The Growing

“I see. That’s your story.”

“That’s what happened!”

“And you want clemency on the basis of your testimony?”

“I deserve clemency. I told you why the metalheads were up to it. You owe me.”

Maggie presses the control buttons on the recorder, and a printer across the room spits out a couple pieces of paper. Boudreaux brings them to her, and she reads them through without comment. Then she sets them in front of Boudreaux. “Sign.”

Laboriously, he reads it though, the holds out his hand for a pen. Maggie hands him a soft-tip, and he laboriously scrawls out EMcCallum across the bottom of the page.

When he is finished, Maggie reclaims the pen, touching it gingerly only with her fingertips. She jerks her head in the direction of the cells. “Lock him back up.”

“Hey! We got a deal,” McCallum objects.

“We got a deal,” Maggie repeats. “You tell us what you know, we take it under advisement. No promises.” To the MP she says, “Lock him up.”

Maggie picks up her folders and the recorder and pushes her way out of the room and all but runs out into the evening air. She has never felt so dirty.

She needs a bath. She needs a long talk with Dakota and with Kirsten, too. Hot water. Lavender salts. Clean.

She switches her brief case to her good left hand and sets out for home.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

KIRSTEN REMOVES HER glasses and rubs at eyes far past weary. The past twelve hours have been spent studying line after line of code that marches across her monitor like a parade of ants to a picnic. Still, the day has been somewhat productive. She’s managed to weed out all but two groupings, each similar in form, if not content. Somewhere within this mess of binaries, she knows the answer, or at least part of it, will be found. For all that, however, she’s not even close to being out of the woods. It’s as if the scrolling numbers are all the words to War and Peace.

With no capital letters.

Or punctuation.

Or spaces indicating where one word ends and the next begins.

In Russian.

And she can’t read Russian.

She doesn’t hear the clatter of her glasses hitting the far wall and coming to rest in a forlorn twist of glass and metal atop the threadbare carpet. With her implants switched off, her world is blessedly silent. Not that there would be anything to disturb the silence if her implants were on, of course. Maggie and Dakota had left the house early this morning; the Colonel undoubtedly off making the world—or what remains of it—safe for Democracy, and Koda tending to the animals thrust suddenly into her more-than-capable hands.

Or maybe not, she thinks as she lifts her head and takes a deep breath through her nose. The scent that lingers there takes her back to a time of cold winters and warm blankets, the love of her family, and the adventures of Katrina Callahan—Intergalactic Cop. A smile steals unnoticed over her face. Mmm. Chicken soup. My favorite.

Casually flipping her implants back on, she listens expectantly for the sounds of life within the house, then frowns, disappointed. Beyond her half-closed door, it’s as silent as a tomb. With a soft sigh, she pushes back from the desk and rises somewhat stiffly to her feet, shaking her legs to restore some feeling into the seemingly deadened nerves.

Padding softly across the small room, she peeks through the opening, smiling in surprised delight at the sight of Dakota propped on the couch, face mostly hidden behind the cover of a thick book. Asi lays sprawled half-across her lap, blissfully asleep. The scent of simmering soup is much stronger here, and she takes it in on a satisfied breath, squinting slightly to catch the title stamped into the thick leather hide of the book Koda holds.

Der Untergang des Abendlandes by Otto Spengler.

“Wow,” Kirsten remarks softly, “and they call me an egghead.”

So confident that her remark was unheard, she almost misses the brief flash of pain that crosses Dakota’s striking features as she looks up from her book. She masks the expression quickly, but Kirsten feels her heart plummet somewhere in the region of her stomach and she takes an involuntary step forward, arms at her sides, palms outspread. “I’m….”

“It’s okay,” Koda intones, pulling up a genuine smile. “Taking a break?”

“Kinda,” Kirsten replies, relieved. “That soup smells delicious.”

“Unfortunately, it’s got several hours to go yet. I just put it on.”

“Ah well. There’s always the mess.”

The women exchange quiet laughs.

Approaching the couch, Kirsten looks down at her dog, who looks up at her without a care in the world. His tail beats a lazy tattoo against the arm of the sofa as his head continues to rest across the top of Koda’s thighs. “You’re a slut, you know that?”

Dakota laughs as Asi gives Kirsten a rather affronted look but deigns not to move from his appointed spot. Rolling her eyes—and secretly envying Asi his prime location—Kirsten perches on the couch’s other arm, peering again at the thick tome in Koda’s hands. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen someone read an actual book for pleasure.”

Looking down at the book in question, Koda lifts one broad shoulder in a shrug. “Disktexts never were my thing. I like the feel of a book in my hands.”

Kirsten nods, though she really can’t relate. She can, and has, read books when she must, but to her nothing compares with a minidisk filled to the byte with her favorite literature. She smiles. “In German, too. I’m impressed.” She touches the book’s binding. “How many languages do you know?”

“Twelve,” Koda replies, “though I can’t really take credit for most of them. Tali had a Master’s in Linguistics and Foreign Languages.” She smiles slightly, sweet memories surrounding her. “It got to be that if I wanted to talk to her at all, I’d have to learn the language she was currently studying.”

“Tali?”

The look of pain flashes briefly again, then is gone. “My wife.”

“Wife?” Kirsten echoes, stunned. A barrage of emotions run through her, none staying long enough for her to identify, though she knows that a bit of anger, shock, and disbelief are somewhere in the mix.

“She died seven years ago. SARS IV.”

“Oh, Dakota. I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks,” Koda replies, noting the obvious sincerity in the smaller woman’s tone. She hesitates a moment, then deliberately lowers another internal wall, needing to share some part of herself with this woman she is quickly coming to cherish. “We married when we were sixteen.”

“Sixteen?” Kirsten asks, though her voice is hesitant. She is fully aware of the precious gift she is about to receive, and is loath to have that gift taken back due to an inauspicious interruption on her part. To her vast relief, however, Koda doesn’t seem to mind.

“A little young, I know, but it was pretty much expected.” At Kirsten’s questioning look, she continues. “We grew up together. Her family owned the ranch next to ours, and we were born only three weeks apart. We were best friends from the cradle on, and when I got old enough to know what love was, I knew that I loved her.” Her sudden smile is lopsided and fond. “When I asked for her hand, let’s just say that no one was surprised.”

“It sounds like something out of a Fairy Tale,” Kirsten remarks quietly.

Koda laughs softly. “Maybe a little, yeah.” Her voice becomes serious. “We went off to school the week after we got married. We were both accepted at UPenn, on scholarship. I went to the Vet school, she studied linguists and foreign languages. When we graduated, we moved back here and refurbished our home. I had my clinic and rehab center, she had her students, and we had each other.” She pauses for a moment, her thumb rubbing on the book’s worn spine. “We were happy.”

Kirsten lays one hand almost reverently on Koda’s bowed head, brushing her palm against the silken strands of her thick, jet hair. “How…how did she get sick?”

“As near as anyone could tell,” Koda begins, comforted by the stroking hand, “it was a student who’d just come back from Asia. The epidemic was just starting up at that time, and quarantines weren’t in force. She went to school hale and healthy one morning, and was hooked up to a ventilator that same night.”

“But the treatment…!”

Koda shakes her head. “She wouldn’t take it.”

“Wouldn’t—? But why?”

As Koda looks up, Kirsten reads the answer within the fathomless grief in those too-blue eyes before Dakota even speaks a word.

“She was pregnant.”

*

Ellsworth is a large installation, and as Maggie makes her way from the brig back toward the base housing and home, the pain in her leg returns full force. Official rationing of gasoline has not begun, but unless they can find fresh supplies to exploit in Rapid City and the surrounding area, the time will come when all petroleum products will grow not just scarce but extinct.

Dionsaur thou art; to dinosaur thou shalt return. Amen.

She makes a mental note to have someone check on foot-driven transportation already available on base and to send a couple squads to raid the remaining inventories of bicycle shops in town. She will need to speak to Koda and the Mss. Tilbury-Laduque about the possibility of acquiring horses. She will also have to think about how—no, goddammit, somebody else can think about something. Let Boudreaux and the other goddam surviving CPA’s earn their keep.

She shifts that problem firmly off her desk. The bean counters will have to figure out how to pay for such things.

Then the rest of us can fill out the forms in triplicate. Requisition: individual personnel transportation and supply hauling unit, quadruped. Translation: horse.

The feeling that time is slipping out from under her returns: years, decades, centuries tilting drunkenly away as they did the morning of the battle of the Cheyenne. The armature of a whole civilization has collapsed, sending them back to . . . where? When? Maggie shivers a little under her uniform jacket, hunching her shoulders both to hoard the warmth and to ease the weight of her brief case. The most taken-for-granted, everyday facts of life have all suddenly acquired question marks, and she’s not sure there are good answers to all of them.

Maybe not to any of them.

Is there still a United States? If so, is there a Constitution?

Who decides?

How are goods to be paid for? Up until now, patrols from the base have been happily looting—there is no other name for it, no matter if they have been calling it ‘salvage’—and that is a thing that offends her orderly soul. Sergeant Tacoma Rivers, as honest a man as she has ever met, is at this moment heading a team to study the feasibility of appropriating electrical generators that had been private property a few short weeks ago. If any of the power co-op survives, how are they to be compensated? Is there such a thing as money any more?

And who decides?

The headache that has been tapping, tapping lightly at the edges of her consciousness becomes the full-blown assault of a jackhammer. She needs that bath. Thank god there is still lavender. She needs a cup of chamomile tea. She needs—

Something cold and wet and rubbery suddenly thrusts itself into her free hand swinging at her side, and it is all Maggie can do not to jump out of her skin. For half a nanosecond it takes her straight back to junior high school and haunted house fundraisers—one of the oldest tricks in the world, a kitchen glove filled with ice water and dragged over an unsuspecting hand or better yet, the back of a vulnerable neck. It had gotten satisfyingly terrified screams even out of the football jocks.

Especially out of the football jocks.

But this is not a trick, and she turns to ruffle Asi’s fur as he greets her, whining and twisting himself into Moebius strips of canine ecstacy. He barks twice, high and sharp, and the sound almost splits her skull, but she is almost as glad to see him as he is to see her. Anything to be dragged away from the train of thought that has become increasingly oppressive. He will allow her to think about something besides the minuscule but suddenly critical problems that have parked themselves like orphans outside her gate, and will not go away.

“Hey, fella,” she says, scratching his back in long, lazy strokes. “Where’s your lady?”

He barks again, a glass-shattering high B, and Maggie looks up to see Kirsten and Koda coming toward her from the bare woods to the west of the base residences, climbing the short slope that leads up to the sidewalk. Their faces are both flushed with the westerly breeze that is now carries with it the chill of dusk, Kirsten’s hair alight around her face like an aureole in the low sun.

There is something of peace in Koda’s face that she has never seen before, the quiet that follows cessation of pain. With it, too, is a new sense of intimacy between the two women. It is nothing overt, nothing that Maggie can easily put words to; only something in the tilt, perhaps, of Kirsten’s head, the inclination of Koda’s body. A lessening of the space between. Something, something of vital importance, has passed between them this day. Something that has Maggie, this time, on the outside, looking in.

The sight brings a small pang about her heart, but Maggie cannot pretend to any sweeping operatic emotion, neither jealousy or grand amour. Neither can she pretend that she does not see the obvious and instinctive bond between the two women. Her ancestors, plying the coast of East Africa with ivory and leopard pelts to trade for turquoise and myrrh in the incense fields of Oman, would have called it kismet.

Insh’allah.

As god wills.

Aloud she calls, “You guys headed home?”

“Yeah,” Koda answers as she gains the sidewalk, and Asi, fickle male that he is, bounds toward her and paws at her chest as if he has not seen her in a week. “Hey, boy. Down.” And to Maggie, again, “I put some soup on before we left. It ought to be done in an hour or so.”

“You look tired,” Kirsten observes. “Bad day with the interviews?”

Maggie grimaces and shakes her head slightly. “Filthy.”

“Them or the day?”

”Both.”

Koda’s eyes meet hers, concern and affection in their blue depths. “You look like something Asi wouldn’t bother to drag in.” She gestures toward a pair of benches set under the still-naked branches of a sycamore tree. “Soup won’t be on for a while yet. Let’s sit.”

Maggie nods and follows the other two toward the knoll that looks down over the woods. The sun has begun to fall toward the horizon, almost even with the treetops, and birds that gleam blue-black in the light that lies like gold wash across the snow make their way ponderously, two and two, into the trees where they will roost for the night. All of the pairs fly sedately together save one. Where the others glide almost wingtip to wingtip, one raven dives from height upon his companion, swoops under to come out in a barrel roll, pinwheeling his wings about the axis of his body, his long flight feathers throwing off flashes of blue and green and silver where the sun strikes them. His low-pitched prrrukkk resonates in the air.

Kirsten stands transfixed, her eyes wide and impossibly green. Asimov seems to have taken on her mood, sitting quietly beside her. A first. Kirsten asks, “Those are ravens, aren’t they?”

“Common Ravens, to be exact. We— we Lakota—call them ‘wolf birds,’” Koda answers. “They’ll follow a pack on the hunt or sometimes even lead them to prey.”

“And they get a share?”

“After the wolves have done. It’s not true symbiosis, but close.”

Caught up in the small drama, Maggie watches as the stunt-flying bird wheels upward again and plunges again toward the other. It seems extraordinarily graceful for birds that big, that heavy. She says, not quite asking, “That’s not a fight.”

“That’s a proposal, “ Koda responds, smiling slightly. “That’s got to be a couple of young birds pairing off, since it’s still way too early for breeding. They won’t nest until next summer.”

Kirsten shades her eyes, following the aerobatics. “Long term pair bond?”

Koda nods. “For life.”

Kirsten stares at the birds, the one serene in her flight, the other tumbling about her in exuberant loops and rolls, untiring. Finally they disappear into the trees, and she turns, her eyes going from Koda to Maggie to somewhere deep inside herself that Maggie cannot see. “How do we get it so wrong?”

Koda is silent, staring out over the woods toward the setting sun. The light plays across her face, bronze and still as a statue’s, and Maggie feels her bearings slipping yet again. Time has ground to a halt, it seems, or spun backward, and drawing the woman standing before her into its looping maze, into past or future or otherwhen. So it is Maggie who says, “Get what wrong, Kirsten?”

Kirsten makes a small encompassing gesture with one hand. “Everything. How did we screw up the whole goddam world? What’s going to happen to us?”

Maggie bites down on the response that leaps to her tongue on the first question: all too easily. There is no answer to the second one. “I don’t know,” she says. “We don’t know how many are left even in North America, much less the rest of the world. We just have to do the best we can and work to make it enough.”

A small smile, half ironic, tugs at Kirsten’s mouth. “My dad was a Marine. You sound like him.”

Wonderful. The thought weaves through the back of Maggie’s mind. My about to be ex-girlfriend is about to become her future girlfriend, and I’m a father figure. Aloud she says, “Career military tend to think pretty much in the same channels. It’s the training.”

“Semper fi, huh, even in the wild blue yonder?”

“You got it.”

“Someone’s coming..”

Maggie starts. Koda has snapped out of whatever reverie has held her and is staring at a Jeep streaking down the street straight for them. Andrews pulls up with a squeal of brakes and the smell of burned rubber laid down on the asphalt. He salutes, still sitting behind the wheel. “Ma’am!”

Maggie tosses her briefcase into the vehicle and starts to climb in, lifting her sore leg gingerly over the low side by the front passenger seat.. “What’s the problem, Lieutenant?”

“Ma’am, the MP Captain asked me to find you. “There’s a situation at the main gate.”

Without being bidden, Koda and Kirsten pile into the back, Asimov between them. “All right,” Maggie mutters resignedly, regretting the hot bath and the hot supper that have now receded as far into the dim future as civilization itself. “Whatever it is, let’s go tend to it. Semper the hell fi.”

The Jeep bumps along the near-empty street at a speed that rattles Koda’s bones together like bare branches in a norther; the winter weather has not been kind to the tarmac, and repairing potholes has not been high on the Base’s agenda. Andrews seems to be making no particular effort to avoid them, possibly on the theory that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The likelihood of a broken axle does not seem to enter the equation. The snarl of the engine and the sharp whip of the evening air make conversation impossible. Koda hangs onto the rollbar with one hand and Asi with the other; on his other side, Kirsten does the same, face set and pale in the chill blue light that follows sunset. Asi, in contrast, leans into the wind created by their speed, eyes bright, tongue lolling, having the time of his life. George Patton Asimov, Dog of War.

He may get a second chance to prove himself. As rancher, Koda knows that only two types of problems develop at gates, whether they involve humans or cows. One: someone wants in who should not be let in. Two: someone wants out who should not be let out. Given the disorderly scenes of civilians attempting to take up residence on the Base and defying MP’s that she has already witnessed, she is fairly certain that the crisis is of the first type.

The sound comes to them through the gathering darkness, well before they come into sight of the gate, a muffled roar like a tornado grinding across the plains. A steady rhythm runs under it, a bass beat answering point counterpoint to intermittent screams. As near as she can tell, they seem to be cries of anger rather than pain. If they are lucky, they may still have a bit of time before matters get entirely out of hand. It won’t be much, though. In the seat in front of her, Maggie pokes Andrews’ arm and mimes a heavier foot on the accelerator. Andrews nods and floors it. Without a word, Koda and Kirsten link arms behind Asi to hold him in place; oblivious to his own safety, he throws back his head and howls like a wolf following blood spoor, closing in on his prey.

“He’s enjoying this, the idiot!” Kirsten yells, the shout barely audible above the racket of the Jeep and the ever-closer thunder of what is clearly a mob.

Koda grins in answer, holding tighter to both the dog and the Jeep. But the sound that she has dreaded cracks out in the middle of one of Asi’s canine arpeggios, and she lets go of the bar and shifts her weight to draw the automatic pistol she has carried ever since the battle. In front of her, Maggie already has her own sidearm in her hand, held low and ready. Kirsten’s is in her lap. “Rifle,” Koda shouts into the wind, and Kirsten nods agreement even though Koda doubts she has heard. The sound is unmistakable. The lack of return fire to that single shot is no comfort.

Andrews rounds the corner where the commissary stands and streaks full throttle down the straightaway toward the Base’s main gate. They are no longer alone. Sirens wailing, so close on their bumper that the lead truck almost backedends them, a pair of MP troop carriers swing in behind them from the opposite intersection, and a small ripple of uncoiling muscles runs down Koda’s back. The situation is still not good, but it is no longer as bad as it was a second or two ago.

At the distance of three or four hundred meters and closing, it becomes clear that a full-scale riot is in the offing. One panel of the Base’s double steel gates blocks the right lane of the road, rolled shut across a clot of a dozen cars and trucks angled in as many different directions. A second logjam of vehicles clogs the left lane. A pair of heavy-duty pickups, the long-bedded, double-cab sort that can carry a dozen armed adults apiece, stand aimed at them just beyond the guardhouse, their front tires punctured on the teeth of steel bars that have risen up out of the asphalt like a pair of shark’s dentures. Over and around and among and on top of the cars and trucks, perhaps forty people stand shouting at the two MP’s on watch. The guards hold their weapons at waist level, ready to fire though not aimed at the crowd.

Add nitroglycerin and stir lightly until moistened: the situation is a breath away from disaster. Maybe less.

Maggie is out of the Jeep before it comes completely to a halt, fishtailing to a stop just behind the guardhouse. Koda and Kirsten pile out on her heels, Asimov and Andrews pace for pace behind them. The carrier trucks swing into nearly right-angle turns, one to barricade each traffic lane; MP’s come spilling out their rear flaps, armed with riot helmets, shields and clubs, to stand shoulder to shoulder across the tarmac. At the sight of them, the crowd surges forward, its roar clawing its way up the scale until it becomes a sustained howl. Without warning, the searchlights mounted on the cabs of the MP trucks flare to life, sweeping the crowd with beams bright enough to dazzle the eyes of anyone who looks directly into them. A ripple passes through the crowd as arms and hands attempt to block the glare; here and there, a figure turns away entirely and begins to move toward the back of the mob. More ominously, the light picks out the metal fittings of half a dozen deer rifles, here and there the skeletal form of an M-16 or an AK-47.

Maggie snatches a bullhorn from the hand of the MP Captain and vaults up onto the bed, then the cab roof, of one of the impaled pickups. Koda and Kirsten clamber up to take station in the back of the truck, facing the crowd, guns held low but visible in front of them. Asimov stands on the lowered tailgate, ruff brisling and tail held straight and prickly as lodgepole pine. His lips curl up to bare his teeth. For an instant his form seems to blur, his head lose its angularity to become shorter in the muzzle, his ears less sharply pointed, his whole face broader beneath the eyes.

A chill slips down Koda’s spine, and the sense of something indefinably other—otherkind, otherwhere, otherwhen—follows after. Something of the same feeling, no more than a frisson, had slid through her mind, half-memory, half-not, while she had watched the ravens making their way into the forest as the sun brushed the horizon in its steepening fall toward night. Time has gone awry, the earth tilted off its accustomed axis, past and future irrupting into the present like steam rising in a geyser.

“I can’t hear you!” Maggie’s voice brings her back from her split-second drift into the time stream. Again, metallic and magnified almost beyond recognition, all its Southern softness gone: “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” Gun tucked back into the waistband of her trousers, Maggie points at a red-faced man in a plaid hunting jacket at the front of the crowd. “You! Talk to me! What the hell’s going on here!”

The man shouts something back, inaudible. “Say again!” Maggie shouts.

Gradually the crowd quiets, and the unexpected spokesperson steps a little away from the others, moving cautiously with his eyes on the line of MP’s just behind the truck that has suddenly become a podium. His hand moves to the brim of his Stetson in reflexive good manners, hesitates, and tilts the hat back on his head at a jauntier angle instead. His step takes on the suggestion of a strut. Unimpressed, Koda suppresses a snort: a banty rooster, this one, all crow and no balls. She catches the roll of Kirsten’s eyes and almost winks in response; it’s as bad a case of testosterone poisoning as she’s ever seen. Unobtrusively, Koda thumbs the safety off her gun. Covering one hand with the other almost demurely, Kirsten does the same, staring at the man and the crowd behind him with eyes bright and cold and hard as green diamonds.

“Who the hell are you?” the Stetson roars.

“Margaret Allen, United States Air Force. Who the fuck are you?”

A murmur runs through the crowd, and the truculent expression drops off several faces in the front. Word of the battle of the Cheyenne has apparently gotten out to at least some of the remaining civilian population. Further back, a couple of rifle barrels slip from view. Sensing the change behind him, the man’s voice loses a fraction of its edge. “I’m Bill Dietrich, and I’m a law-abiding citizen. You want to explain to me why U. S. citizens can’t come onto a Base their taxes paid for?”

Far back in the crowd, someone yells, “You tell ‘er, Bill,” and another, sharply female, snaps, “Shut up, you idiot!”

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Dietrich,” Maggie responds evenly. “Suppose you tell me why you and the good folks behind you are attempting to trespass on a restricted government installation.”

“What guvmint? There ain’t no guvmint! We got a right to what we paid for.”

At that Kirsten steps forward, moving to where Asi stands at the alert at the edge of the tailgate. The glare of the searchlights leaches color from her, turning her hair silver, her face ghost-pale. Her voice, when she speaks, is as chill as her face. “Allow me to introduce myself, Mr. Dietrich. I’m Kirsten King, and I’m the only surviving member of the Cabinet we know of.” She pauses, letting the effect filter through the crowd for a moment. “And much as I would hate to do it, I’m prepared to ask these law enforcement officers to enforce the law by firing on you if necessary. Whether it’s necessary or not is up to you.” She steps back toward the cab of the truck, her gun now in plain sight.

A second man detaches himself from the crowd, unceremoniously elbowing Dietrich aside. He is tall and lanky and grey, with creases carved deep around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. “Ma’am, I’m Jim Henderson. I’ve got a ranch up the road a bit, or did have. Had a family, too. Now I’ve just got one daughter, and her only because she was out riding fence with me when the droids took or killed the rest. All I want is a safe place for her. That’s what we all want, Ms. Secretary, Colonel Allen—just a place to be safe.”

“I understand,” Maggie answers. “But you have to understand that the Base is not safe. It’s already been a target twice; we’re likely to be attacked again.”

“You beat the droids!” That from somewhere about halfway back. “They’re gone!”

“We beat one contingent of the droids,” she corrects the speaker. “There are more where they came from, believe me.”

“Then you gotta protect us! Let us in!” Dietrich swaggers to the fore again.

Koda hears Maggie’s sharply indrawn breath, magnified by the bullhorn. Her voice, though, remains patient. “Mr Dietrich, tell me something. How do I know you’re not a droid? How can we tell you’re not a spy trying to force your way in here?”

“Why that’s the damnedest stupidest thing I ever heard of! Listen to me, you---” He breaks off abruptly. “Look, lady, that uniform don’t make you god!”

“I know one way to tell if he’s a droid,” Kirsten remarks almost casually. “Droids don’t bleed.”

“Look,” Maggie says, “We can’t insure your security unless we can insure the security of the Base and our assets. You folks can try to fight your way in, and lose. You can lose even more of your people. You can kill some of these soldiers who have already bled for you at the Cheyenne.”

She pauses, allowing that to sink in. Koda is pleased to see more guns disappear from view.

“Go home. If it will make you feel more secure, you can move into some of the vacant houses closer to the Base. But don’t expect us to support you; we can’t do it. You’ll have to find ways to feed yourselves and protect yourselves from everything but armed attack. That’s your job as citizens. Ours is to defend you from enemies foreign and domestic—and android. You can obstruct us, or you can help us serve you. Your choice.”

“Who’s in charge?” The voice comes from somewhere in the middle of the crowd, unidentifiable by age or gender.

Which is the sixty-four million dollar question, isn’t it? Koda’s eyes flick sideways to Kirsten, only to find that the other woman is looking directly at her. With a small shake of her head, Koda averts her glance and returns to watching the crowd. For the first time since the uprising, she is truly and personally afraid of what may come. Because the question is not just who’s in charge now but who will be in charge if human society somehow beats the odds and manages to survive.

And the only viable answer is that it will be someone entirely different, something entirely different, than anything that has gone before.

Maggie shouts into the bullhorn. “General Hart is the Commanding Officer of this Base. Dr. King is the highest surviving civilian authority that we know about. Like it or not, we have to assume that the new capital of the United States is now Ellsworth Air Force Base. And that’s going to mean the kind of security restrictions we had before, only more so.” She pauses. “But you’re free people. You need to choose yourselves a mayor or manager or whatever you want to call it. You need to pick law officers. Because as far as I’m concerned the Constitution is still in effect, and the American military does not police American civilians. Anybody got any problems with that?”

The crowd begins to mill, movement coalescing somewhere around its center. Some of them clearly do have problems with that, and have come here in hopes of finding someone to tell them what to do. Others, their faces clearly relieved even in the flat glare of the floodlights, have heard what they needed to hear. Slowly, infinitely slowly, its members begin to bleed off, backing out of the gate on foot, others getting into their vehicles to inch away in reverse. The MP’s begin to pace them, moving in line, shields locked in a solid wall.

Kirsten raps out, “Hold! Let them go voluntarily.”

The line halts as if frozen, and as the last of the would-be mob filters out, the duty guards roll the second panel of the gate into place. It locks with a soul-satisfying clang.

Maggie jumps down from the top of the cab, stumbling a little on her right leg.

Koda slips a hand under her arm to steady her. “You okay?”

A smile plays for a moment about Maggie’s mouth. “Rapists, mobs, oh yeah, just a day in the freakin’ life.” To the MP Captain, she says, “I want half a dozen more guards on this gate and as many on the side entrance. I want staggered patrols all around the perimeter. M-60s’. We’re in lockdown. Nobody gets in and nobody gets out until we know precisely who’s on Base and who has what useful skill.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” The Captain salutes and turns to sort his troops out into patrols.

“And Captain,” Kirsten adds. “If anybody comes over the fence, shoot to kill. This Base was a restricted area before; it’s a restricted area now.”

“Ma’am.” Again, he salutes. “I’m on it.”

Asi, standing down from red alert with an ease granted to none of the humans, begins to wave the plume of his tail. Whining, he paws at Koda’s leg, then noses at her pocket, looking for treats..

Kirsten reaches down to ruffle his fur. “He’s right,” she says. “It’s past suppertime. Let’s go home.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

FOR THE THIRD time in less than an hour, Dakota looks toward the window, then frowns distractedly before returning to her duties. The base vet might have been an excellent diagnostician, but his office skills were decidedly lacking. She has had to send two sets of volunteers on trips to the nearby towns to raid the vet facilities there and return with any usable supplies they can, and it still isn’t close to being enough. As groups of people continue to stream onto the base, they bring their pets with them; pets who have often-times suffered as much, if not more, than their owners. The clinic is bursting at the seams; full of frostbitten dogs, half-mauled cats, dehydrated turtles, constipated snakes, sick birds of all kinds, and a number of more exotic species, along with several army canines who are slowly recovering from injuries suffered during the initial battle with the androids.

With a soft grunt, she tosses the pencil down and pushes away from the desk, running weary fingers through her disordered hair. She checks the window again, then the clock. Something is nagging at her, and has been for the past hour or so, but she can’t put a finger on what it is, and that fact is driving her just shy of nuts.

“What?” she barks in response to a light tap on her office door.

The door slowly opens and a curly-mopped young woman pokes her head in, expression slightly nervous. “You asked me to let you know when I walked Condor, Doctor.” Condor is one of the army dogs who had taken several bullet wounds to the belly and flank. It has been touch and go with him for the past weeks but he appears now well on the road to recovery. “He did fine. I think he can be discharged in a day or two.”

Nodding, Koda forces a smile to her face. “Thank you, Shannon. You’ve done very well with him.”

The young woman blushes under the quiet praise, then calms, her eyes concerned. “Are you…okay?”

“Mm?” Koda drags her gaze away from the window yet again. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked if you were alright. You seem…distracted?”

“Oh.” She shakes her head slightly, clearing it. “No. Just,” one hand waves toward the paper-strewn desktop, “trying to deal with this mess. I never was all that fond of paperwork.”

Shannon brightens. “Well, I might have a solution for that.” At Dakota’s raised eyebrow, she continues. “I have a friend, Melissa, who used to be an Admin Assistant for Kuyger-Barren-Micholvski, the law firm? She’s been going crazy with nothing to do. I’m sure she’d be happy to pitch in, if you like.”

This time, Koda’s smile is more genuine. “I could use all the help I can get.”

“Great! I’ll let her know tonight.”

“Fair enough.” Dakota rises from the chair with fluid grace and grabs her Stetson from the coat rack and settles it on her head, sweeping her hair behind her broad shoulders. “I’m going for a walk. Hold down the fort, will ya?”

“With pleasure, Doc—Dakota.”

*

Maggie sorts through the folders in her briefcase as she waits for the clock on the wall to tick officially around to 11:00. Like the conference room, like everything else in the Headquarters building, the walls and floors are grey with occasional Air Force blue accents. A silk ficus to one side of the General’s door and a faux pothos ivy under the window offer the only relief. At her workstation, the General’s secretary bites her lip and dabs at a drop of sweat rounding up under her heretofore perfect mascara. Kimberley has always seemed to Maggie to be forty-going-on-twenty-five, with her acrylic nails and seamless make-up, short skirts and years-out-of-fashion high heels. Now her heart-shaped face is pinched with effort as she struggles with an old-fashioned manual typewriter, resurrected from God-knows-what basement or storage building. An equally antiquated adding machine perches on the edge of her desk, the kind with a handle that is pulled after each entry to crank up a sum or tax percentage. Maggie recognizes it only because her accountant grandfather kept one of the things on top of the barristers’ bookcase in his office, part of a collection that included such other relics as a slide rule and a solid-black metal telephone with a rotary dial that clicked satisfyingly when she stuck her finger into the perforated disk, pulled it around to the stop and watched it spin back..

That had been nearly forty years ago. A lifetime now; an eon. At five she did not go in for elaborate existential metaphors. She is not pleased that she has begun to see them everywhere now.

The sense of temporal dislocation that has plagued her intermittently for the past week has begun to solidify into a reality she is still not quite prepared to face. Finally and irrevocably, the world has changed. The crisis is not temporary, not just a matter of devising a widget or developing an anti-viral, biological or cyber, that will allow the technological world to right itself onto its accustomed axis and go on spinning. Even if Kirsten King manages to cause every last remaining droid to self-destruct in a single ecstatic nanosecond, there is no way to restore much, maybe most, of what has been lost. And here, an icon of that brave new world folding back into its own past, is a goddamed Olivetti typewriter, its uneven clack of metal keys without doubt the harbinger of more and worse to come.

And aren’t we Ms. Congeniality this morning? C’mon Allen, snap out of it.

Though she has not put it so dramatically to herself, she is here to try to save a man’s life. She can afford neither depression nor woolgathering in the middle of such a sensitive rescue operation.

Because we can’t afford to lose anybody now. Not even an asinine General who bombs first and asks questions later. Not even couple dozen decent citizens of Rapid City who had come within an angstrom of morphing into an out-of- control mob less than eighteen hours ago. Every asset must be deployed and its utility maximized.

Even General Hart.

The clock hand creeps round to 10:56. The typewriter keys continue to clatter in a spotty rhythm, punctuated by small mewing sounds from the secretary every time she makes a mistake. Not for the first time since she has entered the office, Maggie wonders what the hell there is to type in triplicate these days.

She is on a mission of mercy, she tells herself wryly. She might as well have pity on Kimberley, too.

Aloud she says, “You’ll get your computer back. as soon as we have a reliable source of electricity. Sergeant Rivers has gone out to the Red River Co-op wind farm to see if we can move in some of the big generators.”

The secretary turns to look at her, a spark of something besides irritation in her eyes for the first time since Maggie has entered the outer office. “He’s that really tall Sioux guy, isn’t he? Army, not Air Force—the really cute one.”

Maggie breathes a mental sigh. She knows exactly what’s coming next, and it arrives on schedule as surely as Old Faithful or the Italian trains under Musollini.

“. . . really good-looking. Is he single?”

As gently as she can, she answers, “I think so. I don’t recall that he’s mentioned a husband.”

“Oh,” the woman says in a small voice. Then, plaintively, “What are we going to do, Colonel Allen? There’s so few men left. Is it going to be like in the Bible, with one man having three or four wives? Wives and concubines? What’s going to happen now?”

With a supreme effort of will, Maggie manages not to grind her teeth. “I don’t know, Kimberley. But what we’re not going to do is fall back into some Bronze Age form of patriarchy. That will not happen. Will. Not. Happen.”

“It’s happening in town, Colonel. My sister belongs to one of those Bible-believing temples. You know, where the women can’t wear pants or make-up and nobody drinks or dances and church goes on for four hours on Sunday. She said the preacher has already got three wives of his own, one of them only thirteen.” Kimberley snorts, a sound that reassures Maggie that her considerable good sense has not in fact been a casualty of the uprising. “Says it’s the will of God, a holy thing. As if.” She turns back to her typewriter, rearranging the triple load of paper and –Goddess! Maggie stares in wonderment. Is that actually carbon paper? It is.—carbons. “Just a dirty old man if you ask me.”

Miraculously, the clock hand has arrived at 11:01. Maggie clears her throat, pointing.

Kimberley glances up, then makes a show of checking her appointment book. “Go on in, Colonel.”

Maggie gathers her papers, snaps her brief case shut, and escapes.

*

The South Dakota spring is showing her fickle side again, having just finished dumping a fresh four inches of powdery snow that sparkles in the warming sun like scattered diamonds. The breeze is fresh, and crisp, but lacks the arctic bitterness of true winter, and Koda breathes it in with an absent sense of pleasure.

The streets are, for once, quiet, nearly empty. Far from soothing, however, this causes the nagging feeling in Koda’s gut to return. A shadow crosses her path, and she looks up in time to see Wiyo circling low overhead. Her warning cry coincides perfectly with the sound of a single shot, and everything slips into place, clear as crystal. An animal’s snarl mists the air before her face. She turns and heads for the gate at a dead run, teeth bared, lips twisted as a second and third shot ring out followed by barking, mocking male laughter.

There are several airmen peering through the barred gate at what lies beyond. She ignores this, instead darting to the left and up the fifteen foot guard tower, taking the steps three at a time. Brushing past the startled MP, she circles the tower until she is looking over the grounds just outside the gate.

Three flannel-clad men stand outside a still-running pickup truck, each armed with a scoped rifle. They are clearly drunk and one even leans fully against the truck’s fender, his legs no longer able to support him.

“Shoot it again, Frank! It’s still movin!”

She follows their sightline to see a she-wolf, slat thin and panting, peering over the snow ridge to the east. The wolf is clearly injured, but still, she doesn’t flee. There is a quiet desperation to her darting eyes, moving from the men shooting at her to the men behind the gate. Another shot throws up snow just in front of her muzzle, and she ducks, only to pop up a second later, tongue lolling, eyes rolling.

Wiyo screams overhead, and one of the men lifts rifle and head, shooting into the air. The hawk wheels, unharmed, and screams again.

Without thought, Koda grabs the M-16 from the guard’s hands and lifts it to high port, staring down the sight with one piercing eye. Caressing the trigger, she stitches a neat line at the shooter’s feet. He whirls, the barrel of his rifle narrowly missing the man standing beside him. “What the fuck?!?” He narrows his eyes at the woman—at least he thinks it’s a woman, with that hat and that height, who can tell?—standing on the guard tower, pointing the business end of an M-16 at him. “Who the fuck are you, bitch?”

“Drop that rifle, or you’ll never find out.”

“Oh yeah?”

Her voice is velvet over steel. “Oh yeah.”

Summoning his drunken courage, the man does the opposite of what he has been commanded, ponderously lifting his rifle and aiming it at the she-demon on the guard tower.

“I wouldn’t,” Koda murmurs, her voice just strong enough to prick his hearing.

“Says who, bitch?”

The sound of a dozen M-16s being cocked gives the man an eloquent answer.

Paling noticeably, he lowers his rifle. His friends drop theirs and dive for the ubiquitous safety of the pickup.

“Sergeant!” Koda shouts down to the guard leader.

“Ma’am!”

“Round those three up and take them to the brig.”

“For what?!?” the drunken man demands. “You ain’t got no hold on us! We’re on public land!”

“Exactly,” Koda hisses, her grin most unpleasant. “Cruelty to animals will do for starters. If that doesn’t stick, assault with a deadly weapon.”

“You can’t…!”

“Open the gate!” the Sergeant yells.

Hearing this, the man drops his weapon and runs, jumping into his truck and fumbling for the gearshift.

An M-16 rattles, and the truck suddenly finds itself with two flats and a fractured engine block. The punctured radiator sends up a bellow of steam from beneath the hood and the truck shudders, and dies.

“Come out of there with your hands over your heads! We won’t ask you twice!”

Koda doesn’t need to see the rest of it. She hands the gun back to the MP with a quiet murmur of thanks, and crosses the tower, pelting down the steps with speed. Running through the gate, she immediately turns toward the ridge, long strides eating up the ground beneath her. The wolf has disappeared behind the ridge, but she doesn’t need sight to track her. The scent of blood is heavy in the air, and she can feel the pain radiating from the injured animal, tugging hard at a part of her that is far more kin to the wolf than to any of the humans behind her.

Halfway up the shallow ridge, she deliberately slows her steps, listening as the wolf’s panting breaths are interrupted by a weak warning growl.

“It’s okay, shugmanitu tanka, it’s okay. I won’t hurt you.” She steps carefully upwind so that her scent is carried to the injured animal.

Cresting the ridge, she stops and looks down at the silver-tipped fur and the crimson stain slowly spreading in the snow. Her eyes narrow. This is a wolf she knows; the alpha female of a large pack whose home range covers several hundred miles, from the base to her family’s home and beyond. That she’s alone and obviously starving is of great concern.

She meets the wolf’s eyes, then shifts her gaze abruptly to the side before looking back. After a moment, the wolf does the same, and Koda relaxes, letting go a slow breath that clouds the air between them. She resumes her steps, narrowing the gap between them, then drops gracefully to her haunches, holding out an ungloved hand for the animal to sniff.

A soft whine lets her know she’s been accepted, and she spends a long moment unmoving, examining the she-wolf with just her experienced gaze. Beneath dry, brittle and thinning fur, her ribs stand out like dinosaur bones, aspirating weakly with every panting breath. Her tongue is dry, cracked, and bleeding in places, indicating severe dehydration. Blood is pouring from two bullet wounds—no more than grazes really, but in her weakened condition they are life-threatening.

Acting on intuition, Koda reaches slowly over and ruffles through the hair on the wolf’s belly. The nipples are swollen, reddened and cracked.

An early litter. Shit. Removing her hand, she peers into dark, pain-wracked eyes. “Where are your pups, ina?”

With a soft whine, the she-wolf looks over her shoulder, then attempts to rise. She collapses a second later, all of her energy completely drained.

“It’s alright, ina, it’s okay. I’ll find them for you. But first, I need to help you so you can help them, alright?”

Feeling along her ruff, Koda slips an arm under the wolf’s proud neck, then gathers her flank and stands, cradling the injured animal easily in her arms.

Too weak to struggle, the wolf gives a soft whine, then collapses back against the strong body holding her.

Koda looks up. The hawk is still circling, wingtips fluttering in the air’s heavy currents. “Wiyo! Awayaye!”

With a loud kre-ee-ee, Wiyo circles once more, then comes down to land atop a winter-bare tree, carefully folding her wings behind her and staring straight ahead. “Pilamayaye,” Koda shouts to the hawk, nodding once, sharply.

And with that, she turns and heads back to the base using her quickest and smoothest gait.

*

The room is very much as Maggie has become accustomed to it, grey as the rest of the Headquarters Building except for the framed photographs on the walls. Several show Ellsworth’s various aircraft in flight against impossibly blue skies: the Tomcat with its delta wings swept back, the sleek B-1, ponderous and old-fashioned B-52’s that look like nothing so much as locusts built to cyclopean scale. Others depict Hart in the company of various dignitaries: the most recent with President Clinton, the earliest with her husband during his tenure as Commander in Chief. The fluorescent light illuminates them coldly, chilling the imaged skies and the deep blue of uniforms and the hills that ring the Base. Pulled tightly over the windows, curtain panels barricade the office against the bright spring day of strengthening sun and melting snow that lies just on the other side of the glass. There is a settled stillness here that creeps over Maggie’s skin like the passing of a ghost.

The room is so quiet that it seems at first that she is alone. Then paper rustles, drawing her eye to the massive desk at one end of the room as the General slowly pages through a stack of reports, pausing to glance at each one while she stands waiting. With a flourish, he initials three of them, consigning them to one neatly squared-off stack, the apparent rejects to another. The neat surface seems somehow empty, and it comes to Maggie that there are several framed photographs missing. Finally, his point made, the General rises, unfolding out of his leather chair with the suddenly stiff joints of an octagenarian. Maggie has never been quite certain whether the old-fashioned gesture is residual gallantry so ingrained that it is intractable, or whether it is a reminder that while she may be an officer, a gentlewoman and a decorated battle ace, she is still a woman and therefore not quite equal to any one of the boys. “Margaret,” he says. “Good morning.”

“Good morning, Sir,” she echoes. A burning begins, deep in her solar plexus, spreading itself along her nerves until her skin feels as though she has taken fire, incandescent in the chill of the long room. Hart has never played power politics adroitly, and this attempt at dominance is almost as crude as his revelation of the one blot he had been able to find on her record. For an instant Maggie wants nothing so much as to turn on her heel and walk out. Leave him for the jackals, damn him. But she cannot do that. Hart has talents that are in short supply.

He is a human being, she reminds herself sternly. Human beings themselves are in short supply, male human beings even shorter. None salvageable can be wasted with impunity.

“Salvageable” being the operative word. One of the matters they must discuss is the trial and subsequent punishment of the rapists from Mandan and Grand Rapids.

Hart gestures toward the comfortable armchair across the desk, then settles back into his own with an attempt at ease that only emphasizes the angularity of his movements. His skin seems faded by more than the sunless months of snow, his features not so much relaxed as given in to the pull of gravity.

Dead man walking.

He says, startling her almost as much as if he truly were dead, “What can I do for you this morning, Colonel?’

Maggie snaps open her briefcase, removes a pair of manila envelopes and lays them on the General’s desk, facing him. “Casualty report, sir.”

The General lifts one of the files, fans the pages with a thumb and then sets it down again. He does not bother to examine it or read the figures in detail. “How bad?”

“A hundred and fifty dead,” she replies, her voice tight. “Of those, approximately two thirds were military personnel, the remainder civilian volunteers. The heaviest losses occurred on the far side of the river, among the troops assigned to close on the enemy from the rear.”

“Sergeant Rivers’ contingent?” There is a hint of something in his voice that Maggie cannot quite identify; not anger, precisely, not exactly jealousy. Resentment, perhaps.

“Yes. As you’re aware from initial reports, Sir, they came under heavier fire than any of the other units.”

Hart simply nods. Whatever he feels or thinks, he is not going to share it with a subordinate who has, in his clear if unspoken view, usurped his position. “Injuries?”

Maggie points toward the other folder. “Eighty percent ambulatory. The remainder include everything from punctured lungs to third degree burns. The medics tell me we may still lose as many as a quarter of them.”

“Burial details?”

“Proceeding.”

“Very good. What else?”

With considerable distaste, Maggie hands him a third, thicker folder. “Incident report. Reports, actually.”

“I see. Under control?”

“For the time being.”

“What else? How are the prosecutions of the collaborators going?”

“Sir—”

Hart regards her without speaking, not giving her an opening. From the far side of the window come the first hesitant notes of a sparrow’s song to set up a counterpoint to the muffled clack of keys from the secretary’s desk. Perhaps she imagines it, but the grey rectangle of the window seems somehow lighter, as if the sun has emerged fully from the cloud cover that dampened the early morning. She suppresses an urge, almost overpowering, to rise and fling back the curtains, to let the day come spilling into the dingy room.

She cannot do it, though, without being rude, almost insubordinate. Hart has a certain entitlement to his gloom; by rights, his depression should be his own affair. Certainly she cannot openly notice it without embarrassing him, and probably herself. More certainly yet, it would bring his resentment firmly down on her and end any chance of cooperation. Indeed, during the course of their conversation, his face has become both more drawn and more remote. A man going through the motions, getting it over with as rapidly as he can.

Getting human beings as far away from him as he can.

“Sir, if we can get back to the incident reports for a moment—?”

“Yes?”

“Sir, if you’ll look at those reports, you’ll see that a pattern is developing. It’s one we’re not currently equipped to deal with.” Maggie replaces the folder in front of him.

After a pause, clearly reluctant, he picks it up again and begins to read, silently and without comment. Several minutes later he puts it down again. His mouth purses into a tight little moue of exasperation; it is the closest he has come to looking like himself since she entered the office. “Will you please tell me, Colonel, why there are three civilian drunks in the Base jail? Have we taken to picking up winos in alleys or good ol’ boys out on a binge? Surely we can use our resources better than that.”

“They were shooting at a wolf, General, right in front of the main gate.”

“I see,” he says in a voice that makes it clear that he does not. “The United States Air Force is now enforcing environmental regulations?”

“It seems that we may be, Sir, but that’s a side issue. The real problem is that these three idiots drew down on our own MP’s when Dr. Rivers put a stop to their fun.”

“Dr. Rivers. And of course our MP’s—they are still our MP’s, are they not Colonel?—were deployed to back her up.”

The words drop like stones into the air, and Maggie feels the heat as it spreads over her face and neck. ‘The men were drunk, disorderly and presented a direct threat to human life, General. It was a reflection, albeit a minor one, of the previous incident at the gate. That one had the potential to develop into a genuine riot. There could have been deaths—civilians and our troops, both.”

“And your solution to this problem is—?”

And there it is, right in front of her. Maggie mentally crosses her fingers and breaths a small prayer to Koda’s Ina Maka. Or anyone else out there who’s listening. She will have only one chance. Get it wrong, and there will be no way to put it right. It is only with a conscious effort that she does not draw a deeper and very obvious breath before speaking. Here goes.

“My solution, if we can call it that, has to do with reframing the problem, Sir. What we have in the gate riot, the civilians attempting to appropriate Base housing, the numbskulls taking potshots at the wildlife, is a breakdown of civil authority. Quite simply, there is none at the moment.”

All trace of animation recedes from Hart’s face. “There is Dr. King. She is, after all, the only surviving Cabinet officer that we know of, de facto President, if she wants to think of herself that way. And according to your report here, she certainly managed to restore order or help restore order in two of these incidents.”

Maggie shakes her head. “True. But the most valuable thing she can do right now is continue to search for the code that will disable the androids. Someone is needed immediately. Someone who is an experienced administrator and has the confidence of the townspeople as well as the military.”

The General rises to his feet and paces a few feet away, waving her back into her chair when she rises with him. “No, no. Sit down.” He turns to face her, hands behind his back but not at ease at all. “And where will we find such a person, Colonel Allen? Am I mistaken when I assume that you—or you and Dr. Rivers, or the two of you and Dr. King—have someone in mind?”

“I have discussed the matter with Dr. King, yes. As you say, she is the de facto President.”

“And?”

“Sir, we have problems that are not within our military mission to solve. You asked about the trials of the rapists; they’re precisely the kind of thing we don’t really have a way to deal with. For instance—” she refers to yet another folder—“I’ve drawn up suggested indictments under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But can we—legally, Constitutionally—try these men in a military court?”

“It’s the only court we have, Colonel Allen.” Hart’s tone is patient, as if he is explaining the obvious to a rather slow child.

“Which is precisely the problem, Sir. No one has declared martial law. The crimes did not occur on Federal property. They are not Federal offenses, with the exception of collaborating with the enemy and possibly the conspiracy charges. We have them in jail, we’re organizing their trials, but we have no legal jurisdiction.”

“And how will a civil, or civilian, administrator solve this difficulty?”

“Sir, there is currently no legal authority at all in Rapid City. We’ve seen the result of that in the attempt of several families to claim vacant Base housing and in a more concerted attempt to force the gates a few nights ago.” Hart’s face remains expressionless. She is not getting through. Play dirty? For an instant Maggie weighs her options, then continues. “Kimberley tells me that polygamy is taking hold in at least one apocalyptic cult in town. Some old coot who fancies himself a prophet is marrying thirteen year old girls—to himself. If that’s better than what’s happening in the jails, you tell me how.”

For an instant the frozen mask drops off Hart’s face, and fear shows through. Somewhere in upstate New York, with his estranged wife, Hart has twin girls of the same age. There is no way of knowing what has happened to them, but none of the possibilities is good, and all are the stuff of a father’s nightmare. It is their photograph that is missing from the General’s desk, perhaps too painful to look at since the insurrection. Really dirty, Allen. Really dirty. But if it gets results. . . .. With a suddenness that is almost audible, like a gate clanging shut, the rigidity is back. Hart snaps, “It’s an atrocity, of course. But at least those young women are accounted for.”

Maggie shuffles papers and changes the subject, leaving the unspoken parallel to work as it will in the General’s conscience. “Then there’s the matter of the trials, as you say. We need to put together a court that will pass muster with the Constitution—a jury of the offenders’ peers, or as near as we can get to it, and at the very least a civilian judge or two to sit with a military panel. If we can somehow locate a state district judge, all the better. Somebody has to organize that, and it has to be someone the civilians in Rapid City and the military personnel on the Base both trust to do the job honestly and efficiently. Otherwise we have no Constitution, no law at all except what comes out of the barrel of an M-16.”

“Do you have a candidate for this position, Colonel Allen? Your good friend Dr. Rivers, perhaps?”

Maggie’s face burns as if she’s been slapped. But she says, steadily. “No, Sir. I was hoping you would be willing to make use of your good relationship with the civilian leadership in Rapid City and the community’s respect for you to take on the job yourself.”

“I see. Aren’t you forgetting that I made a rather spectacular error in judgment in the bombing of Minot? One that throws your own bombing of civilians into the shade? Don’t you think that calls my authority somewhat into question?” She opens her mouth to speak, but he waves her to silence. “Not to mention being publicly backhanded by the charming Dr. King. But all of that opens the way for you, doesn’t it, Colonel? Just a matter of time until you have the name as well as the job of commander. I’m surprised Dr. King hasn’t field-brevetted you General already.”

Maggie draws in a long breath, appalled. She feels as though the earth has suddenly dropped away from under her, leaving her suspended ins pace. Stupid. Stupid. Christ, I should have seen it coming.

Very carefully, she says, “Sir, if you had been on the field at the Cheyenne, you would know who will eventually command our forces, not just the Base.” She lays the words down one by one, heavy with emphasis, willing him to believe.

“It isn’t me.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard about the charge across the bridge. You’ve got your Joan of Arc, Colonel, but she has no training and no experience. She may make a charismatic figurehead, but you and I both know that at the end of the day that’s not enough.” He pauses. “But she has you and her brother to prop her up. She’ll pass well enough, no doubt.”

With an effort at least as great as the force that propelled her across the ruined bridge in Koda’s wake, Maggie manages to get a chokehold on her anger. There seems to be insufficient oxygen in the room; her throat feels so constricted that each word is a struggle. Her vision constricts to pinpoints. “Sir. With respect. You have the administrative experience that no one else surviving can offer. You are respected in the civilian community. Someone needs to hold that community together, or it will collapse into anarchy. And we will waste time and effort we need to spend fighting the droids fighting them instead. You can prevent that.”

“Anything I can prevent, Colonel, I can prevent as Commanding Officer of this Base. Is there anything else? If not. . . .” He gestures toward his desk. “I’m rather busy, as you see.”

It is dismissal. Maggie rises, snapping her attaché case shut. “Thank you for your time, General.”

Hart nods, dismissively, and turns back toward his high-backed leather chair in front of the drawn curtains. The sense of failure heavy about her, Maggie makes her way to the door and out into the reception area. Kimberly is missing, probably gone to lunch, and she is glad not to have to make conversation. She has no backup plan; neither, that she knows of, does Kirsten. They will have to identify someone in Rapid City, back up him or her, and hope that person’s authority can be made to stick by something besides a bayonet.. Maggie rubs her throbbing temples and strikes out for the Judge Advocate’s office and the brig once again.

One son-of-a-bitch down, four to go.

*

“Clamp down on that rate a little. I don’t want her fluid overloaded.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

The small operating suite is brightly lit; brilliant white on chrome sterility.

Koda and Shannon are dressed in green scrubs, surgical masks hanging from their necks. The she-wolf is on the operating table, only lightly sedated; her weakness and profound dehydration making anaesthesia too risky a proposition.

With a soft grunt of satisfaction, Dakota applies the final bandage to the wolf’s flank wound, then strips the bloodied gloves from her hands, tossing them into a nearby red-bagged trash bin. Long fingers trail through the coarse, brittle fur, stopping briefly against a bony chest, feeling the reassuring beat of life beneath bone and skin. “I’ve done the best I can, shugmanitu tanka. The rest is up to you now.”

“Is that her name?” Shannon asks as she deftly removes the bag of IV fluid from the pole while Dakota gathers the dazed wolf into her arms.

“Mm? I’m sorry?”

“What you called her. Shug…mani…. Is that her name?”

Koda smiles, slipping backward through the swinging doors and into the recovery area. “Shugmanitu tanka. It means ‘wolf’ in Lakota.”

Shannon blushes, then laughs softly. “Oh.” She tips her head toward a large wire kennel separated from the rest, its bottom nested with soft towels. “That one okay?”

“Perfect.” Squatting down, Koda slides the barely conscious wolf into the warm nest and ruffles quickly through her fur, checking all wounds for seepage. When all seems well, she peers into her eyes, and nods, satisfied before closing the door and standing back up. She turns to look at Shannon, who is hanging the IV bag on a poll next to the kennel. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

“Sure! Name it.”

“I know it’s getting late, but I need you to watch over her for a little while longer for me. She’s got a litter out there somewhere and I need to find them before it gets dark.”

Shannon’s eyes widen in shock. “A litter? So early?”

“Too early,” Koda agrees. “But they’re out there. We would never have seen her if they weren’t.”

“Are you sure you can find them?”

“I’ll find them.” A beat, as she looks at the young woman. “Will you stay?”

“As long as you need me to.”

Koda’s lips twitch in some semblance of a smile. It’s not perfect, but it serves its purpose. “Thanks.”

Pulling her heavy coat on directly over her scrubs, Dakota gathers several warm blankets, a basket, and a handful of ChemHeat packs in her arms and heads back outside, the setting sun gilding her in tones of purest gold.

*

The figures march across the screen in orderly rows, keeping lockstep as the files scroll up and disappear over the top edge. Kirsten thinks of micrographs she has seen of blood cells spilling down through the narrow channel of vein and artery, compact red discs propelled from the conundrum of their origin to the mystery of their destination by the alternating pressure of dystole and systole. She thinks of Disney movies and television science specials, streams of army ants gnawing their way across the forest floor in a pheromone-driven rush from here to there, leaving bare earth in their wake. She thinks of lemmings, diving headlong into the sea.

No meaning in any of it.

There are moments when she is so close to the solution—when she knows she is so close to the solution—that she can almost see the dim shape of it forming on the screen. But something is always missing, something vital, the single segment of code that will turn the string of integers into a signal that, properly transmitted, will stop the droids where they stand. And that, in turn, will free the rest of surviving humanity, both those held in jails and the all rest, held by fear or resolve or instinct for survival to resist their rule.

Kirsten removes her glasses, laying them carefully on the desk, and scrubs at her eyes. She is blind weary, almost literally, with the hours of unbroken attention seated before the computer. Her eyes sting; her back aches; the muscles of thigh and shoulder have twisted themselves into macramé in the four hours she has been staring at the code strings, looking for something that she is beginning to fear is not there. Her mouth tastes of too-strong coffee, reheated once too often. She needs a break.

Deliberately, she snaps the lid of the notebook down and retrieves her glasses. Asimov, who has spent the morning drowsing under the desk, perks up instantly at the small sound, ears up, eyes bright. His tail thumps tentatively against the floor, and he whines softly.

Kirsten reaches down to ruffle his ears. “Yeah, boy. I hear you. Give me a minute, and we’ll go.”

She rises, nearly stumbling with the stiffness of her legs. In the bathroom, she splashes cold water over her face, attempting to force her mind back to alertness. It is pain, though, that does the job, the knotted tendons and cramped ligaments in her neck resisting motion as she leans over the basin, then stands almost on tiptoe to reach the mouthwash on the top shelf of the old-style medicine cabinet. She has lived alone so long that she is seldom aware of her lack of inches, but sharing quarters with one six-footer and another woman almost as tall has brought back all the old annoyance at having to stretch for bottles just beyond the tips of her fingers, the indignity of having to stand on chairs to retrieve items from the top shelves of pantry and closet. She swears softly to herself as the bottle slips away from her grasp toward the back of the cabinet, again when it tips forward to land with a muffled thud in the sink.

Par for the course. Nothing else has gone right today, either, least of all her attempt to reconstruct the necessary cyber commands. Deliberately, Kirsten refuses to allow herself to think what will happen if she does not break the code. Failure is not an option.

Ten minutes later, her eyes scrubbed free of grit and the stale coffee-taste replaced by the astringent bite of the mouthwash, she lets herself and Asimov out the front door. Desperate to get as far away as she can from the virtual environment of her computer, she makes for the stand of woods near where she and Koda had met Maggie the evening of the gate riot. The day stands on the edge of spring, though the sun’s warmth does not yet match its brightness. It lies like pale gold along drifts of new-fallen snow, gilding the dawn side of tall birches and sycamores. Against one bare trunk, a woodpecker hitches its way up the bark, searching for still hibernating insects. High up and far out over the woods, a raven calls, his cries dropping into the soundless air. The streets, which should have been heavily trafficked at mid-day with Base personnel coming home for lunch and pre-school kids playing in the white and winter-brown yards or pedaling their trikes down the sidewalk to the peril of hapless pedestrians, lie deserted and nearly silent. As she follows the curve of the road away from the residential area, she encounters only a single squirrel foraging among the roots of a still-bare oak tree. At the sight of Asi loping toward her, she bottles her tail and scampers up onto an overhanging branch, scolding loudly. Then she, too, falls quiet, darting up into the tree’s crown until the intruders have passed.

Kirsten’s hearing loss has left her adapted to silence. Preferring, it even. For the first time, it occurs to her to wonder how others will deal with a world free of blaring automobile horns and ever present radio and television. A world where human voices are swallowed up not by ambient clatter but by the depths of silence.

A fragment of an antique song drifts through her mind:

Hello, darkness, my old friend.I’ve come to talk to you againAbout a vision softly creepingThat left its seeds while I was sleeping,And the vision that was planted in my brainStill remainsWithin the sounds of silence.

Except, of course, she is a scientist. She does not deal in visions. Just the facts, ma’am.

Just the facts, and preferably the numbers. If it’s quantifiable, it can be trusted. Anything else veers off into the realm of unpredictable emotions and their generally messy effects. Better to keep things orderly.

There is order somewhere in their present situation, even though it is not presently discernable. Someone, somehow, has a reason for turning the droids loose on the remainder of the human race. When that reason is found, motives will become understandable and guilt can be reliably assigned.

She shakes her head to clear her thoughts. She has not come out into the fresh air to keep worrying the problem, turning it over and over, trying to rearrange it like a Rubik Cube until questions and answers all match up. Deliberately forcing her mind away from the droids, she searches the snow cover for a length of fallen branch long and heavy enough to throw well but not too heavy for a round of fetch. Finding one, she brushes the leaf mould off it, and, whistling, pitches out far ahead of her. Asi is off after it in a nanosecond, bounding into the trafficless street and returning at a dead gallop, ears laid back and tail straight out like a rudder, to drop it at her feet and quiver with eagerness to do it again.

When they reach the benches, Kirsten sails the stick off over the incline leading up from the woods, and Asi plunges down it , sliding and slipping in the snow and thewet earth beneath it. Kirsten follows more carefully, having no desire to add bruises on top of her existing sore spots. Neither does she want to have to wash her clothes out by hand. Maggie’s machine runs only on full loads now, and only for things, like sheets and jeans, that cannot reasonably be hand laundered. The bathroom has begun to take on the aspect of a dorm room, socks and underwear in three sizes apiece draped over the shower rails and towel rings.

A small stream flows over the flat ground between the street and the wood, and Kirsten follows it into the trees. Most are still bare, but the ice has begun to melt, and here and there along low hanging braches, she can make out the swollen buds of leaves to come. The stream has thawed entirely, and it murmurs softly as it winds between its dark banks, spilling here and there into a low waterfall, spreading out to hardly more than a film over the petrified fans of ancient lava flows.

Asi is quiet now, pacing beside her. There is no room here where the trees crowd close to keep up their game, and somehow the boisterousness of it seems inappropriate, like laughing in church. Weaving her way between gnarled roots and under low branches that will trail their leaves in the water come summer, her eye is caught by a sudden movement some ten feet ahead of her. She freezes where she stands, and Asi with her.

Apparently oblivious of her presence, a raccoon sits on his haunches at water’s edge, dabbling with both hands in the stream. Kirsten knows that the myths are myths; he is not washing up before lunch, or, for that matter, washing his lunch before lunch. More likely he is searching for his meal, small fish or aquatic insects, perhaps even freshwater mussels. Soundlessly, so as not to disturb him, Kirsten sinks down upon one of the sycamore roots, leaning back against the trunk to watch. She keeps her hand on Asi’s collar, but he has shown no inclination to harass the raccoon. Which is odd, she thinks, but certainly convenient.

For long minutes she watches him, the sun striking coruscating brilliance from the clear water through the gently swaying branches. He seems to be out of luck, for he catches nothing that she can see. Yet he continues his search below the surface, patiently, his eyes taking the errant sunlight like dark rounds of Baltic amber.

She is not sure when or how it happens. Nor has she any idea how long she has sat watching the steady, repetitive motions of the creature’s search. She only knows that somehow the light has changed around her. The intermittent fall of sunlight through the branches has become a steady, golden glow without visible source. Colors have grown deeper, the pale grey water become vivid blue, the rough grey bark of her sycamore a rich and varied umber. The sky, where she can see it between the forking trunk of her sycamore, has turned the impossible shade of perfect turquoise, clouds like feathers drifting lightly along under its canopy. Beside her, Asi has fallen still, whuffling softly in his dream.

With a lunge almost too fast to see, the raccoon splashes into the stream and emerges with a small silver fish, still wriggling, in his mouth. On the bank again, he shakes the water from his coat, and, quiet deliberately, begins to clamber over the uneven ground directly toward Kirsten herself. Kirsten holds herself motionless, scarcely breathing. Part of her mind is screaming that this is abnormal behavior, and that she is about to be bitten by a rabid animal. The other part waits in stillness, a frisson running over her skin like electricity. She does not know what is about to happen, but even she knows magic when she sees it. Asi never stirs.

When the raccoon is no more than a yard from her, he sits back on his haunches again. Golden eyes never leaving hers, he takes the fish from his mouth with one long-fingered hand and calmly bites its head off. He chews thoughtfully, swallows, and says, “Well damn, it took you long enough. What kept you?”

For a moment the tingle of anticipation turns to real fear. Nothing in her zoology courses has prepared her for talking animals. She is either mad or dreaming.

Or she was right the first time, and it is magic.

She says, “What do you mean, long enough? Do you have any idea what I’ve been doing the last three months? It’s not like we had an appointment.”

“Oh, we had an appointment, all right. You just didn’t know it.”

“Not any appointment I made. I don’t pencil hallucinations into my schedule.”

“I am not,” the raccoon says, enunciating very carefully, “an hallucination.”

“Then what are you? A dream? Something I ate?”

The raccoon pauses with the fish halfway to his mouth again. “What do I look like, you idiot human? Chopped liver?”

“You look like—”

“I,” he interrupts, speaking with extreme dignity, “am Wika Tegalega.”

He waits, as though he expects the name to mean something to her. When the silence threatens to become awkward, she says, “Pleased to meet you. Kirsten King, here.”

“I know that. Since you apparently don’t speak Real Human yet, I’ll tell you what my name means. It’s ‘Magic One with Painted Face.’ You can call me Tega. I’m your spirit animal.”

“My what?”

“Your spirit animal. Your guide. Think of me as your guardian angel if you have trouble getting your head around a Real People idea.”

“Aaallll riiight,” she drawls. “So what did I do to acquire a spirit animal?. Or guardian angel? Or whatever?” She makes a dismissive gesture with one hand. “In case you haven’t noticed, I have a guardian animal. He chases the likes of you up trees.”

The raccoon shows all his teeth, which are very white and very sharp and very many, in what would be a grin if he were human. There doesn’t seem to be anything humorous in it now, though. “Him and whose army? Looks like tomorrow’s stew to me.”

“What!” She starts to stand, to escape from this surreal conversation, but finds that her muscles will not obey her. It is not paralysis; it is mutiny by her own body, acting on its own wisdom.

“Okay. Look, I’m sorry. Nobody’s going to eat your mutt.” Wika Tegalega raises the fish to his mouth again, then holds it out to her. “Want some?”

Kirsten may not be able to get to her feet and bolt, but she can still cringe. “Uh, no. No, thank you.”

Tega tilts his head to one side as if to say “Your loss” and takes another bite. Scales and bones make small, metallic crunching sounds between his teeth as he chews. Kirsten shudders.

“Good,” he says, running his tongue around his muzzle. “Sure you don’t want some?”

A sense of familiarity has begun to grow on Kirsten. Gingerly she sorts through her memories of her near-death, caught in the downward spiral of a self-destructing android, the code that burned its circuits searing destruction along her own nerves. There had been a red-haired woman warning her back toward life; that she remembered. And there had been another woman, older, clad in vermilion robes that blew about her stooped body and a cap of the same color above her wizened, nut-brown face. And there had been a shape like this creature, holding up a long-fingered hand like a benediction, speaking above the howl of the vortex that threatened to consume her: Go back. The time is not yet.

“You were there!” she blurts. “The time I almost died!”

“I was there,” he acknowledges.

“So what are you doing here now? Am I—” she lets the question trail off in a shiver of unadmitted fear. She cannot let herself go now. Not with the work she has yet to do, not with the first real friend she has ever made in her life. Real friends, she corrects, though one is—she searches for a word that is not too extravagant—special.

“Ahh,” Tega says. “So you’ve gotten around to telling yourself the truth. Some of it, at least.”

‘What? You mean about—about—?”

“About Dakota Rivers. Your friend.”

“Well, I’ve never really had one before. It’s a new experience.”

Crunch goes another mouthful of bones and scales. “It’s even newer than you think, and older, too. Do you want me to tell your future? Your past? Cross my paw with mussels and Wika Tegalega will Reveal All.” The raccoon has no eyebrows, but the stripes around his eyes waggle lecherously.

Kirsten sniffs. “I know my past, thank you very much. And if any of us have any future at all, it will be what we make it. I don’t need a talking four-footed bandit with a bushy tail to tell me that.”

Crunch again. “All right.” Tega shrugs, a very human gesture. “But I’ll tell you this anyway. Think Moebius strip.”

“What?”

“Moebius strip. You know, one of those little thingies you made back in grade school. Twist the loop and glue it together so it only has one surface. Neat trick, actually.”

“I know what a Moebius strip is, dammit. I’m a scientist. Why should I think about one now?”

The last of the fish disappears and a faraway look comes into Tega’s eyes. “Round and round she goes, and where she stops, nobody knows. The front is the back, the past is the future. Round and round, life after death after life. What has been, will be. And there is nothing new under the sun.”

Kirsten frowns, at the cryptic words, and at the chill that passes over her skin. Someone walking on my grave, her grandmother had always said. “I don’t understand.”

“No, of course not.” The remote gaze has gone, and the raccoon’s eyes are on her face, here and now. “Not yet. But you will.”

“I—” Kirsten is not quite sure what she means to say. Demand an explanation? Deny causality? Proclaim her belief in a random universe of random events without pattern that sometimes just happen to give the illusion of purpose?

“You will,” Tega repeats. “What you need to know now is that three drunken idiots with their brains in their tiny, tiny balls have just shot a she wolf at the gate. Koda is caring for her at the clinic and will need to go search for her pups. She needs your help.”

“What? How can I—?”

“Go to her. Go now.” Tega drops to all fours again, the non-human grin splitting his face. “Hasta la vista, baby.”

The golden light fades, and Kirsten finds herself sitting once again on an ordinary root in an ordinary wood with ordinary snow powdering the ground. A dream, that’s all. An extremely vivid dream, but just a dream.

She rises and stretches, Asi with her. “C’mon, boy, let’s—” She stops, frozen, in mid-sentence. Printing the snow in front of her, one string coming and another going, are the marks of long-fingered hands and agile feet. A raccoon’s tracks.

“Come, Asi!” she cries, and begins to run.

CHAPTER TWENTY

KIRSTEN LOOKS UP from her pacing as the door to the vet clinic opens and Koda steps out into the waning sunshine. She runs up to the other woman, noting the grim set to her jaw and the thin, bloodless line of her lips. “I just heard,” she says softly. “How is she?”

“Stable for now,” Koda replies, distracted. “I need to go. I have to find her pups.”

“I’m going with you.”

“No. I’ll go alone. Stay with Shannon and keep watch over the mother.”

“Please. I…I want to help.” She holds up a hand to forestall comment. “I know you don’t need it. Hell, you’ve probably done this a million times before, but….I’d like to help anyway.”

Kirsten receives her answer by way of a handful of blankets being pressed into her chest and a curt “let’s go”. Peering over top of the blankets, she settles them more tightly against her front and starts off at a brisk trot, trying her best to keep up with Koda’s long-legged strides.

Within moments, they’ve breasted the snowy crest, and both stop, though for different reasons. Koda cocks her head, scenting the air and listening to the area around her. All is silent, save for the wind rustling through branches yet to have seen the first touch of spring green.

Kirsten, on the other hand, is staring at a large bird roosting atop the very tallest of the trees ahead. “Koda,” she whispers in her softest voice.

Hearing her, Dakota slowly turns her head until she is looking down at the woman at her side. Her eyebrow lifts in silent inquiry.

“That bird…it’s a hawk, isn’t it? If it’s anywhere around the pups….”

Koda grabs Kirsten’s hand as she lifts it and returns it to her side. She softly utters an odd, three-note whistle With a heavy, almost sub-sonic, beating of wings, Wiyo lifts up from the tree’s top and glides effortlessly onto Koda’s upraised arm. Kirsten stares on as if her sockets are the only things keeping her eyeballs from popping out and rolling around like marbles on the ground. Giving Kirsten a look that could freeze a volcano, Wiyo calmly sidesteps up to Dakota’s shoulder, barely missing her Stetson, and settles there, looking regal as a queen on her throne.

Koda continues on, leaving Kirsten staring after her, slack-jawed, until a soft “coming?” floats back to her and spurs her feet into motion once again.

*

By Kirsten’s reckoning, it is ten minutes later when they once again stop, Koda’s upraised hand giving her direction better than a verbal order. These ten minutes have been silent though, at least from Kirsten’s perspective, far from uninformative. In that short space of time, watching Dakota tracking the wolf pups, Kirsten has received a flash of insight—though perhaps “flash” isn’t the right word. It is as if an elusive puzzle piece has finally slipped into place, providing her with the answers to several questions she’s been asking herself for these months in the other woman’s company.

Watching Dakota’s profile, its sharp lines softened by descending twilight, the image of the blue-eyed wolf, her guardian, comes to her again, superimposing itself over the noble, striking features of the woman before her. She finds herself flushing, shamed at having come to this rather obvious conclusion so late in the game.

Some scientist. Can’t even see what’s in front of my face. God.

The answers, however, raise even more questions, but Kirsten pushes them to the back of her mind as she watches Koda gracefully lower herself to her haunches and stare down at the snow-covered ground for several long moments. When she rises again, her face is carved of granite, absolutely expressionless save for her eyes, which are burning embers glittering with an anger that takes Kirsten aback and has her wishing desperately that this reaper’s gaze will not set itself upon her.

It does, though only briefly, and she feels almost faint with relief as it passes on, leaving her untouched.

Silent as the grave, Dakota resumes her pace, leaving Kirsten struggling to keep up. But not before looking down at the place that had lit the fires of Dakota’s anger.

There, in a small pile, is a heap of bones and bits of fur. Tiny bones, so very tiny, and yet unmistakable even to a city-bred girl like Kirsten. The bones of a wolf-pup; predator turned prey. She slaps a hand over her mouth as her gorge heaves, threatening to expel whatever remains of her breakfast—the only meal she’s eaten today. After a long moment, her stomach settles itself and she takes her hand away, forcibly ripping her gaze from the tiny mound of bones at her feet. Dakota is a dozen yards ahead and pulling away rapidly. Kirsten breaks into a run to catch up.

She has just slowed down to walking speed when Dakota comes to another abrupt halt, forcing Kirsten to jig slightly to the left to avoid a collision. “What is—?”

“Shh.”

Kirsten looks on, slightly annoyed, as Dakota cocks her head in that increasingly familiar listening posture of hers, and stiffens. It’s obvious she hears something, though Kirsten, who knows by virtue of her implants that her hearing is at least five times as acute as a normal human’s, can’t hear a thing.

Of course, I don’t know I’m listening for, she consoles herself, not quite sure why it suddenly matters so much.

A whispered word to the beast on her shoulder, and the hawk flies off to God-knows-where, leaving Kirsten even more annoyed than before. Why am I the only one who’s flying blind here?

She didn’t ask for your help, that more rational part of her brain reminds her. You more or less forced it on her, so don’t be getting all pissy when she doesn’t recite her intentions to you chapter and verse.

Dakota utters a small, soft, whining sound that has Kirsten looking on in amazement. Instinctively, she knows that she has not just heard a human imitating a wolf’s call, but rather a wolf making that call.

Will wonders never cease?

Then she hears it. A soft, almost inaudible cry off to her left. Koda repeats her call, and the cry is likewise repeated. Kirsten stands unmoving as Dakota plucks a blanket from her hands. “Stay here unless I call you.”

Kirsten simply nods and watches as Koda heads with silent steps to the medium-sized rock outcropping ahead and to the left.

With twilight rapidly deepening into night, Koda senses the den’s entrance more than sees it. It’s small and narrow, forcing her to drop to her knees, then to her belly in order to squeeze her way inside. Before moving, she stuffs the warm blanket into her jacket and removes a small, but powerful, flashlight from a pocket and switches it to “wide beam” before clamping it between her teeth and beginning her trek inside.

The rocks brush hard against her broad shoulders and, though not one prone to claustrophobia, she feels the weight of the entire formation pressing in on her from without. It’s not an entirely pleasant feeling, but she shuts her mind to it and continues on, using her elbows to propel herself forward.

The stench of putridity and decay is indescribable, but it’s something she’s well used to, given what she does—or did, she doesn’t know anymore—for a living. Still, she finds herself mouth-breathing to keep the smell from burning itself into her sinuses.

Approximately two bodylengths from the entrance, the den widens, becoming a more or less circular structure surrounded by solid rock on all sides. In the center are the pups, or what remains of them. There were four in the litter—five if she counts the obvious stillbirth remains she’d come across earlier. Only one still lives, clinging to that life by the meagerest of threads. The others are long dead, their bodies cold and stiff; maggots already beginning their gruesome work on the corpses.

Attracted to her living warmth, the pup lifts his shaking head, blindly groping for her, struggling beneath the weight of its dead siblings.

Gently grabbing the pup by its ruff, Koda tenderly pulls it from its macabre nest. The pup hands limp from her hand, and she absently checks its gender before she bares her teeth in an unconscious and soundless snarl. With a soft cry of revulsion mixed with anger, she uses her free hand to pluck the squirming maggots from his living flesh, crushing them between her fingers and flinging them away.

Task complete, she pulls out the blanket and wraps the pup carefully within its folds, murmuring nonsense words to him in Lakota. He whimpers softly, oh so softly, and collapses against her, completely spent. She feels frantically for a pulse, and sags in relief when it is there—too weak, too thready, but there.

“C’mon, boy,” she whispers, tucking the final fold about his tiny, defenseless body. “Let’s get you home to your Ina.”

*

Kirsten stands outside of the den, eyeing the helter-skelter jumble of boulders with deep suspicion. Her dream (and what else could it possibly be? She refuses to entertain the notion that even her hallucinations would feature a talking raccoon with an attitude problem.) comes back to her in soft-filter, like the camera lenses they used to use on movie stars. Back when there were movie stars.

“She needs your help. Go to her. Go to her now.”

She eyes the rockpile again. Is that a rumble she hears? A shifting of stones presaging a total collapse of the structure? Is this why she is needed?

“No,” she whispers, horrified.

Another image flashes before her, this one in sharp, stark lines and bold tones of red and black.

The outcropping is collapsing, drawing down unto itself in cracks of thunder and stifling dust that chokes her as she screams Dakota’s name into the blackness of the night.

Her hands. Blood on her hands. Her palms scraped raw, flesh hanging in tatters as she desperately pulls rock after rock away this charnel house.

“She needs your help.”

Her voice, hoarse and ragged, screaming Dakota’s name over and over and over again.

“Go to her.”

Her lungs. On fire. Sending out pluming jets of vapored, panicked breath.

“Go to her now.”

Her heart. Thundering in her chest. Fear and a savage, piercing grief fueling its frenetic pace.

“No,” she whispers. And “no” again.

And almost launches herself to the moon as Dakota materializes in front of her like a wraith from the mist.

Her face is still harsh-planed, but her eyes have softened a bit from their earlier rage. Kirsten suspects—when she can think again—that that softening is a result of the tiny bundle she holds so tenderly in her large hands.

Her heart rate slows, though grudgingly. She doesn’t like shocks. Never has. And she’s had more than enough to last several lifetimes. Somehow, though, she doesn’t think Dakota will appreciate the sentiment. She’ll have to remember to tell her later.

“How—how many?”

“One,” Koda replies tersely. “The rest were dead.”

“Oh god…I’m so sorry.”

“’s alright. Nothing anyone can do about it now.” Though her words seem offhand, her tone is clipped, each word as precise as a knife cut.

“Still….”

Dakota’s eyes harden. “Let’s get this one back to his mother.”

The pair takes only a couple of steps before a screeching call splits the silence of the night. Both look up, two pairs of keen eyes tracing a shadow against the shadows, flying low over their heads and landing in a tree some forty yards distant.

Kirsten finds herself suddenly cradling the tiny wolf pup as Koda stares deeply into her eyes. “Go on ahead. I’ll be there shortly.”

“But—!”

She finds herself talking to air.

Dakota has disappeared.

“Oh no you don’t, Ms. Bossy,” Kirsten mutters half under her breath. “You forget who you’re talking to here, I think.” She looks down at the bundle in her hands. “Hang on for a little longer, little guy. I have something I need to do.”

*

The deep black of the night parts like a cloak before her. She sprints, full out, toward the tree, keen eyes already spotting the thick chain wrapped around its gnarled base. Wiyo screeches again. Koda looks up at her briefly before rounding the broad trunk, intently following the chain links as they stretch off to a shadowed spot not ten feet away.

A thick, frost tipped pelt comes into view, and her heart shudders in her chest. “Oh no,” she moans, low and deep. “No. Please, Ina, no.”

Her soft prayer goes unheeded, as she knows it must. Tears sting her eyes. She wipes them away with a savage swipe of her arm, not noticing the pain as the stiff cloth of her jacket rakes across her wind-chapped cheeks.

He lays there in his own filth and blood. The one her brothers call Igmu Tanka Kte — “Cougar Killer”— for his fierce defense of his pack from a hungry mountain lion slinking down from the hills in search of easy prey.

The one who has visited her dreams and visions for years.

Who has shared with her bits his life and his ways.

The proud Alpha.

The one she calls Wa Uspewicakiyapi.

Teacher.

His rear left leg, half gnawed through in a desperate bid for freedom, is caught in a steel-jawed trap—the kind that has been illegal for decades. His soft underbelly is flayed, the skin hanging in flaps, blackened from frostbite and infection. His ruff is spiky with dried blood and she can only imagine the terrible wounds hidden from her view beneath the thick pelt.

He is mortally wounded, and yet lives still, bound to life by some strength of will that she can only wonder at. His chest moves weakly, sporadically, pulling in air he soon will no longer need. When she squats carefully by his massive head, he looks up at her through eyes that are glassy and exhausted and utterly calm, as if her presence by his side had always been expected.

Perhaps even anticipated.

“Hello, old friend,” she murmurs in the language of her ancestors, reaching out to gently stroke his proud muzzle. “I’m so sorry.” Tears fall now, and she allows their passage, watching as his image trebles before her, fracturing even as her heart fractures. “So…so sorry.”

Feeling the tentative, weak touch of his tongue on her hand, she shakes her head, blinking away the tears and clearing her vision. His eyes, likewise, have cleared, and she finds herself drawn into them, drawn as if bound by a puppeteer’s strings.

In those eyes, she can see visions; bits and pieces of his life, and hers, and the bond that draws them together closer than kin.

She slips free of herself, and for the last time they run together, unfettered and uncaring, into the nightwind, into the hills and valleys of the home they share as the moon, ripe and full, watches on from her perch above. They run for the joy of running, for the freedom of their souls, for their fierce love of the Earth and all who live upon it.

Then, at last, after what feels like hours, she finds herself gently released and in her own body once again.

Breaking herself free from his gaze, she leans down and touches a soft kiss to his head, then whispers into his ear, “Tóksha aké wanchinyankin kte. Wakhan Thanka nici un.”

And, not allowing herself to think, she moves her hands to his now-fragile neck, and twists.

His spine snaps. His chest settles slowly, and his eyes grow distant and fixed to a point only he can know.

All of her grief, all of her rage, washes through her with the force of a tidal wave, bowing her back and arching her neck to the uncaring sky. She howls in a voice that none would recognize as human, and all would fear.

Still howling, she jumps to her feet and pries the brutal trap from his leg by brute force. Grabbing the chain, she hurls the trap against the tree again and again and again, screaming incoherently, eyes flashing, glowing as if lit from the internal fires of her rage. The tree shakes, bark flying from its trunk in great spraying chunks.

Kirsten, who has forced herself to stand by and watch even as tears stream down her face unnoticed, finally breaks free of her paralysis, and steps forward. Only to dance back as the trap comes perilously close to bashing her head in. She stands for a moment, undecided, her lower lip caught pensively between her teeth. “Dakota,” she tries softly. And then louder, “Dakota!”

Dakota stills abruptly and turns to face the intruder, murder in her eyes. Her lips spread in a snarl as feral as any wolf’s, and Kirsten steps back again, fear delivering a jolt to her heart and belly.

“Nituwe he?” Koda demands.

“I—I’m sorry, I don’t—.”

“Iyaya na!”

“Dakota, please. I don’t understand—.”

“Letan khigla na!” Winding up the chain, she slams the trap against the tree. “Iyaya na!!” And again. “Iyaya na!!”

And again.

And again.

And again.

Every single instinct inside her is clamoring for her to flee, to seek refuge far away from the madwoman Dakota has become. And yet, something even stronger compels her to stay. Some internal voice that she cannot shut off, cannot turn away from, no matter how much she might wish it. Gathering up every shred of courage she possesses, she steps forward, deliberately into the line of fire, and speaks, “Dakota. Please. Listen to me. I want to help. Please. Tell me what to do.” Her tone is as calming and as soothing as she can possibly make it, and she senses, through blind instinct, that it is somehow getting through to the grief-stricken woman.

“Please,” she repeats, in a voice just above a whisper. “Tell me what to do.”

There is a muted “thunk” as the trap and chain slips from Koda’s hands. She follows it down, collapsing to her knees and burying her face in her hands. Her whole body shakes from the force of her sobs. “Wicate,” she murmurs over and over into her hands. “Wicate. Too much. Too much! Wicate. Too much!!” Her head tips back and she howls.

The sound chills Kirsten to the bone. She can feel the wolf-pup still in her grasp respond, struggling weakly against her hold. She looks down, then back at the grieving, howling woman. Gently, tenderly, she unwraps the pup from his blanket and, taking slow, calm, deliberate steps, closes the gap between herself and Dakota. Then, just as carefully, she lowers herself to her knees and waits, the pup held tenderly in her hands.

Dakota’s howl tapers off like a toy whose battery has finally run down. Her head drops, hanging low between her shoulders. Her tears drip into the snow, melting it.

“He needs you, Dakota,” Kirsten whispers into the profound silence left behind. “Look at him. He needs to you care for him, to love him.” She swallows, suddenly understanding. “Like you loved his father.”

After a long moment, Dakota’s head lifts, and she looks down at the tiny, defenseless pup. A trembling hand lifts, hovers, and then drops back down into the snow. “I—can’t.”

“You can. Yes, you can.”

“You don’t understand!”

“Yes, yes I do. I do understand. Dakota, you’ve never turned away from anyone who’s needed your help. He needs your help now. He needs you.”

Their eyes meet and hold. Kirsten feels tears welling yet again as she reads so easily the bone deep grief pouring from Dakota’s soul. Cradling the pup in the crook of her arm, she reaches down and grasps the other woman’s hand, bringing it, palm up, between them. With sure movements, she places the pup into Dakota’s hand, then takes the other one and places it on top, securing her grip. “Help him,” she whispers, still staring into the liquid pools of Dakota’s eyes.

Dakota looks down at the tiny life in her hands. Her face dissolves as fresh grief flows through her. Kirsten does the only thing she can. Using one arm to brace Dakota’s own, she slips the other around a slim waist, melding their bodies together.

Dakota stiffens, then relaxes, leaning into Kirsten’s quiet and gentle strength. Her head bows and rests against an offered shoulder as her tears continue to flow.

*

Kirsten looks up from the desk, a desk she’s starting to believe she’ll grow old and die in (picturing herself as a gray-haired old lady with hearing aids in her implants and coke-bottle glasses, staring at line after line of code) as the front door slams, shaking the entire house down to its foundation.

“No!” Maggie’s demand rings loudly through the home, obviously continuing a disagreement begun prior to entering. Kirsten cringes a little at the sound of it; not in fear, but rather in pain, as it adds to a headache which has spent most of the past twelve hours building, though lack of sleep and tension enough to fell a rutting elk have supplied more than their share as well. She’s tempted to turn off her implants—both for the fact that she’ll at least have some blessed peace from the noise, and because she half-suspects she might be unintentionally eavesdropping on a private conversation—but something stays her hand.

“Will you at least respect me enough to pretend you’re listening to me??”

Kirsten winces at that one. She deduces that the resulting silence is Dakota (who else can it be?) stopping, turning, and fixing Maggie with a glance so emotionless it might as well be carved from the side of a mountain. Kirsten knows that look, having been on the receiving end of it from the moment they left the small glade the night before.

“Dakota, listen. You—what you’re proposing to do here is—it’s…crazy! No wait! Please. I didn’t mean it like that, okay? It’s just—damnit, Dakota! Think about what you’re doing here!”

“I’ve thought about it.” Her voice seems to be coming from the bottom of a very deep, very dark, very cold well.

“And?”

“I’m going.”

“But—!”

“I’m going. End of discussion.”

It is the silence during a gathering storm. “Fine! You want to kill yourself? Be my guest. I hope you have fun doing it.”

Kirsten shoots to her feet as the door slams once again. Wasting no time, she shoots around the desk and out into the short hallway in time to see Dakota disappear into the bedroom. She stares after her for a long moment, undecided, then turns the other way and trots outside. “Maggie! Wait!”

With exaggerated movements, Maggie slows, stops, and turns. “What?”

“I…heard the argument…at least part of it. What’s going on? What’s wrong?” Kirsten comes to a stop before the older woman, feeling the anger radiating off of her slim form.

“What happened last night?”

“Excuse me?” Kirsten asks, brought up short by the apparent non-sequitor

“Last night. I know you followed her out of the gates, and I know you came back with a wolf pup. What happened in between those two events?”

Kirsten ponders the question, unsure how much to reveal of the evening’s proceedings.

Maggie sees the hesitation and throws up an elegant hand. “Never mind. I don’t need to know the particulars. It’s just…I’m afraid for her.” Her gaze is intent, beseeching. “It’s like someone ripped out her heart and put a stone in its place. She’s been like this all day. No matter what I do, I can’t get through to her.”

“There’s something more, though,” Kirsten intones, needing to get to the meat of the matter as quickly as possible. She senses time is definitely of the essence here.

With a heavy sigh, Maggie nods, proud shoulders slumped against the heavy weight they carry. “Yeah. Your friends—Franz and Anna, is it?—they remembered the name of the clinic where they were housed. Dakota’s gotten it into her head that she’s going to go up there, alone mind you, and bust everybody out like in some goddamn Wild West shoot-em-up movie or something. Fuck!” She drags a hand through her short-cropped hair. “It’s suicide. Goddamn suicide.” The beseeching gaze comes again, mixed with a tiny hint of swallowed pride. “Can you…talk to her maybe? See if you can talk her out of this nonsense? I don’t—we can’t lose her.”

Kirsten nods and turns to leave, then turns back, just catching a pained gaze, swiftly masked. “Maggie, I—I promise, when this is over, I’ll tell you what happened last night. Or at least I’ll try to get Dakota to tell you. It was—not good. She lost something…someone…very dear to her, though I don’t think any of us will ever know just how dear. Except, maybe, her brother. Okay?”

Maggie tries to summon up a smile and fails. “Okay.”

Kirsten feels her heart clench. It’s a new experience for her. Compassion has never been her strongest suit, though she suspects it would take a heart of stone to miss the misery playing itself over Maggie’s noble, handsome features. She reaches out and touches the other woman’s arm, giving it a brief squeeze. “It’ll be okay. You’ll see.”

And because she can think of nothing else to do, she turns fully away and trots back to the house, well aware of the eyes at her back.

She steps inside just as Koda exits the bedroom, pack swinging from one fisted hand. Their eyes meet. Koda’s drops quickly away and she crosses the room, moving as if to brush by the young scientist without a word of parting.

“Wait,” Kirsten murmurs. “Please.”

Unintentionally miming Maggie’s earlier actions, Dakota stops and turns. Annoyance is the only expression that can be read on her face. “What is it.”

“Please don’t leave. Not right now.”

“Look. I’ve already explained—.”

“I know, but I’m asking you to hear me out. I’m not saying that freeing those women isn’t important. It is. But you’re needed here, too.”

“Not as much as I’m needed there.”

“What about the wolf and her pup? Shannon’s a decent tech, but you saw the look in her eyes last night. She’s absolutely terrified having that little pup in her charge, let alone his mother.”

“Tacoma can handle it. Manny, as well. They know what to do.”

Kirsten sighs. “Well, would you at least consider taking some backup with you?”

“No.”

“But—.”

“No. It’s already been decided. By me.”

“Why?”

“What?”

“Why? Why do you feel you have to do this alone? Why won’t you accept help? There are a couple hundred men and women there who would die for you if you asked it of them.” She winces as the words leave her mouth, having somehow stumbled on exactly the wrong thing to say. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I mea—.”

Koda holds up a hand. Their gazes meet again. This time, those blue eyes soften the tiniest shard. “Look. I—I need to be…alone right now, okay? This place, these people, they’re all…it’s just…too much right now. I need some time…to think.” She smiles, very slightly. “Besides, what I’m doing isn’t all that difficult. The facility is small, and there are, at most, three androids there.” The smile falls from her face. “Look. Despite what Maggie says, I’m not on a mission to end my own life. It’s just—trust me, okay? I know what I’m doing.”

A moment longer, and Kirsten nods, accepting Dakota’s words for truth. She can see it in the other woman’s eyes, in the set of her shoulders, in the clench of her jaw. “Alright,” she replies, nodding. “I’d rather you just hunkered yourself out in the woods somewhere for a couple of days, but…alright. Can you do me a favor, though?”

Koda’s walls go up. Kirsten can fairly hear the alarm bells going off in her head. She smiles to diffuse the situation. “Just wait here. I’ll be right back.”

A moment later, she returns and hands Koda a minicomp the size of a credit card. Dakota looks at her questioningly. “This morning,” Kirsten explains, “while I was running the code, I came across this slight anomaly. I traced it through to the end, and discovered a way to temporarily disable the androids’ motor functions.”

Dakota’s eyebrow raises. “Impressive. How temporary is temporary?”

“I’m…not sure. Exactly. Five, ten minutes max. Theoretically.”

“Theoretically?”

“Well, I just discovered the code this morning, and it’s not as if we have a handy supply of androids to test it out on. It works in simulation. Beyond that….” She shrugs. “I’ve put the chip with the code in that minicomp. All you have to do is activate it when you’re ready, and set it down somewhere. The transmission will go through just about anything, so you don’t’ have to be in the same room with the droids when you set it off.” She smiles a little. “Think of it as a concussion grenade on a grander scale.”

Koda nods and slips the minicomp into the breast pocket of her light jacket. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

A moment of uncomfortable silence descends between them. “Well…I’ll see you later.”

As she turns to leave, Kirsten draws her back with a touch to her arm.

“What?”

Kirsten takes in a deep breath and lets it out very slowly, gathering her thoughts. “Just…be careful, okay?”

“I will.”

“These people, Dakota,” Kirsten continues, “like it or not, they depend on you. You’re important to them.” She pauses very briefly, gathering her courage, yet unable, for all that, to meet Koda’s intent gaze. Her voice, when she finally speaks, is soft as a rose-petal. “You’re important to me.”

With an expression that is equal parts fondness and sadness, Dakota lifts a hand to tenderly cup Kirsten’s cheek. The eyes that finally meet hers are stormy with indecision and, if looks closely enough, fear as well. The fear of a child who has just spilled her deepest secret and now waits for the lash of a palm against her face. Who hurt you? she finds herself thinking even as her head lowers, drawn down by the shining, fearful countenance of the woman before her. Who made you so afraid to speak your heart?

As if in a dream, Kirsten feels the brush of Koda’s lips; soft, like the wings of a butterfly, warm as a promise kept.

Fundamental, like a piece of her soul, long knocked askew, finally coming home to rest.

It is over in an instant of an instant, but when she opens her eyes, she knows that she has been forever changed. Koda is smiling at her, a sweet, tender smile filled with so much, with…everything.

And as the other woman bids her a soft “goodbye” and turns away, she can only stand, stunned, her fingers trailing gingerly over her lips.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

“THIS IS IT. The end!”

Asi, no sign of belief in his idiot grin or tensely poised body, never takes his eyes off the birch twig in Kirsten’s raised hand. She feints as if to throw it, and his head jerks to follow the movement. His feet, though, remain firmly planted on the tarmac of the Base vet clinic’s parking lot.

“You got it? This is the last one! No more!”

Asi’s ears quiver in anticipation, tail up and alert. If he ‘gets it,’ he gives no sign.

Drawing her arm back as far as she can, Kirsten puts her back into the pitch, sending the much-chewed piece of wood unerringly onto the clinic’s doorstep. “Go!”

Asi leaps to retrieve it, covering the ten yards there and the ten yards back to her in huge, galloping bounds and coming to a skidding halt to drop the stick at her feet. He whines softly, looking up at her face, then fixes his attention once again on her throwing hand. “No, that’s it. Done for the day.” She shakes her head at his expression, which segues from anticipation to incomprehension to utter canine dejection. “And making me feel guilty won’t work, either. How’d you like to go visit the new pup? Since we’re already here?”

Asi does not respond to that, and she ruffles the fur of his neck lightly, tugging at his collar as she moves toward the entrance. “Come on, fella.”

It is purely by chance, of course, that she finds herself just outside the veterinary hospital. Wearied by endless and endlessly futile sifting of code strings for the single line of integers that will shut down the androids once and permanently, she has shut her mathematical conundrums firmly in the house behind her and fled into the open air. It is something she finds herself doing more and more often as the March light warms toward the inevitable spring and the wind softens and veers about into the south. And, purely by chance, her walk has led her here. Her only deliberate choice, she assures herself, has been been to avoid the woods, inhabited as they are by motor-mouthed raccoons and god knows what else. Banshees, maybe.

Fra ghoulies an’ ghaisties,An’ lang-leggedy beasties,An’ things that gae bump in the nicht,Guid Lord, deliver us.

The ancient rhyme says nothing about beasties with long, bushy ringed tails and black masks, but she’s sure the omission is inadvertent.

If they’d only known. . . .

A wailing from hell greets her as she pushes open the door, its chime lost in the howling that rips its way up and down the scale. Asi barks sharply, and Kirsten shushes him. The single person in the waiting room, an airman in a flight suit, leaps to his feet and unzips the side of an over-the –shoulder carrier, nervously adjusting the towel on its floor. “Sorry Ma’am. Callas doesn’t like to have her ears touched.”

As if on cue, Shannon emerges from a treatment room behind the counter, the sound growing louder with her approach. Clinging to the front of her smock with all four feet is a young calico cat, ears folded close to her head and her mouth wide open and yowling like a panther in heat. At least, it is what Kirsten imagines a panther in heat would sound like. She has never actually heard one singing her come hithers.

Claw by sabre claw, Shannon detaches the small creature, and with the aid of her human, carefully backs her into her carrier. An abrupt silence falls, replaced after a moment with a soft rumbling sound. From her pocket Shannon removes a long-snouted tube of ointment and a small plastic bottle of pale yellow liquid. “Here you go, Lieutenant. Tritop in the ears twice a day, Clavamox by mouth likewise. Hydrogen peroxide on the scratches, or wear heavy gloves.”

“Gotcha.” With a long stroke down Callas’ back and a scratch under her chin, the Lieutenant zips her up. “Thanks, Shannon. Ma’am.” He sketches a salute at Kirsten, who acknowledges it after a moment of frozen startlement, then shoulders the carrier and sets off out the door and down the sidewalk at a brisk pace. Kirsten’s eyes follow him as he turns the corner, heading for the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters. Almost no one is driving anymore. It has been days since she has seen anything but an official vehicle on the road; since the attempted assault on the gate, in fact. Conservation is setting in.

“Can I help you, Ma’am? Does Asimov need anything?”

Kirsten, faced with having to explain why she is here, finds herself suddenly embarrassed. She can feel the heat spreading over her face, her annoyance at herself only making it worse. “No, I— That is, we were out for a walk, and—”

“And you wanted to stop by and see the wolf pup?” Shannon grins at her. “It’s okay. You’d be surprised how many people just ‘happen’ to be passing by. Callas and her ear mites were only the second real case I’ve had today.”

“It’s all right? I wouldn’t want to upset the mother or anything.”

“Sure. Asi’d better stay here, though. The only strange males she’s tolerating are human ones.”

Kirsten gives his ears a ruffle. “Sorry, boy. Lie down.”

The big dog folds down on his elbows with obvious reluctance but without argument. With a last glance to make sure he remains, Kirsten follows Shannon through the waiting area and past the examining rooms and surgery. As they approach the wards, the smell of chlorine reaches her, and she steps lightly into the waiting basin of disinfectant without needing to be reminded.

”She’s in Iso,” Shannon says, leading her down a short corridor toward a closed door. “Go on in.”

The smell of bleach is stronger here, and there is a second dishpan of the pungent liquid to the side of the entrance. Kirsten steps in and out of it almost automatically now, the familiarity of the clinic beginning to fit around her like her skin. And yet it is not the clinic itself, but the presence she feels here, the woman who, even absent, has left something of herself in the calm efficiency with which patients are cared for, in the passionate strength of her own caring.

Which is, if she is honest with herself, the real reason she is here: that there is no other place she can go which resonates more strongly of Dakota Rivers.

The light in Isolation is dim, and Kirsten almost gasps as she closes the door quietly behind her. Seated in an old fashioned rocking chair next to a bank of cages, a figure sits with head bent, all attention focused on the small bundle in the crook of its left arm, a miniature nursing bottle in its right hand. The clear profile, the cant of the head, the long legs and graceful hands are all Dakota’s. The sight, unexpected as it is, strikes the breath from Kirsten’s lungs and sets her heart to pounding against her sternum like a wild thing against he bars of its prison. Her lips burn at the memory of the fleeting kiss at their parting, fire streaming along the network of her veins into every cell in her body. “Dakota?” she says softly. Then, louder, “Koda? I thought you’d gone.”

“Kirsten?” The figure looks up, turning toward the light from the hallway.

Brown eyes, not blue. Hair just brushing broad shoulders, not quite long enough to braid, not the wild mane that flows halfway down Dakota’s back. Boots and feet too big to be a woman’s, even a woman standing six feet toward heaven.

“Ta- Tacoma? I’m sorry, I thought—” Kirsten takes an involuntary step backward, her face flaming now with embarrassment.

“That I was Koda?” A rueful smile touches his mouth, so like his sister’s that Kirsten is nearly lost again. “People have been confusing us ever since we were small, even in broad daylight.” The pup in his lap whimpers, and he adjusts his hand under the small body, tilting the bottle at a sharper angle. “We used to switch places sometimes. It drove the nuns wild until they finally noticed that our eyes were different.”

“How long did that take? You’d think it was obvious.” He is giving her time to recover, though how exactly he knows of her discomfort is not at all clear. Perhaps all Lakota people are uncannily intuitive.

Or perhaps it’s just the Rivers family.

Tacoma shrugs. “People see what they expect to see. We’re Lakota; Lakotas all have black hair and dark eyes and say ‘How.’ We wore the same dark blue pants and the same shirts starched so stiff you had to wear an undershirt just to keep from being sandpapered. I was in seventh grade and Koda in fifth before they got it figured out.”

A wheezing gurgle startles Kirsten, and Tacoma gently disengages the bottle from the pup’s mouth. “Hold him for a minute while I get a refill, will you? He draws on this thing like an irrigation pump.”

Gingerly Kirsten accepts the small bundle, both hands under his spine. His muzzle is blunt and his ears floppy, eyes just beginning to open the cloudy blue of any infant’s. There is no hint in his round belly and blunt paws of the formidable creature he will be two years from now, no shadow of the power his father had possessed even in the last moments of his life. He makes a small mewling sound, not unlike a kitten, and she presses him close to her body, rocking him gently as she would a human child. “Tacoma,” she says suddenly. “Do wolves ever have blue eyes? When they’re grown, I mean.”

He looks up from mixing the formula, pouring powder and sterile water into a blender that whirrs quietly. “I suppose it’s possible. Huskies have to have gotten their blue eyes somewhere, after all.”

“Have you ever seen one? A wolf with blue eyes?”

“Not in the wild, no.” He does not add, Why do you ask? though the question is in his face as he decants the formula into a newly sterilized bottle.

She has no answer to that question that she is willing to give him; no answer that she is willing to give anyone . I saw one in a dream. I saw those same eyes in your sister’s face. Instead she says, “Can I feed him? I’ve raised orphan puppies before.”

“Sure,” he answers, handing her the bottle. “That’ll give me a chance to check on mama and give her meds.”

“Is she still too sick to nurse him?”

Tacoma hunkers down in front of one of the lower tiers against the opposite wall. “She wants to, and she can care for him otherwise, but she hasn’t enough milk. She was really badly dehydrated when she came in. She’s still on IV’s.” As he speaks, he checks the drip in the long, clear plastic tube that runs from a flaccid plastic bag hooked onto the bars of the cage above. “Time to hang some more Ringer’s on her.”

He removes the empty bag and steps out into the larger ward, pausing without apparent thought to step in and out of the disinfectant. It seems to be something he does the way he breathes, so long accustomed as to be automatic. She is irrationally pleased that she seems to be acquiring the habit herself, almost without having to remind herself. She is fitting in. She is not terribly sure yet what exactly she is fitting into, but she knows in her bones that she has not wanted to fit into anything so badly since she was a child, cut off from the outside world first by her up-the-wall-and-into-the-ozone IQ, then from almost all the rest of it by her deafness. Perversely, the lack of sound had been a comfort, undemanding in its enforced silence.

For the moment, though, she is this small wild thing’s surrogate mother. Kirsten settles herself against the back of the rocker with the pup against her midsection. The chair, which Tacoma had filled to overflowing, very nearly swallows her so that she finds her feet dangling, toes just brushing the concrete floor. She pushes off from it, setting the chair to rocking gently. The pup, gazing up at her with half-closed eyes, perfectly trusting, evokes instincts she would deny possessing, deny with her last breath. Protect. Nurture. Love. He takes the elongated plastic nipple with no more hesitation than if he were snuggled up to his wolf mother herself. He fumbles at it a bit because he still cannot see clearly, gives a couple of smacks and snorts until he gets the suction going. The level of milk in the bottle begins to fall, slowly but steadily..

Protect. Nurture. They are instincts which Tacoma seems to possess without embarrassment. It is not a lack of macho; Christ, she has seen him on the battlefield, spraying death from an M-16 on full automatic, lobbing round after round of explosives into the lines of mixed droid and humans. With a chill that shivers her spine, she remembers the moment when he called in the strike on his own position, and Dakota’s berserkergang that had lifted Maggie, herself, their whole army up and out of themselves and made of their small makeshift force an invincible, unified instrument of one woman’s will.

From the lowest tier of cages across from her comes a shifting of weight, a low, searching whimper. The mother wolf, looking for her cub. Careful not to dislodge the bottle, Kirsten rises from the chair, crosses the space between and lowers herself into a cross-legged position in front of the cage. “Here he is, mama,” she says softly. “I’ve got him. He’s safe.”

Seemingly reassured, the mother settles her head on her paws, her eyes never leaving Kirsten. They are the color of old bronze coins, not blue, but they have in them the courage and the steadfastness of the eyes she has seen in dreams. The eyes that somehow are both a wolf’s eyes and Dakota Rivers’.

“Christ, you’re dumb.” Without realizing it, she has spoken aloud. Pieces of the puzzle fall into place, locking smoothly and without seam. Item: Dakota Rivers has blue eyes. Blue eyes that, strictly speaking, ethnically speaking, she should not have. Item: the wolf of Kirsten’s dreams, or hallucinations or whatever they were, also has blue eyes. Item: Dakota has—her throat tightens with the thought and salt stings her eyes— or had a somehow intimate and loving relationship with the alpha wolf who was this small scrap’s father. The wolf, obviously, is Dakota’s spirit animal, with whatever that entails for someone who, unlike herself, has been brought up fully accepting that the barriers between the human and non-human worlds are both fragile and fluid. That one can have friends and relations who do not walk on two legs and who do have fur. That one can. . .

Another shiver passes over her, uncontrollable as the thought that spawns it. That one can, somehow, become a non-human being, in spirit and perhaps even . . . But she cannot bring herself even to finish that thought. It is too alien, too far from the familiar terrain of logic, of the physical determinism that has bounded her thought all her thinking life.

And that, in turn, brings her around to a mouthy, cynical raccoon speaking in riddles by a thawing stream. Her spirit animal. A creature who bears the same relation to her that the alpha wolf did to Dakota.

A creature notorious for curiosity and its long, clever, mischief-making hands. A masked creature, not given to self-revelation. A creature, Dakota had said, whose stock in trade is transformation.

Kirsten can feel that transformation at work in herself, however hard she works to ignore it. She is here on the floor of a veterinary isolation ward with the pungent perfume of Clorox in her nostrils not because she has “just happened” to follow Asi’s pursuit of a birch twig, not even because she has genuinely wanted to visit the wolf mother and her baby. (Maybe even pet them? Make friends as she has with domestic dogs all her life?) She is here because this is Dakota’s place. Here she can be close to the woman whose many skills she is only beginning to understand, and to feelings in herself that she is not anywhere close to beginning to understand. It occurs to her that Tacoma is taking an unusually long time to fetch a bag of saline and a syringe of antibiotic. Perhaps he senses her need—an idea she finds half embarrassing and half comforting—and is too polite to intrude.

Halfway down the bottle, the nipple falls out of the pups mouth. Eyes closed, his head drops back against her arm, himself into a wolf’s dreams. After a few moments, his paws and eyelids begin to twitch, his breath coming in soft whuffles. His mother seems to have dropped off, too, no longer unsure of her infant or her infant’s new nursemaid. Briefly Kirsten considers opening the cage to lay the cub beside her. Discretion, Little K. Discretion is almost always the better part of valor. Common sense almost never kills anybody. Go with the stats. Odd, how she can still hear her father’s voice in her head after all these years, remembered from years when she could not hear at all.

Shifting her legs beneath her, she settles down to wait.

Twice she catches her own head beginning to fall onto her chest. The pup’s contentment and his mother’s calm must be contagious. Twice she pulls herself up, wide-eyed, from the edge of sleep. She cannot think what is keeping Tacoma. Perhaps she should put the pup down and offer to help with whatever it is.

The thought passes, though, as once again the light seems to change around her. She is standing on a green hill far away, distant in time and the stretch of miles. Below her lies a valley dotted with campfires in the dusk, a long white twilight that pales the summer stars. Behind her is her own fire, ringed with stones and set within a grove of birch and ancient oak. A woman stands beside her, tall and slender and naked except for her boots and the high-bossed oval shield, painted with unfurling dragon wings, that leans against her knee. Her right hand holds a spear, butted against the ground; the strap of her baldric defines the valley of her breasts with its own stream of blue and silver. Kirsten takes in the proud body, painted in whorls and starbursts of the same deep blue that matches her eyes, scarred here and there with the marks of battle. The woman’s coppery hair wreathes her head in an intricate arrangement of braids: the mionn, meant to deny an enemy’s hands a hold.

With a shock, Kirsten realizes that she, too, is nearly naked. Not just naked but almost identically painted and armed except that she holds a crescent-shaped axe in her left hand, and only a hair’s less high than the woman beside her. The tightness of her scalp tells her that she is likewise crowned with braids, a glance downward that her own hair is black as a raven’s wing. In a language at once musical and harsh, the red woman says softly, “And the hero-light shone about you that time I first saw you on the banks of the Dubhglass, anama-chara, and I knew then I would do anything to have you for my soul-friend.”

“And now that you have me, mo cridh, what will you do with me?”

The other woman’s free hand caresses her shoulder. “Come back to our fire, and I will show you.”

The snap of a closing door brings Kirsten gasping out of her dream. It is one she has dreamed the past night and the night before that, ever since her conversation with the raccoon in the woods. The red woman is one of those who warned her back in her spiral toward death, but the rest is both new and strangely familiar. Before she can make sense of it, a voice cuts through the fog that surrounds her, lightly amused and male. “Sorry to wake you. You three look really comfortable together.”

Tacoma, returning with a bag of Ringer’s and a hypodermic filled with a milky liquid. Kirsten feels her cheeks flame as she remembers twice waking from the dream with her thighs sticky and her heart pounding;. A brief inventory assures her that she has awakened in time to avoid embarrassment, the pup still firmly held against her, still snoring softly. His milky scent comes to her on his breath.

“I guess I just dropped off. Sorry.”

“You needed a break. Here, let’s put the little guy back with his mama. He’ll keep her mind off what I’m doing.” Tacoma hunkers down and snaps open the cage door, waking the mother wolf. He grins. “Go on. It’s okay.”

Kirsten levers herself up onto her knees, careful to hold her small burden steady, leans forward and gently lays him on the blanket beside his mother. Lightly her nose touches Kirsten’s hand, sniffing, then drops to her pup as she begins to bathe him. Kirsten cannot help herself. She reaches forward and strokes the wolf’s beautifully sculpted head, feeling the brittle dryness of her fur, the papery texture of her skin. “She’ll be okay?” It is all she can do to keep the tears from her voice.

”She’ll be okay. She’s reacting well to the drugs and a steady diet. Come summer we should be able to release them.”

With a start, Kirsten realizes how little she knows about Dakota’s brother. “Are you a vet, too?”

He laughs as he straightens up and begins to fasten the bag of Ringer’s to the drip tube, checking the clamp for proper tension. “I’m an engineer, by education if not trade. Comes in handy from time to time—we’ll be bringing a few of those big wind generators for the Base next week.. They won’t feed us, but at least we’ll have refrigeration and lights. And laundry,” he adds, almost as an afterthought. “Manny’s even tireder than I am of washing his socks in the bathroom sink.”

“That’s enough to earn you years of undying gratitude believe me.” Then, coming back to her question, “I just thought—” she makes a gesture that encompasses the ward, the two wolves, his deftness with the trappings of medicine.

“I know. Lots of people think the same thing. It’s just something that comes from growing up in a big family, on a ranch, though.” Tacoma uncaps the syringe with his teeth and, holding the line steady, begins to inject the medication into the IV. “Good old Penicillin. Can’t beat it. You’re an only child, Kirsten?”

She is taken aback. “Does it show?”

“Not really. It’s just that when there are ten of you, like there are of us, you can change a diaper and give a bottle before the training wheels come off your bike. Same with the cats and dogs and cows and horses. We all learned what to do about colic or a breach birth before we quite figured out how the colt got inside his mama in the first place.”

“That young, huh?” She grins at him.

“Oh, even younger than you can imagine.” He returns the smile, looking again so like his sister that Kirsten’s breath leaves her lungs. ‘There’s some coffee if you’d like—“

“Sergeant! Sergeant Rivers!”

The shout interrupts him, repeated to the pounding of feet in the corridor. Shannon bursts through the door, her face and hair wild, “Sergeant—“

“Bleach!” he barks at her, the Master Sergeant suddenly displacing the charming rancher and the rough-and-ready vet with a vengeance.

Shannon hops in and out of the basin with the speed of a Phillipine bamboo dancer. “Sergeant, it’s your cousin, the Lieutenant. He’s out front—“

But Tacoma is gone before the first sentence is out, Kirsten on his heels.

*

Dark is drawing down as Koda lowers the binoculars from her eyes and nods, satisfied with what she’s seen. The Caresaway Birthing Center is a smallish one-story structure bordered by attractively landscaped grounds that are only now beginning to grow ragged. The facility has two entrances. The rear entrance, for deliveries, is locked from the outside with several lengths of chain and three stout padlocks. The main entrance, at the end of a long, winding pathway, is guarded by a single android bearing a nasty semi-automatic weapon. She briefly considers using Kirsten’s handy little device to gain entry, then discards the idea, not knowing for sure how long it will take to round up the women kept captive inside and not wanting to take the chance of the droids “waking up” in the middle of her evacuation and spraying bullets all over the place.

The minicomp is a comforting weight against her chest, and she finds herself smiling as she thinks back on her parting from Kirsten. The feeling of the kiss still lingers, sparking tiny bits of fire along her nerve endings, like an Independence Day sparkler held in a child’s hand. After hours of thinking about it on the drive up to this place, she still isn’t sure exactly what possessed her to act in such a manner with Kirsten—a woman whose emotional walls are so thick that they likely give the Maginot Line pause. She realizes that if she had stopped to think at that moment, it probably wouldn’t have happened at all. Not because there isn’t an multi-layered attraction there, because there is and it is something she’d admitted to herself quite some time ago.

Perhaps it’s because everything about Kirsten King screams “keep out!” in huge neon letters, and Koda has been conditioned from an early age to respect such signs.

Until that one moment in time where she could no more stop her body’s instinctive actions than she could will her heart to stop beating.

With a soft sigh, she relegates those thoughts to the back of her mind where they’ll need to stay until she sees this task she’s set for herself to full completion.

As she watches, a tall man with thick hair and a bushy moustache exits the facility and begins speaking with the android guarding the entrance. Both look up, guns raised, as a herd of winter-thin deer bound from the woods across the neat grounds in huge, panicked leaps.

It is the distraction Dakota needs, and she leaves her tree-lined shelter, darting around the perimeter of the facility until she reaches the west wall. She presses herself tightly against it, feeling the bricks’ chill seeping through her jacket and shirt. To her right, there is a polarized window standing slightly open. She peers carefully through the small slit, and sees that the room beyond is empty and dark.

Sliding careful fingers into the seam, she eases the window open just enough for her to be able to squeeze through. Then, with a soft grunt, she hefts herself up and over the lip of the window and inside the darkened room, freezing the instant her feet touch the heavily carpeted floor. A moment later, she is moving again, silent as a shadow trailing a running man. At the doorway, she pauses again, then slips through and into the empty hallway beyond.

The blueprints she’d downloaded from the computer firmly in her mind, she slides along the hallway wall until she comes to the next doorway. She can hear the muffled sounds of life within: a pen scratching on a piece of paper, the soft hum of medical equipment monitoring and infusing, the deep relaxed breaths of the sleeping and the drugged. She is visible for no more than an instant as she takes in the scene before ducking back out and melding herself to the wall, processing what she’s seen.

Four beds to the left, only to of them occupied. One male to the right, his human status proclaimed by the barren neck that just peeps above the collar of his starched white labcoat. He sits hunched over a desk, writing in a chart. His sandy blonde hair is mussed and lank. His face sports impressive swelling and bruising along his jawline and the one eye she can see.

Taking in a breath, she slips around the doorway and silently moves behind the doctor, squatting on her haunches as she slips a hand over his mouth. “If you want to live,” she hisses in his ear, “don’t scream. Understand?”

The man nods once, quickly.

“Good. I’m gonna ask you some questions. When I take my hand away, I want you to answer me in a whisper, got it?”

Another nod.

“How many women are in this place?”

“Twelve,” he whispers from between swollen and cracked lips.

“Including these two?”

“Fourteen.”

“How many androids?”

There is a long pause. She can feel the surprise and confusion rolling off him in waves.

“How many?”

“T-two.”

“Including the one guarding the door?”

“Yes.”

“Human males? Excluding yourself?”

“Just one.”

“He do this to you?” she asks, trailing a gentle finger against his lumpy jawline.

He flinches, then nods, shamed.

Her lip lifts in a snarl. “Ok,” Koda nods, satisfied. “Aside from these two, are the others able to travel?”

“Yes.”

“And these two, could they, if it was an emergency?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Not even if it meant their freedom?”

Another pause. She can feel it as his confusion turns to hope. “I could get them ready.”

“How long?”

“T-twenty minutes?”

“Make it ten and you’ve got a deal.”

“It’ll be done.” A pause. “Who are you?”

“A friend.”

And when he turns around, she is gone.

*

Tacoma bursts from the short corridor into the waiting room, halting so abruptly that Kirsten almost crashes into him. Behind her, Shannon does stumble and steadies herself against Kirsten’s shoulder. “Sorry,” she gasps, just as Tacoma breathes an audible sigh of relief. Over his shoulder, or more properly, around his ribs, Kirsten has a clear view of the parking lot in front of the clinic door. A long-bedded pickup is drawn up in front of the entrance, with the tops of a couple large steel-wire animal carriers showing under the back window and above the fenders. Manny, in civilian jeans and flannel shirt, is easing the tailgate down, one-handed, assisted by the freckle-faced helicopter pilot who joined them on the mad charge across the Cheyenne bridge after the choppers had shot their loads. Andrews, if she remembers correctly, also in mufti.

Kirsten does not know what Tacoma feared, but it is clear that whatever it was, it has not happened. He pushes the door open almost casually. “Yo, Cuz. What you got?”

“Come look,” Manny answers. “We’re gonna need X-rays, stat.”

Kirsten is not “cuz,” but there is no use in being acting President of the United States if you cannot include yourself in an Air Force Lieutenant’s invitation. When she sees what is in the back of the truck, she wishes almost that she had not. “Oh, my God.” Her throat closes on the words.

The larger cage in front holds a bobcat, well-fed and sleek with the winter’s hunting, and, very probably, the chickens and assorted small livestock from deserted farms. All her grace and beauty lie still now, her eyes wide pools of darkness, her tongue lolling from her mouth. Only the heaving of her ribs shows that she lives. Across her right front paw a bloody gash shows white bone and the loose ends of tendons. “What happened to her?” She manages to force out the words. “Was it—?”

“Goddamned leg-hold trap,” Manny finishes the sentence for her, his voice tight with controlled rage. “I had to dart her to get her out. It’s not as bad as it looks, but the sooner we get her cleaned up and some atropine in her, the better.”

Tacoma inspects the wound carefully, lightly moving the paw back and forward, palpating above the gash. “I think we’ve got one lucky cat here, but we need the radiographs to be certain. Shannon,” he says without looking around, “Set up the X-ray, will you? Dorsal and ventral on the paw. Any other frank injuries?”

This last is directed to Manny, who shakes his head. With his good hand, he pulls forward a second carrier. “This one’s not quite as bad, just embarrassing for the poor guy.”

Kirsten peers past him. Her first thought is that the cage holds a small wolf, her second that this is the biggest fox she has ever seen. He, too, is drugged, though his eyes are not quite so dilated. Even in this state, there is a glint of intelligence in them, and something of the mischief of Wika Tegalega. “Coyote,” Andrews says. “Somehow moved fast enough not to get a foot in the trap. Caught his tail instead.”

“He’s been there longer than Igmú, though. It’s infected,” Manny adds.

Tacoma’s nose wrinkles. The odor is pronounced, even from where Kirsten stands. “Not good,” he says. “Sorry, fella, you may lose some of your brush. We’ll do what we can, though.” Then to Manny again, “ Just these two?”

“There was a badger,” Andrews says quietly. “Too far gone.”

Tacoma swears softly. ‘Any sign of who—“ He breaks off suddenly, his eyes shifting to a large bundle in the corner of the truckbed, then back to Manny again. Something Kirsten does not understand passes between them, clearly as if it had been spoken. Andrews’ face is stiffly, deliberately unexpressive.

The bundle is about the size of a bear, Kirsten thinks. So badly mangled, perhaps, that the men do not want to trouble her tender female sensibilities? But that is nonsense; two of them have grown up in a tradition that honors women warriors, and all three of them were at the Cheyenne, commanded by one woman, led to victory by another. Nothing could offend her sensibilities any worse than the human wreckage at the end of a pitched battle, than what she faced on her flight west before Minot. They have to know that.

The bundle is about the size of a man.

A dead man.

There is nothing to be done for the dead. Aloud she says, “How can I help?”

Tacoma has opened the bobcat’s carrier and is sliding her gently into his arms. Supporting her back and head so that she can breathe more easily, he carries her into the clinic, Kirsten darting ahead to hold the door for him. “Thanks,” he says. “You can help me scrub up the surgery and set out what we’ll need.”

She continues to hold the door as Manny and Andrews between them maneuver the second cage into the waiting room and from there directly into the surgery. Carrying the cat,. Tacoma follows Shannon into X-ray, emerging a moment later and heading directly for the small operating room’s sink. Rolling up his sleeves and scrubbing vigorously up to his elbows, he says, “Let’s see Tshunkmanitu before the drug wears off. If he needs surgery, we can at least start him on antibiotics, knock the infection down some first.”

Ten minutes later, with the bright lamp glaring down on the newly cleaned wound, it is obvious what must be done. The posterior half of the tail hangs by a fragment of crushed bone and little more than ribbons or torn muscle and skin. Tacoma has debrided as much of the dead tissue as he can and flushed the wound with sterile water. “He’d have had himself out of the trap before much longer,” he observes as he strips off his gloves, wads them one into the other along with pus-sodden sponges and tosses them into the red biohazard bin. “He’s going to lose about half that brush. Let’s get the atropine into him and bed him down.”

Tacoma fills a pair of syringes from vials in the refrigerator. One is Clavulin; the other the atropine that will bring the coyote up to consciousness again. “Manny, can you and Kirsten bandage him up? I’ll go take a look at the bobcat’s X-rays.”

Deftly, hardly hindered by his immobilized arm, Manny packs the end of the wound with sponges. A length of Kerlix follows, with bright blue elastic bandage over that. “Just like Coyote,” Manny observes. “In all the old stories, he’s always getting his tail in a crack. That or his—that is, another part of him.”

Kirsten returns his grin as she sprays the table and scrubs it down.. “Did you and Tacoma work with Dakota?”

Manny nods. “I actually got paid. Poor Tacoma just got drafted when she needed someone and he was handy” The coyote’s head suddenly raises up, bright eyes beginning to focus. “Hey, here he comes. Can you lift him?”

Kirsten slides her arms under the animal, no heavier than a medium-sized domestic dog. With Manny holding the door, she walks briskly toward the Iso ward and deposits him in the waiting cage a couple doors down from the mother wolf and her pup. The wolf’s head comes up as they pass, long nose testing the air at the arrival of something canine and male. “Company, girl,” Kirsten says, slipping her arms free and securing the latch.

When they return, Tacoma is working rapidly on the bobcat’s lower leg, just above the ankle joint. This wound is fresher and has not had time to become infected. A pile of bloody sponges sits in their upturned plastic container at one end of the table, beside the bottle of sterile water. “She’s a lucky girl, and we’re a couple lucky nurses,” he says. “The bone’s not broken, and we don’t have to splint it.”

Kirsten watches his deft movements as he swabs and flushes, swabs and flushes the raw flesh. As he reaches for the water, the back of his hand trails gently over the cat’s flank, lingers for a moment on her head. It comes to Kirsten that he has the sort of bond with cats that his sister does with wolves. When he is done he bandages the wound, administers antibiotics and atropine, and himself carries her back toward the ward, murmuring to her softly in Lakota.

An hour later the clinic begins to settle for the night. All the patients are fed, cages cleaned, meds given, dressings changed. Shannon, so bone-weary she can hardly stand, has gone home. Released from his discipline, Asimov sits possessively at Kirsten’s feet in the waiting room. Manny, fishing in his pocket for the truck keys, prods Andrews where he dozes on a bench. “Hey, bro, c’mon. Let’s go home to a deee-lish-us bowl of chicken noodle soup.” And to Kirsten, “You want us to drop you and Asi off at the Colonel’s?”

“Thanks,” she says. Then, very evenly, “In a moment. First I want to know what’s in that bundle in the back of the truck. I like to know who I’m riding around with.”

Again, the covert glances: Andrews to Manny to Tacoma and back.

“I’d like an answer, please.” Kirsten says.

Manny sits down with a sigh, his stocky bulk folding up joint by joint. “It’s the trapper. He was out checking his lines.”

“He drew on Manny,” Andrews says. “It was self-defense.”

Kirsten turns to Tacoma, “You knew about this?”

Tacoma runs his hands through his hair and over his face. “I was afraid something like this might happen, yeah.”

“You thought something had happened to Manny when Shannon came running back to the Iso ward, didn’t you?”

Tacoma nods. “He can’t carry a rifle with his busted shoulder. Look, a trapper is by definition a criminal. It’s not something kinder, gentler people do.”

“Nothing’s wrong with my trigger finger, thank you very much.” Manny pats the bulge at his waist that Kirsten realizes belatedly is a handgun.

“Show me.”

The face of the corpse, when Tacoma unwraps it, is familiar even in the failing light. Except for the bullet hole in his forehead, Bill Dietrich looks exactly as he did the night he and a mob behind him tried to force their way onto the Base. Fleetingly, Kirsten regrets that she did not shoot him on the spot.. “All right,” she says. “Take him over to the morgue. Someone can notify his family, if he has one, in the morning. There’ll have to be some sort of inquest. I’ll talk to the Colonel about it tonight.” She reels off the orders as if she has been giving them all her life.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Manny says. There is a suspicious glint in his eye. “Anything else?”

“Yes.” Kirsten opens the passenger door to the front seat, and Asi hops up, settling in the middle. “Take me back to—“ She hesitates momentarily. “Take me home.”

*

Koda slips back into the darkened, empty room and pauses a moment to consider her options. She knows that down the hall, past the “special care” suite she has just returned from, there are ten birthing rooms, five to a side. Along the other hallway, there are two Jacuzzis used for relaxation, and two “birthing tubs” for water births. At the very end of the hallway is a large, family style kitchen. The two wings sprout from a central core, a square area housing a reception/admitting desk and a waiting area with comfortable couches and a communal television.

Kitchen first, I think.

A noise stays her feet and she listens carefully to she sound of heavy footfalls, nearly inaudible against the thick carpeting of the hallways. Her nose twitches as she scents a noxious cloud of heavy body odor capped by an overly flowery men’s cologne. Reaching under her jacket, she removes the automatic pistol from its shoulder holster and grips it, muzzle down, barrel pressing against her palm. As the footsteps become closer, white teeth glitter in the gathering darkness.

She waits for the man to pass—it is indeed the bushy haired stranger who had stepped out to speak to the android—and just as his shoulders clear the doorway, she steps in behind him, raises the pistol, and cracks the stock against the back of his head. He falls like a stone, and she catches him under the armpits and drags him into the darkened room.

Settling him on his stomach and turning his head to the side, she pulls out a roll of duct tape, placing a piece over his mouth, and wrapping first his wrists, and then his ankles together, binding him securely. Rising fluidly to her feet, she holsters the gun, knowing it won’t be needed further, and walks back to the doorway, peering both ways down the brightly lit hall.

The hall is empty. Pulling the minicomp from her pocket, she slips back out into the hallway and turns left. Long, unhurried strides take her down the short side of the hallway and into the reception area. The area is empty and quiet. Its cheery décor comforts none.

Stopping at an endtable scattered with parenting magazines slipping rapidly out of date, she pops open the minicomp’s protective lid and sets it down. With a crossing of mental fingers, she presses the tiny power button, and waits—expecting what, she’s not exactly sure.

No flashing lights, no screaming sirens, no humming, no martial music piped from infinitesimal speakers.

No nothing.

She waits another moment, pushing down a temptation to give the thing a whack to get it going. She lets go a soft sigh instead. “Guess I’ll have to do this the hard way, then,” she mutters to herself, hand stealing to the gun at her side—a gun that she knows will be less than useless against the androids. “Ah well. Here goes nothing.”

She heads down the hallway, gun cocked and ready, only slowing when she spies a something rather strange. As she closes in, slowly, she recognizes it as a hand, fingers slightly cupped as if reaching for something, peeping out from one of the doorways. As she approaches, the hand doesn’t move and, unable to hold back her curiosity any longer, she rounds the doorway and stares into the blank eyes of an android frozen in mid step.

A smile slowly spreads across her face. With one long finger, she gently pushes against the chest of the android. It rocks in place like an inanimate object, then settles, making no independent movement of its own. “Ohhhh, Kirsten,” she breathes, grinning. “Very nice. Very nice indeed.”

Her grin falls away as she hears a gasp, and she pivots, gun instinctively at the ready. Two hugely pregnant women scream and duck, throwing their arms in front of their faces.

Koda quickly holsters her weapon and shows them both her empty hands. “It’s ok,” she sooths. “I’ve come to get you out of here.”

The taller of the two women slowly removes her hands and peers at Dakota. “Really?” Her voice is high-pitched and full of doubt.

“I’m sure,” Koda replies, slowly and deliberately reaching for the collar of her jacket and separating it to show her neck. “I’m a friend.”

Slowly, more or less assured by the absence of a droid collar, the women come to their feet. The taller one steps forward, then flinches back at the sight of the android, shooting Koda a mistrustful gaze.

“It’s okay,” Dakota replies in response. “It’s temporarily out of commission.”

Like skittish animals, both women step forward until they are within arms length of the droid. They stare at it, wide eyed, then turn those stares to Dakota. “You do this?”

“I had a little help,” she responds warmly.

“Damn,” the shorter woman—little more than a girl, really, with wildly dyed hair and multiple facial piercings—breathes. “Far out.”

“If you can help me get the others,” Koda intones. “We don’t have much time.”

“Wha—?” The younger woman blinks. “Yeah, they’re all in the kitchen. We just came out ‘cause we heard a noise.”

“Alright, then, let’s get everybody rounded up. I don’t know how long it’s going to stay like that.”

*

Three minutes later, Koda is hustling the women, all very pregnant, down the long hall and back into the waiting area. Scooping up the minicomp, she slips it into her pocket and levels the group with an intense glance. “Ok, everybody stay here. I’ll be back in a minute, alright?”

The silent women stare back at her. A few nod. The rest only stand frozen, torn between the polar extremes of fear and hope.

“Be right back.”

Dakota pelts down the hall until she comes to the special care unit. The doctor is almost in the doorway, two groggy women at his side. “Thank God,” he says upon seeing her. “You’re going to have to help me with this one. She began having contractions as soon as I turned her infusion off.”

“Will she lose the baby?”

“She might, if we can’t keep her on the medication.”

“Alright. Does that pump run on a battery?”

“Yes.”

Nodding, Koda brushes by the small group and deftly unclamps the pump from the pole. Wrapping the cord around the clamp, she pulls down the bag of fluid, walks back to the woman, and reconnects the tubing to the IV still in her arm. “Rate?”

“Are you a Nurse?” the doctor asks, surprised.

“Vet. Rate?”

“Um, fifty cc per hour.”

“Fine.” Within seconds, the meds begin once again infusing into the pain-wracked woman. A moment later, she straightens with relief. “Bless you,” she whispers, then nearly collapses as a wave of weakness overtakes her.

“Hold this,” Koda orders, all but tossing the pump to the startled doctor, while steadying the woman with her free hand. Then, in a smooth motion, she tucks her other arm beneath the woman’s knees and lifts her into her arms. “Let’s go.”

“But—.”

“Now.”

Supporting the second woman with an arm around her waist, the physician hurries after Dakota, the pump tucked against his body and the tubing stretching taut between them.

They reach the reception room quickly to find the rest of the group in the same positions Dakota had left them in. Giving them a nod, Koda leads the pack to the front door. Through the glass, she can see the second android standing motionless on the tiny porch. She pushes the door open, and when this action garners no response from the droid, she breaths another silent sigh of relief, and steps through.

“You,” she orders over her shoulder to the punk-haired girl. “Grab that gun. It can’t hurt us without its weapon. Not once we get far enough away.”

“Right on.” The woman does as ordered, then, for good measure, gives the android a mighty heave, sending him toppling from the porch and into the snow where it once again settles, motionless. “Take that, you fucking tin-plated shitheap! Hah!”

“Alright, all of you, let’s go. Walk as fast as you can. Transportation’s just beyond that tree line. Move.”

A moment later, the troop carrier comes into view, and the women break into a run, babbling with excitement and happiness. Koda tosses the keys to one of the women and orders her to unlock the rear door. That done, the women file inside, sliding along the bench seats that line the vehicle. Koda gestures for the doctor to enter, then lays her bundle in the aisle between the seats.

Finished with her task, she looks at the shining faces of the women. “Alright, we’re moving out. This isn’t the most comfortable truck you’ve ever ridden in, but I promise to be as gentle as I can with it, ok?”

The women nod. From the back, a soft voice asks, “Who are you?”

She smiles tightly. “A friend. Now hold on. We’re out of here.”

Slamming the door and locking it tight, she moves alongside the carrier to the driver’s side door. As she’s about to slip inside, she hears the long, mournful howl of a wolf. Tears immediately sting her eyes, and she swipes them away with an angry hand.

“I miss you, my friend,” she whispers into the chilled air.

The howl follows her, filling her ears and soul as she climbs into the truck and drives away.

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

KIRSTEN LETS HERSELF into a silent house. Tentatively she calls out, “Dakota? Maggie?”” There is no answer except for a soft whine from Asimov. Soundlessly she crosses the hall and flicks the light switch. The warm glow of the lamps with their old-fashioned pleated linen shades reveals books ranked on their shelves, Koda’s copy of Spengler neatly closed on the coffee table. The house smells faintly of lavender and lemon wax, no supper on the stove, no fire on the hearth. She has the place to herself, and is content.

She is accustomed to solitude, needs it from time to time as she needs air. Too much has happened in the last two days—too much just in the hours since setting out on a walk with Asi—to tolerate another human presence with any ease. True, she knows that worry will niggle at the back of her mind until Koda returns safely from her raid on the birthing center, but she also knows that the woman who led the charge across the Cheyenne is more than a match for a couple androids and one or two human stooges. Drifting through the living room, her fingers trail over the venerable edition of The Decline of the West. A bit of history, read in some random book or article and never discarded, drifts up from her memory. The great Oglala war chief, Crazy Horse, took the only scalps in his adult life on a raid against the Crow, sparked by his wild grief over the death of his daughter. And Dakota has adopted his blazons of hail and lightning and red-tailed hawk. A shiver runs over her skin; Tshunka Witco had been born somewhere near the bend of the Cheyenne where they had stood down the android army.

And has, perhaps, named his heir, a century and a half later, in the blood and fire of battle?

It is more mysticism than she can tolerate on an empty stomach. Purposefully Kirsten moves toward the kitchen, Asimov shouldering past her to stand over his bowl, eyes bright, tail wagging like a metronome in 2/4 time.

His nose disappears among the kibble the instant it clatters into the metal dish. Kirsten’s choices are not much more varied. An inspection of the refrigerator produces a container of vegetable soup; a moment’s investigation of the pantry, canned fruit, some beans and corn, onions and potatoes. Meat is becoming scarce. Other protein—milk, cheese, eggs—is growing increasingly rarer. It is a problem that will have to be addressed, but not by her, not this evening, at any rate. There is already too much in line ahead of it.

As the soup heats, Kirsten rummages in the bread box, triumphantly pouncing on the last round of fry bread from a batch Koda had made a few days ago. She ought to leave part of it for Maggie and Koda, but hunger and the strains of the day get the better of etiquette. She lays it directly on the stove surface to heat, flipping it a time or two like a pancake, then carries her meal to the table. For thirty minutes, she promises herself, she will think about nothing but the physical necessity of her hunger, about nothing more important than carrying spoon from bowl to mouth. Finding some purchase on the frictionless surface her emotional life has become can wait until after supper.

An hour later, she sits staring into the fire she has lit for company, her fingers idle on the keyboard of her laptop. She cannot bring herself to concentrate on the strings of figures that march across the plasma screen. The work is urgent as ever; unlike the inhabitants of Rapid City, who have abandoned themselves to the optimistic view that the droids are defeated once for all, Kirsten knows, knows better than any, the danger they and the remainder of surviving humanity still face.

She just cannot persuade herself that she should give it her undivided attention. Not now.

The flames leap before her eyes, and in their orange and scarlet she sees again the fires along the valley in her dream, the streaming hair of the warrior woman she has seen four times now. The first time, the woman blocked her passage as she spiraled down toward death; the second time, and the third and the fourth—the last right there in the clinic, with for godssake who knows who coming and going—she had been more than a fleeting image and a voice. There was a past behind her, a past that Kirsten, in her own strange form, had invaded at some place—a battlefield?—somewhere near a body of water called “Douglass,” or something like it.

Someplace, somewhere, something.

Kirsten makes a small noise of annoyance, and Asi, stretched full length on the warm bricks, glances up at her. She stretches out a foot to scratch his belly, and he subsides. It is bad enough to find herself mooning over dreams; it is worse to find herself tolerating the vagueness of a dozen assumptions that she cannot root in fact. Almost without volition, her fingers begin to drift over her keyboard, spelling out the one name she can remember, seeking its place and time in the real world. With luck, she will find nothing and will be able to consign the entire episode to a traumatized and overactive imagination.

Douglass: Scottish Gaelic. From Dubh—black; dark, and glass—stream, water. 1. The name of a family prominent in Scottish history. 2. The site of one of the twelve legendary battles of King Arthur, said to be located in southwestern Scotland.

And the hero-light shone about you that time I first saw you on the banks of the Dubhglass, anama-chara, and I knew then I would do anything to have you for my soul-friend.

Her mind reels away from that as if she has been struck.. She refuses to lose herself in the fog of Arthuriana, in a fantasy para-historical at best. But it has given her a possible foothold in fact.

Item: The ancient Celts—the very ancient Celts, ancient enough to be free of the trailing fantasies of Camelot, she is relieved to find—trained the able of both sexes as warriors. Indeed, the greatest of the Celtic arms masters, those who educated heroes such as CuChullain, were women.

Item: The ancient Celts, including the women, fought naked. A brief anecdote relates how Onduava, wife of the martyred Vercingetorix, led the Gaulish women out against Caesar, “and did the Romans great damage before they got their minds back onto the business at hand.” Kirsten finds herself smiling at that, for reasons that are not quiet clear to her. There is something about the humiliation of the Divine Julius at the hands of a woman warrior that pleases her immensely.

Item: The ancient Celts painted, or sometimes tattooed, their bodies with designs in blue woad, a vegetable dye. They wore their hair in a complicated wreath of braids upon going into battle to deny the enemy a handhold. An illustration shows the helmet-like arrangement, with a sort of attenuated, clubbed pony-tail at the crown. Another shows the alternative, hair cropped short and stiffened into spikes like a hedgehog’s with lime. First millennium BCE punk. Move over, Sting.

Item: The ancient Celts were, according to Caesar, great proponents of “manly love.” Though JC does not mention it in his Gallic Wars, the commentator opines that the warrior ethos extended equally to “womanly love.”

Which brings her back to . . ..

Very softly, Kirsten closes the top of her computer, staring into the fire. Which brings her back to that fleeing moment in the hall, the brief brush of Dakota’s lips on hers. Heat rises in her face that has nothing to do with the fire. She knows, in that irrational part of her mind that she does not trust, that she need not fear the kiss means goodbye. Dakota is neither incompetent nor—except when charging across ruined bridges—careless, and Kirsten knows in her bones that the warrior will not fail in her mission.

But if not goodbye . . .. To the best of her knowledge, the Oglala Lakota do not share the French habit of kissing all and sundry, of either gender, with or without provocation or even the benefit of formal introduction.

Her eyes slide closed, almost of their own volition, and she allows herself to remember the brief contact, not in her mind, but on her lips. There is tenderness in its warmth, a promise of passion, yet it makes no demands. It bears no resemblance to anything in her meager experience, which has been limited to one or two awkward couplings in the back of an ancient Bronco, more out of curiosity than emotion. The experience, she had thought at the time, was not what it was cracked up to be.

But this. . .. Her dreams had been passionate, and had left the physical signs of that passion behind on her skin. An image from her dream forms, flickering in the firelight that plays across her closed eyelids. The red woman’s mouth descending on hers, open and sharing, her hair loose about her, her eyes the color of sapphires in the shadow. The light shifts, and the face has changed with it, the skin bronze now, stretched over high cheekbones, long hair like a waterfall of night cascading over broad shoulders. Only the eyes are the same, blue as the evening sky.

Deliberately Kirsten sets down the computer and goes to stand in the hall, in front of the mirror. Her reflection is shadowed by the firelight and the one lamp left burning in the room behind her. She takes in her own features, the corn-silk pale hair, grown past her collar in the past months, the face she has never considered better than plain, her eyes, probably her best feature, huge and dark in the low light. Dakota Rivers is beautiful, tall and graceful and confident.

Everything Kirsten is not.

And yet. . . . She touches her fingers to her lips, almost disbelieving. And yet, it seems, she finds Kirsten desirable, even when she has someone as assured and as elegant as herself for a lover.

The past is the future, Wika Tegalega had said. Her past? Dakota’s? There is nothing in her own that she cares to repeat, certainly not the puerile gropings of her undergraduate days. Dakota’s past is largely unknown, except for those few facts she has let slip, and the loss of Tali, her first love and first wife. Kirsten has nothing to lay alongside that to fit it to her own measure.

She will not allow herself to think that it may be more than desire. To do so would be to give her heart as hostage to fortune, and there is enough of herself at hazard as it is. For a moment longer, she lingers before the mirror. Then carefully, she banks the fire, leaving the lamp lit against Maggie’s return, or Dakota’s.

Asimov beside her, she slips out of her clothes and into the sweat pants and shirt she still wears against the spring chill. She does not know how long she lies awake, but it is long enough to hear the key in the lock and Maggie’s step, lighter than Dakota’s and quicker, on the floor of the entrance hall. The snick of Maggie’s door closing punctuates the silence, and after that, the only sound in the dark is the soft snoring of Asimov where he sleeps on the floor next to the narrow bed. Toward morning, she falls into sleep and into dream.

*

Dawn has just begun to lighten the horizon when Kirsten rolls from her bed and stretches, feeling oddly refreshed. Oddly, because ever since she’d begun sleeping on the lumpy, pitiful excuse for a mattress, she’s never been even within shouting distance of a good night’s sleep. Of course, it wouldn’t help to grouse about it—aloud, at least. She knows she’s lucky to have a roof over her head. Damn lucky. Many others are making due without even that. Those who are still alive, that is.

Shaking her head to clear away thoughts too maudlin for a newly dawning day, she stretches again and runs a hand through her sleep-spiraled hair, setting it somewhat to rights, as snatches of the dreams which kept her company through the night filter through her slowly awakening consciousness.

They aren’t images so much as colors, very much like the dreams she used to have when her deafness had set in so fully that even the memory of human speech seemed a lost and forgotten thing.

The swirling smoke gray of doubt and confusion merging into the bilious green of fear. The deep purple/red of rage lightening into the golden red of passion. The colors, and their attendant emotions, flow in and among and through each other in dizzying kaleidoscope patterns that change with each twitch of her eyes until she is all but screaming for respite.

It comes, then; a deep, Caribbean blue that nurtures and soothes, and settles over her, leaving nothing within untouched.

And, at last, she knows peace.

Asi hears the sounds a split second before she does, and paces to the door, whining and looking back at her with his best beseeching gaze. Kirsten smiles, and feels her pulse quicken in anticipation. The small room is covered in a quick stride, and she yanks the door open, breath already filling her lungs in preparation for speech.

Breath that leaks out slowly when she sees not Dakota, but Maggie standing in the middle of the living room, pulling on her jacket with short, savage motions, her noble brow deeply furrowed with worry.

“Maggie?”

“She didn’t come home last night,” Maggie bites off, yanking the hem of her jacket down. “I’m going after her. You stay here in case I miss her.”

“She’s back,” Kirsten soothes. “She’s safe.”

Maggie’s head lifts slowly. Her dark eyes dart past Kirsten and to the opened door of the room beyond. A flash of emotion that Kirsten can’t—or won’t—identify crosses her face and is quickly gone. “I see.”

The temperature in the room plummets to sub-arctic temperatures, leaving Kirsten struggling for purchase on this slippery emotional slope. “No!” she finally spits out just as Maggie is beginning to turn away. “She didn’t…I mean, she’s not…I mean….shit.” She sighs, and plays out a hunch. “Could you just…come with me? Please?”

“Where.”

If the spoken word was visible, that particular word, as spoken by Maggie, would be formed from blocks of brittle ice. Kirsten swallows hard, finding herself confronted with a woman very much unlike the one she’s come to know and consider, at least in some ways, a friend. Not lacking in courage, however, she pushes down her unease and faces the Colonel boldly. “Just come. Please?”

“Fine,” Maggie grunts. “Let’s just get this over with quickly. I have things I need to do today.”

“Great! Just let me get my jacket on, and we’re gone.”

The two women step out into the cool dawn. The sky overhead is a pearl gray, and the freshening breeze, while chilled, brings with it the heavy scent of moist earth and growing things. It brings an unconscious smile to Kristen’s face, and an equally unconscious spring to her step as she walks across Maggie’s small lawn and onto the street that will lead them to the vet clinic. Asi bounds ahead, stopping at his usual canine greeting posts and baptizing several newly budding trees. Maggie follows along at a more sedate pace, hands shoved deep in her pockets and eyes fixed to the ground at her feet. She’s feeling out-of-sorts, torn within the space of five minutes between the towering emotions of fear for Dakota’s safety, and a flashing jealousy she’d spent previous hours convincing herself she didn’t possess.

Great, she thinks, giving a soft snort of self-deprecation. I’ve finally gone nuts. Snapping a woman’s head off for absolutely no reason. A woman who, if you’ll remember, just happens to be your Commander-In-Chief. All before breakfast, yet. She snorts again. Great.

Lifting her head, she gazes out over the grounds, toward the hangar where she knows her Tomcat patiently waits. A brief stab of pain twists at her heart, and she wills her gaze away. Damn.

Unaware of Maggie’s turbulent thoughts, Kirsten crosses the last of the ground to the clinic quickly, almost buoyantly, and pulls open the door, taking in the blast of warm, animal scented air with a feeling of true pleasure. Asi rushes inside and assumes his accustomed place on the floor of the waiting room, grabbing a toy from the basket and attacking it with purpose.

Kirsten holds the door until Maggie enters, then follows, taking the lead as she pulls open a second door and walks through into the narrow, pristine white corridor lined with examining rooms on either side. The door at the end of the hall leads to the isolation area, and is presently blocked by the large bodies of Tacoma, Manny and Andrews, who stare, still as statues, through the glass and into the room beyond.

Hearing their entrance, Tacoma turns, smiling in welcome and beckoning them forward. Kirsten reaches the group first, and Manny edges aside, allowing her to fill the space left by his body. As she peers inside, she feels her eyes widen in wonder, even as her heart swells near to bursting.

There, on the plush mats set carefully on the floor, lies Dakota, sprawled out on her back, ebony hair forming a corona around her head. Lying full length against her is the female wolf, free of IV’s, her massive head tucked in tight against Koda’s left side. And, nestled safely upon the softness of Koda’s shirt covered chest, lies the wolf pup. All are blissfully, deeply asleep.

Kirsten can hear Maggie’s soft gasp in her right ear even as she hears Tacoma begin to whisper in her left.

“She came back really late last night and operated on the bobcat and coyote. They’re both doing very well.”

Kirsten nods with relief.

“Then she sent me and Manny home. Wouldn’t take no for an answer, so we went.” Behind her, she can feel Manny’s silent laughter as Tacoma continues. “We got here about ten minutes ago. All the cages are clean and the animals look fine, so I think she nodded off just a little while ago.”

“Is it safe for her to be like that?” Kirsten asks, a little nervously as she watches the female stir slightly and display wickedly long, wickedly sharp teeth in a large canine yawn before settling back against Dakota’s warm body.

“Oh yeah,” Tacoma replies easily. “She’s safe. She’s with her family.”

She turns her head slowly, meeting Tacoma’s gaze, not exactly sure what she’s expecting to see. Humor over his sister’s eccentricities, maybe? Jealousy, perhaps? But she sees none of those things. The only emotions there are an overwhelming pride and, as he turns back to peer through the window, an adoration one would usually see reserved only for the worship of a higher power.

And suddenly, like the Grinch of that long ago children’s tale, she recognizes, and admits, the swelling in her own chest as she too turns back to the scene in the clinic for exactly what it is.

Simple, and complex, and completely irresistible.

Love.

The moment is shattered by the sound of the rear door opening and Shannon, still looking about sixteen hours from rested, stumbling in, dry scrubbing her face and yawning hugely.

Turning quickly, Tacoma bars the way and gently escorts the half-sleeping young woman back the way she came. The others slowly follow, leaving Kirsten to stare at the window, grappling with an emotion, with a revelation, so monumental that it literally steals the breath from her lungs.

I’m in love with her.

Those words go round and round in her mind, each time with a different emphasis until all of them are capitalized and pounding so hard at her heart and head that she fears she’s screaming them at the top of her lungs.

What comes out, however, is the tiniest of whispers, spoken only to an empty, sterile hall. Her breath, as it speaks the words, forms a tiny flower of fog against the glass, misting the scene before her.

“I’m in love with you.”

*

The waiting room sees three men standing at rigid attention as Maggie, back to the exit door, stares at them, dark eyes snapping. “We need to talk.” Her voice, though soft, carries with it the authority of a god. “Be in my office in two hours.”

And with that, she is gone, leaving the men to sag against the walls and desk of the large room.

“We’re in for it now,” Manny mutters, dragging a nervous hand across the freshly sharpened bristles of his regimental buzz-cut.

“We are truly fucked,” Andrews agrees, his face pale as curdled milk.

“Come on, guys,” Tacoma finally says with a quick glance back down the corridor. “Let’s make ourselves presentable before she hands us our guts on a platter.”

The three men quickly exit, leaving one bewildered woman behind trying to convince herself that she’s still dreaming.

*

Maggie unlocks the door to her office and turns up the light switch. Overhead, the fluorescent tubes flicker to life, their cold light falling on the spartan desk and metal-frame chairs, leeching the life from the two Guatemalan cutout tapestries of jungle cats worked in scarlet and orange, bright yellow and fuchsia that share the wall with the ubiquitous color photographs of combat aircraft. One of these shows Maggie herself poised on the ladder of her lead plane, the Bobcats logo splendid in orange and gold above her. It, and the tapestries, are the only personal items in the room. All else belongs to the Squadron Leader, not the woman.

Maggie raises the blinds that cover the one window, giving her a view of the flightline close to the hangers. It is not exactly your executive scenic panorama, but its stark shadings of grey pavement and swept-winged silver birds has never failed to please her. Today they are topped by pale sky and white clouds in the same palette, and a part of her longs to cut free of the ground and lose herself in the blue air where cloud tops fall away beneath her like pristine snowfields.

But that is not why she is here today. Sliding open the top drawer of her file cabinet, she withdraws two fat manila folders and lays them on the desk. A third, empty, she takes from a supply cabinet and labels with Tacoma Rivers’ name. He is not, strictly speaking, “her” non-com, but by following his sister to the Base and fighting under Maggie’s command at the Cheyenne, he has made her his commanding officer. And that makes her responsible for him and his actions.

Briefly she glances at her watch. Ten minutes.

She uses half the time to review the contents of yet a fourth folder, the medical report detailing the manner and cause of death of one William Dietrich, late of Rapid City, South Dakota, currently a pain in Maggie’s official posterior. According to the examining physician, a single 9 mm round had entered the frontal bone of Dietrich’s skull, rather neatly on the medial line between the orbital ridges. It had exited rear, carrying with it a large portion of the late Mr. Dietrich’s cerebrum and cerebellum and an even larger piece of his occipital plate. Death had been instantaneous, not attributable to accident or to suicide.

In plain language, Manny had potted the bastard right between the eyes, blowing his brains out. The said bastard had been dead before he hit the ground.

The body has not been returned to the family because no information is available on Mr. Dietrich’s residence or relations. He carried no identification and is not listed in the Rapid City telephone directory. Maggie makes a note to question the three yahoos presently repining in the brig for shooting at the wolf. Statistically, they are unlikely to have known the late Mr. Dietrich. On the theory that one sadistic thug is likely to know other sadistic thugs, it is the best that anyone has come up with yet.

A shadow passes over her window. Maggie looks up in time to catch a glimpse of three men in uniform, two blue and one green. When the knock comes a few seconds later, she stands in front of her desk, claiming the available space for herself except for a narrow strip at the front of the small room. She lets them wait long enough to knock a second time, then raps out, “Come in!”

They file in one by one, saluting sharply, then tucking their caps under their left arms. “Ma’am.” She acknowledges them briefly, and then, because there is no choice, they form a line along the concrete wall: Sergeant Tacoma Rivers, United States Army on the end; his cousin Lieutenant Manuel Rivers, USAF in the middle, Lieutenant Bernard Andrews, also USAF, nearest the door. All three pairs of eyes seem fixed on some point behind and about two feet above her head. All three are stiff and straight as wooden soldiers.

She lets the silence spin out for a full minute while she stares at them, then says very quietly, “I have before me on my desk the medical account of the violent death of Mr. William Dietrich, civilian citizen of Rapid City. He died of a single gunshot to the head. However this happened, we now have a potential crisis developing between the townspeople and the personnel of this base. I do not need—I hope I do not need—to remind you of the recent unfortunate occurrences at the gate of this installation, or why this shooting is not just A Bad Thing but a Very. Bad. Thing.”

”No, Ma’am,” Andrews says stiffly.

Maggie takes two steps to stand directly in front of him. She snaps, “Did I ask you a question, Lieutenant?”

His Adam’s apple dips visibly under the knot of his tie. “No, Ma’am.”

She begins to pace the line deliberately, looking each man up and down from the toes of his mirror-shined boots to the top of his head. Finally she says, “Lieutenant Rivers. Explain what you and Lieutenant Andrews were doing in the woods the day Mr. Dietrich was shot.”

“Ma’am, “ he says. “We were looking for illegal leg-hold traps we believed had been set in the area.”

“Why?”

“To disable them, Ma’am. Also to assist any animals we might find caught in them, Ma’am.”

“What made you think you might find illegal trapping devices or injured animals in the area?”

Anger flares in Manny’s eyes, white hot. Maggie ignores it. “Well?”

“Ma’am. My cousin, Dr. Rivers, found a grown male wolf in a similar trap the day before. He was moribund and had to be euthanized, Ma’am.”

“So you set out in search of more.”

“That is correct, Ma’am.”

Maggie has heard, in monosyllables from Koda, in more detail from Kirsten, of finding the maimed and suffering alpha wolf in the trap. She suspects that she has nowhere near the whole story, nor does she wish to violate Koda’s privacy by pushing for more information from others. She says, “What did you find?”

“Ma’am. We collected four empty leg-hold traps of varying sizes. In addition, we found one live coyote with a mangled tail, one live bobcat with an injured foreleg and paw, and one badger only barely alive, suffering from shock and advanced infection.”

“And what action did you take?”

“Lieutenant Andrews and I recovered the injured coyote and bobcat, euthanized the badger and transported the surviving animals to the Ellsworth veterinary facility, where they were treated, Ma’am.

“Andrews!”

“Ma’am!”

“Tell me how Dietrich got into the picture.”

Andrews’ eyes have not moved from the spot on the wall above her head. “He approached the trap containing the bobcat as we were attempting to release her, Ma’am.”

“On foot or in a vehicle?”

“On foot, Ma’am.”

“Armed?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Weapon?”

”Deer rifle, Ma’am.”

“Did he threaten you or Lieutenant Rivers?

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“Verbally or with the gun?”

”Both, Ma’am.”

“What did he say?”

“He told us to leave his traps the hell alone, Ma’am. He called us thieves.”

“And?”

“I said that leg-hold traps are illegal, and that we were removing the animals for treatment.”

“And?” Maggie barks. “Do I have to pry this out of you with a crowbar, Andrews?”

“No, Ma’am.” Andrews turns a florid scarlet under his freckles. “He said we were a couple of bleeding-heart candy-ass tree-hugging queers out to steal a real man’s livelihood, and we’d better get out of there before he shoved his gun—that is, Ma’am—”