The Growing

Before either of them can quiz him on the subject, the door opens a crack and Wanblee Wapka peers through. “Kirsten, if you could join us, please?” At her startled and fearful expression, he smiles warmly. “Everything is fine. I promise you.”

With a shuddering breath, Kirsten rises from the couch, hands her mug to Maggie, and all but runs to the bedroom, slipping inside and waiting for Wanblee Wapka to close the door behind her. After a moment, she gathers her courage and looks over at the bed.

There, beneath a heap of blankets, lies Dakota. Though still very pale, thankfully some semblance of color has returned to her face, and she appears to have sunken into a very deep, very peaceful sleep. Having spent so much time imagining various horrible scenarios, Kirsten feels weak with relief. Wanblee Wapka’s steady presence beside her is the only think keeping her from breaking into tears with the force of it.

The older man, reading her like a book, puts a gentle hand on her shoulder and leads her to the side of the bed. “As you can see, she is doing well and resting comfortably.” He gestures to the large bowl and mug that sit on the bedside table. “She is warm, dry, and decently fed. All she needs now is rest. And you.”

Kirsten turns wide eyes to him, and he smiles. “My daughter loves you very much, Kirsten.”

“I love her, too. With all my heart.”

Wanblee Wapka’s smile broadens. “I can see that. It shines from you.” Dakota moans softly. “See how she seeks you out, even in her healing sleep?” Kirsten reaches out and strokes Dakota’s bangs. “And she calms at your slightest touch. She knows you are with her and it helps her to regain her strength.”

“Is that….normal?”

“Normal, yes. Common? No. In fact, it’s quite rare. The bond that is between you is a very strong, very sacred thing.”

“I’m…starting to learn that, I think.”

He laughs softly. “I know it is difficult, Kirsten. Not only are you from a different culture, but your mind, and your beliefs, are as different from ours as night is from day. And yet, Ina Maka has chosen to gift you both with this sacred union. I will help you both to adjust to it as best I can, if it is something you truly wish.”

“More than anything,” Kirsten replies, knowing her words for fundamental truth. “More than anything.”

“I believe you,” Wanblee Wapka replies, his own truth ringing strong in his tone.

Kirsten’s fingers drift down, stroking the cheek of her beloved. “She’s still so pale, so cold.”

“It is an unfortunate side effect of the Vision Trance. She will improve, with rest and time.”

“What can I do?”

“Nothing more than you are doing now. She knows you are here. Your presence will make all the difference.”

Dakota shivers as a great, bone deep chill wracks her body.

“Is it….” Kirsten blushes. “Is it ok if I get under there with her? Maybe it would help her feel warmer?”

“An excellent suggestion. But remember, she will be like this for some stretch of days. Do not feel obligated to stay with her the entire time. You have needs which must be met as well.”

“Right now,” Kirsten remarks, reaching for the bottom of her tank top, “this is what I need.”

With a final, proud smile, Wanblee Wapka inclines his head, then turns and leaves the two of them alone, closing the door softly behind him and plunging the room into twilight.

Kirsten strips down to her undergarments and slides beneath the covers. “It’s okay, my love,” she murmurs as she stretches out full on her back and guides Dakota to her, resting her lover’s sleek head on her shoulder and smiling when one long, strong arm immediately wraps itself around her waist. “That’s right. I’m here. You rest now. I’m here.”

A moment later, she closes her eyes and, like her partner, falls deeply asleep.

*

Tacoma half-rises to his feet as his father re-enters the room. “Ate? How is she?”

“Resting easily. Kirsten will stay with her.” He half turns toward the hall that leads to the kitchen. “Is that coffee I smell?”

“I’ll get you some, Leksi.” Before Wanblee Wapka has a chance to protest, Manny is on his feet and headed toward the back of the house. A smile crosses his father’s face, and Tacoma feels an answering pull at his own mouth. “You must be getting grey, Ate. Would you like a warm blanket for your knees? A cane?”

At that Wanblee Wapka laughs outright. “Not yet, boy. Not yet.” He folds down easily to sit on the chest that serves as a sofa table. In a curious reverse of his movements, Asi rises joint by joint from his place on the hearth, yawns hugely and comes around to lie at Wanblee Wapka’s feet. “Hey, fella,” he says, ruffling the big dog’s fur. Then, returning his attention to Tacoma, “I mean to see my youngest’s youngest before I begin to slow down. You’ll have some grey hairs of you own by the time we get there.”

The words are casually spoken, but Tacoma feels an undercurrent of wakan in them, truth rooted in power. Still he notes the weariness that shows in the creases about his father’s eyes, the cold prickles that rise along the skin of his forearm rested casually across his knee. He glances up to meet Maggie’s eyes, dark with concern and a depth of knowledge that he has seldom seen in anyone not of his own people. “Hey!” he shouts toward the kitchen. “Room service! Move your backside, bro! ”

A clatter in the kitchen announces Manny’s reappearance with a mug of steaming coffee in one hand, a bowl of soup in the other. The rich aroma of chicken broth and sage rises from it. “Here you go, Leksi.”

“Pilamayaye, Tonskaya,” Wanblee Wapka says and applies himself to the food. When the bowl is empty, the last drops soaked up with a piece of frybread, he says, “Maggie, I think you have a few questions.”

“More like a few dozen,” she answers wryly. “But let’s start with the big one. What did Koda say? Can you tell me if it’s not personal? I thought I heard something that sounded like your name.”

Wanblee Wapka nods. “You did, but it wasn’t a name.” He pauses a moment. “I can tell you her words. She said, ‘Red. Red earth. Red rivers. Red all over.’ And she said, ‘Death. Death everywhere.’”

Maggie sits back against the back of the sofa with a visible shiver, her arms crossed over her body like a woman caught in an icy wind. “That’s cheerful,” she says. “Is it a prophecy?”

Tacoma feels the chill course through his own blood, rushing like a stream at spring thaw. He knows the answer to Maggie’s question, knows that his father knows. He cannot explain his certainty, but he is no less certain for that. Wanblee Wapka, though, says carefully, “Until she wakes and speaks to us, we can’t say for sure. We don’t know where she was, or when she was. She could be describing what has happened back east, in Europe, in Asia. She could have been seeing the past in this very place.”

“But?” says Maggie, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped loosely before her , looking Wanblee Wapka directly in the eye.

After a moment, he says, “But yes, I think it was prophecy. I think she was talking about something yet to come.”

“Tomorrow?” she presses. “A year from now?”

A lift of his shoulders answers her. Wanblee Wapka says, “Time runs strangely along the spirit road. One does not always see things in the order they assume in our world. Duration is problematical, at best. We were in the Inipi ceremony for less than an hour. Yet Dakota may have spent half a year, or half a lifetime, on the other side, as time is measured there.”

For a moment, Maggie turns her head to stare out the window. Tacoma follows her gaze to the big oak tree that will shade the house in summer, where a squirrel sits placidly eating one of last season’s acorns, turning it over and over in dainty paws. The plain white curtains stir with the breeze, bringing the scent of new grass. Finally she says, “Can you tell us what you think it means?”

“What does red suggest to you?” Wanblee Wapka asks quietly.

“The obvious?”

”Nothing wrong with being obvious. The whole context—“ A wave of his hand encompasses the Base, the lands beyond, the continent stretching away to the circle of the horizon. “—is obvious.”

“Blood, then. Blood everywhere. Death everywhere. More fighting, more killing, more human casualties.”

“We always knew we weren’t done at the Cheyenne,” Manny says, his voice flat. “The droids won’t leave us alone. They can’t.”

“If there were ever any doubt, the ‘suicide bomber’ that attacked the convoy bringing back the wind turbines put paid to it,” Maggie says dryly. “We’re a rallying point for the population. We’ve got the guns. And we’ve got the President, who also happens to be the one person with the technical knowledge to put the whole fucking lot of them out of business. From the moment she comes out of that room, I don’t want Kirsten to set foot out of the house without a guard on her. She’s got a goddam bullseye painted on her forehead.”

“Want a volunteer?” Manny raises his hand. “If you do, you got one.”

Maggie nods. “Get Andrews. Find two more to spell you, and bring me their names for approval. Twelve hours on, twelve off. We still have some wireless field sets with working batteries. Check out one apiece. And pick out an armored transport. I don’t want Kirsten going off Base any other way from now on. Get it together by suppertime.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” Manny snaps her a salute, grinning. “I always did want to be a Secret Service agent if I couldn’t fly.”

Tacoma stares down at his hands. He cannot volunteer and knows he will be turned down if he does. His skills are needed elsewhere. Wanblee Wapka says quietly, confirming his thought, “Manuel will do what needs doing, chinkshi. You’re too valuable as an engineer and ground field commander.”

“You should have officer rank,” Maggie adds. “I’m going to ask Kirsten to brevet you Captain.” Tacoma looks up, startled, but she waves away his protest before he can make it. “I know it doesn’t matter to you. And it doesn’t matter to the men and women who have fought with you and know you. It will matter to others, eventually, particularly to any other military who may link up with us. You’re getting promoted, soldier. Deal with it.”

There is nothing else for it. “Yes ma’am,” he says. “Thank you.”

A wry grin cants across her face. “Thank me when you have the headaches that go with the job and there’s no more aspirin.”

“There’ll still be willow bark,” Wanblee Wapka says, smiling. “The old ways have gotten our people through a few thousand years or so. Others can learn to use them, too.”

“That could be what Koda saw, too, couldn’t it?” Tacoma meets his father’s gaze steadily. “Red all over. Red people, red ways. The buffalo will come back, and the people with them, just as White Buffalo Woman said.”

“And Wovoka, and others since.” Wanblee Wapka leans down to ruffle Asi’s fur again. “We don’t know yet how much we have lost, or how much we can recover. We don’t know yet how much we want to recover. But you’re right. We—Lakota, Americans, all people—have an opportunity to choose our paths in a way that has not been open to us for centuries. That will be part of Kirsten’s challenge.”

”And Dakota’s,” Tacoma adds.

“And your sister’s. Very much so.” His father levers himself up to his full height, giving Asi’s collar a tug so that Asi comes to his feet, too, tongue lolling in a hopeful grin. “I’m going to walk this guy here, then I’ll be back to stay with them for as long as needed.”

Asi praces to the door, quivering from ears to tail. When it opens he is out like a shot, Wanblee Wapka following more sedately. Maggie looks from Tacoma to Manny and back. “And you two are still sitting on your butts because . . . ?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tacoma says, smiling and getting to his own feet. “We’re on it.”

*

When Kirsten awakens, her body is in a full state of arousal. At first, her eyes still closed, she passes it off as the remnants of a wonderful, if unfortunately unremembered, dream. The hand laying hot on her naked belly, however, convinces her of an entirely different reality. Her eyes flutter open, and she moans softly, her body arching as that hand makes a slow, deliberate circle over her belly before reaching up and brushing tender fingers over her already hard nipples.

Before she can say a word, her lips and mouth are taken in a kiss that is hot, and deep, and wet. Dakota’s taste and scent floods her senses, and she latches on to strong shoulders with both hands, taking what is offered and giving back her own, spiraling desire.

When the kiss is finally broken, Kirsten looks up into eyes fully dilated and black with need. Only a small sliver of brilliant blue surrounds each pupil, like a corona around a total eclipse.

“Lila waya waste mitawa,” Koda purrs, her voice rough with sleep and yearning. “My beautiful woman.” Sliding her fingers down the silken bra, she cups Kirsten’s breast, feeling the strong heart beat quickly, forcefully against her flesh. “Like a drum,” she whispers. “Calling me to worship.”

Heeding the summons, she lowers her head, brushing her cheek against the smooth fabric covering Kirsten’s firm breast before using the tip of her tongue to inscribe wet circles around the straining nipple. A long breath of warm air almost sends Kirsten through the roof, and her cry is loud as warm lips engulf her breast, working it through the silky material of her bra. Dakota’s free hand glides slowly down Kirsten’s side, past her hip to her knee, then reverses its course, cupping her mound briefly before meandering over to the neglected breast and fondling it gently with her palm and fingers.

Kirsten squirms beneath her, hands now clenched in the bedsheets, her head turned to the side, chest heaving as she draws in deep breaths of much needed air. A gentle nip gets her attention; a harder one earns a groan, long and languorous as her hips twitch in response.

Smiling, Dakota pulls away, then leans in for another deep, probing kiss as her hands trail down to work the fabric of Kirsten’s briefs. The smaller woman lifts, and the garment comes free and is tossed to the side of the room, immediately forgotten. “So beautiful,” Koda murmurs, tracing her fingers the middle line of Kirsten’s belly to stroke through the thick, damp hair framing her sex. Long fingers dip lower, swirling through the abundant moisture as Kirsten gasps and moans in pleasure of her lover’s touch.

“So good, tehila, so good.” Stroking softly, she shifts her body until she is off the bed and kneeling on the floor. Grasping Kirsten’s hips, she pulls her young lover forward, hot breath playing over the weeping jewel so beautifully exposed to her. She lifts her gaze up to find brilliant emeralds staring down at her, and she smiles. “Watch me, canteskuye. Watch me love you.”

Lowering her head, she drinks of her lover’s desire, its taste finer by far than any nectar. Her strokes are long, and firm, and swirling, leaving no bit of the slick, swollen flesh unloved.

Straining to keep her eyes open against the waves of ecstasy rising and breaking against her body, Kirsten releases her grip on the sheets and lowers an unsteady hand to the glossy, shining mass of her lover’s hair.

Removing her mouth for just a moment, Koda slides one finger deep within her lover’s center, then removes it slowly, savoring the velvet tightness that grips her so lovingly. Then she returns to her task as her glistening finger trails down until it is pressed familiarly against the small, puckered entrance to the rear. Kirsten lifts her head at the sensation, her eyes showing a little fear. “Koda? What—?”

She collapses hard against the pillows as Koda’s tongue redoubles its swirling strokes and her finger begins a firm massage designed to relax and pleasure.

“Jesus!” Kirsten pants. “That’s—incredible!” she breathes out as Koda enters her to the top knuckle, stimulating nerve endings she never knew she had before.

Koda laughs softly in her chest as she gently eases her finger forward until it is fully sheathed. Then, with a motion that matches her tongue, she swirls and thrusts, ever so gently, reading her lover’s body like a book as Kirsten’s muscles tense and relax, tense and relax, and her breath becomes short, almost agonized pants.

She curls her finger within as she bites down gently on the flesh in her mouth concentrating solely on the swollen head, bathing it with staccato touches of her tongue.

Kirsten explodes with a force that takes her breath away. Her muscles seize in an incredible spasm and she can do nothing but ride out the waves of utter passion that carry her along into the unknown.

When she is at last borne upon the land, Koda is there, holding her gently in her mouth, warming her, grounding her, bringing her home.

And then, another thrust, and she feels herself, impossibly, driven forward again on the wings of an excitement she’s never even dreamed.

“No!” she cries out when she feels her lover leave her. Her eyes open to find Dakota standing, naked, smiling down at her.

“Spread your legs a little more, canteskuye, a little more. Yes, perfect.”

As Kirsten watches, Dakota uses her clean hand to spread her own lips, then leans forward, sealing them both together in the most wonderful of ways. Their slick, slippery, swollen flesh rubs together, setting off sparks throughout Kirsten’s body and she cries out, once again, at the sensations.

“A long, slow ride to bring us home, cante mitawa.” Koda purrs as she plants her fists on the bed and begins to thrust against her lover, circling her hips in a maddening, captivating way. Kirsten licks her lips as she sees Koda’s breasts sway above her, their nipples proudly swollen a deep red. She reaches up to stroke them as Koda continues her long, slow thrusting, grunting softly with the effort of each stroke.

“Harder,” Koda gasps as Kirsten pulls and tugs. “Yes, harder, like that, oh yes….”

Dakota increases her rhythm, leaning closer over her lover, her long fragrant hair forming a curtain over them both. She feels her climax rushing toward her. “Han!” she shouts, tilting her head back, displaying her neck as she continues to thrust into Kirsten’s willing, open body, sweat pouring down her face and neck. “Han!” she shouts again, and begins to shudder as her orgasm overtakes her with great bursts of light and pleasure.

A moment later, she collapses down over the body of her lover. Her fingers move quickly, thrusting themselves into Kirsten’s welcoming body, and grunts with each thrust into the slick, velvet glove. “I love you, canteskue,” she pants out between grunts. “I love you. Gods, how I love you.”

It takes no more than that for Kirsten to burst free from her body once again, her spirit enfolded in brilliant colors that lift her so high and hold her there for a seeming, blissful eternity before easing her gently back down into the embrace of the woman she loves.

She comes back to herself to find her face and eyes and hair peppered with kisses, and it is all she can do just to collapse, completely spent, into Dakota’s strong and loving arms. She manages to lift her shining face to her lover. The kiss they share is warm, and soft, and loving.

Then both fall down into slumber, still pressed tightly against one another as the sweat from their bodies slowly cools.

*

When Kirsten next awakens, it is the morning of the third day after the events of the sweat. She finds herself cocooned beneath Koda’s dead weight just as another soft knock comes to the door. “Just a minute!” she calls, her voice sounding as harsh as a frog’s dying croak. “Koda. Sweetheart, could you—? Unh. Okay, that’s not gonna work.” Her deeply sleeping lover is as boneless as a ragdoll, and it takes all of her strength just to free one leg. With some leverage, she is able to roll Koda to her back, where she stays, head lolled to one side. In the dawning light of the new day, Kirsten carefully looks her lover over. Most of the deep color has returned to her face, but dark circles continue to take up residence beneath her eyes. Despite the heat of the room, her flesh still retains a disturbing chill, and as Kirsten rises from the bed, she carefully tucks the scattered quilts around Dakota’s still form.

The knock sounds again.

“I’m coming!” She finds herself blushing deeply at the words. “That’s what I’ve spent the past two days doing,” she murmurs under her breath, then blushes again. Her body is sore, but it is the pleasant soreness of one well and wonderfully loved. “Jesus,” she whispers, shivering as the memories pass in a merry parade through her consciousness. “Alright, Kirsten, deep breath in, deep breath out, good. Now….” She raises her voice. “Who is it?”

“It’s Tacoma. Lieutenant Jimenez, one of your techs, is here to see you. He has something from that suicide bomber android he needs to show you.”

“Ok,” she says, her eyes darting around for clothes, or a robe to cover herself with, and coming up empty. “I’ll be right out. I have to—.”

“Take your time. We’ll be in the living-room when you’re ready.”

“Thanks.” Lifting an arm, she takes a quick sniff, then winces and coughs. “Shower. Now.”

The master suite contains a tiny half bath with enough room for a toilet, sink, and a stall shower. The spray is bitter cold as she turns on the tap, and, gritting her teeth, she steps inside. “I gain more respect for you military types every day,” she mutters, shivering as she grabs the soap and begins quickly working up a lather. Longing for the days when a steamy hot shower was both luxury and necessity, she completes her washing in record time and gratefully turns off the tap.

A thankfully non regulation towel is her reward and she dries off quickly, then wraps it around herself as she stalks back into the bedroom. “Damn,” she murmurs, looking down at the scattered pile of clothes she’d worn three days before, wrinkled beyond salvaging. “Now what? I’m certainly not gonna entertain guests in a towel.”

Shrugging, she steps over to the battered dresser where she’d seen Koda draw forth clothes. Opening a drawer, she rummages through until she comes up with a plain black t-shirt—overlarge, which is good since her bra has been reduced to two matching strips of useless cloth—and a pair of cargo shorts that, once she pulls them on, resemble Capri pants given the difference in height between herself and her lover. “Ah well. They’ll just have to learn to deal with it.”

Running Dakota’s brush through her hair, she deems herself as presentable as she’s going to get, and makes a final check on Koda, who is sleeping peacefully, burrowed beneath the layers of blankets covering her. “I’ll be back soon, sweetheart,” she whispers, gently touching Dakota’s cheek before turning and leaving the room.

*

Jimenez and Tacoma come to their feet as Kirsten steps from the bedroom. She waves them back down, not one to stand on protocol in her own home—and truly, for the first time, that’s what she thinks of this place. She gives each as much of a smile as she can muster, then comes around to the couch and gingerly perches on one arm, hoping neither can see the slight wince she gives as she does so.

“So, what do you have for me, Lieutenant?”

Jimenez lifts his briefcase and props it on the table, sliding the latches and exposing the interior. Picking up a small, labeled plastic baggie, he hands it to Kirsten, who swipes her glasses from the endtable and slips them on. A pair of tweezers follows, and Kirsten accepts them with a nod and opens the baggie, drawing out a tiny object no bigger than the half moon of a fingernail. She turns the blackened object this way and that, a smile blooming over her features. “Oh, this is good. This is very good.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” Jimenez says, beaming with pleasure.

“Was this separate from the other pieces or did you extract it?”

He lifts another baggie from the case and hands it to her. “We took it out of this, Ma’am.”

The metallic square he hands her is half the size of a pack of cigarettes and weighs less than two ounces, by her reckoning. Kirsten feels her heart race at the discovery. Though blackened, melted, and quite damaged, the piece she holds is the nerve center of the android; something no one save Westerhaus and his flunkies has ever seen. “You may just have made the second biggest mistake of your life, Pete,” she murmurs, grinning a shark’s grin. Then she looks up at Jimenez. “Any other nice surprises for me, Lieutenant?”

“Back at the lab, Ma’am,” he says, chest so puffed with pride that Tacoma spares a brief second to wonder if he’ll soon burst, leaving Air Force blue bits of himself scattered about the house. He stifles a chuckle in deference to the man’s obvious sincerity, though his eyes share a wicked grin with Kirsten, who’s successfully hiding her own mirth. “Will you…uh…will you be returning with me, Ma’am? To the lab, I mean. Corvallis and I really could use your expertise. Ma’am.”

“I’d like to, Lieutenant,” Kirsten remarks, carefully slipping the square back into the baggie and zipping it closed, “and I will, but right now, I have to….”

“…get yourself to the lab with this young gentleman,” Wanblee Wapka states, stepping through the door. Asi, who he’s been trying to entertain, pushes past him and, yodeling with joy at finally seeing his Mistress, all but leaps into Kirsten’s arms as he covers her face with wet, sloppy dog kisses. “Dakota should be awakening soon. I’ll keep an eye on her while you tend to your own needs.”

“But—.”

“Go. Please. She will be fine, and it will do you good to get out for awhile.”

Kirsten still looks unconvinced. Oh, she believes that Wanblee Wapka speaks the truth; he knows about these things much better than she does, after all. But there is a churning, gnawing feeling inside of her which makes her wonder if, rather than Dakota being okay without her, she will be okay without Dakota.

“Go,” Wanblee Wapka repeats, smiling. “You don’t have to stay long.”

Finally, reluctantly, she nods and, with a final pat to her lovelorn canine, slowly rises and follows the young Lieutenant from the house.

When she leaves, Tacoma also rises from his place on the couch. “If it’s alright with you, Ate, I think I’ll head back to the power plant. Bernstein and Jove are just about to do the first test with the windfans we’ve installed. I’d like to be there if anything goes wrong.”

Wanblee Wapka nods.

“She will be alright, right?” Tacoma asks, eyeing his father closely.

“She’ll be fine, chinkshi. But you know that already. You’ve always been closer than cekpapi.”

“I do know,” Tacoma admits. “But it’s always nice to have it confirmed.” He smiles. “Thanks, Ate. I’ll be back soon.”

“Be off with you then,” he orders, lowering his long frame onto the couch and patting his lap. Asi obligingly puts his head in the indicated spot, and begins to groan as his ears are firmly scratched.

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

DAKOTA BATTLES UP from the deep levels of her sleep; her body burning, aching, bone deep. She reaches for her partner, only to come up empty-handed. Her eyes flutter open, dark with arousal. “Kirsten? Canteskue?”

Only silence answers her call, and she scrambles up to a sitting position, flinging the heavy covers off of her burning flesh, then groans as her head all but explodes from the abrupt change in position. Her hands fly up to cradle her skull. The mother of all headaches seems to have taken up residence in her brain and she grits her teeth against the urge to cry out in pain. “Gods,” she grits out, trapped between the splitting fire in her head and the throbbing need in her body. “What’s happening to me?”

Slamming her eyes shut, she takes in several deep, slightly labored, breaths, trying to restore some semblance of control. The deep breaths are a mistake. Kirsten’s essence, the commingled essence of their passion, lies heavy in the room, causing her whole body to clench with unmet desire. She bolts to her feet and walks on unsteady legs to the one small window. Throwing it open, she breathes deep of the springtime air. Her headache pounds, sending sharp spikes of pain down her neck, behind her eyes, and even through her teeth. She groans and clamps hard fingers to her skull once again. “Thunkashila, help me,” she prays, her words slipping into the breeze that cools the sweat on her skin. “Please.”

Slowly, gradually, with the speed of forever, a small measure of calm steals over her, allowing her to straighten somewhat, which helps lift the strain from her overstressed muscles and bones. “Thank you,” she whispers, taking in a final deep breath before turning away from the window and heading for the small bathroom to take care of other, readily apparent, needs.

The shower beckons, and she turns on the tap and quickly enters. What little calm she’s managed to attain is immediately driven from her by the first blast of icy water on her skin. Her headache trebles in strength, driving her to her knees with its force. All of the muscles in her body simultaneously cramp, and an agonized cry sprouts forth, fully bloomed, from between tightly clenched jaws.

Within seconds, the icy spray ceases its unremitting, torturous dance on her skin, and she finds herself wrapped in the strong arms of someone she knows well. Her father’s scent, warm and comforting, fills her senses, allowing her some small measure of peace, though her body is wracked with violent tremors and her head is an agony almost too much to be borne. “Ate,” she moans, feeling much like a frightened child, “what’s happening to me?”

“Shhhh,” Wanblee Wapka croons in her ear, helping her through the wracking shudders which knot her muscles until they are like rocks beneath his hands. “Shhh, chunkshi. I’m here. I’m here. Shhh.”

A steaming mug is brought to her lips. “Here. Drink this. It will help.”

Inhaling the fragrant steam, she takes a tentative sip, then a larger one as the well remembered and much loved taste of honey soothes her palate and warms her from the inside. Her muscles begin to relax and she leans gratefully into her father’s quiet strength, taking her first full breath in what seems like hours. “Thank you.”

Smiling, he draws the mug away. “If you can hold this for a moment, I’ll get a towel.”

Raising shaking hands, she grasps the mug and holds it like a lifeline. Wanblee Wapka gradually releases his grip and, when he is satisfied that she can hold herself up without assistance, grabs a large towel from its place on the bar and returns, wrapping her in it and holding her close. “Better?” he asks, watching her take another, deeper drink from the mug.

“You don’t know how much,” Dakota replies as her eyelids begin to droop. “What did you—?”

“Just something to relax you, chunkshi. Is the headache easing?”

“A little, yes.”

“Good. Do you think you can stand?”

“With some help, I think. Whatever herbs you used….” She yawns hugely. “…they’re knocking me for a loop.” She turns her head and blinks at him. “How did you know?”

“I am your father,” he replies simply, giving her all the answer she needs.

With Wanblee Wapka’s help, Dakota slowly rises to her feet and allows him to lead her back to the bedroom. As he makes for the bed, Koda shakes her head and stops. “Couch,” she says. “Better.”

He looks at her for a moment, then nods. “I’ll get your robe.”

After trading towel for robe, Koda manages to make it to the living room under her own power and, thanking the gods that there is no one but her father to bear witness to her weakness, she collapses onto the couch in a less than dignified sprawl. Her father’s herbs have eased the vice in her head and loosened the cramping tension in her muscles, but nothing, it seems, can ease the burning in her blood. This state of hyper-arousal is, in its own way, more painful than the headache at its worst, and she shifts on the couch, eyes darting wildly around, seeking out her lover in the deep shadows of the house.

“She will return to you soon,” Wanblee Wapka remarks, entering from the kitchen carrying a bowl of steaming, thickened soup. He hands it to his daughter, returning her glittering stare with one of his own. “Yes, I sent her away for a short time. I knew you were ready to awaken, and needed time to speak with you.” Smiling slightly, he gestures toward the bowl. “Eat. It will help replenish your strength.”

“I—.”

“Eat.”

It is a tone she well remembers, and instinctively heeding it, she begins to do as ordered. After a couple of spoonfuls, however, she pauses, the soup sitting heavy in her belly. “Ate, I….”

With a small sigh, Wanblee Wapka lowers himself to the chest facing his daughter. He puts a hand on her wrist, squeezing it lightly. “Chunkshi, this need that you’re feeling…it is a normal thing.”

“Normal!?” she blurts out, wide eyed.

“Yes. It is an aftereffect of your spirit walk.”

“Never,” Koda half-whispers, bringing her free hand to her brow, “never, not even with Tali.”

“Tali was your beloved. But she was not the match to your spirit, Dakota. Kirsten is. She is mashke naghi. You feel the bond between you. You know I speak the truth.” He smiles a bit to soften his words. “This is something I have experience with, chunkshi. After all, why do you think you have so many brothers and sisters?”

Pulling the mug of cooling tea away from her mouth, Koda sputters and chokes and turns tearing eyes to her father. “Too much information, Ate!” she gasps. “Too much!”

Wanblee Wapka’s laugh is deep and melodious as he leans over and gently pats his beloved daughter on the back to ease her choking spell. “Too much, perhaps, but you need to know that I am speaking from experience. You are not alone in these feelings.”

The choking spell finally passes and she leans, gratefully, against her father’s hand, her expression somber. “How—how long will this…this ache last, Ate? I know that I can’t live this way, and Kirsten….” Her eyes widen as a new worry takes up residence in her churning mind.

“Be at peace in your heart, chunkshi. This need for your tehila will never pass, but the strength of it will dim over time.”

“How much time?”

“Two or three more days, perhaps. It is different for everyone.”

“What about Kirsten?”

“What about her? She is a very strong woman.”

Dakota doesn’t miss the strong note of approval in her father’s voice, and it warms her somewhat. “Yes, but how will she feel…tied to me in this manner? Mother understands, she is Lakota. But Kirsten….” She shakes her head. “Gods, Ate! What if she says ‘no’ and I can’t…I can’t….”

“She’ll never say no.”

Head snapping up, Dakota stares wildly into the shadows as the speaker of those words enters slowly, like a shining spirit making its way into the light. Kirsten is glowing, radiant, shining with an inner light that completely captivates her avid watcher. The hunger which has abated somewhat comes back full force and Dakota feels her entire body pulse with renewed, overwhelming desire. An almost soundless groan sounds from between suddenly parted lips as Wanblee Wapka looks on, smiling to himself.

He silently lifts his body from the chest and summons Asi, who is doing everything short of standing on his head and singing “Yellow Rose of Texas” in order to get his oblivious Mistress’ attention. With a very human sigh, the jilted dog trots over to Wanblee Wapka and allows himself to be led out into the fresh air.

“Never,” Kirsten repeats, voice low and purring, as she continues her slow, deliberate advance. Reaching the arm of the couch, she bends at the waist and covers Dakota’s lips in an incendiary kiss that has her lover seeing an entire universe of stars.

She finally pulls away, running the tip of her finger over Koda’s passion swollen lips. “Come, my love. Let me ease your ache.”

Unable to feel anything beyond the jolts of fire sparking along her nerve endings, Dakota allows herself to be urged up from the couch and let into the bedroom. When the door is closed behind them and Kirsten gathers her into her arms, the inferno roars to blazing life, and she gives into it willingly.

*

Two hours later, the lovers are lightly dozing, their bodies still pressed together, legs comfortably tangled. Kirsten is partway on top of Dakota, her head tucked into her lover’s neck. “Koda?” she murmurs sleepily, lips brushing against sweat-salty skin.

“Mm?”

“I was wondering….”

Koda tips her neck to the side, silently encouraging further exploration. “’bout what?”

Kirsten gives the skin against her lips a light nip, then pulls away slightly. “Those words you use when we make love….”

“Yes?” Koda purrs, pulling Kirsten even closer as she runs one bare foot along the smooth slope of Kirsten’s calf.

“I guess—I mean, I understand them in context, I think….”

“Oh, you do.”

“Thanks,” she replies, blushing slightly. “But…well…do you think you could teach me what they really mean? I mean, I’d…like to learn.”

“Ya would, hmm?”

“Yes. I would.”

“Alright, then.” Moving her legs just slightly, Dakota twists her body, and Kirsten suddenly finds herself flat on her back with six feet of amorous Lakota poised over her, a wicked glint in her eyes. “Consider this your first lesson.”

“Now?” Kirsten squeaks.

“No time like the present.” Giving Kirsten a quick peck on the lips, Koda settles herself more comfortably, then reaches up and glides a hand through Kirsten’s golden hair, watching as the soft, thick mass slips through her fingers like water. “Pehin.” She tugs the locks gently to establish her point.

“Pehin,” Kirsten repeats dutifully. “Hair.”

“Got it in one,” Koda replies, leaning down and giving her a deeper, lingering kiss. “You’re a good student,” she remarks when she comes up for air.

“With incentive like that, how could I be anything else?”

Laughing, Dakota hugs her close and slips a hand into her hair once again, splaying her fingers over the curve of Kirsten’s skull. “Nata.”

Kirsten’s brow wrinkles as her straight, white teeth bite down on her lower lip. “Nata. Skull?”

“Close.”

She thinks a moment more, though those thoughts are distracted by Koda’s short nails lazily scratching beneath the fall of her hair. “Head?” she guesses.

“Perfect.” Another kiss.

“Oooh, I like this kind of reward,” Kirsten chuckles when her lover releases her lips. “Sure beats the gold stars Mrs. Price used to give out in first grade!”

Dakota grins, and draws her hand away. Long fingers gently trail over Kirsten’s brow, her cheeks, her chin. “Ite.” She repeats the gentle stroking. “Ite. Ite hopa.”

“Face,” Kirsten finally replies, then blushes. “Beautiful face.”

“Very beautiful,” Koda murmurs, leaning down for another kiss. Tilting her head slightly, she brushes her lips against Kirsten’s nose. “Pasu.” Tilting further, she brushes a kiss against the lids of her lover’s eyes. “Ista.”

“Nose…and eyes,” Kirsten hums, squirming a little as her body begins to warm.

“Nuge,” Koda breathes into the delicate shell of one ear as her tongue teases its flesh, earning her a moan and a shiver from her responsive lover.

“E—ear.”

“Mmm.”

“Dakota—I—sweet Jesus!” Her ears are extremely sensitive parts of her body, and what Dakota is doing to them is driving her off the deep end in a hurry.

“Pute,” Koda husks softly, running a thumb tenderly across Kirsten’s lips as she continues to work magic on her lover’s ear. She groans as those lips part and suck her thumb inside a hot, wet mouth. Kirsten’s tongue moves to suckle, and Koda moans out, “Wichaceji.”

That moan is nearly her undoing. Reaching up, Kirsten pulls Koda’s hand from her mouth and boldly slides it down her own body. “Sweetheart, I think this lesson’s gonna have to wait.”

“Oh yes,” Dakota purrs as her fingers are bathed in Kirsten’s passion. Suckling her lover’s earlobe, she enters Kirsten’s heat with one smooth, deep stroke. “I think you’re right.”

*

Night has drawn its curtain over the sun, leaving a billion billion stars in its wake. Inside the quiet house, Dakota is seated on the couch, long legs tucked beneath her and covered with a quilt in deference to her still malfunctioning thermoregulatory system. Her deeply tanned face is gilded gold by the light of the cheerily crackling fire, and in her hands is Spengler, turned to the last few pages.

Kirsten sits in an overstuffed and tattered easy chair positioned at a right angle to the couch. Her laptop is on the chest that serves as a coffee table, and her face is bleached of all its color by the backwash of the brilliant blue-white screen. With her recent bonanza of the android ‘nerve center’, she is running the results against established data, hoping to find a common thread that will allow her to affect a permanent shut off of all android systems wherever they might be. After several hours of searching, she hasn’t made a hit, but her confidence is up, flowing from her like fresh water welling up into a natural hotspring. Asi lies adoringly at her stocking feet, his head resting on his stuffed chew-toy, dreaming whatever dogs dream of on soft spring nights like this one.

As if by common, and silent, consent, dark and fair heads rise and two sets of eyes meet, crinkled at the edges from the loving, almost shy smiles they share. Over the crackle of the cheery fire, the refrigerator hums to life, then cuts off just as quickly with a dying clank and groan. Koda sighs and rests her head back against the couch. “That’s it. The last of our diesel ration for this week.”

“Damn. We’ve still got tons of food in there.”

“I know.” Tossing the quilt from her lap, Dakota unfolds her legs and makes as if to rise when a strange buzzing noise fills the room briefly, followed by the flickering of the overhead fluorescents in the kitchen and two table lamps in the living room. A loud crackle and hum issues forth from the speakers of the forgotten stereo system

Kirsten sits back, startled, and almost topples her chair. “What—?”

Asi scrambles to his feet, barking furiously at nothing.

“Looks like Tacoma got those turbines running after all,” Koda replies grinning. The smile slips from her face as the lights brighten for a second, flicker, and wink out, leaving the faint scent of ozone behind. “Or not.”

Kirsten barks out a short laugh, drawing a hand over her face in embarrassment. “I can’t believe I reacted like that. It was like I’d seen a ghost or something! Damn!”

Koda chuckles. “I’d say that was a pretty natural reaction, considering we haven’t full electricity here in what, a month? Two?”

“It feels like forever. But still….” She shakes her head, then looks up at Dakota, her expression somber. “Do you think this is what it’ll be like in the future?” she asks, somewhat plaintively. “Do you think we’ll go back to believing in magic, to thinking that lightening is the gods’ way of showing displeasure? Will technology become something to be feared instead of welcomed and used?” The implication of her questions cause a prickle of unease to dance down her spine, raising the hairs on her arms. “God. How morbid.”

“It’s not morbid,” Koda counters, rising from the couch and coming to Kirsten’s side. Sitting on the wide arm of the chair, she reaches out and strokes her lover’s hair. “I don’t think we’ll ever lose technology completely,” she muses softly. “As a species, we love our creature comforts too much to give them up that easily. We might not get by on coal and other fossil fuels, but we’ve got other inexhaustible supplies of energy, like the wind and the sun, and ways to convert them into what we need to keep our houses lit, our food cold, and our water warm.”

“Some of us, maybe.”

Koda looks sharply at her. “What do you mean?”

“We’re setting up a perfect dichotomy,” Kirsten starts slowly, gathering her thoughts. “The ‘Haves’ versus the ‘Have-Nots’. Here, on the base, or in a larger city, I can see what you’re saying coming to pass. But what about all the people living outside of the cities, outside of the military bases, people who are used to the same creature comforts as the rest of us? Can you imagine Mr. and Mrs. Joe Normal and their 2.3 kids out in the suburbs wrestling a wind fan into place around the ol’ homestead? And even if they could, who would teach them how to hook it up so that Martha could use the washer once a week? Who would fix it when it broke? And what would they pay him or her with?”

“Well—.”

“For every Tacoma” Kirsten continues, now on a roll, “there are a hundred, maybe a thousand people whose only knowledge of technology is that when they push the button, the dragon comes to life. They don’t care how it works, only that it works.” She looks up at her lover, eyes bleak. “So what happens when the ‘have-nots’ gather outside of Grand Rapids in the middle of winter, up to their necks in snow, freezing, covered in furs, and look in on all the folks who are living the life of gods, with central heating and hot water and food that comes with the flick of a switch? How will they feel? What will they resort to, to live that kind of life? Theft? Kidnapping? Murder? Will this new God, Technology, eventually be the name under which all future wars are fought?”

Breaking off, she tilts her head, looking at Dakota who is staring at her with an indecipherable expression on her face. She flushes. “Told you it was morbid.”

“Morbid? No. Something we really need to think about? Definitely.”

Kirsten sighs. “It’s just that….” She shakes her head, then peers pleadingly at her lover. “Dakota, you were born to this land, raised on it. You love it and it loves you. Even a fool like me can see it.”

“Kirsten, you’re no fool….”

“The point is, sweetheart, as much as you might love your creature comforts, you’re more equipped to deal with this kind of thing than ninety nine percent of the people out there. People like me, and like Andrews, and even Maggie. When we lost the electricity that first time, it didn’t even faze you. No, you just built up a fire, got out the blankets and the oil lanterns from god knows where and continued on as if nothing had happened. While the rest of us….”

“You’re adapting….”

“Of course I’m adapting, Dakota! I don’t have any other choice but to adapt! But Dakota, don’t you see? I’m a scientist. More than that, I’m a scientist of technology. This,” her arm sweep indicates the computer and myriad of other electronic gadgets that share space on the wide trunk, “these, are as much a part of who I am as your animals and your visions and your connection to the land are a part of you. Can I adapt? Anything’s possible, I suppose. Do I want to?” She laughs. It’s an empty sound. “I…don’t know.”

“Well then,” Dakota finally replies after what seems a lifetime of silence, “we’ll just have to make sure that the new world we build contains enough for both of us, won’t we.”

This time, Kirsten’s laugh is a little more genuine. “You don’t ask for much, do you.”

“Me?” Koda quips as she slips from the chair, and bends forward, bringing their lips close. “I ask for everything.”

Their kiss is aborted by the sound of men and woman shouting. Somewhere on base, a loud siren begins to wail.

“What is it?” Kirsten asks, scrambling to follow her lover who has straightened and is striding for the door.

“Fire.”

*

Dakota steps into a scene filled with paradox. Uniformed military men and women march forth in orderly, ordered rows as frightened and yelling civilians dash about in utter chaos, clutching their children and belongings to their chests as if Armageddon has come to visit once again.

Small fires dot the landscape here and there, their flames licking up against the inky blackness of the moonless sky. The air is acrid with smoke and the shouts of frightened people, while the wailing siren holds sway over them all like an omnipotent king on a mountaintop throne.

Shooting a quick glance in the direction of the clinic, Koda is relieved to see that it, for the moment, is out of danger. She can well guess the meaning of these fires; small appliances left on during the first uprising, and forgotten in the subsequent loss of electricity, came once again to life with the return of power, however briefly, to the base. Left unattended, the small, poorly cared for appliances overheated and caught fire.

As she watches, a small base fire truck trundles self-importantly by, its blaring siren poor competition for the base siren which wails on and on and on, causing more fright than it stills. Knots of people stare up at the sky, fearing an invasion from above. Koda grabs a passing airman and yanks him to a stop. “Find that siren and pull its cord. Damn thing’s gonna start a panic that none of you are prepared to deal with right now.”

The arrogant young man thinks to resist. The impulse is a brief one as he recognizes her face in the fire-sparked darkness and stiffens to rigid attention. “Ma’am! Yes, Ma’am!”

“Go. Now.”

He runs off as his cohorts, dressed in fire gear, slip from the now parked truck and drag hoses to the waiting hydrant. Within moments, powerful sprays of water begin to douse the fires and Koda breathes a little easier.

She senses her lover a split-second before she feels the soft weight of a woolen blanket drape over her shoulders. Smiling, she clutches the blanket to her and watches as Kirsten appears to her left, the dwindling flames reflecting off the lenses of the glasses she’s forgotten to remove. “Our little power surprise do this?” she hazards, watching as the airmen beat back the flames of one partially gutted house.

“I’m guessing so,” Koda replies, snuggling further into the blanket as the cool, smoky evening air chills her more than it should. Kirsten looks up at her, concerned, only slightly mollified by the grin and small shrug she receives in return.

Before she can pry further, Tacoma steps up, his face smudged with dirt and soot, his hair hanging in lanky strings. His expression is half-chagrinned, half-pissed.

“Way to make a statement there, goober,” Koda kids him, pressing against the side of his sodden workboot with her bare foot. “Couldn’t you have gone with something a little less…dramatic?”

“Ha. Ha,” he replies, looking her over carefully. “Good to see you’re not looking like death warmed over anymore.” In fact, he muses, she looks much better than he’d even dared hope. She has a sort of…glow…about her that-he shifts his eyes just slightly-Kirsten seems to share. He feels the heat of a blush warm his skin and hopes, prays, that the darkness is enough to hide it from his eagle-eyed sister. The knowing grin she gives him when he dares to look tells him he’s wrong on that score too.

“Anyway,” he drawls after clearing his throat and willing the blush away, “it’s pretty obvious we screwed up. I can’t believe none of us thought about the danger of just flipping those breakers on from outta nowhere like that.” He gives Kirsten a pleading look. “I know you’ve got a lot of stuff on your mind, but I’m gonna have to make my pitch for a Town Hall or something along those lines again. Relying on the bush telegraph like we’ve been doing just isn’t going to cut it anymore. We need more efficient communication or things like this are just gonna keep happening.”

Kirsten nods, embarrassed that she hadn’t the foresight to push Tacoma’s pleas through weeks ago.

“You’ve had other things on your mind,” Koda murmurs, cutting Kirsten’s self deprecation off at the knees. She looks over at her brother. “When you can, get Maggie, Horace, Ate, and whoever else you think might be needed and have them meet at the house tomorrow night, after dinner. We’ll talk about this then, ok?”

Wiping the sweat from his brow, Tacoma grunts his assent.

Koda smiles. “Good.” She looks around at the fires which are slowly, but surely, being tamed. “Could have been worse,” she comments. “Did the equipment sustain a lot of damage?”

“Nah,” Tacoma replies, shrugging. “It tripped off pretty quick. Just a few yards of soldered wires we’ll have to rewrap. Maybe another week and we can try it again.”

“Sounds good.”

“Yeah, well….” He gives his sister and her lover a tired grin. “I’ll let you guys get back to…whatever it was you were doing. See you tomorrow, k?”

“See you then.”

As they watch him trudge tiredly off, Kirsten wraps an arm around Dakota’s lean waist. “Your brother had a good idea,” she murmurs.

Koda turns wide eyes to her. “What, more Spengler and code busting? Joy.”

Kirsten grins. “I was thinking rather more along the lines of earlier this evening.”

“Mm. I could definitely get into that.”

“I’m sure that’s not all you’ll be ‘getting into’,” Kirsten jokes, then trots off, leaving her sputtering lover to catch up as best she can.

CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

“SO THIS IS somebody’s idea of the presidential limo, is it?

Kirsten eyes the APC pulled into the driveway with disfavor. Andrews sits behind the wheel, his red hair blazing even through the thick glass, even under the shadow of his uniform cap. Manny, similarly decked out in his blues, grins and shrugs. “Hey, we tried for a Rolls, but we couldn’t find any with armor plating. South Dakota isn’t exactly prime mob country, y’know.”

“Obviously you just didn’t look hard enough.” Kirsten keeps her voice flat and stern, her face set in her who-failed-to-clear-the-lab-bench expression. Manny almost buys it; she sees the fleeting alarm cross his face, leaving behind a grin.

“My unworthiness bows before Your Excellency.” He opens the passenger door for her, offering a steadying hand as she scrambles unpresidentially into the back seat. It is not just that these vehicles are not built for dignity. A message from Fenton Harcourt, delivered just before the Inipi ceremony and left unopened until Koda was once again safely in the daylight world, informed her that he expected final arguments this morning. Jury deliberations should begin after the noon break. She is, therefore, attending in her official capacity as the person who will sign the condemned’s death warrants if the jury invokes capital punishment. Also therefore, she is wearing the closest thing the Base can offer to a power suit: a pair of blue uniform trousers half an inch too long and an officer’s jacket stripped of its insignia, complete with mid-heel pumps. The last she had accepted only at Koda’s urging. Unlike the pants, they are almost her size, and will prevent her tripping on her own cuffs. The rest is bearable, mostly, but the shoes have already begun to pinch.

“I’m going to pass a law against these damned things. I swear I am,” she says as she twists around in the confined space and is finally able to sit down.

“What, APC’s?” Manny says as he settles into the front passenger seat with an M-16 across his lap.

“Shoes with heels higher than half an inch. Tell me some man didn’t invent these things.”

For answer, Manny gives a short laugh, then speaks into the wireless microphone clipped to his tie. “Armadillo Two, this is ‘Dillo One. Come in.”

The speaker he wears just behind his ear crackles to life, barely audible to Kirsten in the back. “’Dillo Two in position. Over.”

“We have the supplies, ’Dillo Two. Rendezvous as planned.”

“Roger. Out.”

“The supplies,” Kirsten knows, consist of herself. Armadillo Two is a second APC, waiting now at the Base gate, that will run escort for her own vehicle. Maggie’s new security arrangements had been waiting for her along with the Judge’s note when she had emerged from the bedroom to take a look at Jimenez’ findings. She is not yet sure how she feels about them, even though she knows she would have acknowledged the practical necessity had they been set up for anyone else. Still, a neat five-shot automatic nestles in its holster at the small of her back. She is too accustomed to relying only on herself to take easily to trusting others, much less depending on them.

She has begun to make exceptions, of course. The memory of the last few days runs sweet in her blood. Kirsten has never given herself over to anyone as she has to Dakota, and that trust extends beyond her lover to Koda’s family, who have made a place for her within their bond as confidently as she had been born to them. It is not just that they honor Dakota’s choice; it is as herself that she feels welcome.

And that is something entirely new.

The MP on duty at the gate waves their small convoy out with a salute. The countryside streaks past Kirsten’s window in a blur. Fallow fields, still marked by the furrows of the last winter plowing, before the uprising lie green under the clear sky, overtaken by grass and early wildflowers that show as patches of yellow and lavender and rose. Trees, newly leafed out, march along the lines of windbreaks; here and there a hawk circles lazily, and Kirsten wonders if one of them is Wiyo. Once she is almost sure she sees a pair of mule deer drifting behind the screen of saplings that top a rise; another time, Manny points out a humping black shape too large to be anything but a bear. Wolves she fears no more than other dogs, bobcats and pumas no more than other cats. She is not, however, sure how she feels about having a three- or four-hundred pound carnivore with bad eyesight and a worse temper for a neighbor. At least, she reflects, they are too far south and east for grizzlies. So far.

The road into town stretches empty for the first two miles, save for a squad of soldiers in an M-60 equipped humvee whose job it is to keep it that way. Since the near-riot before the gates and the incident of the drunks pot-shotting at the she-wolf, access to the Base has been strictly controlled. Closer to town, they pass a wagon loaded with rolls of hay that tower over the driver and his two mules; close still, a woman on a bicycle pauses at a farm-road intersection to check her tires. In her panier baskets are a dozen small parcels, some in plastic bags, others wrapped in paper. The market square Kirsten has observed the half dozen times she has gone into Grand Rapids has firmly established itself as a thriving commercial and social institution.

As they pass the former Wal-Mart lot, Manny points out his window. “Hey, there’s Leksi.”

Peering, Kirsten locates Wanblee Wapka’s buckskin jacket and long ponytail moving awy from her down one of the aisles. He is pushing a battered Vespa borrowed from the inventory of surplus vehicles belonging to Base personnel lost in the uprising or since; a new pickup might be too much of a temptation to thieves. While Rapid City has settled into an approximation civil order, there is still no real law enforcement, and scavengers from outlying ranches and farms have periodically staged snatch-and-run raids on both townspeople and travelers. It is a problem that will have to be addressed sooner rather than later; Rapid City needs a mayor and a police force of its own. The MP’s do what they can, but their primary duty restricts them to Ellsworth.

At the courthouse, Manny and Andrews escort Kirsten past a small knot of civilians gathered just inside the doors A murmuring precedes her, and follows her as she passes; several of the onlookers smile or wave. A few scowl, one turning ostentatiously away. Kirsten follows Andrews’ gaze as he marks the man, and a shiver runs down her spine. It is not the potential danger that chills her. It is the assumption of danger as the default condition.

Inside, a crowd packs the courtroom from wall to wall. The windows stand open to admit the afternoon breeze, and one or two spectators perch precariously on the narrow sills. Among them are half a dozen women that Kirsten recognizes as released prisoners from the Rapid City Corrections Corporation of America facility, their faces hard and expectant. In a corner, as far away from the others as she can manage, Millie Buxton stands among an anonymous knot of citizens. Only her colorless skin and the deep blue smudges under her eyes mark her off from the rest. The four accused sit ranged behind the defense table, McCallum Kazen and Petrovich hunching forward in conversation with Boudreax. Buxton sits slumped and indifferent, his chair turned so that his back is to the jury box. Boudreaux seems to be breaking off every few sentences, repeating what he is saying to Buxton, who gives no sign of hearing. If he had been thin before, he is gaunt now, cheekbones jutting so sharply from the planes of his face that they seem about to break through his skin. As she moves into the seats reserved for her and her escort, Kirsten catches a glimpse of his eyes. Lightless, sunken, they give no sign of thought behind them, only the stubborn endurance of unbearable pain. For the second time, cold ghosts across Kirsten’s skin. Dead man walking.

On the other side of the gate, Major Alderson sits quietly, his hands folded on a stack of closely written yellow legal pads. His assistant appears to be checking bookmarks, opening volume after volume of the traditional red-and-black embossed legal volumes. Some of her activity, Kirsten is almost sure, is stage effect; there is no precedent in case law for the legal conundrum that faces the men and women in this courtroom. If anything, it will create the pattern of law to come.

The crowd stirs expectantly as she and her escort take the seats reserved for them, again as the door leading to the judge’s chambers opens a crack, closes. After a moment the Bailiff emerges, coming to stand in the well of the court and bellowing, “All rise!” As the assembly gets to its feet with a creak of folding seats and a shuffle of shoe leather, Harcourt enters to take his place behind his high bench, followed by the Clerk and another Bailiff. The jury files in last. The Bailiff gives tongue again, calling the court to order. “Oyez! Oyez! The Court of the Fifth Circuit of the State of South Dakota is now in session, the Honorable Fenton Harcourt presiding. God bless the United States and this honorable Court!”

When silence has settled over the court, Harcourt sits. He says, “Are Counsel prepared to make their closing statements this morning?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” Alderson answers firmly. With a quick, doubtful glance at Buxton, Boudreaux responds, “Prepared, Sir.”

Harcourt leans back in his chair. “Very well. The prosecution may begin.”

Alderson rises from his seat and comes to stand at the rail of the jury box. He says, measuring his words, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the men who stand accused before you today”—he points to each as he names them—“McCallum, Petrovich, Kazen, Buxton, are charged with a crime that has no precedent in the jurisprudence of the United States. Your verdict will make the law that will determine how cases like theirs are handled for the foreseeable future. That burden, which you did not ask for, is on your shoulders and on your shoulders alone. It is a task I do not envy you.”

He pauses a moment, then continues. “Do not allow yourselves to be daunted by the prospect. You will be doing your fellow citizens a service which will be of benefit to other communities, in this state and in others, as the free people of America begin to reclaim their country from the androids who have wrought so much destruction. It is the destruction that comes with war, with civil war, because it was our own that rose up and attacked us.”

Alderson points a second time. “These men, these four men, are charged with assisting the enemy in an uprising that appears to have destroyed as much as two-thirds of the population of the United States. Presumably the peoples of other nations have suffered as badly as we have. Perhaps they have suffered worse. We are dealing with a holocaust here of a kind that has not been seen since the two World Wars of the last century. It may be that nothing like it has been seen since the Black Death wiped out between a third and a half of the world’s population in the thirteen hundreds.

“These men are accomplices in those deaths.

“Oh, they may not have killed anyone with their own hands. But they bought their lives from the killers. They failed to resist the killers. They co-operated with the killers in a scheme which, to be honest, none of us yet understands. For some reason these killers do not desire to wipe out the entire human race. For some reason they took women—grown women and girls not yet even into their teens—to breed a strain of men for purposes of their own. And these four men, taken captive in the jail where they were already imprisoned for crimes ranging from embezzlement to murder, were the stud bulls in that breeding project.”

Alderson pauses for a long moment. The strain is plain on his face; the honest disgust; the lack of comprehension that niggles at them all when they have tried to explain the uprising. “Ladies and gentlemen, you have heard the testimony of the women who were these men’s victims. They committed forcible rape upon those women, and they did it willingly. They did it knowingly, and they did it repeatedly and routinely.” Alderson’s fist comes down on the rail of the jury box with each word “They enjoyed it. Not once did any of them attempt to spare his victim out of common humanity. Not once. Not. Even. Once.

“They say they acted under compulsion, or rather the defense says they were forced by fear for themselves. But they did have a choice, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Some crimes are so horrible that common decency demands that a decent man lay down his life before he will allow himself to be entangled in them. These men had the choice to die where they stood rather than aid the enemy. They had the choice to die rather than cooperate in the purpose that led the androids to come perilously close to wiping us out as a people. They had the choice to die rather than violate those women in the most brutal fashion imaginable.

“Ladies and gentlemen, those four men did not make the honorable choice. When you retire to deliberate, I ask that you consider the evidence that has been presented to you and that you find them guilty of the crimes with which they are charged. And when you have done that, I ask that you make the choice they refused, and assess against them the penalty of death. Thank you.”

“Damn straight,’ someone behind Kirsten mutters, and another, “Preach it, brother.” She cannot see their faces without twisting about conspicuously in her seat, but those she can see mirror their grim satisfaction with the prosecution’s summation. Unless the jury is cut from an entirely different cloth than their neighbors, and there is no reason to believe that they are, they are doubtless equally susceptible to Alderson’s unexpected eloquence. From behind her glasses, she sees the same hard determination in the narrowing of Manny’s eyes, the dangerous tightening of Andrews’ mouth in something that is not quite a smile.

Boudreaux stands as Alderson returns to his own seat. Compared to the Major’s, his stance seems less confident, his shoulders rounded in a scholar’s slouch rather than the precise right angles of his opponents. His hands clasped behind his back, he seems almost to wander into the center of the open space bounded by the judges’ bench and the tables, finding himself half-surprised to be facing the jury. He pauses for a moment, looking down at the floor, or his shoes. Then he says, almost softly, “You know, I was very impressed by Major Alderson’s summation just now. He makes a persuasive case for finding the four defendants guilty. Putting them to death, even. A sound case.”

McCallum lets out a yell and comes halfway to his feet before the Bailiff stationed behind him shoves him back down into his chair. Harcourt says quellingly, “Mr. McCallum, you will sit down and be silent, or I will have you removed from this courtroom. I will have order, Sir!”

When silence falls again, Boudreaux smiles faintly. “Even Mr. McCallum makes a good argument against himself.” He pauses again, gazing over the heads of the jury, then lowering his eyes to meet theirs. “But we can say so, ladies and gentlemen, because none of is in his position. Please God, none of us every will be.

“Because none of us can say what we would do when faced with our own deaths until we have been in that situation. Oh, we all want to think that we have the integrity and the strength to resist temptation. We want to think that we’d have the courage to say no. But then, we don’t have to answer that question in just that way, do we?

“But it gets worse even than that for one of the men who stand accused before you. For Harold Buxton, the question was not what he would do to save his own life. The question was what he could do to save his wife and his daughter from rape and possible death.

“And the answer to that question, tragically, was to harm others.”

A small stir erupts in a back corner of the courtroom, and Kirsten turns to see Millie Buxton making her way toward the doors, her face white and frozen with grief. Her husband’s eyes follow her for perhaps half a second, then drop blankly to his hands. A murmuring ripples through the room, instantly squelched by the rap of Harcourt’s gavel. “This is a public proceeding, ladies and gentlemen, but it is not an occasion for public comment. Do not oblige me to clear the court.”

Silence falls, and Boudreaux resumes. “What would you do, to protect your spouse? What would you do, to protect your only child from horror? Faced with a choice between harming someone you loved and someone you did not know at all, which would you mark out for suffering? When you consider the fate of Harald Buxton, ladies and gentlemen, ask yourselves these questions, and let your answers temper your verdict.

“In all four cases, ask yourselves whether we have not had enough of dying. Ask whether, in our present condition, with perhaps as much as seventy-five or eighty percent of our population dead or captive, we can afford to discard one more human life, even the life of a man who has committed abominable acts but who even so has not fallen so far as to murder. A life for a life, ladies and gentlemen, whether that life is taken or spared. Thank you.”

Only the rustle of papers breaks the silence as Boudreaux makes his way back to his seat. At the bench, Harcourt sifts through half a dozen sheets of printout and a pair of legal volumes marked with so many small post-its in so many colors that it looks like the business end of an old-fashioned feather duster. When he has found the passages he wants, he lays the books open before him. “Does the prosecution wish to offer rebuttal, Major Alderson?”

Alderson half rises in his chair. “No, Your Honor.”

“Very well. I will now charge the jury.” Harcourt pushes his glasses up onto the high bridge of his nose and begins to read from one of the heavy embossed volumes. As he details the legal definition of rape, assault, battery and the other lesser included charges, Kirsten allows her attention to wander. She had hated the ceremonial and bureaucratic aspects of her position as a Cabinet officer, the endless meetings, the wrangling, the trading off, the paper-pushing. Her role here is largely ceremonial, too, and she would by far rather be at home working on the android code. Or, better yet, sitting with Dakota before the fire, Asi sprawled at their feet.

But the atmosphere in this courtroom is free of both the cyicism and the zealotry to be found in government. The people who fill the spectators’ seats—the women brutalized by the four defendants; surviving residents of Rapid City, most of them women, too; the ranchers with faces and hands burned raw by the wind rolling unimpeded over the plains off the Arctic ice cap—sit in quiet solemnity, patient with the workings of justice. This community has begun to feel its way toward a framework of order. Perhaps other remnants, elsewhere, are even now faced with finding solutions to the same problem these face; perhaps their solutions are completely different. How would the Shiloh community handle a trial on a capital charge? And how, if she is successful in shutting down the droids, will she manage to draw together a collection of far-flung and disparate townships, villages, communes, no two with the same experiences since the world has changed?

She has never put it to herself in quite those terms before; has never dared. A lump of ice forms in her chest, its cold running down her veins, sheeting along her skin. How will I manage? Gods . . ..

With an almost palpable wrench, she forces her attention back to Harcourt’s charge to the jury. He has finished with the legal definitions and has gone on to outline the panel’s options.

” . . .is perhaps the heaviest part of the burden your fellow citizens have asked you to bear. If you find the defendants guilty, and I cannot impress upon you too clearly that you must make four separate decision, then you must turn your attention to setting the punishment. And here we encounter a difficulty.

“Before the uprising, your choices would have been to sentence a guilty party to death or to a substantial term in a federal prison, given that the federal conspiracy charges would take precedence over the state jail felony of rape. The option of a federal prison is no longer available, nor is either the Ellsworth brig nor the Rapid City jail sufficiently staffed to handle long-term inmates. Imprisonment is not a viable option.

“It is at this point, ladies and gentlemen, that you must, in essence, make the law rather than follow it. We are in the Fifth Circuit of South Dakota, but we are also in the lands traditionally inhabited by the Lakota, the Cheyenne and other indigenous Nations. Under their traditional law, a violent offender is exiled rather than executed so that continuing undesirable, indeed potentially tragic, consequences, and I urge you to approach it with caution. We are in uncharted territory here, and the precedents we set may well become the foundations of future law. Let us take up our responsibilities as the ancient Book of Common Prayer admonishes those about to enter into matrimony: soberly, advisedly and in the fear of God.

“The jury will now retire. Court is in recess until a verdict is reached.”

Kirsten rises to her feet, stretching, bracketed by Manny and Andrews. Wonderful. Siamese triplets. On their way out, she is not surprised to see Blind Harry, his guitar slung over his back, making his way toward the door, his white cane tapping out a path in front of him. She is pleased to see that his cotton shirt still has the creases from its package; he has made himself a comfortable place within the new economy as tale-teller and news-bearer. Whatever happens in the next few hours, he will have a song from it, and an audience.

Andrews says, “We’ve got some sandwiches in the truck. Anybody want to try to find a lemonade stand?”

*

Two hours and a tour of the market later, the sun casts long shadows along the open space in front of the Judicial Building. . The shade under the trees where Kirsten and her escort have taken possession of a bench begins to grow chill, and only a few stragglers remain on the streets. Of all the strange things she has encountered since setting out on her journey across the continent, this is among the strangest, that the night is no longer human territory. A small crowd, though, still lingers on the courthouse steps, waiting patiently, stubbornly, for the jury’s decision.

“Are they going to sequester them for the night?” Manny asks, glancing at his watch. “It’s past five, and we need to be starting back.”

Andrews shrugs. “Want me to ask?”

As he starts to make his way across the flagstones, the knot of people around the doors stirs, and one of the Bailiffs appears. Kirsten gets to her feet, followed by Manny. The Bailiff, spotting them, stops halfway down the stairs and beckons. “They’re in!”

*

Filing back into the courtroom, Kirsten feels the silence like a pressure on her skin. The audience has thinned, the seats now less than half filled, the murmur and shuffle as the judge enters and takes the bench now muted. Kirsten’s eyes, like the others’, track the twelve men and women as they file into the jury box. Their faces, set and still, give nothing away, not to the spectators, not to the defendants. Kazen stares at his hands, clasped on the legal pad before him. Petrovich and McCallum seem distracted, eyes flickering down the row of jurors, back again. Only Buxton seems entirely unaffected, lost somewhere in his own mind, indifferent to this moment as he has been to the trial from the beginning.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” Harcourt asks, “have you reached a verdict?”

The foreman, a tall Cheyenne with grey braids, answers, “We have Your Honor.”

“If you will hand it to the Bailiff, please, Sir.”

The Bailiff receives the folded papers from him and carries it to the Judge. Harcourt unfolds and reads it in unbroken silence. Finally he says, “The defendants will rise.”

When they have done so, he says, reading from the documents in front of him, “Eric McCallum. On the first charge, of forcible rape, as defined by and pursuant to the criminal code of the State of South Dakota, the jury has determined the following verdict: guilty. On the second charge, of conspiracy, the jury has determined the following verdict: guilty. On the third charge, of murder as defined by the law of parties, the jury has determined the following verdict: guilty. In consideration of the gravity of your crimes, the jury has assessed against you the penalty of death.”

For Petrovich and Kazen, the findings are identical. As the verdicts are read, an MP moves to stand behind each man, handcuffs ready. The Judge continues, “Harald Buxton. On the first charge, of forcible rape, as defined by and pursuant to the criminal code of the State of South Dakota, the jury has determined the following verdict: guilty. On the second charge, of conspiracy, and on the third, of murder as per the law of parties, the jury has determined the following verdict: innocent. In consideration of the gravity of your offense, but in consideration also of the threats to your family employed to procure your co-operation, the jury has assessed against you the penalty of exile.”

Harcourt turns to the jury box again. “So say you one, so say you all?”

The foreman answers, “We do, Your Honor.”

Harcourt nods, turning back to the defendants. “Ordinarily,” he says, “your sentences would automatically be appealed. Unfortunately, there is no longer a superior court to hear your case. Also unfortunately, neither the civil nor the military authority has the means of maintaining you for an extended period. It is therefore the order of this Court that, at an hour and place to be determined, the sentences against you shall be carried out within two calendar days from the instant. May God have mercy on your souls.”

Kirsten, sitting almost directly behind him, sees the shudder that passes through Buxton’s gaunt body. With speed that seems impossible for a man honed down to bone, he pivots toward the military policeman behind him, feinting with his right hand toward the man’s face. In the fraction of a second it takes the officer to react, Buxton snatches the pistol from the holster at his right side. “No!” she cries, pushing up against the arms of her chair. And then she is sprawled face-down on the carpet, staring at the scuffed boots of the person behind her, while Manny’s bulk pins her to the floor and shields her from the shot that goes wild, shattering the glass shade of one of the ceiling lights. She hears a second shot, muffled; and a woman’s anguished scream, “Hal, no! Oh, God, no!”

Something wooden, perhaps a chair, strikes the railing that divides the a well of the court from the audience; something else, not hard, strikes the floor. There is the sound of a brief, violent, struggle, grunts, blows struck. Turning her head to the other side, Kirsten can see only Andrews’ brightly polished black dress shoes, the line of his trouser leg, the muzzle of his M-16 as he stands between her and whatever is happening at the defendants’ table. “Manny,” she gasps, “let me up!”

“Not yet,” he answers. “Not until things are back under control.”

“The MP, Buxton—”

“MP’s fine,” Andrews says from above them. “Buxton’s dead.”

Above the rest of the noise, Harcourt’s voice booms out. “Remove the prisoners! Bailiff, clear the court!”

More feet, more rusling of clothes. Finally the weight above her eases, and Kirsten pushes herself up to her knees, then takes Manny’s proffered hand to rise to her feet. Except for Harcourt, themselves and one Bailiff, the courtroom is deserted. Only a spreading crimson stain on the floor marks the spot of Buxton’s death. Harcourt says, “I apologize, Madam President. I should have realized something like this might happen.”

Kirsten shakes her head. “He wanted to be found guilty and executed with the others; we all assumed he would be.”

“There are papers to be signed. I can bring them to you later if you’d rather.”

“No. Better face it and be done with it.”

Something that might almost be an approving smile touches Harcourt’s lips. “Come back to my chambers, then. The Clerk will have them ready very shortly.”

Quietly, still bracketed by her two guards, she follows him across the well of the court and through the door to the comfortable room beyond. The door closes behind her, Andrews still at guard.

*

The moon rides high in the west as the small convoy speeds back toward Ellsworth through the dark. Kirsten, leaning against the back of her passenger seat, has forced her mind to blankness. Shutting out the plain printout sheets that had been set in front of her, shutting out the scratch of her pen where she had scrawled her signature to the right of the Judge’s. Half turning, Manny says softly, “You okay back there?”

“Getting there.”

“We’re almost home. Hang in.”

It is a long almost. But when she walks through the front door, into Asi’s exuberant greeting and Dakota’s arms, she is as well as she has ever been in her life.

CHAPTER THIRTY SIX

“COMING!” KIRSTEN RESPONDS to a knock on the door, flinging the dishtowel over one shoulder and bumping her busily scrubbing partner with her hip as she slips from the kitchen.

Maggie stands grinning at the threshold, a suspiciously shaped bag in her hand. The smile slips from her lips as she takes in Kirsten’s strange look. “What?”

Kirsten sighs. “I know we’ve been over this already, but it still makes me uncomfortable that you think you have to knock on the door to your own home.”

Rolling her eyes, Maggie pushes Kirsten gently back and slips into the house. “Darlin,” she drawls, “I used to knock before going into the house I grew up in. My mama would have whuped me purple if I didn’t show respect, family or no, so just stop worrying about it, ok?”

Kirsten frowns, unconvinced, and Maggie takes gentle hold of her elbow. “Listen to me, my friend, and listen closely, because this is the last time we’re going to have this conversation, you and I. You did not chase me from my home. It’s mine. I choose what to do with it, and I chose to let you guys have it. No pain, no strain, and all’s cool, capiche?”

“I suppose,” Kirsten replies, grudgingly.

“Good,” Maggie replies, holding up the package, “and to seal the deal, a gift!”

Slipping the bottle from the bag, Kirsten squints at the lettering on the label. “Southern Comfort? Wow, I haven’t had this since college!”

“Madame President!” Maggie huffs, feigning extreme shock. “You actually admit to the consumption of spirits? Whatever will your constituents think?”

“My constituents can kiss my ass,” she retorts, breaking the seal with a quick twist of her wrist. “Where’d you get this anyway? I thought the base was dry?”

“I have my sources,” comes the smug rejoinder as Maggie moves off to the kitchen. “Now, where did I put those shot glasses?” She stops short so as to avoid running into Dakota, who smirks down at her, three shot glasses in her hand. “Well look who’s back from the dead! And looking damn good to boot!”

Koda lifts a brow. “Looks like someone’s started the party a little early.”

“Hardly. Can’t I be in a halfway decent mood once in awhile? Besides,” she adds, pitching her voice low, forgetting about Kirsten’s enhanced hearing, “I think someone could use a little cheering, don’t you?”

“I heard that,” Kirsten remarks, making her way to the kitchen, “and I’m fine. Really.”

“Mm.” Maggie looks at her with a critical eye. “Well, I suppose we can pass that unnatural pallor off to too little sleep then, hmm?” A saucy wink accompanies the statement, making Kirsten’s face heat. “C’mon. Let’s have a toast before the rest of our guests arrive, ok?”

The trio moves into the living room. As Maggie pours the liquor, Koda sits on the floor, her back against the couch. Kirsten settles behind her, stroking the black hair fanning over the tattered fabric of the couch. Maggie hands over the glasses, then holds up her own, her expression serious. “To lessons learned, hurdles overcome, dangers to come, and love and family, which makes it all worthwhile.”

Three glasses clink together, three arms lift, and three heads tip back, taking in the sweet, fiery liquid in one smooth gulp. “Ahh,” Kirsten exhales, slamming her glass down onto the chest that doubles as a table. “That definitely hit the spot.” The liquor spreads warm fire through her belly and limbs, taking with it the sharpest edge of grief and second thoughts she’s been dealing with since signing the execution orders. “Thanks, Maggie. I owe you.”

“What are friends for? Another?”

Kirsten holds up a hand. “Better not. I’d like to appear at least somewhat coherent while we hash things out this evening. Maybe later, though.”

“Suits me,” Maggie replies, capping the bottle and stowing it away just as the door sounds again. “I’ll get it. Be right back.”

Koda and Kirsten share a quiet look as Maggie leaves and returns with the rest of the group in tow. Tacoma, Manny and Andrews look sharp in their crisply pressed uniforms. Harcourt follows, impeccably dressed, as always, in a somber black suit and regimental tie. Wanblee Wapka rounds out the party, looking comfortable in his jeans and workshirt.

“Where’s Hart?” Kirsten asks.

“The General is, unfortunately, indisposed at the moment,” Harcourt replies, settling himself into the overstuffed armchair. “Quite likely for the rest of what remains of his life if the quantity of beer cans outside of his residence is any indication.”

“Great. Just what we need.”

“I think this little clandestine meeting of the minds is better had without him in any event,” Harcourt remarks, a slight smile breaking the stony planes of his face as he looks at Dakota. “It’s good to see you up and around, so to speak, Ms. Rivers. I understand you have an interesting tale to share?”

“In a moment,” Maggie interjects. “Let’s get the rest of our business out of the way first, if we could.” She turns to Tacoma who is crowded into one of the small kitchen chairs he’s dragged over. “Nice light show last night, Captain. Got any tally on the damages for us?”

“Two houses were completely gutted,” Tacoma intones. “Luckily, they were so badly damaged during the original uprising that they weren’t being used. Minor fire damage to twelve other houses. I’ve got repair crews working around the clock on them.”

“Damage to the power station?”

“Minimal.” He looks down at his hands, red and raw from wrapping copper wire non-stop. “We should be up and running again in a week, best guess.”

“Good. We got off a lot more lightly than we should have.” She holds up a hand to forestall Tacoma’s comment. “I’m not laying blame here. We all dropped the ball. Kirsten mentioned you’ve been pushing for a Town Hall, and you’re right, it’s something we desperately need right now. Communication with the civilians on this base is sorely lacking and it’s only going to lead to more problems in the long run. So…we’ll need to set up a Communications Committee. Say ten in all, split evenly between base personnel and civilians. They can meet once a week to start, hash out any issues they have and pass along whatever needs passing. Kirsten, I know you’ve got an overly full plate right now, but I think you’ll probably need to chair the first meeting, just to keep everything Kosher.” She smiles. “You should be able to pass on that honor to some other deserving soul once everything’s underway, though.”

“Being the top dog really sucks sometimes,” Kirsten grumps, but nods her acceptance of yet another duty.

“Yeah, yeah. Tell it to the press.”

The group laughs, then quiets as all eyes turn to Dakota. Maggie raises an eyebrow in silent invitation.

Nodding, Koda straightens and pulls up her legs, crossing her arms over them and looking at the group evenly. “I’ll spare everyone the background details, since I’m sure you probably know pretty much all of them anyway.” Receiving nods, she closes her eyes and calls up the images from her Vision. They come to her easily, though thankfully she feels a sense of detachment from the emotional backlash they convey. She senses that that detachment is helped along by the feel of Kirsten’s warm hand on her shoulder, and she smiles her thanks inwardly.

“Dakota?” Her father’s smooth, kind voice filters into her consciousness. “Where are you?”

She is standing in the middle of a killing field. Red is all around her; sunk deep into the earth, running in rivers across her unclad feet. Even the air is red, as if she is viewing the world through crimson silk, and the stench of burning and death is overpowering. Overhead, carrion birds circle endlessly, waiting for the chance to feed.

“Just outside of the base,” she replies, voice deep, words slow and carefully measured. “To the south, fifty yards beyond the gate.”

“When?”

A listless breeze flutters the leaves on the trees. A blood drenched flag flaps wetly, sullenly, like mud covered sheets hanging from a clothesline.

“Mid spring, early summer. It is difficult to tell.”

“Are you seeing the past?”

The whole room holds its breath.

“No.”

Kirsten’s hand tightens involuntarily on Dakota’s shoulder, but the distraction is minimal. The group exchanges grave looks, and Tacoma turns away, fists clenched, jaw set, as if he’s ready to take on the entire droid army by himself.

Maggie shoots a silent question to Wanblee Wapka, who nods.

“Dakota?” she asks.

“I am here.”

“What do you see?”

There is a brief pause. Then, “Death.”

The room is filled with hissed breaths.

“Death.” In her vision, she lifts hands dripping with gore. “All around me.”

“Are there androids?”

“Yes. Many hundreds.” Her vision body turns in a complete circle, red gaze lancing out over the carnage. “More than I’ve ever seen before. They come from the south, and from the west, in tanks….”

“Tanks?” Maggie asks, startled.

“Yes. Many tanks. Many bombs. And death. So…so much death. All around. All around.”

Kirsten looks over at Wanblee Wapka, in her eyes, an anguished plea. His face set and grave, he holds up a hand. Maggie interjects, softly, “Kirsten, we must know.”

“At what expense?” Kirsten demands, voice shrill. “You’re hurting her!”

“Kirsten—.”

“Canteskuye, please, let me tell it all. I must speak this. Please.”

Dropping her objections reluctantly, Kirsten draws an arm along Dakota’s own and squeezes, pressing a kiss to the crown of black hair beneath her chin. Koda grasps her hand and holds it lightly between her own. Wanblee Wapka nods at Maggie to continue.

“Dakota, the androids…are there humans with them?”

“Yes. Many men. Strangers all. Wearing red. Red death.”

Running a hand through her close cropped hair, Maggie sighs, then puts forth the one question she doesn’t want to ask. “And the base?”

Another pause, longer this time.

“Gone.”

As one, the group stiffens, none having expected such a final answer.

“Gone?” Maggie asks finally, when she’s recovered her voice. “Can you explain?”

“Gone,” Koda repeats. “All gone. No buildings. No life. Only death. Death, all around. The earth weeps for her children.”

“Alright,” Kirsten says, her tone brooking no argument. “That’s enough. You’ve got what you came here for, now end it! Now!”

Wanblee Wapka nods and shifts forward, but Dakota breaks herself from her trance unaided, and gathers Kirsten in her arms as her lover scrambles from the couch and to her side. “It’s okay, my love, it’s okay,” she whispers into fragrant hair. “I’m alright. It’s okay.”

The rest of the group members exchange grim looks. After a long moment, Koda lifts her head and eyes those around the table. “This was a warning. The androids are coming. I can feel them closing in. But how the battle ends will be up to us, in part, to decide. Ina Maka has seen fit to help us, to warn us of what is to come. The rest is up to us.”

Gripping the arms of her chair, Maggie lets go a long breath, and nods. “Tomorrow, then. In my office. All of us.” The smile she gives Dakota is grim, but a smile nonetheless. “Thank you, my friend. Your gift has given us a fighting chance.”

“Thank the Mother,” Koda returns.

“I will.” Standing, Maggie gathers the others with a look. They rise as well, and with soft murmurs of thanks and goodnight, they file from the house, leaving the lovers alone.

*

Maggie raises a hand to shield her eyes against the late afternoon sunlight that pours through the blinds of her office, casting strips of glare on the large map of South Dakota and surrounding states spread out on her desk. Its brilliance strikes blue sheen like a raven’s wing off Koda’s hair where she leans on her elbows, tracing the thin black lines of state roads feeding into Rapid City and from there onto Highway 90. “Here,” she says. “For the ones moving in from the west, their best bet is to come up 85 to the Interstate, then make the loop back east to Ellsworth. Troops moving up from Offut could use 183 or 87, then march west on 90.”

“If they’ve got heavy armor,” Tacoma adds, “they’ll want to get onto the Interstate as quickly as they can.”

“Isn’t there still a lot of wreckage on the highway?” Kirsten asks. “Is it enough to slow them down?”

“Minimally. Things like mobile Howitzers can just push other stuff out of the way. It won’t take but one advance party to clear the way for them.”

“We need aerial recon. Rivers,” Maggie addresses Dakota’s cousin where he leans over Kirsten’s shoulder. “Put a couple birds up and have them scout the roads. I want reports by evening. And no,” she adds quellingly, noting the gleam comes into his dark eyes. “Not you, and not Andrews. You have your assignment.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, turning on his heels in the cramped space between Koda and the door. Dakota jerks her foot out of his path, almost kicking Kirsten’s ankle where she sits to her left. “Sorry, cuz,” he murmurs, then, “We gotta move these meetings into a conference room or something.”

“Scoot,” says Maggie, and he does. The half-dozen bodies surrounding the desk shift, taking advantage of the greater space.

“He’s right,” says Kirsten, flexing shoulders that are no longer jammed against her neighbors’. “Why don’t we use one of the big meeting rooms?”

“Hart,” says Maggie succinctly. “Territory.”

“He doesn’t seem—well,” Wanblee Wapka offers from his place beside Tacoma.

Maggie gives a small, exasperated snort. “Make this man an Ambassador when we’re out of this mess,” she says to Kirsten. “General Hart hasn’t been—well—since the uprising. According to his secretary he comes into his office every day, drinks his coffee, and looks at reports in triplicate. Then he goes back to quarters and waits to do it all again the next day.” Her voice softens. “He’s a manager, not a field commander. Losing his family has been hard on him.”

“What about that aide of his—what’s his name—Toller, Toleman—?”

“All he does is carry the reports back and forth and tell Kimberly who to open the door to. Another MBA. Pigs’ll fly stealth bombers before he questions an order.”

“Okay,” says Tacoma, bringing the conversation back to the map and the advancing enemy. “Manny’s going to take care of air recon. We need some boots on the ground, too.”

Maggie nods approvingly. “Make the assignments when the birds get back.” She turns her attention to Wanblee Wapka. “What are your defense caps?”

His eyes, as startlingly blue as his daughter’s meet hers. “Sixty able-bodied adults with small arms and the skill to use them. Another twenty or thirty for support. If this force gets past you, though, our only real defense is our feet.”

Maggie taps the end of her marker against the map. Multi-task, Allen. Contingency plans. “All right,” she says. “When the time comes, I’ll have two Tomcats fueled up and ready to go. One to cover Rapid City, one to cover you guys if the bastards flank us and turn north. If the droids keep their forces all together, we’ll have them for our ace in the hole here. With distances that short, we won’t need guidance systems for the ‘Cats, and most of our ordnance has been reconfigured to laser.

“Meanwhile, we need an accounting of assets. Tacoma: get me an inventory of all armor, artillery, small arms and foot soldiers and your assessment of the best use we can make of all of the above. I already know what we can put in the air and who can fly it. When we know more about what we’re facing, we can talk deployment.”

“Meet them on the road if we can,’ says Dakota. “Block them off before they can reach the Base or the city.”

“Exactly. And we need to keep our options open to do that.” Maggie folds up the map and hands it to Dakota. “You and Tacoma know the ground better than anyone else here. Choose at least three provisional points where we can cut them off. Kirsten—any luck with that droid fragment Jimenez brought you?”

“Not yet—” Kirsten’s head turns abruptly toward the window, where a shadow crosses the blinds, accompanied by the rich, sweet scent of pipe tobacco. Tacoma reaches a long arm behind her and opens the door to admit Fenton Harcourt, a briar between his teeth and a sheaf of papers under his arm.

“Well,” says the Judge. “How unassuming. Foxes have lairs and birds have their nests, but the Wing Commander operates out of a middling small closet, and the President of what’s left of these United States has no office at all.”

Maggie eyes the folders warily. “What can we do for you, Judge?”

“Nothing you’ll enjoy,” he answers, sifting three of the thin portfolios from the stack. “General Hart saw me after a lengthy wait this afternoon, then told me to take the matter to you.”

“And the matter is?”

“McCallum. Petrovich. Kazen.” Harcourt punctuates the names with the slap of each file as it hits the desk. “They are presently back in the guardhouse, since there are no facilities for holding them in Rapid City. Neither are there any facilities for carrying out their sentences. You do not,” he adds, “seem pleased.”

“I am,” she says precisely, meeting Harcourt’s, “just as pleased as I would be if Ms. President’s dog had made me a present. Asimov would, however, be too polite dump it on my desk.”

Unexpectedly, Harcourt’s face splits in a grin, pipe still tight between his teeth. “Colonel,” he says, “I am sorry I underestimated you. Unfortunately, there is no one else with either the authority or the means to handle this problem. Civil institutions remain in suspension.”

“Unfortunately,” she says, “you’re right. Tacoma.”

“Ma’am?”

“When you get me the list of troops, pick out twenty-five by lot. We’ll cut them down to fifteen in a second round. Tell Major Grueneman to see that the indoor firing range in the gym is set up, and make sure we’ve got lighting there. Better get started now.”

“Ma’am.” Tacoma salutes and squeezes his large frame around Kirsten and the Judge, making for the door. Kirsten moves over by one seat, offering her chair to Harcourt.

“I take it there’s something else I can do for you, Judge?”

“Not you, Colonel. Rivers,” he says, addressing Wanblee Wapka. He takes a long draw on his pipe, and smoke streams out his nostrils. “Can your settlement accommodate a new widow and her orphan daughter?”

Wanblee Wapka contemplates Harcourt’s face for a long moment, his eyes blankly amiable. Then the laugh lines around them fold into wrinkles, and he says, “Fenton, you do know how to ask a leading question, don’t you? ‘Poor little match girl out in the snow.’ You’re referring to Ms. Buxton, I take it?”

Another puff and river of smoke. “I am.”

“Have you consulted the lady about these arrangements?”

“I will inform her of the possibility when I have your answer.”

“You have it, then. Tell her to be ready.”

“Mrs. Rivers?”

“Themunga wouldn’t turn away W. T. Sherman himself if he showed up on her doorstep hurt or hungry.”

“No,” Dakota says wryly. “She’d nurse him back to health, then take his hair.”

Maggie catches a small, alarmed glance as Kirsten’s eyes shift from Koda to her father and back, and she allows herself to wonder how the Rivers matriarch will take to a white daughter-in-law. Not easily, by all indications. But she says only, “Any other business?”

There is none, and as the rest file out her door, she sets grimly to making arrangements for a triple execution. Not for the first time, she wishes for a good stiff drink.

Damn Hart.

Damn Harcourt.

Damn the three bastards who made it all necessary.

Most of all, damn Peter Westerhouse and his droids.

*

The wolf cub wriggles in her hands as Dakota lifts him gently away from his mother and places him at the back of the crate that will carry them to their new home. Kirsten kneels alongside, holding his attention with a finger drawn along the wire mesh, so that all his small body wags, and he stands on his hind legs, nipping at the elusive prey and yapping sharply. The sound brings his mother out of her run, straight into the carrier with him. Kirsten withdraws her finger abruptly.

Dakota lifts the small hatch on top of the carrier and bends to scratch the pup under his chin one last time, and smooth the fur on the mother’s head. “Go safely,” she murmurs. “Live well.”

“They’ll be all right, won’t they?” Kirsten asks.

Koda slides the hatch closed and reaches across the top of the crate to take Kirsten’s hand in her own. “The place where Ate will release them has a stone outcropping for shelter and a spring for water. With only one cub, the mother will have no trouble feeding him until he can join her on the hunt.”

“He’s going to release them on your ranch?”

“Han,” Koda says, squeezing her lover’s hand. “I wish we could go with him now. I wish you could see it.”

“When this is over, we’ll go. I still need to meet your mother.”

Koda says nothing, only tightens her fingers around Kirsten’s. Wanblee Wapka’s easy acceptance will make the meeting easier, when it comes. It occurs to Dakota that she probably should have written a letter for her father to carry home to Themungha, but there is no time now. Coward, she berates herself. You can run across a ruined bridge straight into an army like a freaking idiot, but you can’t manage to face your own mother. Aloud she says, “I think I hear the truck.”

The sound an approaching engine grows louder, and Koda goes to unlock the back gate that leads to the runs. Beams from a pair of headlights sweep across the small parking lot, and Wanblee Wapka’s big pickup makes a three-point turn then backs slowly, coming to a stop between the two rows of kennels. Overhead, stars still spangle the western sky, swinging low over the Paha Sapa. The hills bulk huge and dark below them, distinguished from the arching darkness above only by the wash of moonlight along their flanks. A white shape passes overhead, almost too swift for sight, and Koda shivers in the dawn breeze. Owl.

Owls are messengers from the spirit world. But she needs no additional omen to know that death is near them—herself, Kirsten, her father, Tacoma, all of them. Her vision has told her that, and the preliminary reports from the scouts have confirmed the forces now converging on Ellsworth in numbers far greater than any they have encountered so far.

The driver’s door opens, engine still running, and Wanblee Wapka steps behind the truck to open the tailgate. “Let me give you a hand with that, chunkshi.”

Together, with Kirsten assisting, they lift the mother wolf and her cub up into the bed of the truck. Wanblee Wapka slides the carrier back toward the cab and ties it down in place, giving the knots an extra pull to secure them. To Koda he says, “Don’t worry. I’ll have them in their new home before the sun is over the trees. I’ll see that there’s food available for the first few days, just until Ina here gets the lie of the land.”

For answer, Koda walks into his arms and hugs him fiercely. “I wish that I could come with you, Ate. That we could.”

“I know,” he says. “But you’re needed here, both of you.”

“Mother—”

“Hey, I’m a diplomat, remember?” Laughter runs through her father’s voice. “I’ll have the peace treaty ready to be signed by the time you come home.”

“Oh, yeah,” she says wryly. “The droids’ll just be the warm-up.”

His arms tighten around her. “Wakan Tanka nici un, chunkshi. Toksha ake wachingyankin kte.**” He releases her then, turning to Kirsten. “Chunkshi,” he says, pulling her into a hug. “Take care of each other.”

The fleeting startlement in Kirsten’s face gives way to a blush, and she shyly returns the embrace. “We will. Thank you, Ate.” Her brow creases briefly. “Ate—is that right?”

“It’s exactly right,” he answers.

Almost too low for Koda to hear, she says, “Dakota and I—can you see—?” She drops her eyes, leaving the question in the air.

“I see that you are meant to be together, Kirsten. It is something you have chosen, time and again. But no, I do not see what is on the other side of this battle. There is a cloud over it, and what is beyond I don’t know.”

Then, with a last squeeze of her arm, a hand on Koda’s shoulder, he is gone, the red points of the truck’s taillights vanishing as he turns onto the road that will take him out the main gate. Koda takes Kirsten’s hand in hers, feeling the chill of her skin. In the east, a faint haze of rose and gold washes the hills. “You’re cold,” she says. “Let’s go inside.”

CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN

WHAT A MAN will do for love.

Manny stands just inside the shadow of the hanger, his harness strapped and buckled, his helmet in the crook of his elbow. By main force of will he banishes what he knows is a sappy, lovestruck grin from his face. At least, he banishes it for a moment. His watch shows his copilot/navigator due in less than three minutes, and it costs him an effort o refrain from tapping the toe of his boot against the runway apron. It will not do to show eagerness. He has flown a couple times before with Ellen Massaccio, an experienced and careful pilot; he has no reason to believe she will not be prompt today. That gives him a few more moments to contemplate the object of his affection as she sits on the tarmac, her silver skin gleaming in the spring sun, her slender form made all the more enticing by months of abstinence and flying helicopters.

For Manny, his Tomcat is not a male of any species. She is a she, a lady sleek and sure and deadly, a lioness stalking the high cloud savannah, her fur silvered by moonlight. She is, as she was originally, Tom’s Cat, the brainchild of Admiral Tom Connolly, the last and most perfect in a series of his brainchildren. After forty years of refinement and the shift from pure naval deployment to air defense, the craft is still the fastest, meanest fighter in the world. And Manny is as enamored as he was the first time he set eyes on her, as desperate in his forced estrangement as any deserted lover. Their reunion will be sweet.

At least I didn’t out and out grovel to get to fly this mission. Not quite, anyway.

All right, he had almost groveled. He had been prepared to and would have, if Kirsten had not shown immediate understanding when he had asked for the assignment. Instead, she had merely agreed that his request to go was reasonable and pointed out that for a single day on Base, at least, she was unlikely to need more protection than Andrews, Koda, Maggie, a three- pound Sig Sauer and Asimov could provide. Put like that, the Colonel had agreed that he should be the one to fly recon. Somewhere in the back of his mind, there lives the nasty suspicion that he would have copped the assignment anyway, given that he knows the country better than any of the other surviving pilots and can navigate by sight or with an AAA map if he has to.

Nothing wrong with taking out a little insurance, though.

Or a little self-satisfaction.

“Yo, Rivers!” Manny turns to the sharp rap of bootleather on concrete. Massaccio carries her helmet tucked under one arm and a sheaf of paper in her free hand. One, incongruously, is a folded map which flops back and forth, flashing the Triple-A logo, as she waves it under his nose. “Tell me, Manny my man, that we are not actually going to have to find Offut by following the highway signs.”

“Okay,” he says amiably, “we are not actually going to have to find Offut by the highway signs.”

“But?” A scowl appears between Massaccio’s blonde brows.

“No buts. We’re going to fly straight south till we pick up the main fork of the Platte east of Scottsbluff. Then we’re going to follow it till we get to the Missouri. That will bring us within sensor range of Offut. Straightforward as it gets.”

“Riiiight,” she drawls. “No GPS, no air control.”

“Cheer up, Ellen,” he answers, grinning. “If Lindbergh could do it, so can we.”

Fifteen minutes later, Manny looses the throttle on the shuddering bird as it idles at the end of the airstrip and sends it streaking down the mile and a half of runway. The force of it presses his back and shoulders into the padded ejection seat, jams the back of his head against the lining of his helmet. The rush that takeoff always brings starts somewhere around his solar plexus, a tightening pressure almost like the oncoming climax of sex, rises up his spine until his head seems unbearably light and the howl of the engines rises in his ears and the airstrip and the buildings lining it streak by under him until the nose leaves the tarmac and the lift of the wings carries the Tomcat into the blue air, and they are floating free. The earth falls away behind to become an abstract pattern of green and brown veined with deep-cut watercourses. The Cat becomes almost an extension of his own spine, his own limbs, as he pulls back hard on the stick, sending her into an almost vertical climb, then levels off and banks hard left, steering their course out over the creased and folded basalt of the badlands.

They skim along above the bare rock barely a mile high, low enough for visual contact with the ground. The barrens give way almost immediately to prairie, long empty expanses pale green with new grass. Some of it is pasture; some of it, he knows, is fields plowed and left fallow through the winter, now reclaimed by native vegetation. At widely spaced intervals, he can make out the parallel rows of small patches of growing crops, and he keys them into his topography display. “Infrared giving you anything back there, Massaccio?”

“Some,” she says. “Scattered readout. Some blips are probably horses and cattle. Might be some humans in here, though. At least, something roughly the same mass as humans, and something in their vicinity that’s probably a machine heat source.”

Which at least, Manny reflects wryly, leaves out rabbits. Deer, bears and elk are still possibilities, even if they are unlikely to be driving a tractor. Locating survivors is a secondary objective of the mission. At best, they can be recruited into support positions, freeing more trained military for fighting the droids. At worst, it may be possible to warn them of the advancing enemy. He pulls the plane around in a graceful loop to make a pass over the coordinates Massaccio punches into his readout, activating the zoom on the powerful camera riding among the Sidewinder and Phoenix missiles nestled underneath the Tomcat’s wings.

“What’s the radar look like back there?”

“Negative. No company at all within range.”

Not that he expects any. According to Kirsten, no androids have ever been programmed as either pilots or navigators, one of the few precautions the Pentagon had agreed to in its enthusiasm for soldiers that would never come home as political liabilities in body bags.

Wounded Knee passes beneath them, the empty black lanes of Highways 18 and 20, the blue ribbon of the Niobrara. They are over Nebraska, the rolling hills of the western rural counties stretching empty to the horizon. The shapes of farms and ranches remain clear despite their abandonment, the pale lines of fences marching across the land, the rectangular fields defined by windbreaks and the hatched checkerboard created by the last harrowing after harvest. Silent blips appear on his topo screen as Massaccio punches her readouts forward, but there is nothing of note. Scattered readings that may be human appear sporadically, along with occasional clusters that are probably surviving farm animals, or, more likely, deer. Manny knows he does not have the mystic streak that runs through his uncle’s family—and he is happy not to have it, thank you very much—but even he can see the future in the air that shimmers over the bare earth. Even now, even a mile up and years in their past, he can almost see the dust cloud raised by the myriad hoofs thundering across the prairie as the buffalo return, and with them the wolf and the bear, the puma and the river otter. As it was in the beginning, in the time of the People’s coming forth onto the broad shelf of Ina Maka’s breast, so it will be again.

“Rivers, you there?”

The squawk comes through his earphones, jarring him out of the interstices of time-not- yet. “What is it?”

“Something about twenty miles off to the south—moving toward us, not very fast.”

Without even thinking, Manny hits the switches to arm the missiles under the Cat’s wings. “Civilian aircraft? Chopper?”

“Can’t tell.”

“Let’s check it out.” He pulls on the stick again, laying the craft over onto her side in a wide turn. The blip comes up on his screen, and he frowns at it.. Massaccio is right; whatever it is, is slow. Damned slow. To slow to stay in the air almost, unless it’s a helicopter. Low, too. Only a thousand feet up or so. He kicks Cat’s nose up, getting a bit more height. Just in case.

A few miles to the north of the Platte, movement appears on the horizon, a sweeping, undulating mass riding the wind that scuds over the Kansas flatlands to the south. It is at least a mile wide, perhaps twice or three times as long. Manny feels his muscles go slack, losing their unconscious tension, and he slaps the missile controls a second time, deactivating the preliminary launch sequence. As they pass overhead, he can make out the beating of thousands of wings, hundreds of thousands, as a kettle of hawks makes its way north toward their nesting grounds in Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

“What the hell are those things?” Massaccio demands. “There must be a million of them!”

“You a city girl, Massaccio? Those were hawks, probably broadwings. Koda could tell you for sure, but I don’t think anything else travels in kettles that large.”

And it comes to him that it is beginning already, the return of the winged ones and the four foots. Without humans to shoot them for sport, without humans to poison their prey, unprecedented numbers of the hawks have survived to make the spring flight north from their wintering in Central and South America. Which means that there, too, the humans must lie dead in the millions.

With the sun at their tail, Manny guides the Cat along the course of the Platte. Once or twice they pick up a blip that may be a watercraft. Or maybe rafts of debris, floating down toward the Missouri with the thaw. As they pass Kearney, just west of the spot where the river splits and flows in parallel streams for fifty miles or so, the infrared picks up multiple heat sources, all of them mechanical.

“Droids on the move?” Massaccio’s voice comes over the com. “I don’t see any readout that looks like anything but a vehicle. And I’m getting hits on the metalhead scanner.”

Not good. “Let’s get some height here. I’m gonna take her from here on compass. We’ll make a pass straight over Omaha and hope they don’t put up any surface-to-air.”

Up and level again, Manny opens the throttle and lets the Cat scream across the sky, afterburners blazing. The readout passes across his screen so fast he cannot process it, only hope that the sensors record everything the telemetry picks up. “Incoming!” Massaccio yells, and he has it on his radar almost simultaneously, a long, slim shape streaking toward them from the ground. Manny hauls the plane into an evasive corkscrew and fires a Sidewinder at the rising missile, noting with satisfaction the blossom on the LED screen as it makes its kill. So much for hoping to go unnoticed; one of the trucks has radioed the Base. A second surface-to-air missile bores at them on the heels of the thought; a second Sidewinder leaves its nest and scores a second kill. Yet a third goes wide, missing them and inexplicably detonating in a cloud of white smoke a thousand feet above them.

Or maybe not inexplicably. Maybe the droids haven’t modified their weapons’ guidance systems and their GPS is fritzing out.

One for our side. Aloud he says, “You got what we need back there?”

“Got.”

“Okay, then. Let’s go home.”

Their course takes them north along Interstate 29, checking still for movement along the highway. They are over Sioux Falls and about to swing west along 90 for home when the plane falls out of the sun, coming straight toward them on an intercept course, visual contact almost as soon as it shows up on the screen. “Unidentified!” Massaccio yells in the same instant that Manny comes to the same conclusion for himself and dives just as a missile separates from the F-15 and comes snaking toward them, its contrail white in the clear air. One of their own Sidewinders takes it, and Manny looses a Phoenix at the unknown fighter as they pull up and away, looping back to evade the enemy’s guns as it fires and corkscrews away. “Massaccio! You get any signal at all off that fucker?”

“Negative. No markings that I can see, either. You wanna try talking to him?”

“Not after that introduction. You still got him?”

“Here we go again. He’s turning.”

Manny hauls back on the stick and puts the Cat’s nose straight up into a vertical climb, then pushes it down again, diving on the other plane. The sun glitters off its unmarked silver fuselage, off the canopy behind which a helmeted shape is visible for the fraction of a second it takes to sweep past, kicking out another pair of Phoenixes at close range.

The Eagle spirals down in evasive action, swinging away to the south. “No joy,” Massaccio reports. “He’s not hit.”

Manny comes to a decision. “Screw this. We can’t afford the risk. We’ll just have to outrun him.”

With that he levels the Cat out with the sun to his left and opens the throttle. He feels the shock as he hits Mach 1, then the plane leaves its own sound behind to skim silently along the air. The Eagle follows, falling steadily behind until it turns back somewhere north of Minot. “Lost him,” says Massaccio. “Headed east.”

“Terrific,” Manny observes wryly. “That means he could be from Offut, or Grand Forks, or Willard Hall. Assuming he’s headed back to base, that is.”

“The Colonel is not going to like this.”

“Nobody’s gonna like this.” Manny throttles back to subsonic speed and heads south. “Let’s go home and tell ‘em.”

*

“Redtail one, this is redtail two. What’s your twenty?”

Rolling her eyes, Dakota unracks the mike and puts it to her lips. “Right in front of you, pinhead.”

“Hey! I resemble that remark.”

“Yeah, yeah. What’s up?”

“Isn’t old Boney Markham’s hunt shop around here somewhere?”

“Boney died about six years ago, thiblo.”

“Yeah, I know, but I heard his son took over for the old coot after he kicked it.”

“Terrence?”

“Yeah. Didn’t you go to high school with him?”

“Don’t remind me. What a nutjob.”

“He was scary alright. You still didn’t answer my question, though.”

“Yeah, I think it’s up another mile or so on the left. Why? You up for a little looting?”

“I prefer to think of it as ‘creative acquisition’, tanksi.”

Koda laughs. “Call it whatever you like, thiblo. But if Terrence comes out with a shotgun pointed at your head, don’t come screaming to me.”

Tacoma joins in the laughter. “Like I did when old man Johnston caught us stealing pumpkins from his patch that time?”

“You, brother dear. You got caught. I wasn’t the one getting rocksalt plucked outta my ass for weeks afterward.”

“Hey! Is it my fault you can run faster than me?”

“Yup! Sure is. Hang on,” she says to her front seat passenger, a young airman with the down-home name of Joe Poteet. He does as she asks, grabbing the rollbar as she swings the big truck around an overturned John Deere that is pulled halfway onto the road.

“Nice driving, Ma’am,” the young man remarks, slowly removing his white-knuckled grip from the bar.

Giving him a smirk, Koda continues on over the slight rise. Beyond it, a small shopping center, three stores in all, comes into view on the left. As she pulls into the empty parking lot, Koda scans the area. The store to the far left, Tamke’s Hardware and Feed, has been obviously looted, as has the Video Store to the far right. Shattered glass sparkles in the sun like diamonds on the dark macadam of the lot. Doors hang loose from their hinges and trash is strewn everywhere. The sign from the Video Store, its letters obliterated by blasts from a shotgun, sways in the slight breeze, its rusted hinges squeaking a discordant, depressing melody.

Dakota brings the truck to a slow stop, its fat tires crunching complacently over trash, gravel and glass. Opening the door, she swings out, bootheels clocking on the macadam, and watches as her brother pulls in, followed by two other olive green trucks.

“Damn,” Tacoma remarks as he jumps down from the truck. “Looks like old Boney’s place was the only one that wasn’t hit.”

“Yeah, well there’s a reason for that,” Koda replies, gesturing toward the heavy metal grate that covers the entire front of the store.

“You any good at picking locks?”

“With what? My fingernail? Besides, I thought you military types learned lockpicking about the same time you were learning the difference between your rifle and your gun.”

“Left my lockpicks in my other uniform,” Tacoma mumbles.

Koda shakes her head. “Poteet, Catcham, go around the back and see if there’s a way in from there. The rest of you, look sharp. We don’t know if any friends are lurking about.” She shoots a look to Tacoma. “Be right back.”

Several minutes later, she reappears from the depths of the looted hardware store, two portable blowtorches in her hands and a pair of protective goggles tucked under one arm. Seeing her, Tacoma grins. “Interesting looking lockpicks ya got there, sis.”

“Ha. Ha,” is the droll reply as she slaps one of the torches into his hands. “Hold this.” Grabbing the goggles, she slips them over her head. “Poteet have any luck?”

“Nope. Only way in or out is through that door.”

“Then step aside and watch the Master at work.”

Tacoma’s jaw snaps shut with an audible click as his sister gives him a very pointed look that aborts any quip he might have thought to utter.

Leveling a wink at him, she turns to her work, and all falls silent in the lot.

*

With a sigh of weariness, Kirsten slumps against the low-backed stool she’s occupying and picks up the blackened circuitry board she’s been staring at for the last two hours. While the others work quietly, continuing to piece what they can of the droid back together, using tweezers in a high-tech game of jigsaw puzzle, she flips the piece back and forth, glaring at it as if it will give up its secrets simply by the force of her will.

Jimenez moves to stand beside her, running a hand through his short-cropped black hair. “You look beat, Ma’am.”

“I’m alright,” she replies, though she knows that’s far from the truth. Rather than being tired, though, she’s feeling…vague, out of sorts. She finds her mind wandering off on strange tangents instead of focusing on the task at hand. This is nowhere near normal for her, and it frightens her, just a bit. The fact that this dazed feeling coincides perfectly with Dakota’s absence leaves her feeling not one whit better about the whole situation.

With a reluctant nod, Jimenez steps away just as Kirsten flips the board in her hand. The shaft of light let in by the young Lieutenant’s movement strikes the charred board in a way that causes Kirsten’s eyes to widen. “Jimenez!” she shouts happily, jumping down off the stool. “Consider yourself promoted.”

“Ma’am?”

“Never mind. Is there a microscope around here anywhere?”

“I don’t—. What kind of microscope, Ma’am?” It’s obvious the man’s confusion is deepening.

“A microscope! You know, the kind you played with in Junior High science lab?”

“I…guess there’d be one at the hospital, Ma’am. Or at Dr. Rivers’ clinic, maybe. For looking at slides and stuff?”

“Perfect! Grab a pad and pencil and come with me.”

“Yes, Ma’am!”

*

With a last, precise cut, the part of the grating that contains the lock breaks free and falls to the ground with a loud clink. Satisfied, Koda shuts off the blowtorch, slips her goggles off, and grabs the gate. It slides grudgingly, sounding out a rusty squeal of protest. A second later, a simple wooden door is revealed.

Tacoma steps forward and gently pushes his sister aside. “Can’t let you have all the fun, chunkshi,” he says, grinning. A moment later, the door is a splintered mess courtesy of a swift kick amidships.

Koda rolls her eyes as Tacoma. “You’re so butch.”

“With a role model like you, how could I not be?” he teases, delivering a light elbow to her side and ducking into the darkened shop before she can retaliate.

Koda follows close behind, clicking on the flashlight she’s appropriated from Poteet. Tacoma whistles. “Not bad,” he whispers, “not bad at all.”

The store is good sized and filled, seemingly, with everything a hunter or fisherman could want, and more besides. Along the leftward wall is a glass case filled with handguns of all makes, models and sizes. Tacked up to the wall behind the case are dozens and dozens of rifles, shotguns, and several highly illegal fully automatic weapons. “Damn,” Tacoma remarks, gazing at a proudly displayed Uzi. “He must have had some cops on the payroll.”

Dakota snorts. “And this comes as a surprise to you…how?”

Three more soldiers enter, their own flashlights brightening the interior and bringing more of the varied merchandise into easy view. Tacoma turns to the men. “Jackson, Carter, start gathering up those guns and all the ammo you can find. Pack ‘em in tight.”

“Will do, Cap.”

“The rest of you, look around and box up anything you think we can use…which is probably most of the stuff in here. Move.”

“We’re on it, Cap.”

After watching them for a moment longer, Dakota strikes off toward the rear of the store, her flashlight making sweeping arcs along the dusty floor. “C’mon,” she says to her brother, “let’s check out the storeroom.”

“Right behind ya.”

*

“Jimenez, you have your pencil ready?”

“Ready and waiting, Ma’am.”

“Good. I want you to take down these series of letters and numbers for me.”

Adjusting the eyepiece just slightly, she squints as the charred numbers come slowly into view. “S…D…Zero…zero…A…four…six…. No wait, make that a five. Yes, five.” Even with the benefit of the microscope, the information is difficult at best to read. Blackened streaks and smudges all but obliterate what’s underneath. She looks back over her shoulder. “You getting this?”

“Yes’m.” Jimenez, with his round rimmed military-issue glasses, pad, and poised pencil, looks more like an accountant than one of the worlds’ best fighter plane mechanics. Kirsten can’t help but smile.

“Good.”

Ten minutes later, the task is done. Not as complete as she would have liked—not by a long shot—but given the rather sizable string of numbers and letters completely obliterated by their fiery ending, she’s more than content with what she’s managed to recover. With instincts borne of literally decades of experience, she senses what she has will be more than enough for her current needs.

Her smile tells the story, and when she turns it upon Jimenez, he blinks at her, dazed. “Ma’am?”

“Take the rest of the day off, Lieutenant,” she replies, snatching the pad out of his hand. “Catch up on your sleep, read, hell, pick dandelions for all I care. You’re dismissed.”

“Did—did I do something wrong, Ma’am?”

“No, my friend,” she laughs and, uncharacteristically, goes up to her toes to plant a soft kiss on his clean-shaven cheek that leaves him seeing stars, “you did everything right. Now scoot!”

He does.

*

“Tanski, you got a minute?”

Sighing, Koda looks to the left, where her brother’s flashlight bisects the shadowy interior. “I’m up to my elbows in ammo, thiblo. Can it wait?”

“I think you might wanna come take a look at this.”

Passing her duties off to a nearby soldier, Dakota rises to her feet and wipes the sweat from her forehead with a negligent swipe of one long arm. Following the light trail her brother has lain down, she comes up next to him at the door to what appears to be Markham’s private office.

With a flair for the dramatic, Tacoma pauses, then sweeps the light in a wide arc until it is pointing directly into the office. He stands quietly, awaiting his sister’s reaction.

Koda gives a low whistle as she peers inside the good-sized room. “My, my, my,” she remarks softly, hands on hips, “looks like someone was a naughty boy.”

The room is filled with items that would make Richard Butler fall on his knees and weep for joy. A huge white cross, complete with the suffering Jesus, is flanked on both sides by flags of the Third Reich, Aryan Brotherhood, Confederacy, Ku Klux Klan, Concerned Christian Men, and a half-dozen others. Above a rickety television set, an old framed photograph of a long dead Austrian private hangs in the place of honor, gleaming forelock forever drooping over one crazed eye.

On the splintered coffee table, several dog-eared copies of The Turner Diaries share space with Mein Kampf, a whole slew of Soldier of Fortunes, and a broad range of other far right wing paramilitary and religious propaganda. Bits and pieces of dismantled weaponry cover the floor like a macabre carpet, and the room stinks of old sweat, old urine, and old hatred.

“Damn,” Tacoma whispers. “I didn’t think he’d go down so deep.”

“I did.” Grabbing the flashlight from her brother’s hand, she shines it in the direction of a white hooded robe. Behind it, she can just see the seal of a door. “And I’m betting the jackpot’s behind door number three.”

CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT

WITH ASI HAPPILY ensconced at her feet, Kirsten taps at her keyboard, entering the last of the partial serial number into her specialized search engine. Another quick tap sets the wheels in motion, and she slumps back against the couch, watching the numbers crunch. Asi takes this as a sign that some attention-getting is in order, and he sits up, weaseling his massive head between the laptop and Kirsten’s belly. Big brown eyes roll up at her as his tail beats a comforting tattoo against the chest cum table.

“Slut,” she chuckles as she reaches out to scratch his ears. “Nothing but a slut-puppy you are.”

Asi groans in agreement before weaseling further onto what little there is of her lap.

“Oh no. If you think you’re gonna climb up here, you’re got another thing coming. Mommy’s work—aha! Speak of the devil. Okay darlin. Show me what you got.” Pushing her glasses higher on her nose with an absent finger, she studies the results of her search. She frowns. “Great. Sixty thousand possibles. How peachy.” She sighs, white teeth worrying pensively against her full lower lip. “Let’s see…how to narrow this down.” Her eyes brighten, and she taps in several commands, followed by the ‘enter’ key. “There. Chew on that for a bit.”

Satisfied, she turns back to her whining canine companion, and bending forward slightly, touches noses with him. “Now, where were we?”

“Just wait till I tell Dakota how you spend your free time when she’s not around.”

The dry, melodious voice, completely unexpected, causes Kirsten to jump, almost dumping the precious computer from her lap. Heart beating a mile a minute, she looks up to see the shadowy figure cross easily into the light. “Jesus, Maggie! You almost gave me a heart attack, here!”

“Sorry,” Maggie replies, though her tone doesn’t exactly convey apology.

“I didn’t even hear you come in!”

“You told me not to knock.”

“I know, I know.” Settling the laptop, she looks over at her friend as the Colonel settles her long frame into the armchair. “Long day?”

“You don’t know the half of it.” Maggie drags a weary hand through her close cropped hair. “Just got out of a debriefing with Manny.”

“And?”

“Droids,” she responds, mouth cutting off her words with the precision of a Ginsu. “Lots of ‘em. Armed with surface to air missiles. Heading this way.”

“Shit. How long?”

Maggie shrugs. “Dunno. Depends on how fast they’re moving. About a week, on the outside, I’d guess.”

The twinge in Kirsten’s gut multiplies tenfold, but her eyes meet Maggie’s steadily. “How are we going to stop them?” she asks softly.

“I don’t know that either.” Silence falls between them, but is broken a moment later. “So, what are you doing this fine day?”

“Hold that thought,” Kirsten replies as her computer chimes softly at her. A smile creases her face as she looks down at the latest results. Sixty thousand possibilities has suddenly become forty, thirty of which she can rule out without a second glance. One name stands out from the rest, and her grin broadens. “Ha! Gotcha, you bastard!”

“Care to share?” Maggie asks after a moment of watching Kirsten gloat.

“Wha-?” Kirsten blinks. “Oh. Yeah, sure.” She turns the computer so that the screen faces Maggie. “See?”

Maggie takes a quick look, then lifts her eyes to her companion’s. “In a famous physician’s immortal words, I’m a pilot, not a bionicist, Jim.”

Righting her machine, Kirsten laughs at the fairly accurate imitation. “Well, I am, so I’ll try to explain it to you.”

“Do tell,” is the dry response.

“Ok. Remember our suicide bomber friend of a week or so past?”

“I do.”

“Well, as you know, I’ve been spending my time trying to discover what I can from its remaining parts.”

“And you discovered something?”

“In a manner of speaking. Actually, your man Jimenez discovered it for me. I promoted him, by the way.”

“Oh you did, did you? What rank?”

“I’m…not sure.” She waves a hand. “Anyway, what he found for me was a circuit board that just happened to contain the serial number for this particular model. It was pretty badly burned, but I was able to extract enough of the code to plug it into my database, and viola!”

“And what does that tell you, exactly?”

Kirsten ponders the question for a moment. “Have you ever heard of Richardson’s Avionics?”

Maggie tilts her head, thinking. “No, I don’t believe I have. Should I?”

“Probably not. To the world, they were pretty much a two-bit operation, manufacturing parts for single engine aircraft and the like.”

“But to those in the know…?”

“Let’s just say they were the recipient of quite a few juicy government defense contracts over the past twenty years or so. The story was that they were developing top secret radar evading and jamming equipment for warplanes.”

“Interesting.”

“Quite.” A pause. “But I see now that that’s not all they were developing.”

Maggie sits forward, intrigued. “No?”

“No. The serial number on that droid leads right to Richardson’s doorstep. None of us knew that these type of droids even existed. And we weren’t meant to.”

“Which is why their manufacture was kept off of the military bases.”

“Exactly.”

“Okay. What does this knowledge do for us?”

“Possibly plenty.” Kirsten adjusts her glasses again. “For one thing, we have proof of another species of androids whose only purpose is to kill. Something all non military androids were supposedly guaranteed against doing. Secondly, and this is only a guess, since these androids were already programmed to kill humans, it’s likely that whatever code that was used to ‘turn’ the others wasn’t implanted into this model. It would have been a needless waste of resources and energy, something that Westerhaus would never have stood for, and his stench is all over this project.”

“I’m afraid I’m still not seeing how this benefits us,” Maggie admits.

“I’m getting to that part.” Kirsten looks at her and grins. “If I’m right, and if these droids aren’t programmed with the same unbreakable code, that means that someone who knows a thing or two about android coding can turn these people killers into android killers.”

Comprehension dawns, and Maggie breaks out in a beaming smile. “Kirsten King, I could kiss you!”

“What, and give you another thing to tattle to Koda about?” she teases, feeling inwardly very pleased.

“I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Kirsten laughs. “I’ll settle for a nice handshake. And maybe another shot of your Southern Comfort a little later on.”

“You’re on!” She settles back in the chair. “Ok, logistics time. How do we go about getting a hold of these droids and reprogramming them, assuming that can be done?”

“Well, as I see it, there are three possibilities here.” Lifting her right hand, Kirsten begins ticking the points off on her fingers. “As far as I can tell, these droids were manufactured with only one purpose, and that was to explode. Which means that it’s very likely that they can’t work the machinery replicate themselves. So, either manufacturing was shut down when the ‘uprising’ happened, and all the droids simply left the factory to go on their killing missions, or some of the androids programmed to do manufacturing came down from Minot, or there are some humans still left alive who are cranking those babies out as fast as they can.”

“If you had to choose, which one would you go with.”

“If I had to choose, I would go with number two, I think. Call me a sop, but I have a hard time believing an entire manufacturing plant full of humans would willingly continue building the things that likely murdered their families and friends. And I think that that plant is much too valuable to Westerhaus and his stoolies to let lie fallow, so that leaves androids from Minot as our only viable option.”

“Hmm.” Maggie rubs her chin absently as she thinks. “My gut tells me you’re right about this. Unfortunately, that scenario is the worst one for us, for obvious reasons. How big is the plant?”

“Actually, not that big at all,” Kirsten replies, pulling up the blueprint from her database. “If I plot out part of the code here, I can probably be in and out in less than a few hours.”

“You?!?” Maggie asks, wide-eyed. “Oh no, no, no, no, no. Sorry, Ms. President, but if I let you within a thousand miles of a droid manufacturing plant, Dakota would kill me. Then she’d probably find a way to bring me back to life, just so she could kill me again. No thank you. I’ll figure out a way—.”

“Maggie.” Kirsten’s soft voice interrupts her ramblings. “I have to be the one to go. You can’t just go down there, spray the place with bullets, and kidnap a couple dozen androids to bring back here to me. It doesn’t work that way. The coding has do be done at the plant. My little laptop won’t cut it, I’m afraid. I’m going down there.”

“Kirsten,” Maggie replies, voice deadly serious, “you know I can’t allow that.”

Pulling off her glasses, Kirsten fixes the Colonel with a stare that is pure ice. “You don’t have a choice in the matter, Maggie. I’ll make it a direct order if I need to, but I don’t want to have to do that. You know I’m right. You know this is right.”

“I know that letting you go down there, to a plant full of androids, is the most wrong thing there is, Kirsten. You’re so much more than a scientist to us.”

“Right now, the scientist is all that matters. If I can reprogram enough of these androids to infiltrate their fellows’ ranks and destroy them, it could give us the only break we have. I can’t not do it, Maggie.”

“But Kirsten—.”

“Maggie, look me in the eye and tell me that we will win this war without those androids. Tell me that you’ve got some secret superweapon stashed away that will take care of the problem once and for all. Tell me that Dakota’s vision is nothing but a bad dream after too much pepperoni pizza. Do that and I’ll forget the whole thing.”

The two stare eye to eye for long moments.

Finally, Maggie blinks, and looks down at her hands. “You know I can’t tell you any of that.”

“Then it’s settled. I’ll leave first thing tomorrow morning. The plant is less than a hundred miles away. I should be back before midnight.”

“Kirsten—.”

“The matter is settled, Maggie. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some coding to do.”

And, just like that, Kirsten slips her glasses back on, and is lost to her, once again immersed in the world of android codes. Resisting the urge to grab the woman by the shoulders and shake some sense into her, Maggie rises to her feet and, after a moment, turns on her heel and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her.

Kirsten looks up once the house is empty. “Goodnight, Maggie,” she murmurs. “Thank you for caring.”

*

“Holy mother,” Tacoma breathes as he shines his light down the narrow stairway and into the cluttered cellar. “It looks like a National Guard armory down there!”

“Yeah. Just keep alert. We don’t know if he left any little surprises for us to trip on our way down.”

“Roger that.” Tacoma makes deliberate sweeps with his flashlight, keen eyes examining every square inch illuminated. “Looks clean from here.”

“Alrighty then.” Koda starts cautiously down the stairs, eyes open and alert. She reaches the third step from the bottom when her brother’s voice sounds over her shoulder.

“Hold up a second.”

Koda freezes where she is. “Something?”

“A twinge in my gut. Something’s not right. Here, let me through.”

“Um, I hate to break it to you, big brother, but there’s barely room for me on this step. And you’re blocking me from behind. Do you propose levitation or should I just try my invisibility trick?”

“Very funny. Here, let me try—this.” Grunting, he puts his hand carefully in front of her face, feeling blindly for what he senses is there. “Just…a little…furth—.”

The sound of a gun going off is deafening in the small confines of the stairwell.

The men above hear it easily and, as one, race for the door to the cellar. Poteet reaches it first. “Doc! Cap! Are you guys alright?”

Dakota’s voice drifts up from the darkness below. “Just fine.” She stares at the charred, ragged hole in her brother’s shirt cuff. “Nice reflexes there, Tex.”

“Jesus. That was almost your head, chunkshi !”

“But it wasn’t, thanks to you.” She peers down the rest of the stairs. “How’s the gut now?”

“As soon as it stops digesting my heart, I’ll let you know.”

Reaching up, she gives his large, warm hand a squeeze. “Thanks, thiblo . I owe you one.”

“Nah,” he shrugs, trying to sound offhand and not exactly succeeding, “that’s what big brothers are for, right?”

“Riiight,” she drawls before beginning her descent once again. She reaches the floor when her brother’s voice halts her steps. “Another twinge?”

“Just making sure,” as he steps off the last stair and moves around her, his light sweeping in arcs across the floor and reflecting off of the dozens of wooden packing crates stacked along the length and breadth of the mid-sized cellar. He whistles soft and low. “How in the hell did he get a hold of all this?”

“Probably the same way he was able to openly sell illegal weapons in his storefront,” Koda replies, looking past the muscled bulk of her brother’s body. Spotting something out of the corner of her eye, she freezes. “Tacoma, shine your like back this way.”

“What way?”

“Toward that packing crate with the crowbar on it. Yeah that one.” Her eyes narrow, trying to recapture what she’s sure she’s seen. “Anything look fishy to you?”

“I’m not the one with the eagle eyes here, sis.” Still, he does his best. “No, don’t see anything but a few dust motes. What do you see?”

“Not sure. Move the light to your right, slowly. There. What does that look like to you?”

Concentrating on holding the light steady, he squints and spies a thin, translucent thread from the crowbar’s forked end to the ceiling rafter above it. “Well, it’s either a tripwire, or a cobweb. It’s sagging in the middle, so I’d go for old cobweb, but I wouldn’t bet your life on it, chunkshi .”

Taking the flashlight from his hands, she shines it along the walls and ceiling, eyes straining for any glimpse of weaponry or other lethal surprises. There is nothing that she can see, but her instincts, once alerted, refuse to be quieted.

“Squat down.” As her brother follows her instructions, Dakota hands him back the flashlight, digs into the pocket of her jeans and pulls out the keys to the APC. “Get ready to duck….”

“Dakota—.”

With an easy underhand motion, she tosses the keys so that they break through the thin thread above the crowbar. In the same motion, the covers her brother’s body with her own, pushing him to the floor. A split second later, four miniature crossbows let loose their bolts, one from each side of the room, all set to intersect through the plane of space that anyone who had hefted the crowbar would be occupying—a space that is, thankfully, empty.

“Can you let me up now, Koda?” Tacoma’s muffled voice filters up from beneath her. “This moldy cement is giving me hives.”

Carefully, Dakota leans back, eyes alert for any further danger. Thankfully, all remains quiet, and she helps her brother sit up.

Tacoma looks over his shoulder at the crossbow bolt driven halfway through the cheap plywood wall at the level of where his head would have been had his sister not pushed him down. He lets out a slow breath, then gifts Koda with a small grin. “Guess we’re even now, huh?”

Laughing, she slaps his meaty shoulder. “You are such a goober.”

“Yeah, yeah, you say that now .” Rising easily to his feet, he reaches down a hand and helps her up. “Shall we see what Santa Skin-Head left us for Christmas?”

*

Koda eases Redtail One out of the small shopping center’s parking lot, followed by the other trucks in the convoy. The back wheels answer sluggishly to the steering wheel; the lead vehicle, like the others, is packed from bed to canopy with crates of small arms and the ammunition to go with them. Old Boney had been a desultory desultory sort of right-winger, not much into doctrinaire survivalism himself but willing to capitalize on the kind of paranoia that drove self-styled “militiamen” to indulge in black helicopter fantasies and stock up on illegal weapons, all against the day that the commies came swarming over the Pole. Or the federal government, whichever arrived first.

Terrence, on the other hand, had been a nutjob’s nutjob. When Sister Rosalie had assigned a book report on a “classic” in seventh grade— and by “classic” she had meant something like David Copperfield or The Last of the Mohicans —Terrence had turned in a glowing review of The Turner Diaries . Some of the literature they had found along with the guns had been considerably more radical. If Terrence had lived through the uprising, she had no doubt he would be yelling “I told you so!” to anyone who would listen.

But Terrence had been into droids, especially the military models. He’d even bought a surplus metalhead or two and had been trying to modify them for what he’d termed “commando operations.”

Live by the droid, die by the droid.

Beside her, Poteet turns his handsome new Bowie knife over in his hands. Once they had cracked the store, they had had to empty it down to the slingshots and Swiss Army can openers or risk the weapons’ getting loose in the population. Which would not have been a problem in nine cases out of ten. But the variety and extent of Terrence’s stock indicated a considerable customer base. And there was bound to be more than one surviving wingnut out there, more than one surviving Dietrich. Not the kind of folk one would want to trust with mortars and grenades and LAAW rockets.

“Eyes on the street, Joe,” she says quietly. “There’s more weapons like these out there, and not all are upstanding citizens like us.”

“Ma’am,” he says with a guilty glance up at her. Then he sets his prize aside and takes up his M-16 again, laying it lightly across his knees.

Koda flashes him a smile to let him know he’s not in trouble and glances into the rearview mirror. The other three trucks follow closely behind, all of them as heavily laden as Redtail One. Casually Dakota waves at the line of kids and teenagers standing across the street, watching as she and her party relieve Boney’s establishment of his inventory. She says, “They’re gonna be real disappointed we didn’t leave them anything.”

“Looks like folks have liberated just about everything that’s not nailed down.”

“And a few things that were.” Navigating around the hulks of cars left standing in the street, Koda gestures toward and abandoned house. The windows gape black, the glass lifted out, not broken; the wall studs stand bare like ribs where clapboard siding has been pried away, possibly for building, more likely for fuel. A couple blocks down, a six-foot-high plank fence with an iron gate surrounds another house.

“You know, ma’am, it could all still go to hell,” Poteet observes.

Koda shoots him a brief glance, noting the solemnity on his rawboned face. “In a heartbeat, Joe.”

Further along, the houses give way to a strip of used car lots and other businesses, all of them broken open with splinters of glass still scattered on the sidewalks, glittering now in the afternoon sun, their doors hanging loose on twisted hinges. A church still stands mostly intact; outside a branch bank a handful of twenty-dollar bills, bleached grey by the weather, skid along the gutter as a breeze gusts by.

Koda turns left to regain the Interstate, taking a different route than the one they had followed coming in. Maybe the wingnut paranoia is beginning to rub off, she reflects; given their firepower, there is no real possibility of ambush. Still, best not to advertise where they have been or become predictable.

At the next turn, the wind brings the sound of shouting, a man’s deep voice and, incongruously, the squeals and laughter of small children. A block down the street stands the venerable brick façade of St. Boniface’s church and school, and the voices grow louder as Koda pulls level with it. On the playground two small children ride the seesaws up and down, while another pumps his legs to carry the swing higher and higher. A veiled woman watches over them from a flight of steps leading up into the building, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on the knot of adults gathered at the picnic tables under a small grove of pine trees.

More veiled women, and for a moment time slips and it comes to Koda that the nuns have somehow returned. But most of the women wear jeans and sweaters; the few men, denim and Stetsons. All but one.

Standing on one of the concrete picnic tables, he leans on a tall cross made of two branches roughly lashed together. His beard, liberally sprinkled with grey, cascades past his collar, and his long hair stirs in the breeze. Before his ears dangle long, corkscrew curls, though Koda would bet her ranch and all the stock on it that he is no Hassid. He wears a cassock buttoned almost to the throat; on his chest lies a large cross, also crudely made from twigs. She slows the convoy, rolling down her window to hear more clearly.

“. . .only a righteous remnant left here on earth to endure the Tribulation. In those days, says the Prophet Isaiah, seven women will lay hold of one man, saying ‘be our husband.’ The time was when women could refuse their duty to the Lord and to their husbands, but no more. The man-faced scorpions of the Tribulation, sent by God to cleanse his earth of the unrighteous, have killed not a tenth part of mankind but nine out of ten. We let a woman rule over us, and this is God’s just punishment for our disobedience. Now we must restore the order God meant for us to live in. Let no woman have authority, but be in all submission, and if she would learn anything, let her ask her husband. But let her remember her real purpose, and that is the bearing of children.”

Frowning, Koda counts up the veiled women. Seven. The preacher’s “wives?” Two, at least, look under age, fifteen or so. “We’re gonna need to get some civilian law enforcement in here,” Joe mutters. “Next thing you know ol’ Judah there’s gonna start serving Kool-Aid.”

Koda gives him a sharp look. “You know this guy?”

“Know him? Nah.” Poteet shakes his head. “But I’ve seen him preaching on the streets or in parks a few times I was in town on weekends. Calls himself Judah ben Israel now, but I think it was Brother Sam Something before. Cops hauled him off once when he was baptizing folks in the Civic Center fountain during a concert.”

She has head enough. Judah ben Israel, is something they should have known was coming. Unfortunately, there is nothing in the framework of the law to deal with him, unless they can find a way to enforce the age of consent laws. Koda presses the gas pedal, speeding up the truck, and heads back to the relative sanity of the Base.

CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

DAWN IS STILL several hours away, but Kirsten is wide awake, her lover’s pillow clutched tightly against her chest as she stares at the blackened ceiling above. Her body still hums with the sweet energy of their lovemaking less than half an hour ago, and she already misses Dakota’s passionate presence. “The things you make me feel,” she murmurs into the still, humid air. She remembers the look Koda gave her when she thought she was sleeping. The tenderness and adoration emanating from those magnificent eyes was as palpable to Kristen as a caress, laying itself over the parts of her that were still wounded and raw from a lifetime standing on the outside, and making her feel, for that one wondrous moment in time, whole.

A sinking surge of guilt hits her belly and she rolls from the bed, pushing her lover’s pillow away from her as if she doesn’t deserve the comfort it holds. And in truth, perhaps she doesn’t. Keeping her plans from Dakota was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Compared to that, walking unarmed into Minot had been child’s play. What is it they say? Act first, apologize later, right?

She has the sinking feeling that no amount of contrition will ever make up for her silence of last night and this morning.

Please, God. Let her understand.

Striding into the bathroom, she turns on the tap and stands under the frigid spray, letting the stinging, icy water chase the thoughts and emotions from her. Her face, like her soul, grows stony, and by the time the water is once again silent, she resembles the very androids she is going after.

She dresses quickly and steps into the darkened living room. Koda had left one lamp burning low on the hearth, and its somber light casts Asi’s curled body into flickering shadow. Having gone out earlier with Dakota, he merely looks up at his master, tail thumping companionably against the hearthstone. A slight smile cracks Kirsten’s icy veneer, and squatting, she strokes his noble head, then hugs him close for a moment, allowing herself to enjoy his soft warmth and unwavering affection.

After a long moment, she pulls away and stands, looking down at him. “You be good today, you hear me?”

He looks up at her, slightly outraged, as if “good” isn’t his middle name.

Correctly interpreting the look, Kirsten rolls her eyes, shakes her head, and turns away, grabbing her laptop and the silver case she’s brought with her from the bedroom. Plucking a set of keys from their hook just inside the door, she lets herself out into the cool night.

Feeling a bit like a criminal, she stands at the driveway and looks carefully up and down the street. All is quiet, and dark, and, satisfied, she makes her way toward Koda’s truck. As she reaches the vehicle, a soft voice sounds behind her, causing her to jump and turn, body braced for a fight.

“Jesus, Lieutenant!” she gasps as the tall, muscled and incredibly handsome man steps out from the shadows. “You scared me!”

“Sorry about that, Ma’am,” he replies, touching the brim of his cap in salute and smiling at her.

“What are you doing lurking in the bushes in the middle of the night?”

“Following orders, Ma’am.”

“Orders? Who’s orders?”

“The Colonel’s, Ma’am. I’m part of your night guard.”

Kirsten’s eyes narrow. “Night guard?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“I see. And does Doctor Rivers know about this?”

The lieutenant’s grin returns. “She does. I just talked to the Doc this morning, as a matter of fact.”

“Oh, you did, did you?” Placing her articles on the hood of the truck, she crosses her arms. “And what did she have to say?”

The grin fades slowly. “Well, Ma’am, she said that if anything happened to you while she was away, she’d flay me alive.”

Kirsten snorts. “Well, I wouldn’t want that to happen.”

“Thank you, Ma’am.”

“So, you’re coming with me.”

Jackson snaps to attention. “Of course, Ma’am. Where are we going?”

Her smile is mystery itself. “Oh…you’ll see.”

*

Dakota’s Cougar 2 hums along the blacktop leading north from Ellsworth to the ruins of Minot. Cougar 1, leading the convoy, bristles with armament: like all the APC’s in the line, it mounts a machine gun on its roof, minded by a soldier with one hand on its swivel and the other on her own M-16. Cougar 1 also carries a spotter with binoculars, sprouting up out of the moonroof to keep company with the gunner. So far they have met nothing but the empty highway. Almost a meter high, grass grows along the shoulders to the very edge of the asphalt, with here and there a green shoot springing up on the tarmac itself. There are no wrecks here, and no roadkilled four-foots. The whole caravan had almost come to grief within an hour of setting out, when a mother skunk had led her line of five offsping across the pavement in aloof indifference to the trucks, and Tacoma had run Cougar 1 off onto the shoulder with the four following vehicles screeching to a halt bumper to bumper behind it.

“Shit, Cap, you crazy?” Sergeant Greg Townsend had bellowed from two APC’s back, leaning out of the driver’s window, his face beet red from the spring sun and the barely avoided accident.

“Hell, no, city boy.” Tacoma’s laughter had come over the walkie-talkie. “Better to kiss a telephone pole than hit a skunk, any day.”

After that, they had strung out at a safer distance. From the front seat of Cougar 2, Koda can see Larke’s abbreviated ponytail fluttering like a pennant in the wind created by the APC’s speed as he leans his elbows on the roof of the lead vehicle to brace his optics. Regulations be damned, many of the soldiers and airmen of Ellsworth have taken to growing their hair. Only the pilots, whose coiffure has to fit the confines of a helmet, have remained impervious to the new fashion statement.

Closer to, Dakota has a view of Cougar 2’s driver, Catcham, and Joe Poeteet’s camo-clad legs, the top half of their gunner invisible beyond the roof. Most of the time, though, she keeps her elbows propped on her knees, studying the country through her own pair Swarovski 10×50’s. There has been no sign of the enemy, though the tall grass would give ambushers excellent cover. Once she has seen the tall humps of buffalo lumbering along the horizon; twice, small herds of horses who have survived, still patched and shabby looking with the unshed straggles of their winter coats. She feels untethered, somehow, not quite in the present, not sure whether they are moving through the past or the future. It is a sensation that has lingered every since her vision in the sweat lodge, a sense that she is neither who nor where nor when she once was.

All perfectly normal, according to Ate.

“Halfway mark, Ma’am,” Catcham observes, pointing at the odometer. “We’ve been in North Dakota for the last twenty minutes or so.”

Koda nods her thanks. They will bypass Bismarck and Mandan to the east, making directly for the base. They should arrive in time for a bit of recon, camp for the night and head back tomorrow afternoon with a cargo of whatever small arms they can pick up and a notion of whether or not it is feasible to try to collect a B-52 or so. Maggie has flatly refused to risk her remaining pilots on a scouting mission, no matter how Manny begged or cajoled or argued. Certainly one or two of the behemoths will come in handy if it becomes necessary to destroy yet another Air Force installation. Her cousin’s account of the F-15 fighter over Offut has raised a number of possibilities, all of them unpleasant.

Because if the droids have acquired the ability to strafe them from the air, they have lost their one great advantage in the upcoming confrontation. Their own air power will have to be deployed to counter the enemy craft and will no longer be available to cover the ground forces or even the civilians of Rapid City.

Still less will there be backup for the settlement coalescing around the Rivers’ ranch. No more will there be any defense for them.

Koda thumbs the button on her walkie-talkie. “Yo, thiblo. Seen anything up there yet?”

“Nothing since we took evasive action to get out of the way of Mama Skunk and her family this morning.”

“Evasive action, my ass. We nearly had a pile-up.”

“And you’d rather stink of skunk for the next three weeks? There ain’t that much tomato juice left in the world, sis. Besides, you got it all wrong. That was a squad of indigenous freedom fighters. One cadre and five enlisted, equipped with chemical weapons.”

The radio falls silent, and the miles slip by. The high grass seems to stretch forever, overgrowing the prairie, the pastureland, fields harrowed for the winter before the ice sank into the soil, petrifying it as surely as the passage of uncounted time. This, it comes to Koda, is Ina Maka reclaiming herself, giving birth to a new family of children, winged and four-footed and finned, the standing people and the stones. The only question that remains is how or whether the human two-foots will have a place in the new world. Or no, that is not quite right. The question is whether humans will live free in the universe that their own creations have brought into being. The question is whether they can survive in large enough numbers to create a stable population, and having done so, whether they can live with each other without sinking into tribal warfare.

If they survive this battle, their first priority must be to make contact with other surviving communities and make alliance with them.

Or, the unpleasant thought intrudes, subjugate them.

Do you want to become a conqueror, Dakota Rivers? Do you want Kirsten to become a dictator, the iron fist that forces the population back into technological society at the point of a machine gun?

No?

Well, then, do you want to allow some old coot who thinks he is God’s administrative assistant to “marry” fourteen-year-old girls by the half dozen?

Somewhere there has to be a balance between the two, some territory marked by common sense and respect for one’s neighbors and the workings of democracy. And somewhere, on this land that her people have lived on time out of mind, there is the pattern of a new and ancient compact between human and four-foot, human and winged, human and Ina Maka herself. Despite the cloud that shadows the battle to come, she knows that that, nothing less, is the quest that awaits her on the other side of blood and death.

Koda steadies her binoculars and sweeps the horizon for the thousandth time. Move over Galahad, she thinks wryly. Compared to this, the Grail was a slam-dunk.

The first sign of trouble appears some ten miles south of Max, North Dakota, arcing over a shaggy forty-acre pasture from the windbreak along its northern border. The grenade lands some twenty feet in front of Cougar 1, gouging a hole in the tarmac and spraying the lead APC with a rain of melted tar and minute asphalt pellets. Koda has just time to see Cougar 1 veer off the road, Larke raising one arm to shield his face from the spatter of liquefied pavement, and to register the incongruous roar of the explosive when another round impacts the spot they had occupied a fraction of a heartbeat ago.

“Motherfucker!” someone bellows from the truck behind her, and flame from a return round blossoms along the treeline, its glare picking out a flurry of movement in the shadow of the trees. Then nothing.

Tacoma scrambles out of Cougar 1, careful to avoid the recklessly canted driver’s door as it clangs shut behind him. “Two of you come with me! The rest stay with the trucks!”

Not turning to see who follows, he slogs into the grass, still only knee-high by the roadside. With a wave of her hand to Poteet, Koda follows, pausing to exchange a grin with her brother where he holds down the lowest two strands of barbed wire so that they can duck into the sea of waist-high purple-top that was once a cultivated field. Some stalks, grown tall, brush at her face, their deep burgundy seeds shining along their spikes like garnets dangling on golden scepters.

“Spread out.” Tacoma waves them off to either side of him. “Watch your footing. Keep your eyes on that ridge.”

Tacoma sets off through the grass, its deep green parting for him, then closing like a wake behind him. Koda strikes out a few yards to his left, Poteet to the other side. She holds her rifle high, ready to fire without aiming at their attackers’ position, but, like Tacoma, she suspects that they are already gone. They may have simply fled in the face of greater numbers and bigger guns. Or they may have abandoned their position to report to whoever stationed them here.

Which would be a troubling thought all by itself, but Manny’s flight over Offut has only confirmed what they already knew. The remnants of Ellsworth and Rapid City are not the only survivors of the uprising, nor the only armed survivors. The F-15 her cousin met in the sky over Nebraska might have gone east when he outran it, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t take off from Minot.

And if it did, we’ve got a whole lot of trouble, right where we don’t need it.

Right when we don’t need it.

Tacoma tops the rise slightly ahead of Poteet and Koda. She watches as he sweeps the line of sight with the muzzle of his rifle, head up and alert for movement, then drop it to part the grass at his feet.

No one home.

Lowering her gun, she sprints the rest of the way up the side of the windbreak to join her brother. The grass along the ridge lies broken and beaten down where two men have crouched to set up a grenade launcher, its abandoned tube tossed down halfway to the narrow blacktop road blow. By the roadside twin ruts run through the grass and weeds, a partial tire pattern visible where it has been printed in dust on the asphalt.

“Shit,” Koda observes.

Tacoma glances at her sharply, one side of his mouth canting up in a crooked smile. “Oh yeah. This road’s still got enough traffic that they pull off to park. Not good. Not good at all.”

“What now, Cap?” A frown crosses Poteet’s sunburned face. “Any chance these guys are friendlies?”

“Well, they don’t seem to think we’re friendlies, and I’m gonna defer to their opinion until proven otherwise.” He shoulders his rifle and heads back down the slope. “From now on, we keep close, drive fast, and shoot first.”

*

Bright sunlight streams through the windshield, almost blinding Jackson. Squinting, he flips down the visor, but that action brings no relief. With a grumbling sigh, he turns his head to look at his Commander-in-Chief, who is currently humming a song he can’t begin to identify as the passing wind tousles her golden hair.

“Problem, Lieutenant?” Kirsten asks, not taking her shaded eyes from the deserted access road before her.

“No, Ma’am. Except….”

“Except?”

“Well…could you maybe clue me in as to where we’re going?”

“You’ll know soon enough, Lieutenant. We’re almost there.”

This statement does nothing to calm the fears of a man who has spent the last three plus hours imagining one Doctor Dakota Rivers filleting him with a butter knife and dragging what’s left over shards of broken glass. He seriously, albeit briefly, considers jerking open the door, diving out, and taking his chances with the androids, or whatever other unsavory characters make up this stretch of backwater nowhere. His reverie is disrupted by a gentle pat to the knee.

“Don’t worry, Lieutenant,” Kirsten comments, smirking as she divines his thoughts. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“I, uh, think that’s supposed to be the other way around, Ma’am.”

Kirsten’s laughter is rich and surprisingly uncomplicated, and he decides he likes it, even though, in the end, the privilege of hearing it will likely cost him latrine duty for the rest of his natural life. And beyond.

A short time later, he feels the truck slow, and watches as it pulls to a stop behind a large, thick copse of trees. It’s not what he expected, but years in the military have him prepared for almost anything. “I take it, Ma’am, that you didn’t drive us all the way out here just to commune with nature.”

Kirsten laughs again as she gathers her things. “You guessed right, Lieutenant. Sit tight. I’ll be right back.” She levels her sternest look at him. “Stay in the truck, if you please.”

With a sigh, he gives in to her soft-voiced command, slumping back against the seat and waiting for whatever may come.

‘Whatever’ comes sooner than he expects as he suddenly finds himself staring into a pair of android eyes. The only thing that keeps him from depressing the trigger of his weapon is the smile beneath those eyes; a smile that he has come to be acquainted with these past several hours. He blinks, shakes his head, then blinks again. The vision does not change. “M-Ma’am? Ms. President?”

“In the flesh, so to speak. You like?”

“If ‘like’ suddenly means ‘get the shit scared out of’, then yes, Ma’am, I like.”

Chuckling, Kirsten holds up a hand. “Here, take this.”

The cup of his palm suddenly holds a blob of flesh colored plastic. He looks at her inquiringly.

“Put it in your ear.”

With a bit of skepticism, he does as she asks, surprised to find the device sits easily in his ear canal.

“Good. Can you hear me?”

“Yes, but….”

Kirsten lifts a brow.

“Begging your pardon, Ma’am, but you’re like six inches away. It’d be pretty impossible not to hear you.”

“You have a point,” Kirsten replies dryly. “Hang on a second.” She disappears behind the truck. “Can you hear me now?”

“You sound like one of those old time cellphone commercials, Ma’am.”

“Should I take that as a ‘yes’, Lieutenant?”

Jackson fights the urge to snap off a salute. “Yes, Ma’am. I can hear you fine, Ma’am.”

“Good.” The android face appears in front of Jackson, taking another few years off of his life. “Now, this is what I need for you to do Lieutenant. See those trees over there?”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

“I want you to patrol them, but stay hidden. Just beyond them is a small manufacturing plant. I have some business to attend to there. You’ll be guarding my back.”

“With all respect, Ma’am,” he protests, “wouldn’t it be easier to guard your back if I could actually see it?”

Reaching through the rolled down window, Kirsten claps Jackson’s broad shoulder. “Not this time, Lieutenant. I need to do this alone.”

“But—.”

Kirsten’s face goes stony. “No ‘buts’, Lieutenant. I’ve given you a direct order, and I expect you to obey it. Without comment, and without question.”

“I’m sorry, Ma’am,” he shoots back, “but your safety is more important than any order you could give me. I can’t—I won’t let you walk into some unknown structure alone and unprotected.”

“You can, and you will, Lieutenant Jackson.” Taking a breath, she consciously reins in her temper and softens her voice. “Darius, you can’t come with me.”

“Why? Would you just mind telling me that, please, Ma’am? You’ve kept me in the dark for hours now, and I think I at least deserve something! Please?”

She looks at him for a long moment, then nods. “Did you hear the story of what happened at Minot?”

“Bits and pieces. I know you were there to try and get the android code.”

“I was. And if your General Hart hadn’t decided, against all good sense, to bomb the place to smithereens, we might not be in the trouble we’re in right now.” She takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly, forcefully pushing away the memories of that time. “I have another chance, Darius. Not the same chance, but a good one. And as much as I value your protection, if you come with me, that chance will never be realized. Can you understand?”

“Not really, Ma’am. But…I accept your reasoning. I just—need to help, in some way.”

“Believe me,” she replies, relieved beyond measure, “you will be. That earpiece will allow you to hear everything that’s going on. I’ll be able to communicate with you through it, and if I sense any trouble, you’ll be the first to know.”

“How?”

“I’ll say….” She thinks about it for a moment, then smiles. “Nun lila hopa.”

“Nun lila hopa,” he repeats dutifully. “What does it mean?”

Kirsten blushes faintly. “That doesn’t matter. For our purposes, it means ‘Lieutenant Jackson, your presence is required, NOW!’”

He laughs a little, though his insides are twisted up tighter than a roll of barbed wire and every instinct he possesses is screaming for him to grab her, throw her in the truck, and hightail it back to the base, damn the consequences. Still…. “Okay, Ma’am. I got it.” He looks up at the sky. “How long to you think it’ll take?”

“A few hours, no more. I’ll let you know when I’m headed back, okay?”

“It’s not okay, but I’ll follow your orders, Ms. President.”

Kirsten smiles. “Thank you, Lieutenant. I’ll see you soon.”

A moment later, she’s gone.

*

“Ho. Ly. Shit.”

Koda stares across the field, in wordless agreement with her brother. Behind them, Larke lets out a long, low whistle. “Dayyyum,” he says. “You didn’t put any funny medicine woman stuff in the water, did you Ma’am?”

“Nope,” she answers, not quite believing it herself. “It’s really there.”

“It” looks like nothing so much as an extraterrestrial grasshopper, from Jupiter maybe, with heavy, drooping wings and squinting compact eyes, squatting in the middle of the prairie that stretches away to the horizon. The curves of the intake turbines of the twinned jet engines, though, just visible above the tall grass, name it for what it is.

“A B-52,” Tacoma adds. “A. Fucking. B-52.”

Slashed across the field from northwest to southeast, the scar of its landing shows bare earth gouged up to either side; a fine dust covers its metal skin from the nose back. The crash, or forced landing, depending on how one views it, is recent; the binoculars show no sign of green sprung up on the low berms ploughed up by the bomber’s skid over the pasture. Koda lowers her optics and says quietly, “Get the Geiger counter, Larke.”

“You think there’s nukes on board, Ma’am?” he asks as he turns back to the line of vehicles parked on the shoulder.

Dakota shrugs. “All we know right now is that if there are, they didn’t go off. What we need to know is whether they’ve been breached.” Larke goes white to the gills, and she adds, “If they’re there at all.”

When he has gone, Tacoma says quietly, “All right, we know someone’s still up at Minot. Someone who’s trying to fly nuclear bombers.”

“Not very successfully, it seems,” Koda answers.

“Not this time. Maybe next.”

Koda nods. “Maybe next, thiblo. Or maybe the time after that. If they have another crew.”

Tacoma looks from the downed plane to his sister and back. He says musingly, “Not likely, is it? I don’t think Ellsworth could muster a full crew for one of those monsters; Manny and Andrews sure as hell aren’t qualified on the heavy stuff, and I doubt the Colonel herself is. And the droids have to have hit Minot even harder than they did us. We got a rogue on our hands, tanski.”

“Take him out?”

“If we can. Or make an alliance. You see a third possibility?”

It’s a no-brainer. “We can’t leave an unknown at our backs. Not this close. Not now.”

Larke arrives with the Geiger counter, and Koda takes it from him. The readout remains at normal levels as she walks it toward the wreckage of the plane. There is no need to check for injured. Once she is within ten meters of the derelict, she sees the white lime left by carrion birds along the edge of the wing; a little closer, and the smell reaches her. Confirmation, if she needs it, that the pilot or pilots did not survive.

Interesting that no one came to bury them. But droids would hardly bother, if droid experiment it was.

On the other hand, a band of marauders—ambitious marauders at that—was unlikely to have sentimental feelings for one another.

Koda snaps the cover over the readout and heads back toward the line of APC’s waiting by the road. “No radiation here. The trouble’s up ahead.” She grins. “Let’s not keep it waiting.”

CHAPTER FORTY

PUSHING ALL NON-ESSENTIAL thoughts from her mind, Kirsten strolls onto the grounds of the plant as if she has every right to be there. Which, she considers, given her recent promotion to the head of what’s left of the free world, she does.

Her computer enhanced senses assure her that the building is unguarded, which makes sense, since its unprepossessing façade hardly screams out “We’re making killer androids here!” Taking in a deep, cleansing breath, she grasps the door handle with her free hand and pulls. The door opens easily, silently, on well-oiled hinges, letting out a blast of chilled air. Huh. Air conditioning. Almost forgot what that felt like.

The air smells musty and canned, and she finds herself wrinkling her nose, and blinking at the sudden over-brightness of the fluorescent lighting that bathes the sterile, empty reception area.

Huh. Guess I’m getting used to this Robinson Crusoe stuff after all. After a moment, she straightens her shoulders and drops the emotionless mask back over her features. Ok, kiddo, showtime. Let’s get it right this time, hmm?

Striding through the empty room as if she hasn’t a care in the world, she pulls open the heavy glass door to the factory proper and steps through. Her senses are immediately assailed with the heavy scent of oil and machinery, but she takes it in stride, and approaches the neatly dressed android facing her. His scan hums along her ear canals, tickling against the tiny hairs there. When it finally comes to a stop, she looks at him directly. “I have been programmed to download a patch into your system. 7-E23-1267AA-349.”

“I was unaware of such an order, Biodroid 42A-77.”

Kirsten lifts her laptop and places it on the desk in front of the man. “All the instructions are here, should you wish to verify.”

The scan is more direct this time, deeper and harder, and she fights the urge to clamp her hands over her ears as the drilling pain shoots along her nerve endings in agonizing pulses of pure energy.

The pain stops as abruptly as it begins, and Kirsten is hard-pressed not to gasp for air. She knows her heart is pounding quickly, but hopes the android will take it as a normal response for her model. If not, she’s dead. She has no illusions about that.

“Proceed to the computer room, Biodroid 42A-77.”

Very careful to mask her relief, Kirsten moves off in the direction indicated, looking neither right nor left until she stands before another glass door. The computer room is, as expected, scarcely furnished and icy cold. Mainframe servers take up space along all of the walls, humming, whirring and chittering complacently to themselves.

Walking over to the central desk, she places her laptop down and seats herself on the more-or-less comfortable office chair. As her computer boots up, she taps the keys on the loaded desktop sitting beside it. Less than surprisingly, the passwords haven’t been changed since the uprising, and she is able to get into the system easily.

Quickly scanning down the standard list of codes, she stops as she reaches the area where the “suicide bomber” aspect of the androids’ “personality” is encoded. “Interesting,” she whispers softly, squinting slightly to try and unblur the huge string of binary staring back at her. Shoulda remembered to make these damn contacts prescription.

Easily changing the view from ‘read only’, she clicks the cursor at the beginning of the added code, then takes out the wire needed to mate the two computers. That done, she drags the blinking cursor over a certain area, then hits the ‘enter’ key on her laptop, and sits back as her computer begins to disgorge its altered information. She can feel her heart rate pick up as she waits out the download, hoping beyond hope that she’s not tripping some alarm system down the line. A quick scan before the download told her that wouldn’t be the case, but she can’t help worrying nonetheless.

Several tension filled moments later, the words download complete appear on the screen, and Kirsten finds herself taking her first full, unencumbered breath of the afternoon. Fingers flying over the keyboard, she builds a secure site, then launches a test program, eyes darting across the screen as she watches the new code in action. “Perfect,” she announces to the empty room, before dumping the test program and erasing all traces of its existence.

Just as she’s about to power down her laptop, the door swings open and another android steps through, staring down at her through his emotionless, dead doll’s eyes. “You will explain and demonstrate the new parameters of the patch you have just installed.”

Ohhh shit! I knew this was too damn easy. Think, Kirsten, think. Don’t screw up now, or you’re dead.

“Your heart and respiratory rate mnemonics show an increase of 7.34%, Biodroid 42A-77. In a human, this would indicate nervousness.”

“I am programmed to mimic human autonomic response to a multitude of different stimuli, 16617-398PZ.”

“Noted. Continue.”

Kirsten’s mind races a mile a minute as she desperately tries to think up a story that will placate the killing machine standing a foot away from her. An idea slides into her mind so perfectly that it seems to her as if some outside force has placed it there. Her fingers quickly map out an alternate test pattern as she eyes the android steadily. “As you know, the units here are currently programmed to detonate upon the acquisition of human targets. However, given that a small but noteworthy number of humans have joined together with the standard units, the probability is significant that a one or more of these units will detonate within a mixed group, causing unneeded collateral damage.” She holds up a hand, finger pointed to the ceiling. “Normally, such collateral damage to standard units would not cause difficulty, but with the factory at Minot now substantially out of commission, every android unit is needed to continue its task to completion.”

“Acknowledged.”

“Therefore,” she continues, lowering her hand to continue her character mapping, “I have been programmed with a patch that will cause these special units to avoid any human target that is detected within the presence of standard units, and only to detonate when it finds human readings alone.”

Crossing mental fingers, she turns the monitor toward her listener, and presses ‘enter’. “The flashing red number is our special unit, adapted with the patch. The flashing black numbers are human and android targets. The flashing blue numbers are human targets alone.”

Pleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseplease….

As if reading her thoughts, the tiny red number veers away from the group of black numbers and heads into the very center of the blue group. A split-second later, the entire screen flashes, and when it steadies, a line of numbers scrolls down the monitor, ending with a flashing black 78% target acquisition.

Oh, thank you God!

“Does this scenario meet with your satisfaction?” she asks.

“Affirmative,” the droid replies after a moment. “Will there be anything else that you require?”

“Yes. This patch only ties in to the original manufacturing mainframe. If you have any completed units that have not yet been released, I’ll need to apply it to them as well.”

“Acknowledged. If you will follow me, I will lead you to them.”

“Affirmative.”

Powering down her laptop, Kirsten rises from her chair and follows the android out of the room, through a series of intersecting corridors, and down a well-lit stairwell into the basement of the manufacturing plant. The room is large, spotless, and completely dust free. It is also filled with row upon row of deactivated androids, looking like something out of one of those ancient television shows. The Outer Limits, perhaps. Or the Twilight Zone. Kirsten suppresses a shiver as she eyes the stringless puppets awaiting their Master’s bidding.

As she steps closer, she notices something that causes her very soul to grow cold.

These particular androids aren’t only human-like. If she didn’t know, with one hundred percent certainty, that they are simply made of high quality organic plastics and computer chips, she would swear that they are, in fact, human. Gone are the silver circlets around their necks. Gone are the dark, dead eyes that seem to absorb all light. These eyes, these faces, have expression, human expression, and Kirsten feels her mouth go dry at the implication.

Jesus. I have to let Maggie and Dakota know right away. We could be harboring these monstrosities right under our noses without even knowing it. Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck!

She’s brought back to the present by a cord entering her field of vision, held by the ever-helpful android to her left.

“These units are connected to the secondary computer at the pedal terminus.”

Accepting the cord, Kirsten looks down and notices that the androids, twenty five in all and lined up in neat rows of five, are all standing on a metal strip. The cord she’s holding trails out from the far left side of that strip. “Acknowledged,” she comments finally, placing her laptop on the computer desk and connecting the wire to its back.

“Is there anything further that you require?”

“Neg—Affirmative.”

The droid looks at her. She’s sure if it was within its programming to lift an eyebrow, it would be doing so right about now.

“I’ll be appropriating one of these units for a field trail when I leave.”

The pain hits again, like a high-speed dental drill being slowly shoved into her ear canal. Mercifully it stops before she decides to slit her own wrists just to stop the torment.

“Affirmative,” the droid remarks. “If there is nothing else you require, I will leave you to your tasks.”

“That’ll be all.”

*