The few pictures on the walls are idiosyncratic, too, not the official art of fighter planes and bombers. One shows grain fields stretching golden to the horizon, another a forest glade where a stag bends to drink, his antlers struck to gold like a crown by a shaft of sunlight. The third, a photograph, catches a pair of eagles in the midst of their courtship flight, talons locked with talons, wings spread wide against the receding sky. The image is stunning in its clarity, and paradoxically, its untrammeled sense of motion, as if the two birds might come tumbling out of the frame and into the room at the viewer’s feet.

Behind the big desk by window, Fenton Harcourt gives his newly pressed robe a twitch, and its folds fall into perfect place. He seems curiously at home in this room that seems to have slipped out of its proper time and place. As he taps the ash out of his pipe and refills its bowl from a cordovan pouch, his eyes stray again and again to the eagles, a small, secret smile curving his mouth. It suddenly occurs to Kirsten to check the photographer’s signature when she gets a chance. Or she could just ask.

“That’s one of your pictures, isn’t it, Judge? It’s beautiful.”

Harcourt glances sharply up at her over the tops of his old-fashioned half-glasses. For a moment it seems he will not answer her, but he says, “Why, yes. That’s very perceptive of you, Dr. King.”

“Our Judge Advocate was a birdwatcher—I’m sorry, a birder, too,” Maggie says quietly. “We haven’t seen or heard from her since before the uprising.”

“A shame, that. I would have enjoyed telling her about the Cassin’s Sparrow I saw two weeks ago.” Harcourt clamps the stem of the cold pipe between his teeth, picking up the gavel from the desk, together with the bulging portfolio containing the charges against the defendants. “Now,” he says abruptly, “let us see whether we have twelve persons who are at all capable of rendering a disinterested verdict in these appalling cases.”

“Everyone in that room has an interest of some sort in this case, Judge,” Kirsten observes evenly. “Bias and disinterest are not the same thing.”

Kirsten is almost sure she sees a glint of warmth, perhaps even surprise, in the Judge’s eye, but it may as easily be a reflection from the green-shaded banker’s lamp on the desk. “Indeed they are not. But I doubt you will find more than half a dozen folk out there who have not been personally and traumatically injured by the androids. This case has not even begun, but it is already rife with grounds for appeal.”

“Let’s see if we can get these men convicted first, shall we?” Maggie says dryly. “We’ll worry about appeals later, assuming anyone can find the staff to convene and appellate court.”

Kirsten knows what Harcourt will say before he opens his mouth and suppresses urge to kick Maggie’s ankle. “Colonel Allen,” he says mildly, “a court is not needed. You are aware, I am sure, of the prerogative of Presidential pardon?”

With that he steps between them, tucking the unlit pipe back into his pocket, and knocks on the inside of the door. Pausing a moment for the bailiff to shout “All rise!” and for the rustles and thumps that accompany three hundred people getting to their feet, he sweeps behind the witness stand and up the three steps to the bench. Kirsten and Maggie slip out much less dramatically in his wake, to take their places in the observers’ area behind the prosecution table next to the jury box. Again the bailiff gives tongue, rolling out the words one after another on a single pitch: “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!”

For a long moment, Harcourt stands behind the bench, inspecting the occupants of the courtroom. It is a glance very much like the eagles’ in the photograph, bright and implacable. In a rush for the door that morning, a scrambled egg wrapped in fry bread in her hand, Dakota had referred to the old gentleman as “Hangin’ Harcourt,” a stickler for the law, letter and spirit. It seems to Kirsten that the epithet is not, perhaps, a joking matter. Despite the man’s respect for his fellow bird enthusiasts or his obvious pleasure in a rare sighting, the lean planes of the his face, cut sharply to the bone under his shock of white hair, would not be out of place on an Old Testament prophet—Jeremiah, bewailing the whoredom of the Daughter of Zion, John the Baptizer munching locusts and wild honey—or a Huguenot martyr bearing his Calvinism like a banner to the stake. Kirsten trusts him to be fair. She is not sure there is any mercy in him at all, or whether she thinks there should be.

A chill passes over her as she stands, waiting like the rest for Harcourt to be seated. The Judge will sign a death verdict, if one is rendered, read the sentence, set the date. But she, Kirsten King, must sign the execution warrant when the time comes.

It is a long way home to Twenty-Nine Palms. A long way home and circles upon circles of hell yet to pass through. To Harcourt’s right, the national flag drapes in soft spirals of red and white around its stanchion, and Kirsten wonders how many stars will be left when the insurrection is over. If it is ever over. If anyone survives. To his left, South Dakota’s flag proclaims, “Under God the People Rule.” Kirsten has no interest in presiding over a theocracy, but restoring the government of the people, by the people, is something she would do in a heartbeat if she could.

A heartbeat that would allow her to go back to being a scientist, not a political figure.

Or, more aptly, a figurehead. A figurehead with life and death in her hand, and no way to open her fingers and cast herself free of them.

Finally Harcourt sits, and the rest of the room follows suit. The crowd remains silent as he opens the folder in front of him and studies it briefly. Then he closes it and folds his hands on its cover. Pitching his voice so that it carries to every corner of the high-ceilinged room, he says, “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for coming here today despite what must be considerable hardship for some of you. I commend you on your sense of duty even in the present crisis and for your willingness to undertake perhaps the most solemn responsibility of a citizen of this state and this nation. You are here to administer justice. Justice under the law.”

He glances around the room. “The circumstances are extraordinary. For one, this court is of necessity a hybrid of military and civilian practice, even though the defendants are civilians and no state of war has been formally declared by the Congress of the United States. So, even though you will see both the defense counsel and the prosecutor in the uniform of their service, the charges laid against these defendants are those allowable in the criminal law of the State of South Dakota. They are not federal charges. They are not war crimes, even though it seems, in logic, that they should be.

“You will be asked, if you are chosen for this jury, to sift a body of evidence that you will find disturbing in the extreme. And you will be asked to render a verdict, bearing in mind that men’s lives will be in your hands, on that basis of that evidence alone. In a moment, the Clerk of the Court will ask for exemptions, which may be granted for several reasons under the law of this state. If you have formed an opinion on any of these cases, or if you do not believe you are capable of rendering a just and true verdict, you will have an opportunity to inform the Court at that time. Madame Clerk.”

The Clerk, a trim redhead with Sergeant’s stripes on her sleeve, begins to read out the list of persons exempt from jury service. Kirsten leans slightly toward Maggie and whispers, “My God, he really is a classic, isn’t he?”

“He almost makes me believe in reincarnation,” Maggie answers sotto voce. “He’d be right at home in a toga, stabbing Caesar in the gut for the good of the Republic.”

A sharp glance from the bench quiets them both as the Clerk drones on, “. . .Persons over sixty-five years of age . . . full time student . . . care of children under six . . . minister of religion . . . .persons unable to read and write the English language. . . .”

Surprisingly few members of the pool choose to opt out. One young woman with an infant in arms sounds almost disappointed that she can find no one else to care for her baby; a young man with watery eyes and a bad cough is hustled out before he can make a gift of his cold to anyone else. Kirsten steals a glance at the defendants where they sit at the table across the room. The four of them are to be tried together, and they provide a study in contrasts. One, Kazen, seems scarcely out of his teens, his eyes wide with obvious fear. McCallum sprawls in his chair; Buxton slumps in his. The fourth, Petrovich, stares at something in the corner of the ceiling which apparently only he can see. Shackles, unobtrusive, clink each time one of them moves. The chains are not where the jury can see them, but any escape attempt will have to drag the defense table along with it.

Half-hidden behind piles of briefs, Boudreaux’s own face is as pale as his clients’. A fine shimmer of wet at his receding hairline betrays his nerves. He is not a defense lawyer by trade, and despite his uniform, not a lawyer. The responsibility for others’ life and death sits no easier on him than it does on Kirsten herself, and it seems to her that his is the one job even less appealing than her own. He must save these thugs’ lives if he can, and he must save them knowing that if they are found innocent they must be released. Knowing that they have been spared the firing squad only to be handed a more subtle death sentence, and a more brutal one, at the hands of their victims.