“Ma’am?” It is Andrews again.

Without warning, in a single word, the ambush her grandfather had warned her about is upon her. Koda can turn responsibility back to the Lieutenant and walk away from the instinct for command that she now knows to be grappled to her bones. She can deny the power that lures her with the easy excuse of familiarity. Leave the job to professionals.

Or she can give the order that will commit the lives of these men and women to mortal hazard. Once the hatchway is breached, an alarm will flash across monitor screens in the Base’s control rooms, tripping klaxons, giving them away as surely as if they had marched up to the front gate and asked politely to come in. Once into the silo, they will be trapped, easy prey for defenders human or android.

“Reese,” she says. “You’re absolutely sure this is the way your father showed you into the command shelter? Absolutely?”

“Yes’m.” He nods toward the electronic device in his hand. “My dad was a flight commander, and he told us to get in through here if missiles ever came over the Pole. We wouldn’t be allowed in, normally.”

“All right. Hanson.”

“Ma’am?”

“Set the charge.”

“Ma’am!”

Hanson opens a small case he has carried with him ever since Rapid City, extracting a small packet with vari-colored protruding wires. It looks not unlike a spider, and Hanson sets about attaching it to the outside locking mechanism. “One Black Widow Special, coming up!”

The effect is remarkably modest. The plastic explosive emits a muffled thump, a bit of smoke. But when Koda comes up from her crouch, a foot-wide hole gapes in the entry cover, clearly exposing the lever beneath. Hanson reaches into the opening and turns the bar. Reaching for her flashlight, Koda plays the beam down the steeply descending spiral staircase. “Stay,” she says to MRE, and steps carefully into the darkness of the rabbit hole.

5

Were it not for the light of the moon on the mostly virgin snow, the darkness would be complete. No overhead lights, no flickering headlights, not even a flashlight carried loosely by a careless night watchman to bisect the encompassing black.

With a deep, though silent, breath, Kirsten steps forward, tripping the infrared beam and causing the outer door to slide open. The cold hits her immediately and she fights her weakened body’s urge to step back into the warmth of building. Her bladder pangs, its summons unimpeachable, and her course is decided.

Hatless, gloveless, and without more than a simple woolen sweater to protect her from the arctic night, she knows that her needs must be attended to with the speed of lightning, or she’ll join the snow-covered corpses already liberally scattered over the grounds.

One step leads to another, and another. Completely numb, her strides take her along the building’s faux-brick walls as her mind plays over the locations of the security cameras and the blind spots between each. The snow beneath is white and virgin. None have come this way, and this gives her hope as she sticks to the shadows created by the roof’s slight overhang.

She’s not alone. She can feel them out there, somewhere. She can’t see them, can’t hear them, but she knows they’re there, just as she knows that if they choose to, they can see and hear her as if she were standing in the brightest sunshine no more than a foot away.

Her nape hairs stand at stiff attention. Adrenalin floods her body in a fight or flight instinct old as time. Still, her bladder urges her onward and it is only with the strongest of wills that she prevents her numb, wooden legs from shambling into a quick, and deadly, sprint.

Finally, she comes to a spot that her senses tell her will be adequate for her needs. Leaning against the wall for support, her deadened fingers fumble with the button and zipper on her jeans as her bladder gives out its final warning. Hands curled into claws yank her jeans down at the last possible instant, and she can’t help the soft groan that issues from her lips as she finally finds the relief she’s sought.

Her eyes dart furtively, knowing that if she’s caught in this position, her life is forfeit.

6

Koda leads her troops down the spiral stairs of the silo, booted feet clanging on metal risers behind her. It is cold here, brutally cold, surrounded as they are by struts and platforms of reinforced steel that rise up toward them out of the pit like the bones of some Mesozoic beast. Their breath makes a mist about them, shot through with the beams of their torches. Before them, behind them, beside them at every turn looms the hundred-and-fifty-foot bulk of the Minuteman IV missile, set as softly into its cradle of springs and blast absorbers as an egg into isinglass. Under the shell of its nosecone lie multiple warheads, each bearing death in a blaze of light. A shudder passes through her that has nothing to do with the frigid air. Like all the people of the high plains, Koda has known life long of the dragons sleeping beneath her earth, has known that one day fire may rain down from the sky and parch to ashes the land and all its living.

And now the end of days is upon them in truth, and it is nothing foreknown except in the lightly-dismissed rantings of a handful of Luddites and the gut-deep discomfort of folk like her own family. Ambush, just as her grandfather had said.

Three turnings of the stair bring them to a steel door. A keypad is built into its handle; a small glass circle at head height is obviously a retinal scan. Koda steps to one side. “Hanson.”

Hanson rigs the small shaped device in matter of seconds. “Okay folks,” he says, “Black Widow II. Duck and cover.”

The charge is smaller than the one used to break open the hatch above, but here the report of the explosion clangs off the steel plates of floor and ceiling, loose-mounted to survive shock, reverberates off the steel pylons that rock the sleeping monster in its springs, sets their coils to humming. The clatter echoes and reechoes around the length of the missile itself, settles finally like thunder walking over the men and women huddled in the dark, hands clamped futilely against their ears. It is, Koda thinks, like being trapped inside John Bonham’s drumkit about halfway through “Dazed and Confused,” with all the tower amps turned up to max.

When the puff of smoke clears, Koda motions Martinez and Larke forward with their crowbars. More clanging as they work the forked ends of the pries between the door and the jamb, and at last it creaks open. Six feet ahead of them is another entry just like it. In normal use—if nuclear war could be considered “normal,” ever—neither door would open unless the other were closed. The arrangement reminds Koda of the sterile airlocks found in medical labs, sometimes in surgical theaters. She turns to the tapping of a hand against her shoulder to see Hanson mouthing “Ma’am?” at her.

“Go on, do the other one.”

Again the silent goldfish “Ma’am?” and Koda realizes that he is shouting at her. He cannot, obviously, hear her, either.

She points toward the other blast door, and he nods, motioning her and the couple other soldiers who have followed them out of the airlock. He gives the timer an extra sixty seconds, and he and Andrews push the first door almost shut behind them before the charge detonates. This time it is not nearly so painful. Either we’re all stone deaf, or the door did the job. But the ringing in her ears is already less, and she can hear her own voice, high and tinny, yelling, “Come on!” to the men and women behind her.

The second blast door opens onto a long corridor that is nothing but a bridge suspended inside a twelve-foot wide pipe. Koda’s flashlight plays over arm-thick cables hanging from their staples in loops like boa constrictors. The floor of the passage sways beneath their feet, and from somewhere back in the line, Johnson yells “Break step!”

The tunnel seems to go on forever into the darkness, and its swaying beneath her feet calls up childhood panics: her first time on the high diving board with only one way down through an infinity of empty air; daring Phoenix to walk the two-by-four laid over the twenty-foot drop from the hayloft to the barn floor; making her way along an eight-inch wide deer trail after an injured fawn, with sheer rockface to her left and an even sheerer sixty-foot plunge into a frozen creek on the right. She stifles the impulse to run and get it over with.

Showing fear is not an option. Not now; maybe never again.

After what seems like an eon in Purgatory, the tunnel ends at another door. This one, by miracle or negligence, is not locked, and they emerge into the missile crew’s living quarters. They plunge down another three flights of metal stairs, passing the ghostly remains of lives passed here beneath the earth in the imminent expectation of holocaust: beds still neatly made, a table with a game of checkers still half-played. On the bottom floor is a common area with a wide-screen television and disc player; a pool table; a stove and refrigerator; and a wall papered with photographs of families, wives and husbands, parents and children. Koda takes it all in at a glance as they sweep through, heading for yet another stretch of tunnel that will lead them into the command center and ultimately, if Reeves is right, into daylight inside the shelter compound that now serves as the droid factory.

The bridge here sways, too, but it is only a fraction of the length of the distance from the silo to the crew quarters. In the darkness of their approach, Koda can see green and amber telltales winking on control panels and the soft glow of monitor screens. This area must have its own generator, but there is no time to search for a light switch. Guided by the beams from the flashes, they make for the staircase leading upward into the darkness. Koda has her foot on the first step when the field telephone buzzes.