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.