying to speak.
Fighting through horror, she formed words. Two.
“End this.”
Connor nodded. Gently, he took the detonator. Then he rolled his head to one side so he could see out the open side of the chopper. After everything that had happened, after all that had transpired, he did not want to miss the fireworks.
He squeezed the trigger.
In order for any designated Terminator to operate and carry out its programmed functions, an enormous amount of energy had to be packed into the small, portable container that powered it. Thousands of such containers lay stacked in a secure corner of the main Terminator factory below. When the C-4 cord that had been wrapped around them detonated, so did they.
This in turn set off a great many unstable substances that were also stored within the factory. When the factory went up, in a blast sufficiently wide, deep, and loud enough to satisfy the most vengeful Resistance fighter, this in turn touched off similar explosions in every facility nearby.
By the time the chopper was well on its way across the bay, a good deal of machine-transformed San Francisco was blowing itself skyward in a series of sequential eruptions