“Larke’s hit, Ma’am.”

Andrews, his own sleeve streaked crimson, kneels beside the Corporal where he lies in the in the open yard, a wide scarlet stain seeping through the snow beneath him like the bloom of some exotic flower. The layers of his battle dress are soaked with it. Larke is conscious, but his lips are ashen with pain as much as cold. His wry smile, isolated by the bone-white of his ski mask, seems to Koda the macabre grinning of a skull. “Just a flesh wound, Ma’am.”

Unbidden, her hand goes again to the medicine pouch about her neck, but she says crisply, “Reese. Martinez. Get him up the steps and into the building. As they move to comply, assisted rather too eagerly by the Lieutenant, she adds, “Andrews.”

“It’s only a graze, Ma’am. Just took off a bit of skin.” He pulls down the frayed edge of the tear in his jacket to expose a long, narrow scrape. “Really.”

“You’ll live,” Koda concedes, stepping over the jagged fragments of metal and plastic that are all that remain of their enemies. The entrance, as expected, leads into a large institutional kitchen. Pots and pans hover just above their heads, suspended from the ceiling by stainless steel hooks. Choppers and graters occupy the countertops, together with piles of bowls and spoons. On the stove a huge tub of rice boils energetically, foam overflowing its sides to sizzle on the burner beneath. Its smell recalls her grandmother’s washdays, the stiffly starched blouses and shirts into which she and her brothers had been buttoned every school day of every year until their high school graduations. “Because you must always look better and do better.” Prison uniforms, she and Phoenix had called them.

Reese and Martinez set Larke down on a large central worktable, with his pack under the calf of his injured leg and a stack of clean dishtowels to hand. Quickly but gently, Koda cuts the fabric away from the wound, which lies about a hand’s breadth down from the groin. She folds a pair of towels into a compress and slips it under the exit wound. From the open door she can hear the muffled rattle of gunfire and men shouting. “Andrews,” she says, “Take everyone but Martinez and start moving up the central hall. I’ll be right behind you.”

To Larke she says, “You know what ‘flesh wound’ really means? Severed tendons. Ripped muscle. Shredded veins. Still, you got off fairly light.” She slaps another compress into place on the entry wound and bears down hard on the torn flesh.

Larke gasps, turning even paler. “Oh Lord, Ma’am. You wouldn’t take advantage of a guy when he’s down, would you?”

The attempt at a joke is the best sign from the wounded man yet. “Nope,” says Koda, maintaining pressure with one hand and swinging her rifle back down to the ready with the other. “Martinez is going to do that.” As Martinez’ hand replaces hers, she says, “Press down as hard as you can. Change towels when they get soaked. We’ll be back for you.”

“Got it, Ma’am.”

Koda sprints down the branching hallway, following the increasingly sharp reports of automatic weapons, their own arms and the droids’. As she runs, she can hear the beginning of resistance from the cells she passes, prisoners shouting encouragement to their jailers’ unseen enemies, the sparse metal furniture of the prison banging against walls and doors. Somewhere up ahead the shouting becomes a chant, reverberating rhythmically in the narrow passageways, taking strength from the beat of steel on steel within the cells.

Kill the droids! Kill the droids! Kill the droids!

As she turns a sharp corner, Koda almost slams into Andrews, skews off to the right and slides in beside him and the rest of the unit where they hunker behind a improvised barricade of overturned desks. The space before them is an open intersection where three hallways meet. Two droids, their heads blown to fragments, lie frozen in a bizarre mechanical rigor mortis, joints still bent at elbow and knee. Another form sprawls between them, an enormous charred red hole where its right ribs should be and no arm or shoulder at all. The blood beneath it has already begun to congeal with the cold.

“Johnson?”

“Yeah. She went down just as we got here. The droids are over there—“ Andrews points toward a corridor to the right. “—and they’ve got a fifty-caliber. The Colonel and the rest are around the corner to our left. They’ve got a couple injured, but she doesn’t want to call in the gunships yet. We’d lose too many civilians if we did.”

“Damn. We need to get behind them.”

“There’s another entrance over on the other side; we might be able to get through there.”

Koda shakes her head. “That would take too long. There’s a quicker way.”

“Yeah?”

Koda points upward, toward the acoustic ceiling tiles. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

Andrews’ bright blue eyes take on a sparkle in the midst of his featureless ski mask. “No, Ma’am! Lead the way.”

Koda drags a chair over to a spot beneath a light fixture, climbs up onto it and begins tossing down the large tiles. Wiring runs thickly tangled under the first two; the darkness behind the third glints with the lights’ reflection off the aluminum sheathing of the HVAC ducts. The fourth gives access to the crawl space. “Paydirt,” she observes, turns on her flashlight and pulls herself up and into ceiling and its snarl of pipes and wires.

The going is incredibly slow. The prison is carefully built, and the wire ends she can see are all properly capped. One exception, though, will fry them and the mission with them. Koda squirms forward on her elbows, avoiding as much of the brightly colored strands as she can, lifting her weight gingerly over pipes they cannot afford to break. Behind her she half senses, half hears, her soldiers, some of them slithering along with the ease of rattlesnakes, others with about as much finesse as a bear raiding a dumpster.

“Shhhhh, dammit.”

Reese, two behind her, tries to quiet the others. With the droid’s sensors, though, they cannot be quiet enough. Andrews knows it, too. “We need more cover, Ma’am.”

“Right,” she says. By dead reckoning, they should be over a cell facing the corridor they have just left, some distance behind their abandoned redoubt. “There should be somebody—“ she pulls off her mask and pries a tile loose“—right about—here.”

In the dim light of the cell, two startled women stare up at her. One holds the room’s only stool, battered half to splinters where she has been pounding it against the door. The other has a metal bowl in each hand, their unpalatable contents spilled dirty white along the floor. Cymbals.

“We need more noise, please,” Koda says simply. “Cover us.”

The younger woman of the two, perhaps eighteen, loses her frozen expression and bares more teeth than Koda has seen outside an alligator’s mouth. “You got it!”

Koda nods her thanks, and as they push themselves again along the narrow crawlway, the redoubled clamor becomes a vibration in the walls of the prison itself, a low, deep drumming of voices and metal shifting into a simpler, more primal rhythm. Cold creeps along Koda’s spine as the chant pounds through her blood, an echo of war drums pounding down the centuries.

Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!

She hears her men behind her take it up in breathy whispers, keeping with the women’s voices as the mantra spreads, intersecting at first with the earlier chant and running counterpoint to it, then overwhelming the more complicated rhythm with its purer line.

Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!

They have traveled perhaps fifteen meters in little more than half an hour. It feels like an eternity, though. Koda does not panic in elevators, but nor does she have any love of spaces that fit her like underwear. Motioning Andrews and the others to wait, she creeps forward alone for another few meters, pausing every couple of feet to listen with an ear pressed hard against the ceiling struts. Once she lifts a tile a centimeter or so and sees only a darkened cell with a dim form doubled up almost into fetal position; once she freezes like a rabbit who sees an eagle soar above its meadow, straining to pick up the oddly musical electronic tones or voder-generated voices by which the droids communicate with each other. In the end it is the shockingly loud burst of fire from the large-calibre machine gun almost directly beneath her that charts her location for her, and she waves her troops forward.

They drop from the ceiling directly behind the droids, howling. The sound that rips from Koda’s throat is none that she has never made before in her flesh, a full-throated baying that speaks of the spoor tracked to its source, of blood and death. Andrews, plummeting down beside her, screams like a panther as he raises his M-16 and presses the trigger down onto full automatic, spraying destruction across the brilliant metal surfaces of the droids, the dull green walls, the the light fixtures that shatter and fall in minute glass shards like snow. “The gun!” Koda bellows as she braces her own rifle against her hip, raining armor-piercing rounds upon the nightmare things before her. “Get the machine gun, dammit!”

But one of the droids, quicker than the rest, is already turning the heavy weapon to face them. Spinning on her heel, Koda turns her fire on the M-50 and its operator. Andrews takes down the droid sliding into position to reinforce the gunner, the fall of its metal body indistinguishable from the cacophony of battle. Reese, though, darts from behind and charges the machine gun head-on, falling over the barrel and toppling it just as its fire rips through him, spattering blood and gouts of flesh over the walls, the ceiling, his comrades behind him. Andrew screams again and empties his magazine into the droid gunner. Hardly audible through the gunfire and the incessant chanting of the prisoners, Koda hears the clatter of booted feet stampeding across the concrete floor. Allen’s troops, the Colonel herself in the lead and snarling like the bobcat emblazoned on her sleeve, come swarming over the barricade, pinning the droids between the two forces.