As if sensing the rapt attention, Koda looks up from her pleasurable task, and their eyes meet and lock. Kirsten feels the fiery heat of the blush that crawls upward across her skin; embarrassed at being caught staring, embarrassed at the noises her dog is making, embarrassed, most of all, by her attitude of the night before.

It suddenly seems okay, somehow, despite the embarrassment and, if she goes deep enough within to admit it, her remorse. Things seem…possible. As if the chasm between them could be healed as simply as an “I’m sorry” or a “good morning”.

Part of her knows this is true, knows it would take no more than that, and her mouth opens, more ready to say those simple words than she’s ever been ready for anything in her life.

Maggie returns, two cups of steaming coffee in her hands, and the moment is broken like a child’s brightly colored party balloon that drifts too close to the fireplace.

Kirsten turns resentful eyes to the intruder and is met with a friendly smile and a salute from a coffee mug. “Thanks for brewing this.”

“No problem,” Kirsten manages before levering herself up off the couch and giving them the most civil nod she can. “If you don’t mind, now that you’re both up, I’ll shower and get ready for my day.”

“Not at all,” Maggie replies, completely unfazed by Kirsten’s grumpiness. “We won’t be here when you get out. We’re taking down a prison up north.” Her smile turns conspiratorial. “If we’re lucky, we’ll bring back a working droid for you.”

“That’s a very dangerous thing to do.”

Maggie actually laughs at this, though what she could possibly find funny in the situation is something Kristen can’t begin to fathom. “Of course it is. That’s why I’m a soldier.” With a wink and another coffee-cup salute, the young Air Force colonel turns away, leaving Kirsten flat-footed and speechless in the middle of the living room.

Asimov simply whines, tosses himself on the floor, and covers his snout with his massive paws.

2

The compound huddles low against the snow, its walls seeming to rise out of the drifts piled against them in a seamless extension of the frozen earth. The central building appears to be both Administration and cell block, its colorless concrete block façade broken only by ranks of steel louvers over the high, narrow windows. None of them is open to the fading light. Even those closest to the heavy metal door, which must have been offices or reception rooms for the Corrections Corporation of the Northwest personnel, are shuttered tightly. Coil upon coil of concertina wire tops the eight-foot walls which surround exercise yard and parking lots. Here and there the low sun strikes off its razor edges; the barbs take the light in bursts of flame. The frigid air lies over the jail and its snowy matrix like glass, trapping the evening for all time in its clarity: the rising dark in the east, bands of gold and crimson fading in the west; the land and the double handful of humans crouched in a streambed long since gone to ice to the south.

“How many?” Allen’s voice is no more than a raspy whisper. The heat of their bodies will give them away well before they become audible to sensors at the jail, but habit dies hard.

“Metalheads?” Andrews consults his readouts again. “Colonel, I’m getting only a dozen for sure. There are a couple blips that might be double—say fifteen, max.”

Koda frowns. “That’s not many for a jail this size. There were more than that at Mandan—twice that. Will that thing pick them up if they’re deactivated or on standby?”

“It should, Ma’am.” Andrews points to the LED display, which is broken down into a series of arcane number strings. “It reads off their metal mass, specifically the titanium. It doesn’t pick up their transmissions.”

Allen gives a wry grin. “Yeah. The first models kept picking up filing cabinets and calling them military droids. Goddam near got a couple Marine units fried the first time we used them in Baghdad. The troops steered clear of the “droids” and ran smack into the Republican Guard instead.”

“Okay,” says Koda. With a frozen sycamore twig, she rapidly sketches out the plan of the jail, courtesy of an overflight by one of the gunships that await their signal a couple miles off. “Show us where they are.”

Glancing back and forth between his readout and the diagram, Andrews positions their enemies. Ten in the building, apparently stationed at doors and along corridors; two in what may be the kitchen. The others seem to be a moving patrol, working the perimeter in mathematically precise rounds at equally precise intervals. “With a bit of luck,” he says, “these will be less sophisticated models than we encountered at Minot, with fewer built-in logic branches and more stereotyped responses. No boidroids, no ‘creative’ types with psuedo-HumIntel capacities.”

Allen nods. “Johnson.”

“Ma’am!”

“You’re smallest; there’s a chance you’ll read as a large dog or a deer on their heat sensors. When I give the word, and the patrols are here and here”—Allen jabs the diagram with her white-gloved finger—“you scramble out there and set the charge on the east gate. Then get back around to the south side. Give yourself thirty seconds. Andrews.”

“Colonel?”

”Give me your droid reader. Rivers, you take him and half a dozen others and get through that gate when it blows. Make lots of noise; you’re partly a diversion. While they’re busy with you, I’ll take the rest in through the front. Meet in the middle. Everybody got it?”

Koda nods, and with Andrews and the rest of her troops behind her, begins to move upstream—what would be upstream if the water were not frozen blue to the bottom—under the shelter of the bank. Crawling on hands and knees where the overhang is high enough, humping seal-fashion on knees and elbows where it is not, she breaks trail through the snow for them. White snow, white Arctic camo from head to foot, white breath hovering in clouds about them. White faces, even her own, smeared with grease paint where the ski mask does not cover the skin around the eyes.

White is the color of the North, and in the North there is death. A shiver passes over her that has nothing to do with the temperature. As she looks up, the shadow of an owl passes overhead, great wings spread on the silent air. Without thought, Koda brings a hand to her medicine pouch where it hangs about her neck. Lelah sica. The white owl, Hinhan ska, is an unpropitious sign. Ina Maka, she breathes silently, Mother of us all. Do not let me lead my people into death.

Behind her she hears a muffled curse as someone catches his foot in a root of one of the centuries-old sycamores that line the stream. Someone else sets too much weight on a branch invisible beneath the snow, and she turns to see Larke pitch forward abruptly as it snaps, only to be caught by his belt by the man behind him. No harm done. Koda slows as the creek leads them in a wide curve around to the east of the compound, the light growing dimmer here where night already spreads across the horizon. Peering above the stream bank, she can just see the outline of the wide metal gates that control vehicular traffic in and out of the prison. For several meters in front of it, shallower snow lies in a wide, straight band that must mark the driveway.

Andrews nods as she points to it, and gives a thumbs up. “Gotcha.”

“Straight in when—“ Koda breaks off as the com unit at her waist vibrates and buzzes softly. She thumbs it on. “Rivers.”

“Allen. It’s time.” The unit clicks off abruptly.

“. . . the time comes,” Koda continues. “Johnson! Now!”

The woman flings herself up over the stream bank in a gymnast’s clean vault and is on her feet and streaking for the gate before Koda finishes the order. She covers the hundred yards in seconds, plants the charge and sprints for the corner. Thirty interminable seconds later, the plasique goes off with a whump and the clang of metal against metal as the lock blows away from the heavy steel panels.

“Let’s go!”

Koda swings up out of the gully and is running full out even as the echoes of the explosion reverberate against the high walls of the compound. Andrews is beside her, the rest in a tight knot behind. They crash into the gate and keep going. The panels swing back to reveal an empty yard perhaps fifty meters square, the snow stained with grey sludge along the mathematically straight path the sentry droid has followed as it makes its circuit of the wall. A number of trucks are pulled up beneath a carport to one side of the central building, all white except for the CCNW logo of Justice’s scales enclosed within a wreath of laurel leaves. The building itself is white and featureless, its blankness relieved only by the steel-blind windows, its single story sprawling off from its original axis in half a dozen ill-proportioned wings.

The loading bay is at the end of the carport, close but difficult because of its double-door airlock construction. Koda opts for the kitchen entrance instead, cutting across the open space from gate to carport, then hugging the cell-block wall as she leads her unit through the deepening shadows around one wing and across a second yard to another.

”What the fuck?” Andrews mutters. “Where the hell are they?”

“There,” says Koda as they turn the corner of the second wing.

Six droids stand in a perfectly straight line across the service entrance to the prison. All are armed with Uzis and M-16’s.

Bracing her rifle at waist level, Koda stitches a row of holes neatly as her mother’s sewing machine across the middle of one of the droids. It drops its weapon, and Koda raises her own her shoulder to fire straight into its optics, large and luminous in the half-light. Her squad fires beside her in a storm of gunfire. She hears a scream from somewhere to the right but cannot take her attention off her targets long enough to see who is hit. “Grenades!” she yells, plucking one from her belt, pitching forward and rolling in the snow, coming back up with a perfect overhand lob into the middle of the four droids still standing. It explodes like lightning struck too near, but the smell is of gunpowder and hot metal, not the clean ozone of the walking thunder. Two more grenades arc down upon the droids, then two more again, and the step before the kitchen door stands clear except for shrapnel and shards of Lexan, fragments of printed circuits and twisted copper wire scattered over the snow.