“You look tired,” Kirsten observes. “Bad day with the interviews?”

Maggie grimaces and shakes her head slightly. “Filthy.”

“Them or the day?”

”Both.”

Koda’s eyes meet hers, concern and affection in their blue depths. “You look like something Asi wouldn’t bother to drag in.” She gestures toward a pair of benches set under the still-naked branches of a sycamore tree. “Soup won’t be on for a while yet. Let’s sit.”

Maggie nods and follows the other two toward the knoll that looks down over the woods. The sun has begun to fall toward the horizon, almost even with the treetops, and birds that gleam blue-black in the light that lies like gold wash across the snow make their way ponderously, two and two, into the trees where they will roost for the night. All of the pairs fly sedately together save one. Where the others glide almost wingtip to wingtip, one raven dives from height upon his companion, swoops under to come out in a barrel roll, pinwheeling his wings about the axis of his body, his long flight feathers throwing off flashes of blue and green and silver where the sun strikes them. His low-pitched prrrukkk resonates in the air.

Kirsten stands transfixed, her eyes wide and impossibly green. Asimov seems to have taken on her mood, sitting quietly beside her. A first. Kirsten asks, “Those are ravens, aren’t they?”

“Common Ravens, to be exact. We— we Lakota—call them ‘wolf birds,’” Koda answers. “They’ll follow a pack on the hunt or sometimes even lead them to prey.”

“And they get a share?”

“After the wolves have done. It’s not true symbiosis, but close.”

Caught up in the small drama, Maggie watches as the stunt-flying bird wheels upward again and plunges again toward the other. It seems extraordinarily graceful for birds that big, that heavy. She says, not quite asking, “That’s not a fight.”

“That’s a proposal, “ Koda responds, smiling slightly. “That’s got to be a couple of young birds pairing off, since it’s still way too early for breeding. They won’t nest until next summer.”

Kirsten shades her eyes, following the aerobatics. “Long term pair bond?”

Koda nods. “For life.”

Kirsten stares at the birds, the one serene in her flight, the other tumbling about her in exuberant loops and rolls, untiring. Finally they disappear into the trees, and she turns, her eyes going from Koda to Maggie to somewhere deep inside herself that Maggie cannot see. “How do we get it so wrong?”

Koda is silent, staring out over the woods toward the setting sun. The light plays across her face, bronze and still as a statue’s, and Maggie feels her bearings slipping yet again. Time has ground to a halt, it seems, or spun backward, and drawing the woman standing before her into its looping maze, into past or future or otherwhen. So it is Maggie who says, “Get what wrong, Kirsten?”

Kirsten makes a small encompassing gesture with one hand. “Everything. How did we screw up the whole goddam world? What’s going to happen to us?”

Maggie bites down on the response that leaps to her tongue on the first question: all too easily. There is no answer to the second one. “I don’t know,” she says. “We don’t know how many are left even in North America, much less the rest of the world. We just have to do the best we can and work to make it enough.”

A small smile, half ironic, tugs at Kirsten’s mouth. “My dad was a Marine. You sound like him.”

Wonderful. The thought weaves through the back of Maggie’s mind. My about to be ex-girlfriend is about to become her future girlfriend, and I’m a father figure. Aloud she says, “Career military tend to think pretty much in the same channels. It’s the training.”

“Semper fi, huh, even in the wild blue yonder?”

“You got it.”

“Someone’s coming..”

Maggie starts. Koda has snapped out of whatever reverie has held her and is staring at a Jeep streaking down the street straight for them. Andrews pulls up with a squeal of brakes and the smell of burned rubber laid down on the asphalt. He salutes, still sitting behind the wheel. “Ma’am!”

Maggie tosses her briefcase into the vehicle and starts to climb in, lifting her sore leg gingerly over the low side by the front passenger seat.. “What’s the problem, Lieutenant?”

“Ma’am, the MP Captain asked me to find you. “There’s a situation at the main gate.”

Without being bidden, Koda and Kirsten pile into the back, Asimov between them. “All right,” Maggie mutters resignedly, regretting the hot bath and the hot supper that have now receded as far into the dim future as civilization itself. “Whatever it is, let’s go tend to it. Semper the hell fi.”

The Jeep bumps along the near-empty street at a speed that rattles Koda’s bones together like bare branches in a norther; the winter weather has not been kind to the tarmac, and repairing potholes has not been high on the Base’s agenda. Andrews seems to be making no particular effort to avoid them, possibly on the theory that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. The likelihood of a broken axle does not seem to enter the equation. The snarl of the engine and the sharp whip of the evening air make conversation impossible. Koda hangs onto the rollbar with one hand and Asi with the other; on his other side, Kirsten does the same, face set and pale in the chill blue light that follows sunset. Asi, in contrast, leans into the wind created by their speed, eyes bright, tongue lolling, having the time of his life. George Patton Asimov, Dog of War.

He may get a second chance to prove himself. As rancher, Koda knows that only two types of problems develop at gates, whether they involve humans or cows. One: someone wants in who should not be let in. Two: someone wants out who should not be let out. Given the disorderly scenes of civilians attempting to take up residence on the Base and defying MP’s that she has already witnessed, she is fairly certain that the crisis is of the first type.

The sound comes to them through the gathering darkness, well before they come into sight of the gate, a muffled roar like a tornado grinding across the plains. A steady rhythm runs under it, a bass beat answering point counterpoint to intermittent screams. As near as she can tell, they seem to be cries of anger rather than pain. If they are lucky, they may still have a bit of time before matters get entirely out of hand. It won’t be much, though. In the seat in front of her, Maggie pokes Andrews’ arm and mimes a heavier foot on the accelerator. Andrews nods and floors it. Without a word, Koda and Kirsten link arms behind Asi to hold him in place; oblivious to his own safety, he throws back his head and howls like a wolf following blood spoor, closing in on his prey.

“He’s enjoying this, the idiot!” Kirsten yells, the shout barely audible above the racket of the Jeep and the ever-closer thunder of what is clearly a mob.

Koda grins in answer, holding tighter to both the dog and the Jeep. But the sound that she has dreaded cracks out in the middle of one of Asi’s canine arpeggios, and she lets go of the bar and shifts her weight to draw the automatic pistol she has carried ever since the battle. In front of her, Maggie already has her own sidearm in her hand, held low and ready. Kirsten’s is in her lap. “Rifle,” Koda shouts into the wind, and Kirsten nods agreement even though Koda doubts she has heard. The sound is unmistakable. The lack of return fire to that single shot is no comfort.

Andrews rounds the corner where the commissary stands and streaks full throttle down the straightaway toward the Base’s main gate. They are no longer alone. Sirens wailing, so close on their bumper that the lead truck almost backedends them, a pair of MP troop carriers swing in behind them from the opposite intersection, and a small ripple of uncoiling muscles runs down Koda’s back. The situation is still not good, but it is no longer as bad as it was a second or two ago.

At the distance of three or four hundred meters and closing, it becomes clear that a full-scale riot is in the offing. One panel of the Base’s double steel gates blocks the right lane of the road, rolled shut across a clot of a dozen cars and trucks angled in as many different directions. A second logjam of vehicles clogs the left lane. A pair of heavy-duty pickups, the long-bedded, double-cab sort that can carry a dozen armed adults apiece, stand aimed at them just beyond the guardhouse, their front tires punctured on the teeth of steel bars that have risen up out of the asphalt like a pair of shark’s dentures. Over and around and among and on top of the cars and trucks, perhaps forty people stand shouting at the two MP’s on watch. The guards hold their weapons at waist level, ready to fire though not aimed at the crowd.

Add nitroglycerin and stir lightly until moistened: the situation is a breath away from disaster. Maybe less.

Maggie is out of the Jeep before it comes completely to a halt, fishtailing to a stop just behind the guardhouse. Koda and Kirsten pile out on her heels, Asimov and Andrews pace for pace behind them. The carrier trucks swing into nearly right-angle turns, one to barricade each traffic lane; MP’s come spilling out their rear flaps, armed with riot helmets, shields and clubs, to stand shoulder to shoulder across the tarmac. At the sight of them, the crowd surges forward, its roar clawing its way up the scale until it becomes a sustained howl. Without warning, the searchlights mounted on the cabs of the MP trucks flare to life, sweeping the crowd with beams bright enough to dazzle the eyes of anyone who looks directly into them. A ripple passes through the crowd as arms and hands attempt to block the glare; here and there, a figure turns away entirely and begins to move toward the back of the mob. More ominously, the light picks out the metal fittings of half a dozen deer rifles, here and there the skeletal form of an M-16 or an AK-47.