Terminator in Brockton Bay

[AntonioCC]

Chapter 1

Brockton Bay General Hospital

Taylor Hebert's room

January 5th, 2011

23:11
​

'Taylor looks so frail.' Danny Hebert thought, looking at his daughter being near-comatose in the bed of the hospital.

He didn't know yet how wrong he was.

Brockton Bay

A lonely alley, not far from the Boardwalk
​

Suddenly a bit of wind carried some papers around, and some sparks jumped between metallic surfaces. The sparks intensified until a ball of plasma appeared and disappeared, depositing a naked muscular man on the street, kneeling on one knee.

He stood up and slowly looked around, as if recognizing landmarks. Apparently satisfied, he started to walk purposefully. His HUD showed two main directives:

Terminate Taylor Hebert

Avoid conflict with parahumans, if possible.

His mission parameters also included a nearby place where to resupply. Soon, he stood at the door of a seemingly abandoned shop. The door was seemingly weak, but an analysis showed that it was actually quite strong, and probably a cover for a security door inside.

So he didn't give the guards the benefit of waiting, he kicked the door open, and opened the security door with the code in his memory banks. The guards had barely started to react when they were surprised by the man who quickly broke their necks and used the spare clothes and equipped himself from their arsenal.

The snake insignia would invite questions. He removed it.

Location of Taylor Hebert: Brockton Bay General Hospital.

He started to walk.

Another alley
​

Another plasma sphere opened and closed two feet over the ground on the alley, leaving another man. This one was also naked, but not that well built, wiry, and full of scars. He looked around quickly and nervously, and hid himself behind a dumpster, but nobody seemed to have observed his arrival. Even the local homeless seemed to be asleep.

"Come on…" he said to himself, as he walked around toward one of the homeless men.

After checking he was roughly his size, he stole his clothes. The man stirred as he worked; he put him back down and left him unconscious.

He then looked for an older car, his old man hadn't been much but had taught him how to open and hotwire a car without the alarm going off. HKs and T-600 converged on alarms like you wouldn't believe.

Once he had the car, he closed his eyes and tried to remember where to go now. The hospital. Taylor. He had to protect Taylor. Whatever the cost.

He searched the car, and found a sawed-off shotgun. Something with stopping power at least. He idly wondered who the car belonged to.

He knew that trying to run toward the hospital would only attract the attention of the cops, so he drove carefully toward it, but trying to reach it before the Terminator could. He could have warned the PRT. But no one knew when Skynet had gone online, the bastard had ensured that its creator had also been its first victim.

Brockton Bay Hospital

Taylor Hebert Room
​

Danny Hebert rubbed his eyes, and sat in the armchair. He would stay here, in his vigil until his daughter recovered. She was starting to show signs of being better, her eyes tracked and responded to sounds, but other than that she seemed to be still near catatonic.

Suddenly he was pulled from his thoughts by a commotion in the corridor. He got up, and went to the door. When he looked he saw a tall, well built man dressed in tactical clothes, and wearing dark sunglasses walking purposefully down the corridor. A smaller man in a ratty trenchcoat was standing in front of the other man.

Suddenly, there was a sawed off shotgun in his hand, and he shot the bigger man with it three times and then ran towards him.

But before he could say anything he saw the bigger man starting to get up, despite the wounds. As the other man grabbed him and barricaded himself in the room with his daughter, he could only think that the big man was some kind of cape.

"What the…" Danny said, staring at the man with the shotgun.

"Mister Hebert?" he asked politely, but not lowering the shotgun.

"Who are you? What do you want with my daughter?"

The man spotted a wheelchair and pulled it over.

"I want to save her from that thing. Help me put her here."

"No, Taylor stays. Security and the PRT will deal…" Danny started to say before the door started to shake violently, which elicited a moan from Taylor. It was clear that it wasn't going to resist long.

"You said?"

Wordlessly, Danny helped the man to put Taylor on the wheelchair and then, while the door kept shaking violently, the man opened a side door.

"Fortunately, it's not good at lateral thinking." he said, and they both ran through the side corridor.

"I don't understand." Danny said as they ran through the corridor and the other man or whatever it was finally broke through the door, and started to chase them.

"That thing and I both come from the future. A bad one. Skynet, an AI created by some Tinker, took over after Scion went nuts…"

"Fuck." Danny said, "How is that possible?"

"We don't know. The thing is that Taylor became the leader of the Resistance against Skynet." he explained, "I'm Alex, by the way."

Danny had a thousand questions, but survival instinct told him that it was better for later. If there was a later. They finally arrived at a lift, and called it. They could see that the man chasing them had stopped and was taking aim.

Alex pushed Taylor out of the line of fire just as the man shot, taking the shot just as the lift opened. They descended in silence.

"Let me see." Danny said, "I was a Navy corpsman, I know something about wounds."

With reluctance, Alex opened the coat showing the place of the wound. Abdomen.

"That wound…"

"I know, a couple hours at most." Alex said

"We are in a hospital, and Panacea could still be around"

"And a killer robot is still after your daughter. No, I knew that the voyage was one way from the beginning." Alex said, shaking his head.

"A killer robot…God,..this feels like a bad movie."

"Yeah, I know, believe me. I was a kid when everything went to Hell." Alex replied, "But we don't have time for this."

He pressed the stop button, just as the lift was on the first floor.

"Come on." he said, "I think I saw loading bays on the first floor when I was parking."

TO BE CONTINUED...

 

[Lord of the First Flame]

I have no proof but I know Cauldron is involved in this.

 

[ATP]

I have no proof but I know Cauldron is involved in this.

Click to shrink...

plausible explanation.

 

[AntonioCC]

I have no proof but I know Cauldron is involved in this.

Click to shrink...

plausible explanation.

Click to shrink...

It could be. It could be also Leet. It could be also an original tinker without relation to Cauldron.

 

[AntonioCC]

Chapter 2

Brockton Bay General Hospital
​

The Terminator had already deduced that its objective wasn't going to stop on the ground floor. Ignoring the security guards trying to stop him, and the chaos his presence was causing, he proceeded toward the stairs, to start a methodical search.

Then one of the security guards shot the Terminator. Insufficient to impair function.

The Terminator shot the guard without looking, killing him, and then going for the other guards.

Once he had finished he started his search. He would start for the first floor, where the lift had stopped.

Unknown to him, the PRT had been warned and Armsmaster and Miss Militia were en route.

First Floor
​

They soon located a loading bay, where they could exit the hospital.

"My truck is parked nearby." Danny said.

"And probably in that thing's files." Alex said, "I can hotwire a car. But, we can't go to your home…"

"Because it will also be in his files, and our friends too." Danny replied and started to think, "We could go to the PRT."

"Bad idea. One of the first things that Skynet did when it awakened was to compromise the PRT systems." Alex explained, "And the Resistance never knew when it did awaken."

"But that's for the future, and we can get their protection…"

"Skynet can't know the future role of Taylor." Alex said, "At all."

"Very well, I think I know the place where we can go…" Danny said

"Where?"

"The Navy had a group of warehouses in the Harbor. They closed them, and tried to sell them, but then came the strike." Danny explained, "The keys are in the possession of the Dockworkers Association, unofficially."

"How far?" Alex asked, already kneeling beside a car to open it. He suppressed a sharp breath from the pain as he worked.

"It's in the Docks. The Dockworkers Association first, to get the keys." Danny said.

"Don't you have copies?" Alex asked, as he opened the car and started to help Danny to move Taylor onto the backseats.

"No, there are few people even in the DWA that know of the keys. A simple set, kept on the HQ." Danny explained, as he covered Taylor with his coat and tied her with the seatbelt. She moved a bit, but didn't wake up yet.

"All right." Alex said.

Danny turned to Alex.

"Let me at least bandage that wound. The car has a first aid kit." he said as he looked for the kit.

"Okay, but be quick." he said.

Danny did what he could, which was disinfect and apply pressure and bandages to the wound.

They looked at each other for a moment, and Danny nodded, going to the driving seat of the car.

Brockton Bay General Hospital
​

The Terminator paused his search to observe the arrival of two bikes through the window. One was a custom vehicle driven by a thirty-something bearded Caucasian male in power armor, and the other was a high powered, but standard bike, driven by a middle Eastern woman in military fatigues with a bandanna covering her face. His HUD identified them as the parahumans Colin Wallis A.K.A. Armsmaster and Hannah Madison A.K.A. Miss Militia.

Probability of Taylor Hebert continued presence in the building: 3.7%

Probability of altercation with parahumans: 94.5%

He stopped searching and waited until both parahumans had entered the building. Then he jumped out of the window, and stole Miss Militia's bike. His direction, the Hebert home.

PRT HQ
​

It was not one of Emily Piggot's better nights. Night calls tended to range from bad to catastrophic, with some stops into the genuinely apocalyptic.

"Run that by me again." she said.

"The perpetrator sustained three close range shotgun blasts to the chest and upper abdomen." Armsmaster's voice was precise, clipped, and carried the particular tension of a man who did not like reporting things he couldn't explain. "He then proceeded to neutralize six armed security personnel, exited through a fourth floor window, and departed on Miss Militia's motorcycle."

Piggot was quiet for a moment.

"He stole Miss Militia's bike."

"Yes Director."

"Not the point, I'm aware." she said, "casualties?"

"Four security personnel dead. Two in critical condition. The perpetrator sustained damage that should have been incapacitating by any conventional metric and showed no functional impairment whatsoever."

"Brute?"

"Unknown. His movement patterns don't match any parahuman in our database. That's actually why I've looped in Dragon."

Dragon's voice joined the call, characteristically measured, though Piggot had worked with her long enough to catch something underneath it. A careful quality. The particular tone Dragon used when she was working at the edge of her own certainty.

"Director Piggot. I've been reviewing the hospital security footage."

"And?"

A pause. From Dragon, that pause was its own kind of answer.

"The entity's damage tolerance, locomotive efficiency, and threat response patterns are unlike anything in the parahuman database. His movements are too economical. Too consistent. A human combatant under adrenaline shows variance. This one showed none, across the entire engagement."

"So what are you telling me?"

"I'm telling you what it isn't." Dragon said, "I'm still working on what it is."

Piggot absorbed that. Dragon telling her what something wasn't at one in the morning while four people were dead was not, strictly speaking, a good sign.

"What about the other one? The smaller man with the shotgun."

"That's where it gets interesting." Armsmaster said, which from him meant that's where it gets worse. "Witness accounts and footage suggest he wasn't attacking the larger individual. He was attempting to slow him down. The target appears to have been a patient — a teenage girl, Taylor Hebert, fifteen, admitted two days ago following a trauma incident at Winslow High School. She was removed from her room in a wheelchair by the smaller man and her father, Daniel Hebert, during the chaos."

"So we have an unidentified entity that eats shotgun blasts for breakfast, an unidentified man who apparently knew it was coming, and a missing fifteen year old girl in a hospital gown." Piggot said, "In January."

"That is an accurate summary, yes."

"Find them." she said, "All three. The entity first, the girl and her father second. And Colin…"

"Director?"

"Get Hannah a new bike."

TO BE CONTINUED

 

[ATP]

Yes,they should not trust PRT with anytching.Maybe gangs or scion would deal with it for them....