Her troops. A Lakota chieftain did not command troops. Warriors followed him because he was successful, not because rank or organization compelled them. Despite the cultural dissonance, despite her strictly legal status as a civilian, she knows that she has somehow become a commander and that these men and women following her north into danger are her troops. Andrews may be the nominal leader of the mission, but he defers to her, as do all the others. Some of their respect may reflect the obvious awe in which they hold her top-gun, kick-ass, take-no-prisoners cousin Manny ; some may have rubbed off onto her from the Colonel, who seems to be indistinguishable from God in her squadron’s eyes. But that does not explain the easy companionship or the instant equality she has found with Maggie herself.

It does not explain the familiarity.

Perhaps it is a memory of another time, when she was not Dakota Rivers. Perhaps it is the memory of Ina Maka, Mother Earth herself, seeping into her mind and her bones from this land that has been so long a battleground, so drenched in the blood of the Lakota and other Nations. If she listens with the ears of her spirit, she can almost hear the war cries, the clash of metal; almost she can smell the sweat and blood. Almost, as she looks up at the sky, she can see the stars shift about the pole through the frozen light years. Almost.

As she watches, a silver pinprick of light makes its way across the sky beneath the stars. A meteor, perhaps, flaring as it plunges to earth. Perhaps a satellite, part of another world now, pacing its orbit, or like the meteor, burning in the air.

“My mother used to say a falling star meant a death.”

Koda turns to look up at the speaker. It is Sonia Mandelbaum, the older woman from the jail, now bundled against the cold in Polartec and boots. “Are you having trouble sleeping?’ she asks. “I could get you something for that.”

The woman shakes her head. “No,” she says, “thank you. I’d rather face my ghosts than try to drug them out of existence.”

Koda slides to one side of the bench in invitation, and the woman settles herself, her breath forming a cloud about her. Even in the pale light, Koda can see that her eyes are swollen, the faint glint of frozen crystals on her eyelashes. She is silent for a long moment, her gaze following the path of the meteorite. Then, “Do you understand this?”

“You mean the uprising?”

Sonia nods. “That. And what’s happened to us.”

‘The uprising—no. All we do know is that it seems to have been world-wide and coordinated. The other—how much to you feel able to tell me?”

“There’s not much.”

After a time, she goes on, “ We had a bakery, my husband and I, with half a dozen employees and a couple droids to clean and do deliveries and run errands. Maid Marians, both of them brand new. Nick always liked to have state-of –the-art equipment.”

“Nick is your husband?”

“Was my husband.” The emphasis is very slight. Sonia pauses, then goes on. “I was finishing a wedding cake. Nick had some French bread just out of the oven and was bagging it. I heard some shouting in the street, and went to the front of the store to look out the window. We’ve had trouble with skinhead demonstrations in Mandan before, some of those ‘Christian Nation’ people from Idaho. Once we had swastikas painted all over the display window. But it wasn’t the brownshirts this time.”

“The droids.” It was not a question.

“The droids. One of ours grabbed Nick from behind and broke his neck.” She makes a snapping motion with her hands. “Just like that. Then they killed Bill and Lalo, who did most of the breads.” Again the snapping motion. “Just like that.”

“But not the women.”

“No, not the women. They herded us into the delivery truck and took us to the jail.”

She flinches as boots crunch through the crusted snow behind them. Koda turns, half rising with her hands on the grips of her gun as Reese passes on his guard round. He is clearly surprised to find them outside in the cold, but much too disciplined to remark on their presence. He salutes, “Ma’am.”

“Carry on.” Koda nods, resisting the urge to return the salute, and settles again on the bench. As footsteps recede down the path toward the next cabin, she says, “They took only the women of childbearing age?”

“Yes. They asked us about when we’d had our last periods when we got to the jail, before they locked us up.” She turns haunted eyes to Koda. “I said last month; it’s been almost a year.”

Very gently, Koda asks, “How did you know that was the right answer?”

“There was one girl who told them she’d had a hysterectomy; I think she was a teacher at the middle school. They took her outside, and we heard her scream. We never saw her again.”

“I see.”

”So I lied. The rapes began the next day.”

Koda’s mind flashes back to her first conversation with Maggie. Slaughter the steers, keep the cows and heifers to make more steers, send the old cows to auction when they can no longer produce calves. But that doesn’t make sense. Droids do not eat.

If not food, then what? Slaves?

That possibility seems no more likely than the first. True, slaves bred to servitude from the womb, who had never known any other life, might be more docile than those taken as adults or even as children, but slaves require a slavemaster. Droids need slaves as little as they need food.

Someone controlling the droids, then?

Koda says, “Flora, did you ever see or hear the droids receive transmissions from anyone?”

“No. After that first day, they never spoke to us. They never spoke to each other at all.”

It is three in the morning and Koda’s head is beginning to ache. She needs coffee; she needs sleep. She will get neither. Tomorrow she and her troops must settle the women in the camp, and the day after they must move out again, toward Minot. “Black helicopters,” she says, suddenly.

“Pardon?” Sonia looks up at her, puzzled.

“Sorry. Twenty years ago, there were a lot of people, especially out in this part of the country, who thought the government was part of some vast international banking conspiracy It was going to take over and create a corporate state with its capital at Zurich. They thought they were being spied on from black helicopters.”

“Do you think that’s what it is?”

Koda stands and stretches; her legs and shoulders feel like lead. Another pinprick of light scuds across the sky as they turn back toward the cabins, and a shiver passes up her spine that has nothing to do with the temperature.

“No,” she says. “I think that whatever it is, is worse than that. Much, much worse.”

7

The whole world seems to hold its breath as the first gray streaks of dawn stand poised to paint themselves over the roof of the earth.

Seated crosslegged on a tallish bolder about a mile from the base, Kirsten faces east and watches as the earth prepares itself to give birth to another day.

Watching sunrises is, she believes, a pastime best left to dreamers and fools, and she considers herself neither. But the odd sense of peace that descends over her makes the break in her fastidious habits worth the effort.

She’s alone now. More alone than she’s ever been, and that thought brings with it a surprising twinge of sadness. Surprising because she’s quite sure that somewhere on some dusty library shelf, there’s a dictionary that sports her picture next to the word “loner”. Born into a family of loners, she’s always figured she came by it honestly. Add to that the fact that it’s hard to make friends when kids your age are sitting in kindergarten learning the pleasures of eating paste while you’re in a fifth grade classroom calculating the square root of pi, and you have the recipe for a person whose mind is her own best company.

When the plague of ’07 hit—the one they called the Red Death—the complete loss of her hearing hardly fazed her. If keeping the noises of the outside world at bay allowed her to delve more deeply into the rigid structure of her private thoughts and aspirations, well, that was pretty much fine by her.

She laughs now as she remembers that day, so many years ago now, when she woke up in the recovery room of Brooke Army Medical Center, able to hear again for the first time in two years. How joyful her parents had been, and how their faces had crumpled as she cried for the loss of her deafness.

“I’m sorry, Mom and Dad,” she says softly into the wakening world. “I know you only wanted what was best for me, and you did a damn good job giving it to me, too. Thank you for that. I appreciate it, and you, more than you’ll ever know.”

As if in answer, the rim of the sun peeks over the horizon, and, surprised, she wipes a dampness from her cheeks.

She laughs again, this time in self derision. “Alright, Kirsten, enough of this foolishness. You’ve got a job to do, and it’s about damn time you started doing it.”

Like a rude guest who’s bound and determined to pull up a chair and stay awhile, the strange, but welcomed, sense of peace travels with her to the back of the van. Opening the doors, she crawls inside the cool dimness, sharp eyes scanning the interior until they light upon the items she needs.

A powerful battery operated lantern lights the dim interior, and she settles once again into her cross-legged position, grabbing a set of carefully packed items and placing them within easy reach around her.

First she pulls out her laptop, the steroidal super-computer some of her staff jokingly named “Arnold”. The joke had to be explained to her before she got it. Movie watching had never been on her top ten list of things to do.

The computer obediently boots up courtesy of a special, long lasting battery and a solar panel tucked into one corner of the cover. Nimble fingers fly over the keyboard, opening a succession of windows more quickly than the human eye could ever hope to follow.