With a soft grunt, she tosses the pencil down and pushes away from the desk, running weary fingers through her disordered hair. She checks the window again, then the clock. Something is nagging at her, and has been for the past hour or so, but she can’t put a finger on what it is, and that fact is driving her just shy of nuts.

“What?” she barks in response to a light tap on her office door.

The door slowly opens and a curly-mopped young woman pokes her head in, expression slightly nervous. “You asked me to let you know when I walked Condor, Doctor.” Condor is one of the army dogs who had taken several bullet wounds to the belly and flank. It has been touch and go with him for the past weeks but he appears now well on the road to recovery. “He did fine. I think he can be discharged in a day or two.”

Nodding, Koda forces a smile to her face. “Thank you, Shannon. You’ve done very well with him.”

The young woman blushes under the quiet praise, then calms, her eyes concerned. “Are you…okay?”

“Mm?” Koda drags her gaze away from the window yet again. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked if you were alright. You seem…distracted?”

“Oh.” She shakes her head slightly, clearing it. “No. Just,” one hand waves toward the paper-strewn desktop, “trying to deal with this mess. I never was all that fond of paperwork.”

Shannon brightens. “Well, I might have a solution for that.” At Dakota’s raised eyebrow, she continues. “I have a friend, Melissa, who used to be an Admin Assistant for Kuyger-Barren-Micholvski, the law firm? She’s been going crazy with nothing to do. I’m sure she’d be happy to pitch in, if you like.”

This time, Koda’s smile is more genuine. “I could use all the help I can get.”

“Great! I’ll let her know tonight.”

“Fair enough.” Dakota rises from the chair with fluid grace and grabs her Stetson from the coat rack and settles it on her head, sweeping her hair behind her broad shoulders. “I’m going for a walk. Hold down the fort, will ya?”

“With pleasure, Doc—Dakota.”

*

Maggie sorts through the folders in her briefcase as she waits for the clock on the wall to tick officially around to 11:00. Like the conference room, like everything else in the Headquarters building, the walls and floors are grey with occasional Air Force blue accents. A silk ficus to one side of the General’s door and a faux pothos ivy under the window offer the only relief. At her workstation, the General’s secretary bites her lip and dabs at a drop of sweat rounding up under her heretofore perfect mascara. Kimberley has always seemed to Maggie to be forty-going-on-twenty-five, with her acrylic nails and seamless make-up, short skirts and years-out-of-fashion high heels. Now her heart-shaped face is pinched with effort as she struggles with an old-fashioned manual typewriter, resurrected from God-knows-what basement or storage building. An equally antiquated adding machine perches on the edge of her desk, the kind with a handle that is pulled after each entry to crank up a sum or tax percentage. Maggie recognizes it only because her accountant grandfather kept one of the things on top of the barristers’ bookcase in his office, part of a collection that included such other relics as a slide rule and a solid-black metal telephone with a rotary dial that clicked satisfyingly when she stuck her finger into the perforated disk, pulled it around to the stop and watched it spin back..

That had been nearly forty years ago. A lifetime now; an eon. At five she did not go in for elaborate existential metaphors. She is not pleased that she has begun to see them everywhere now.

The sense of temporal dislocation that has plagued her intermittently for the past week has begun to solidify into a reality she is still not quite prepared to face. Finally and irrevocably, the world has changed. The crisis is not temporary, not just a matter of devising a widget or developing an anti-viral, biological or cyber, that will allow the technological world to right itself onto its accustomed axis and go on spinning. Even if Kirsten King manages to cause every last remaining droid to self-destruct in a single ecstatic nanosecond, there is no way to restore much, maybe most, of what has been lost. And here, an icon of that brave new world folding back into its own past, is a goddamed Olivetti typewriter, its uneven clack of metal keys without doubt the harbinger of more and worse to come.

And aren’t we Ms. Congeniality this morning? C’mon Allen, snap out of it.

Though she has not put it so dramatically to herself, she is here to try to save a man’s life. She can afford neither depression nor woolgathering in the middle of such a sensitive rescue operation.

Because we can’t afford to lose anybody now. Not even an asinine General who bombs first and asks questions later. Not even couple dozen decent citizens of Rapid City who had come within an angstrom of morphing into an out-of- control mob less than eighteen hours ago. Every asset must be deployed and its utility maximized.

Even General Hart.

The clock hand creeps round to 10:56. The typewriter keys continue to clatter in a spotty rhythm, punctuated by small mewing sounds from the secretary every time she makes a mistake. Not for the first time since she has entered the office, Maggie wonders what the hell there is to type in triplicate these days.

She is on a mission of mercy, she tells herself wryly. She might as well have pity on Kimberley, too.

Aloud she says, “You’ll get your computer back. as soon as we have a reliable source of electricity. Sergeant Rivers has gone out to the Red River Co-op wind farm to see if we can move in some of the big generators.”

The secretary turns to look at her, a spark of something besides irritation in her eyes for the first time since Maggie has entered the outer office. “He’s that really tall Sioux guy, isn’t he? Army, not Air Force—the really cute one.”

Maggie breathes a mental sigh. She knows exactly what’s coming next, and it arrives on schedule as surely as Old Faithful or the Italian trains under Musollini.

“. . . really good-looking. Is he single?”

As gently as she can, she answers, “I think so. I don’t recall that he’s mentioned a husband.”

“Oh,” the woman says in a small voice. Then, plaintively, “What are we going to do, Colonel Allen? There’s so few men left. Is it going to be like in the Bible, with one man having three or four wives? Wives and concubines? What’s going to happen now?”

With a supreme effort of will, Maggie manages not to grind her teeth. “I don’t know, Kimberley. But what we’re not going to do is fall back into some Bronze Age form of patriarchy. That will not happen. Will. Not. Happen.”

“It’s happening in town, Colonel. My sister belongs to one of those Bible-believing temples. You know, where the women can’t wear pants or make-up and nobody drinks or dances and church goes on for four hours on Sunday. She said the preacher has already got three wives of his own, one of them only thirteen.” Kimberley snorts, a sound that reassures Maggie that her considerable good sense has not in fact been a casualty of the uprising. “Says it’s the will of God, a holy thing. As if.” She turns back to her typewriter, rearranging the triple load of paper and –Goddess! Maggie stares in wonderment. Is that actually carbon paper? It is.—carbons. “Just a dirty old man if you ask me.”

Miraculously, the clock hand has arrived at 11:01. Maggie clears her throat, pointing.

Kimberley glances up, then makes a show of checking her appointment book. “Go on in, Colonel.”

Maggie gathers her papers, snaps her brief case shut, and escapes.

*

The South Dakota spring is showing her fickle side again, having just finished dumping a fresh four inches of powdery snow that sparkles in the warming sun like scattered diamonds. The breeze is fresh, and crisp, but lacks the arctic bitterness of true winter, and Koda breathes it in with an absent sense of pleasure.

The streets are, for once, quiet, nearly empty. Far from soothing, however, this causes the nagging feeling in Koda’s gut to return. A shadow crosses her path, and she looks up in time to see Wiyo circling low overhead. Her warning cry coincides perfectly with the sound of a single shot, and everything slips into place, clear as crystal. An animal’s snarl mists the air before her face. She turns and heads for the gate at a dead run, teeth bared, lips twisted as a second and third shot ring out followed by barking, mocking male laughter.

There are several airmen peering through the barred gate at what lies beyond. She ignores this, instead darting to the left and up the fifteen foot guard tower, taking the steps three at a time. Brushing past the startled MP, she circles the tower until she is looking over the grounds just outside the gate.

Three flannel-clad men stand outside a still-running pickup truck, each armed with a scoped rifle. They are clearly drunk and one even leans fully against the truck’s fender, his legs no longer able to support him.

“Shoot it again, Frank! It’s still movin!”

She follows their sightline to see a she-wolf, slat thin and panting, peering over the snow ridge to the east. The wolf is clearly injured, but still, she doesn’t flee. There is a quiet desperation to her darting eyes, moving from the men shooting at her to the men behind the gate. Another shot throws up snow just in front of her muzzle, and she ducks, only to pop up a second later, tongue lolling, eyes rolling.

Wiyo screams overhead, and one of the men lifts rifle and head, shooting into the air. The hawk wheels, unharmed, and screams again.

Without thought, Koda grabs the M-16 from the guard’s hands and lifts it to high port, staring down the sight with one piercing eye. Caressing the trigger, she stitches a neat line at the shooter’s feet. He whirls, the barrel of his rifle narrowly missing the man standing beside him. “What the fuck?!?” He narrows his eyes at the woman—at least he thinks it’s a woman, with that hat and that height, who can tell?—standing on the guard tower, pointing the business end of an M-16 at him. “Who the fuck are you, bitch?”