Excerpt: Zahn’s Terminator Salvation: Trial By Fire

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Timothy Zahn’s Terminator Salvation: Trial By Fire hit both brick and mortar and virtual bookshelves this week. The latest installment in the Terminator universe picks up where the movie left off. Connor is on the mends and the Resistance is trying to figure out what exactly Marcus Wright is and how they can defend themselves against the undetectable hybrids.

Zahn’s impeccable pacing makes for a quick read of Trial By Fire and anyone interested should pick it up. It’s only $8 from Titan Books.

The fourth Terminator movie, Terminator Salvation, starring Christian Bale and directed by McG was a summer box office hit, grossing over $400 million worldwide. In this brand new spin-off novel which follows on from events in the movie, a recovering John Connor grants Barnes permission to return to the destroyed VLA lab and bury his brother who was killed in the explosive opening of the movie. At the ruins Barnes and pilot Blair Williams search through the debris for the remains of their comrade. During their hunt they uncover a half-buried cable, that was clearly a data transmission line, leading up into the mountains. The two Resistance fighters head northwest to investigate. Amid the forests on the slopes of the mountains, the pair uncover an entire village that appears to have been largely untouched by Judgment Day and its aftermath. Suspicious of the villagers, Barnes and Blair decide to dig deeper….

We’ll be interviewing Zahn next week, so if you have any questions leave them in comments. Oh, and here’s a one chapter excerpt from the book. Enjoy!

CHAPTER FOUR

They’d been flying for nearly three hours, and Blair Williams had watched the landscape sliding beneath the Blackhawk helicopter gradually change from forest to sparse grassland and finally to desert. Above her, the sky was mottled with a mixture of feathery white cirrus clouds and long dirty gray stratus ones, interspersed with occasional patches of blue sky. All around her the air was filled with the hum of the Blackhawk’s engines and the rhythmic throbbing of its rotors.

Beside her, scowling in the copilot’s seat, was Barnes.

Blair sighed to herself. She hadn’t wanted to take on this mission, and it had been abundantly clear that Barnes hadn’t wanted her along, either. But Connor had insisted,
and John Connor wasn’t the sort of person you said no to.

Especially when the only reason Connor’s dark eyes were even alive to gaze at, into, and through you was because Marcus Wright had given his life to save him.

Marcus Wright. The man who in a few short days Blair had learned to love.

Not the man, a bitter-edged corner of her mind corrected mockingly in Barnes’s voice. The machine you learned to love.

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