“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.