Terminator 3: Hunt

Far overhead, in the wooden platform hastily built to give her a safe perch among the ceiling girders, Kate Brewster pressed a rocker switch to touch off the first of the detonators.
	They weren’t connected to conventional explosions. Instead, they were wired to a series of capacitors, each of which could discharge enough voltage to blow the circuitry of a good-sized office building.
	Below, the disguised T-X jerked and spasmed as the first blast of electricity coursed through her. No blast of superheated matter emerged from her right arm. For this second—and this second only—John Connor was safe from incineration.
	Kate threw the second switch.
*   *   *
John made it to the doorway, ducked through, and snatched up the plasma rifle waiting there, propped up against the door jamb. He turned to look.
	First he saw the broad back of Mark Herrera, who had interposed himself between John and the T-X, a living shield who, if the T-X recovered, would absorb the first plasma blast and die to give John a chance for escape.
	Not that he’d do so passively. He had an M-25 plasma pulse rifle at the ready. With his skill and experience Mark would probably get a few licks in before her first plasma shot eradicated him.
	More Hell-Hounds and Scalpers were moving in, forming a semicircle.
Most carried plasma rifles or rocket-propelled grenades. Kyla had her sniper rifle at the ready, its iron sights up.
	The air was filled with overlapping roars: the sound of the T-X’s batteries maintaining their charge prior to the plasma cannon firing; the sound of the electricity pouring through her body, causing the water beneath her, water that grounded her, to superheat into steam; and a shrill, sirenlike wail that seemed to come from the T-X’s mouth—one of her nonverbal vocal forms of expression, its volume reaching its maximum level as the damaging electricity caused her to malfunction in countless ways.
	Above it all came Kate’s voice, a barely audible shout: “Three!”
	Tom Carter joined the line of security specialists, an object like a brushed-aluminum briefcase in one hand, a handheld device that looked like an old-fashioned stun gun in the other.
	“Two!”
	The T-X toppled to one side, still jerking and jittering like a bug on a frying pan.
	“One! Zero! Clear!”
	The sounds of electrical discharge and the T-X’s involuntary shriek ended. Tom Carter dashed forward, slipping as he hit the patch of water. He ran right up onto the metal net, heedless of the danger it represented were it to carry another electrical charge, and knelt straddling the Terminator.
	He set the aluminum case down and threw it open. He set the smaller device against the T-X’s neck and triggered it.
	A small blue spark emerged, a much tinier manifestation of the plasma energy that had threatened John’s life, and sliced into the T-X’s skin.
	Except, of course, it wasn’t skin, not in the traditional sense. It parted under the tremendous energy from the plasma device and shrank away, liquid metal that had just been instructed by a strong heat and power source to flee the vicinity.
The retreat of the metal bared the T-X’s endoskeleton, a silvery gleaming metal thing that was as inhuman and menacing as the T-X had just appeared human and inviting.
	Carter cut into the endoskeleton just under the neck, severing whatever locking mechanism held protective plates in place, and raised a hinged piece about the size of a saucer. Even at this distance John could hear sputters and zaps from within that housing, the sound of the Terminator’s internal systems desperately working to come back on-line.
	Carter pulled wires from the aluminum case and set them within the T-X’s body cavity. With a calm sureness that was more and more maddening to John as the seconds ticked by, he methodically connected them to components within the Terminator’s torso.
	The T-X’s eyes, so much like those of John’s mother, snapped open.
	Carter reached into the aluminum case and flipped a switch. The T-X jerked a final time and then lay there, limp, staring up at her captor. Carter raised his hands like a rodeo cowboy who’d roped and thrown the world’s deadliest calf.
	Members of John’s security teams applauded.