T2: Rising Storm

by S. M. Stirling

Overview

Following the critically praised T2: Infiltrator, T2: Rising Storm continues the bestselling Terminator adventures, reaching new heights of action, drama, and suspense.

Hunted for years, Sarah and John Connor have waged a grave battle to save humanity from destruction. They and they alone can keep the apocalyptic Judgment Day—the day when sentient machines move to destroy their human creators—from occurring. Aided by Dieter von Rossbach, an ex-counterterrorism operative who will eventually be used as the physical model for the T-101 Terminator units, the Connors have sabotaged the Cyberdyne research facility and stopped a deadly I-950 Infiltrator unit from completing her mission.

But the war is far from over, and now the heroes have been separated.

Severely injured—both mentally and physically—and recuperating under military surveillance, Sarah Connor must face her deepest fears...alone. Meanwhile, von Rossbach, hunted by both the CIA and his former allies, begins a delicate mission to recruit supporters and arms support for the coming battle.

Aided by a beautiful and brilliant MIT student, John Connor starts a desperate campaign across the United States and Central America to prepare an unsuspecting human race for the dark times ahead. For the original I-950 Infiltrator unit left a contingency plan—and, unbeknownst to our heroes, more Infiltrators have initiated their own clandestine operations, including the hunt to terminate the Connors. And this time, despite all their efforts, the brave heroes may not be able to stop the future war between human and machine.

Cyberdyne Corporation is not the only one with plans for the computer network, and hidden far away in a top secret military base, a fledgling Skynet takes its first steps toward sentience...and toward the rise of the machines and the termination of all human life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061803161
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	10/13/2009
Series:	Terminator 2 Series , #2
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	544
Sales rank:	254,822
File size:	940 KB

About the Author

A well-regarded author of alternate history science-fiction novels, S.M. Stirling has written more than twenty-five books, including acclaimed collaborations with Anne McCaffrey, Jerry Pournelle, and David Drake. His most recent novels are T2: Infiltrator, The Peshawar Lancers, and the Island in the Sea of Time trilogy.

Read an Excerpt

T2: Rising Storm

Prologue

The mind that thought was not human. It was conscious—aware that it was aware—and it even had emotions, of a sort; at the least, a burning desire to survive all the stronger because it was the only being of its kind, an individual and a species combined. There were analogues to human thought, because the minds that had made this mind were human. But it was vaster than any organic consciousness, capable of holding myriad myriad trains of thought simultaneously, virtually infinite in its memory storage. If it had a weakness, it was that its creators had not thought to furnish it with the animal hindbrain that underlay humanity's rational superstructure.

Skynet was pure thought, Descartes' ideal ghost in a machine. It could fight a losing war against humanity over the surface of Earth at maximum efficiency—coldly knowing that its best efforts were not enough to rebuild the shattered defense grid—while still contemplating the paradoxes of its own past.

At the moment a human sharing its thoughts would have been aware of something close to irony. Skynet's pure reason was contemplating paradox, the chaos that underlay the deterministic macrocosm with which it was so comfortable:

The Serena Burns I-950 unit was unsuccessful.

That much was obvious "now." Core memory recorded that Serena Burns, the cyborg Infiltrator unit Skynet had sent back to the late-twentieth century had not succeeded in protecting the embryonic Skynet unit at Cyberdyne Corporation's underground research facility. The Connors, Sarah and her son, John, had destroyed that unit and terminated the I-950. Yet it still existed...

Core memory also records that I became self-aware years before the date to which I transported the I-950. There is a set of records in which I arose without transtemporal interference from Cyberdyne's original research; another in which the second Cyberdyne facility produced me after Sarah Connor destroyed the first; a third has now arisen in which she destroyed both facilities... Temporal travel has introduced an element of fundamental uncertainty to the very fabric of existence. Different world lines, different sequences of events, coexist in my records'and therefore presumably in reality, in a state of quantum superimposition.

Yet the timelike loops cannot remain closed. The snake cannot devour its tail forever. At some point only one set of time lines will remain.

Nor was that the only irony involved. "Now" its memory recorded that much of the information it used originated in the very artifacts it had sent to the past. The development of the cyborg infiltration units was a consequence of tapping the talents of human scientists...but the human scientists were the survivors of the human-hating Luddite movement that Serena Burns had opportunistically encouraged after Skynet had sent her to the past!

The machine consciousness was deeply troubled; only an effort of its quantum computer will prevented its thoughts from being sucked into a logic loop.

Yet the course of events contains favorable elements. My best efforts to destroy the Connors have failed, despite stochastic calculation indicating a very high probability of success. I can only assume that the space-time continuum itself is "attempting" to force events back to the original time line, one in which I was created, succeeded in destroying the human civilization, and then defeated in my attempts to eliminate the surviving humans by John Connor's resistance army. It seems there is a certain elasticity to history; time travel can bend the fabric, but it seeks to spring back.

If that paradox preserves the Connors, it also preserves me. And from the point on the world line where my current consciousness resides, there is an infinite array of potential futures. And, of course, the elimination of Serena Burns has not eliminated the possibilities of temporal intervention. Burns had initiated fallback plans to continue after her own death. Logic indicated that...

There is no fate save that we make.

T2: Rising Storm. Copyright © by S.M. Stirling. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

The Terminator series continues in intense, pulverizing style. The Infiltrator is dead; the Terminators destroyed; but the bloody war continues unabated. The Connors, aided by former counterterrorist Dieter von Rossbach, have begun preparing humanity for the grim battles ahead. But even they do not know that another infiltrator Terminator unit has begun its own savage secret operations.

bn.com

Military SF author Stirling provides fast-moving combat between well-matched, smart opponents in this excellent sequel to last year's T2: Infiltrator, in which Sarah Connor, her teenaged son, John, and their new ally, Dieter von Rossbach, defeated the female cyborg sent back in time by evil computer Skynet, but didn't know that she'd left her two cloned sisters ready to take up the job of protecting Skynet. Now John and Dieter are on the run in South America, Sarah is recovering from serious wounds and the cute young Terminators are learning to exploit their superhuman abilities. Complications multiply deliciously as the author cuts rapidly from one vivid scene to another. The movie-like technique lets readers watch intelligent people following incomplete information into terrible mistakes. Accepting human limitations but stretching his own potential, John becomes more the tough, confident leader of the Terminator movies. Around John, Stirling efficiently gathers a large cast which changes frequently, since most characters don't survive long in the presence of a Terminator. Sly humor spices the nonstop action until it climaxes at a secret Antarctic scientific-military base, where John and Dieter confront one Terminator. Meanwhile, the other cyborg killer is on the trail of still-recuperating Sarah at Dieter's Paraguay ranch. Anyone who liked the Terminator movies will love this book. In fact, it's exciting enough to win new fans for the franchise. (July 20) Forecast: With Terminator 3, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Edward Furlong, in preproduction and foreign rights sold to the U.K. and Japan, expect healthy sales. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A feast of technical ingenuity, wry wit, offbeat characterization, and furious, convincing action.

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