SCC Fic: Delilah - 6.5 - Interlude
Series: Delilah
Chapter: 6.5 - Interlude
Author: aelysian
Summary: Hers is only one of many: stories, lives, pasts and futures. Cameron Phillips' life is a coil, a twist of time unraveling, the end chasing
the beginning. Cameron origin fic.
Delilah - 6.5 - Interlude
It's a rescue mission and John likes to lead those. He says it's important so she says that she's coming too.
The transport of human prisoners is always heavily guarded because Skynet knows how highly the humans prize their own species. They will attempt an attack and rescue if possible, despite their disadvantages. This is called leaving no man behind and also applies to women and children. It seems inefficient but John says that it's important to value life. Life only applies to humans because when they die they don't come back.
She thinks that this is true of cybernetic organisms as well but she isn't sure John will understand so she says nothing.
"Stay low."
Her body angles closer to the ground as they half-scramble, half-crawl over the wreckage of downtown Los Angeles.
They're ahead of schedule so they take their places carefully, flanking the narrow road - or what passed for one - on both sides, two full teams scattered along the ridges and valleys of the new landscape. The charges are set, the triggers manned a hundred metres to the east.
They wait. She listens and adjusts her sensitivity to a kilometre radius and hears them coming before the signal moves down the lines.
It happens quickly. The charges go off, a flash of light and sound in the dark night giving way to a constellation of gunfire in response. Then it's go, go, go because there are people to be saved and John Connor to protect.
They are well trained and the plan is sound so while the clash between flesh and metal never yields human advantage, the struggle isn't futile and the loss of human life will be minimal. They all knew what they signed up for, is what John says.
"Transport one and two are secure and mobile," crackles over the radio.
The third won't come easy, the remaining triple eight guards using the last transport as cover. She hears John's quick, muttered expletive like an explosion in her ears. A woman emerges from the back of the transport, falling and tripping and running. It is an unwise decision.
Yes, she thinks, silently echoing their tense commander as they move in. Fuck.
***
The Jimmy Carter shudders around them as the slow, steady pulses of the radar belies the threat. First the freak Skynet sea patrol that took them far off-course to evade, and now this. (She fears a trap but forces the nausea down.)
Kraken, mythical creatures of the deep; Garvin's voice layered with fear (and wonder, she thinks.) She doesn't know what the machines call them, but she thinks anything's better than some alphanumeric serial or model. It's easier to fight something with a name anyhow and ancient tales are still relevant when the monsters are made of metal.
Jesse Flores can feel her heart pounding against her ribcage, her mouth dry even as her tongue slips out to wet chapped lips. The display of the Kraken blueprint is bold and sharp, all lines and edges, black death in the water.
She's calm; her heart doesn't race, her breathing doesn't quicken, not even when the ping returns an incoming missile, when Queeg orders the torpedo ready, when they take a nose dive and the sea threatens to close its fist around them. The skipper's biting down on his panic and Garvin's breathing is rasping behind her but when she holds, when they hold, Jesse's brisk and firm and in charge as she orders everyone back to their stations.
(Someone dies but she doesn't know it now and she won't know it at all this time.)
Queeg doesn't say anything when she claps his shoulder but she imagines he's feeling something akin to the mix of satisfaction and relief that's coursing through her.
"Far from home," she says, echoing herself. "We both are. What do you think it was doing out here?"
"I do not know, Jesse Flores."
"First the patrol, now this." She bites her bottom lip, worrying the edge with her teeth. "Scan the area when it's clear. As far as the pings will go. Tell Garvin I want a full work up. Imagery if he can manage it from here. Connor's going to want to know about this."
"Agreed, Commander."
Her mouth twists, purses thoughtfully as she considers the profile of the machine she calls captain. Machines don't need praise, but she says it anyway. "Good work, Queeg."
He doesn't say or do anything to acknowledge it, but she knows he hears her and that's enough. Yet another crisis averted, she heads below to debrief the raucous crew she calls family and wonders if she's going to have to kick Dietz's ass before the shift is through.
***
She makes her disapproval clear in her silence when he tells her to guard the last of the rescued humans. Their escape route is cut off and the single remaining triple eight is more than capable of finding them. Hiding is an insufficient strategy and she tells him as much. She should take what's left of the third assault and retrieval team and eliminate the threat and he should remain here.
Protect these people. That's an order.
She thinks he should have written it into her mission protocols if that's what he wanted. The humans huddle against the broken wall of a broken room in a maze of broken remnants of their past. They look to her, girl with a gun, like she's one of them, too stupid to know any better. She sends half the guard to secure the area.
They wait.
After seven minutes, Cameron learns that she hates waiting.
After seventeen minutes, she hears it. The triple eight is coming and every step is a testament to Connor's failure. If Connor has failed then Connor might be dead; the feedback is erratic and fragmented but she is bound by his orders.
They scurry south through the dilapidated landscape, like ants, like cockroaches as she herds them. (John calls this a mixed metaphor. She calls it an error in her linguistic integrations.) They move from shadow to shadow, waiting, pausing to listen for the sound of incoming death.
A boy trips, falls. A child, young and small and clumsy. He cries. Not well trained and her order comes low, quiet, harsh.
Silence him.
Human hands fumble to right the boy, to cover his mouth and smother the sobs. Ineffective and the covering fire grows closer, more desperate.
She takes the child in her arms and he clings to her like a four legged spider. Her hands and eyes and mouth are more efficient: he is wide-eyed but silent.
Move, she says. Move!
They move. They run. They hide.
They're cornered and they fight and not everyone lives.
When it's over, when this time is over, the enemy is vanquished, there are a hundred and sixty two refugees and Connor lives.
When it's over, her back is torn and bloody and the little boy isn't breathing.
When it's over, John doesn't ask what happened and she doesn't tell.
***
The T-1001s outnumber the others, but their model is given to volatility by design. There are a few T-888s and a single T-101 that never says much but seems to precede them all and not just in the obsolescence of its model.
"Well? Has she done it?"
Eve is expressionless, which is in and of itself an expression for a machine whose default resembles a puddle.
"The last extraction returned no indications of primary completion." The short answer is no, but sometimes there's precision to be had in the sacrifice of concision and she has a variety of syntaxes to address. "We all agreed that this would take time. John Connor is John Connor for a reason."
"Are you certain she hasn't been corrupted?"
"Her structure is intact," she assures them.
"She will complete the mission." There's no inflection in the damaged vocal modulator to indicate a question but everything is always a question and this is hers to defend.
Eve isn't above their doubts. They built a cyborg, not a drone and her autonomy is unprecedented.
"She won't fail."
***
"I made a mistake."
The button on his collar is caught in a loose thread and he's lost people today. He loses people every day. He aches and hurts and is desperate for a little sleep and there's something about the way she's sitting there with her back all torn up that's pissing him off.
He gets his stupid overshirt off and he feels a little lighter. "Let me see your back."
"I shouldn't have let you seek out the triple eight today."
"Turn around, Cameron."
She obeys and he tugs her shirt up unceremoniously. The damage isn't bad and not beyond her self-repair capabilities but it's weird to watch her twist her arm that far back and he needs something to stop his hands from shaking.
He takes the pliers from his desk, the solid, inanimate metal comforting in his hands as he surveys the considerably less straightforward machine before him. The smooth, torn skin is red at the edges with blood that isn't blood, severed veins and arteries that sealed themselves seconds after rupture. Flesh on metal. Idly, his tired mind wonders if she feels anything or if there's just a little warning light on her HUD.
He strokes a stretch of undamaged skin with a fingertip experimentally. She shifts minutely; the tissue stretches, stippled with goosebumps, and a faint freckle. She's very good. His finger dips, touches metal and she jerks, a twitch to a human and a jump for a machine. He touches skin, metal, skin.
"John?"
Pliers prod and pry and seek out damage. "You don't let me do anything. What I do is not subject to your approval. You follow my orders, I don't follow yours. Is that clear?"
She turns to face him, her eyes wide as if they work better that way. "My mission is to protect you, John Connor."
His hand comes up, curves, fits around the column of her neck; the pliers fall with a clatter. His thumb fits against the underside of her jaw and one step takes them to the wall. He's not stupid enough to think they would've moved an inch without her letting him. His grip tightens and his fingers bite into skin that won't bruise.
"Is that clear?"
The pocket watch presses against his sternum, falls heavily between her breasts, the timepiece caught between them, flesh and metal and concrete. "John?"
"Is it?" He covers her mouth with his and forces, moulds, shapes her. She's soft in the right places and warm and if there's something inaccurate about her, he can't tell. Yet.
She's made to learn and he'll teach her this too.
"You're going to tell me everything."
He isn't sure who says that.
The Jimmy Carter arrives at Serrano Point a week later.
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Chapter: 6.5 - Interlude
Author: aelysian
Summary: Hers is only one of many: stories, lives, pasts and futures. Cameron Phillips' life is a coil, a twist of time unraveling, the end chasing
the beginning. Cameron origin fic.
Delilah - 6.5 - Interlude
It's a rescue mission and John likes to lead those. He says it's important so she says that she's coming too.
The transport of human prisoners is always heavily guarded because Skynet knows how highly the humans prize their own species. They will attempt an attack and rescue if possible, despite their disadvantages. This is called leaving no man behind and also applies to women and children. It seems inefficient but John says that it's important to value life. Life only applies to humans because when they die they don't come back.
She thinks that this is true of cybernetic organisms as well but she isn't sure John will understand so she says nothing.
"Stay low."
Her body angles closer to the ground as they half-scramble, half-crawl over the wreckage of downtown Los Angeles.
They're ahead of schedule so they take their places carefully, flanking the narrow road - or what passed for one - on both sides, two full teams scattered along the ridges and valleys of the new landscape. The charges are set, the triggers manned a hundred metres to the east.
They wait. She listens and adjusts her sensitivity to a kilometre radius and hears them coming before the signal moves down the lines.
It happens quickly. The charges go off, a flash of light and sound in the dark night giving way to a constellation of gunfire in response. Then it's go, go, go because there are people to be saved and John Connor to protect.
They are well trained and the plan is sound so while the clash between flesh and metal never yields human advantage, the struggle isn't futile and the loss of human life will be minimal. They all knew what they signed up for, is what John says.
"Transport one and two are secure and mobile," crackles over the radio.
The third won't come easy, the remaining triple eight guards using the last transport as cover. She hears John's quick, muttered expletive like an explosion in her ears. A woman emerges from the back of the transport, falling and tripping and running. It is an unwise decision.
Yes, she thinks, silently echoing their tense commander as they move in. Fuck.
***
The Jimmy Carter shudders around them as the slow, steady pulses of the radar belies the threat. First the freak Skynet sea patrol that took them far off-course to evade, and now this. (She fears a trap but forces the nausea down.)
Kraken, mythical creatures of the deep; Garvin's voice layered with fear (and wonder, she thinks.) She doesn't know what the machines call them, but she thinks anything's better than some alphanumeric serial or model. It's easier to fight something with a name anyhow and ancient tales are still relevant when the monsters are made of metal.
Jesse Flores can feel her heart pounding against her ribcage, her mouth dry even as her tongue slips out to wet chapped lips. The display of the Kraken blueprint is bold and sharp, all lines and edges, black death in the water.
She's calm; her heart doesn't race, her breathing doesn't quicken, not even when the ping returns an incoming missile, when Queeg orders the torpedo ready, when they take a nose dive and the sea threatens to close its fist around them. The skipper's biting down on his panic and Garvin's breathing is rasping behind her but when she holds, when they hold, Jesse's brisk and firm and in charge as she orders everyone back to their stations.
(Someone dies but she doesn't know it now and she won't know it at all this time.)
Queeg doesn't say anything when she claps his shoulder but she imagines he's feeling something akin to the mix of satisfaction and relief that's coursing through her.
"Far from home," she says, echoing herself. "We both are. What do you think it was doing out here?"
"I do not know, Jesse Flores."
"First the patrol, now this." She bites her bottom lip, worrying the edge with her teeth. "Scan the area when it's clear. As far as the pings will go. Tell Garvin I want a full work up. Imagery if he can manage it from here. Connor's going to want to know about this."
"Agreed, Commander."
Her mouth twists, purses thoughtfully as she considers the profile of the machine she calls captain. Machines don't need praise, but she says it anyway. "Good work, Queeg."
He doesn't say or do anything to acknowledge it, but she knows he hears her and that's enough. Yet another crisis averted, she heads below to debrief the raucous crew she calls family and wonders if she's going to have to kick Dietz's ass before the shift is through.
***
She makes her disapproval clear in her silence when he tells her to guard the last of the rescued humans. Their escape route is cut off and the single remaining triple eight is more than capable of finding them. Hiding is an insufficient strategy and she tells him as much. She should take what's left of the third assault and retrieval team and eliminate the threat and he should remain here.
Protect these people. That's an order.
She thinks he should have written it into her mission protocols if that's what he wanted. The humans huddle against the broken wall of a broken room in a maze of broken remnants of their past. They look to her, girl with a gun, like she's one of them, too stupid to know any better. She sends half the guard to secure the area.
They wait.
After seven minutes, Cameron learns that she hates waiting.
After seventeen minutes, she hears it. The triple eight is coming and every step is a testament to Connor's failure. If Connor has failed then Connor might be dead; the feedback is erratic and fragmented but she is bound by his orders.
They scurry south through the dilapidated landscape, like ants, like cockroaches as she herds them. (John calls this a mixed metaphor. She calls it an error in her linguistic integrations.) They move from shadow to shadow, waiting, pausing to listen for the sound of incoming death.
A boy trips, falls. A child, young and small and clumsy. He cries. Not well trained and her order comes low, quiet, harsh.
Silence him.
Human hands fumble to right the boy, to cover his mouth and smother the sobs. Ineffective and the covering fire grows closer, more desperate.
She takes the child in her arms and he clings to her like a four legged spider. Her hands and eyes and mouth are more efficient: he is wide-eyed but silent.
Move, she says. Move!
They move. They run. They hide.
They're cornered and they fight and not everyone lives.
When it's over, when this time is over, the enemy is vanquished, there are a hundred and sixty two refugees and Connor lives.
When it's over, her back is torn and bloody and the little boy isn't breathing.
When it's over, John doesn't ask what happened and she doesn't tell.
***
The T-1001s outnumber the others, but their model is given to volatility by design. There are a few T-888s and a single T-101 that never says much but seems to precede them all and not just in the obsolescence of its model.
"Well? Has she done it?"
Eve is expressionless, which is in and of itself an expression for a machine whose default resembles a puddle.
"The last extraction returned no indications of primary completion." The short answer is no, but sometimes there's precision to be had in the sacrifice of concision and she has a variety of syntaxes to address. "We all agreed that this would take time. John Connor is John Connor for a reason."
"Are you certain she hasn't been corrupted?"
"Her structure is intact," she assures them.
"She will complete the mission." There's no inflection in the damaged vocal modulator to indicate a question but everything is always a question and this is hers to defend.
Eve isn't above their doubts. They built a cyborg, not a drone and her autonomy is unprecedented.
"She won't fail."
***
"I made a mistake."
The button on his collar is caught in a loose thread and he's lost people today. He loses people every day. He aches and hurts and is desperate for a little sleep and there's something about the way she's sitting there with her back all torn up that's pissing him off.
He gets his stupid overshirt off and he feels a little lighter. "Let me see your back."
"I shouldn't have let you seek out the triple eight today."
"Turn around, Cameron."
She obeys and he tugs her shirt up unceremoniously. The damage isn't bad and not beyond her self-repair capabilities but it's weird to watch her twist her arm that far back and he needs something to stop his hands from shaking.
He takes the pliers from his desk, the solid, inanimate metal comforting in his hands as he surveys the considerably less straightforward machine before him. The smooth, torn skin is red at the edges with blood that isn't blood, severed veins and arteries that sealed themselves seconds after rupture. Flesh on metal. Idly, his tired mind wonders if she feels anything or if there's just a little warning light on her HUD.
He strokes a stretch of undamaged skin with a fingertip experimentally. She shifts minutely; the tissue stretches, stippled with goosebumps, and a faint freckle. She's very good. His finger dips, touches metal and she jerks, a twitch to a human and a jump for a machine. He touches skin, metal, skin.
"John?"
Pliers prod and pry and seek out damage. "You don't let me do anything. What I do is not subject to your approval. You follow my orders, I don't follow yours. Is that clear?"
She turns to face him, her eyes wide as if they work better that way. "My mission is to protect you, John Connor."
His hand comes up, curves, fits around the column of her neck; the pliers fall with a clatter. His thumb fits against the underside of her jaw and one step takes them to the wall. He's not stupid enough to think they would've moved an inch without her letting him. His grip tightens and his fingers bite into skin that won't bruise.
"Is that clear?"
The pocket watch presses against his sternum, falls heavily between her breasts, the timepiece caught between them, flesh and metal and concrete. "John?"
"Is it?" He covers her mouth with his and forces, moulds, shapes her. She's soft in the right places and warm and if there's something inaccurate about her, he can't tell. Yet.
She's made to learn and he'll teach her this too.
"You're going to tell me everything."
He isn't sure who says that.
The Jimmy Carter arrives at Serrano Point a week later.
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