One son-of-a-bitch down, four to go.

*

“Clamp down on that rate a little. I don’t want her fluid overloaded.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

The small operating suite is brightly lit; brilliant white on chrome sterility.

Koda and Shannon are dressed in green scrubs, surgical masks hanging from their necks. The she-wolf is on the operating table, only lightly sedated; her weakness and profound dehydration making anaesthesia too risky a proposition.

With a soft grunt of satisfaction, Dakota applies the final bandage to the wolf’s flank wound, then strips the bloodied gloves from her hands, tossing them into a nearby red-bagged trash bin. Long fingers trail through the coarse, brittle fur, stopping briefly against a bony chest, feeling the reassuring beat of life beneath bone and skin. “I’ve done the best I can, shugmanitu tanka. The rest is up to you now.”

“Is that her name?” Shannon asks as she deftly removes the bag of IV fluid from the pole while Dakota gathers the dazed wolf into her arms.

“Mm? I’m sorry?”

“What you called her. Shug…mani…. Is that her name?”

Koda smiles, slipping backward through the swinging doors and into the recovery area. “Shugmanitu tanka. It means ‘wolf’ in Lakota.”

Shannon blushes, then laughs softly. “Oh.” She tips her head toward a large wire kennel separated from the rest, its bottom nested with soft towels. “That one okay?”

“Perfect.” Squatting down, Koda slides the barely conscious wolf into the warm nest and ruffles quickly through her fur, checking all wounds for seepage. When all seems well, she peers into her eyes, and nods, satisfied before closing the door and standing back up. She turns to look at Shannon, who is hanging the IV bag on a poll next to the kennel. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

“Sure! Name it.”

“I know it’s getting late, but I need you to watch over her for a little while longer for me. She’s got a litter out there somewhere and I need to find them before it gets dark.”

Shannon’s eyes widen in shock. “A litter? So early?”

“Too early,” Koda agrees. “But they’re out there. We would never have seen her if they weren’t.”

“Are you sure you can find them?”

“I’ll find them.” A beat, as she looks at the young woman. “Will you stay?”

“As long as you need me to.”

Koda’s lips twitch in some semblance of a smile. It’s not perfect, but it serves its purpose. “Thanks.”

Pulling her heavy coat on directly over her scrubs, Dakota gathers several warm blankets, a basket, and a handful of ChemHeat packs in her arms and heads back outside, the setting sun gilding her in tones of purest gold.

*

The figures march across the screen in orderly rows, keeping lockstep as the files scroll up and disappear over the top edge. Kirsten thinks of micrographs she has seen of blood cells spilling down through the narrow channel of vein and artery, compact red discs propelled from the conundrum of their origin to the mystery of their destination by the alternating pressure of dystole and systole. She thinks of Disney movies and television science specials, streams of army ants gnawing their way across the forest floor in a pheromone-driven rush from here to there, leaving bare earth in their wake. She thinks of lemmings, diving headlong into the sea.

No meaning in any of it.

There are moments when she is so close to the solution—when she knows she is so close to the solution—that she can almost see the dim shape of it forming on the screen. But something is always missing, something vital, the single segment of code that will turn the string of integers into a signal that, properly transmitted, will stop the droids where they stand. And that, in turn, will free the rest of surviving humanity, both those held in jails and the all rest, held by fear or resolve or instinct for survival to resist their rule.

Kirsten removes her glasses, laying them carefully on the desk, and scrubs at her eyes. She is blind weary, almost literally, with the hours of unbroken attention seated before the computer. Her eyes sting; her back aches; the muscles of thigh and shoulder have twisted themselves into macramé in the four hours she has been staring at the code strings, looking for something that she is beginning to fear is not there. Her mouth tastes of too-strong coffee, reheated once too often. She needs a break.

Deliberately, she snaps the lid of the notebook down and retrieves her glasses. Asimov, who has spent the morning drowsing under the desk, perks up instantly at the small sound, ears up, eyes bright. His tail thumps tentatively against the floor, and he whines softly.

Kirsten reaches down to ruffle his ears. “Yeah, boy. I hear you. Give me a minute, and we’ll go.”

She rises, nearly stumbling with the stiffness of her legs. In the bathroom, she splashes cold water over her face, attempting to force her mind back to alertness. It is pain, though, that does the job, the knotted tendons and cramped ligaments in her neck resisting motion as she leans over the basin, then stands almost on tiptoe to reach the mouthwash on the top shelf of the old-style medicine cabinet. She has lived alone so long that she is seldom aware of her lack of inches, but sharing quarters with one six-footer and another woman almost as tall has brought back all the old annoyance at having to stretch for bottles just beyond the tips of her fingers, the indignity of having to stand on chairs to retrieve items from the top shelves of pantry and closet. She swears softly to herself as the bottle slips away from her grasp toward the back of the cabinet, again when it tips forward to land with a muffled thud in the sink.

Par for the course. Nothing else has gone right today, either, least of all her attempt to reconstruct the necessary cyber commands. Deliberately, Kirsten refuses to allow herself to think what will happen if she does not break the code. Failure is not an option.

Ten minutes later, her eyes scrubbed free of grit and the stale coffee-taste replaced by the astringent bite of the mouthwash, she lets herself and Asimov out the front door. Desperate to get as far away as she can from the virtual environment of her computer, she makes for the stand of woods near where she and Koda had met Maggie the evening of the gate riot. The day stands on the edge of spring, though the sun’s warmth does not yet match its brightness. It lies like pale gold along drifts of new-fallen snow, gilding the dawn side of tall birches and sycamores. Against one bare trunk, a woodpecker hitches its way up the bark, searching for still hibernating insects. High up and far out over the woods, a raven calls, his cries dropping into the soundless air. The streets, which should have been heavily trafficked at mid-day with Base personnel coming home for lunch and pre-school kids playing in the white and winter-brown yards or pedaling their trikes down the sidewalk to the peril of hapless pedestrians, lie deserted and nearly silent. As she follows the curve of the road away from the residential area, she encounters only a single squirrel foraging among the roots of a still-bare oak tree. At the sight of Asi loping toward her, she bottles her tail and scampers up onto an overhanging branch, scolding loudly. Then she, too, falls quiet, darting up into the tree’s crown until the intruders have passed.

Kirsten’s hearing loss has left her adapted to silence. Preferring, it even. For the first time, it occurs to her to wonder how others will deal with a world free of blaring automobile horns and ever present radio and television. A world where human voices are swallowed up not by ambient clatter but by the depths of silence.

A fragment of an antique song drifts through her mind:

Hello, darkness, my old friend.I’ve come to talk to you againAbout a vision softly creepingThat left its seeds while I was sleeping,And the vision that was planted in my brainStill remainsWithin the sounds of silence.

Except, of course, she is a scientist. She does not deal in visions. Just the facts, ma’am.

Just the facts, and preferably the numbers. If it’s quantifiable, it can be trusted. Anything else veers off into the realm of unpredictable emotions and their generally messy effects. Better to keep things orderly.

There is order somewhere in their present situation, even though it is not presently discernable. Someone, somehow, has a reason for turning the droids loose on the remainder of the human race. When that reason is found, motives will become understandable and guilt can be reliably assigned.

She shakes her head to clear her thoughts. She has not come out into the fresh air to keep worrying the problem, turning it over and over, trying to rearrange it like a Rubik Cube until questions and answers all match up. Deliberately forcing her mind away from the droids, she searches the snow cover for a length of fallen branch long and heavy enough to throw well but not too heavy for a round of fetch. Finding one, she brushes the leaf mould off it, and, whistling, pitches out far ahead of her. Asi is off after it in a nanosecond, bounding into the trafficless street and returning at a dead gallop, ears laid back and tail straight out like a rudder, to drop it at her feet and quiver with eagerness to do it again.

When they reach the benches, Kirsten sails the stick off over the incline leading up from the woods, and Asi plunges down it , sliding and slipping in the snow and thewet earth beneath it. Kirsten follows more carefully, having no desire to add bruises on top of her existing sore spots. Neither does she want to have to wash her clothes out by hand. Maggie’s machine runs only on full loads now, and only for things, like sheets and jeans, that cannot reasonably be hand laundered. The bathroom has begun to take on the aspect of a dorm room, socks and underwear in three sizes apiece draped over the shower rails and towel rings.