CHAPTER ONE: PROLOGUE

The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war that we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living.

- Omar Bradley

Serrano Point Resistance Bunker Complex, Avila Beach, California, 19th April 2033.

General John Connor watched around him as the bubble techs hurried through the final pre-jump checklists, their chatter muted by the idling roar of the gas turbines. Tech-Com Security personnel stationed around the room watched silently from behind the darkened visors of their helmets.

Below on the Time Displacement Chamber floor, men and women stripped, piling their clothes in a heap to one side. The Resistance was thrifty and fatigues, especially those treated to minimize their infrared signatures, were difficult to come by.

"Sir? It's ready. Critical systems are green across the board, we're powered up and ready on your go."

John mused on the man's choice of words. He wasn't a physicist or an engineer and he didn't understand what they said at least half the time, but he honestly couldn't think of any non-critical systems on a TDE. It was at times like these that he suspected his Sci-Tech personnel suffered from a chronic case of optimism.

Below him, the nude figures waited on the pad, heads tilted up to look at him. If any of them were discomfited by the experience, they tried not to show it – only two of the older troopers even bothered to make some concessions to modesty.

"Do it," he said.

The Machines had done a lot of damage before Security retook the lower levels. The techs had crawled over the systems a dozen times and announced that everything was okay, but it was obvious to anyone with a working brain that their patch-jobs weren't exactly up to Skynet's original spec. He wondered if the soldiers down below cared.

The generators started to spin up.

"Transit in five …" the loud-hailer boomed.

The figures huddled closer together. The radius of the chronoportation sphere was limited: five adult humans could just about fit, with a little discomfort. A little discomfort was preferable to what happened when someone stuck bits out the bubble.

"... in four ..."

"Good luck," he whispered, "and good hunting."

They couldn't hear him over the background noise, but that didn't matter. They'd need all the luck they could get.

The raid on Depot 2 and the near-repeat here had finally convinced his fellow generals that time displacement tech was more trouble than it was worth. In their minds, getting rid of the remaining TDEs was a small price to pay to ensure that the Machine Remnant couldn't get at them.

John had reluctantly agreed. In principle, they were right; the problem with any new technology was that, sooner or later, it fell into the wrong hands. More pragmatically, John wished that he'd had another month to prepare.

"... three …"

The generators were up to speed now. Sparks began to play over the pad. The team were huddled together shoulder to shoulder, crouched down with heads bent.

"... two …"

The air crackled with energy.

"... one …"

The bubble coalesced.

John slitted his eyes but didn't avert them. The flashes of light were dazzling, but they were nothing compared to the destructive energy of a plasma bolt. He could stand it. He watched.

Tech-Com Special Operations personnel were volunteers. They'd known what they were getting into, but this surpassed any sane expectations. His men were giving up nothing less than their chance at living in a world at peace. For him. A bitter smile flitted across his lips for just an instant. He wondered how willing they would be if his name wasn't John Connor.

The bubble shrank, collapsing to a pinprick of light. And then nothingness.

As the storm died away, the techs ran their diagnostics: hardware integrity checks, recalibration, condition monitoring, and so on. It was pointless given what would happen next and they knew it, but ingrained procedure was stronger than reason.

When it was all over, John turned to the head of his close protection detail. Tech-Com Security personnel were experienced soldiers – they had to be, in a world where any outsider could be a skinjob – but John had always felt that Sergeant Mason had come extra-grizzled. The veteran passed John his plasma rifle without further cues.

The general took it with a grunt of effort. The high-intensity plasma guns Security used were weighty hunks of metal that clocked in at twice the weight of an M-16. Only a terminator could heft them effortlessly. He shouldered the weapon and squeezed the trigger.

He saw a line of white fire connected the muzzle and the TDE's control unit for the fraction of a second before the blink reflex cut in. The smell of burning metal assailed his nostrils.

He opened his eyes. The techs backed up against the wall sported sullen, sour or apprehensive looks but that was too bad for them. The other components could be dismantled for salvage, but the integrated circuit boards had to be destroyed. Being slagged with a plasma round was just the most symbolic way of doing it.

It said that the window of opportunity had been slammed shut. It was a nice capstone for the Machine War. That was that. It was over. For him, at any rate.

Los Angeles, California, 25th August 2008.

Pain blossomed like a delicate flower.

It was a singular experience. The human language couldn't do it justice; it had no frame of reference. One moment, they had been huddled together. He had felt the warmth of skin contact, the feel of breath and the coolness of the air. The next, the world flickered. Reality collapsed and sensation overloaded. There was heat, burning like the heart of a star, and the cold of absolute zero, and light. And then, as if coming from a great distance, arrival.

The chronoportation sphere discharged violently around them.

Alex looked up. The five of them were sprawled in a hemispherical crater. The point of incidence was in the middle of an open grassy area, although they were somewhat concealed on two sides by nearby vegetation. The low levels of ambient noise suggested this was a suburban neighbourhood.

He stood up, suppressing the superficial complaints from his leg muscles. The late night air wasn't particularly cold, but the breeze still raised goosebumps on his skin. He diverted more resources to maintaining homeostasis.

They had to move. Although there was nobody in immediate sight, the sound and fury of their arrival might attract unwanted attention. Unfortunately, the humans were still prostrate on the floor. They seemed uninjured.

He leaned over the closest, a blonde-haired young woman. His implant computer automatically supplied her name: Eleanor Weinbaum. He didn't pull up the personnel file.

"Hello? Can you hear me?" he asked.

She stirred. He reached out to shake her by the shoulder and, with surprising speed for a semi-conscious woman, grasped his wrist. Her grip was surprisingly firm. Her eyes opened. She stared at him uncomprehendingly for two seconds before letting go.

She slowly got to her hands and knees, stretching each muscle out in turn. Alex regarded the scars across her arms and back with interest. Resistance soldiers usually bore scars, but they tended to be burns or shrapnel wounds. These made him think of knives. Interesting. Across one shoulder was tattooed a broken cogwheel, a common affectation among Connor's soldiers.

"You okay?"

"Yeah, thanks." Her face was almost bloodless. "I'm all right, infiltrator. See to the others."

They all showed more or less similar symptoms. Nausea, stress, muscle aches. Even he felt a little shaken, although he had far more control over his body's stress reactions than any baseline human. Something had obviously gone wrong, though the error seemed to be relatively minor. A serious calibration error or field instability could have resulted in the averaging of the subject matter over a comparatively large volume of spacetime.

Alex's lips twitched.

"What're you grinning at, infiltrator?"

He looked back. Sergeant Holden, the team's second-in-command, was on one knee, hands massaging her temples.

"Nothing, sir. Any one you can walk away from, right?"

She looked at him askance, but he kept his expression inscrutable. Politeness was a useful tool. It clouded the subtle cues people used to determine social hierarchy, and the way they reacted to that uncertainty told him more than they realised.

"Yeah. The four-eyed bastards fucked up, no surprises there."

"Alexander, Tara." They turned. It was the Captain. He was pale and sweat beaded his face. "What are you standing around for? I'd like to be out of here before any gawkers arrive."

They set off, pale shapes in the darkness.

The local clothing store was isolated and, rather luckily, the owner had left the wireless security cameras connected to the web rather than on a true closed circuit. Alex transmitted his own commands, tilting their fields of view until they surveyed nothing at all. The cameras were pure security theatre; if nothing else, they could've manually disabled the cameras. They dressed quickly, and cleaned out the tills before leaving.

They holed up in a discount motel for the night. There were plans to be made. They needed a secure safe house, identification, gear and more money. Tech-Com had a list of reliable underworld contacts (at least, the contacts had told Tech-Com that their younger selves would be reliable) and other Resistance cells could supply some of their needs. Connor had ways and ways.

The first complication came with the leading news story. The grainy video feed from the primitive CRT proclaimed TECH COMPANY BOMBED. This was accompanied by a montage of shaky camera footage: screaming crowds, armed police, a burning skyscraper and, finally, surveillance photos of a teenager and an older woman. The teen was recognisable as a younger John Connor. The woman was identified as Sarah Connor, the notorious domestic terrorist. The newsreader informed them that she was armed and extremely dangerous and should not be approached.

The commonly repeated aphorism was that no plan ever survived contact with the enemy. In this case, it seemed that nobody had considered the possibility that their plans wouldn't survive contact with their oblivious ally. There was a moment of horrified silence.

"Shit," Sergeant Holden spat.

Author's Notes: Very special thanks to JMHthe3rd, an excellent writer and a patient beta-reader, for reading through interminable drafts of this story.

Feedback, especially in-depth critique, is appreciated. They say that your first 1,000,000 words aren't going to be great, and I'm a long way off that mark. Thoughtful, harsh critique is preferable (pedantic nit-picking welcomed).

This story started life as a mental exercise in world-building and snowballed from there. Terminator isn't my favourite science fiction universe, but The Sarah Connor Chronicles trod some interesting ground. Some ideas were well-executed, others … not so much. For much of it's run, it failed. But it failed upwards (if that makes any sense to you at all). So anyway, my story grew out of that.

This is not a continuation story that attempts to write Season 3; it's telling the story of John Connor the way I envision it. This story is about John Connor and the War Against the Machines. It's about the people and the world during and after that war. Elements from the movies and expanded universe materials will be cherry-picked and integrated into the story and world-building. Some minor technical details which I find overly implausible will be put up against a wall and shot in the services of drama and internal consistency.

Revision 7, 14/10/2011.