Disappointment washes through her, leaving the taste of acid in her mouth. The damned things might as well be invisible. Maybe they are invisible. Maybe her brain has shorted out under the stress of the last several weeks.
Maybe Hart was right. She is not command material, never was.
Maybe she’s not even a goddamned decent pilot.
Banking one more time over the snaking canyons of the badlands, she follows the twisted paths of dry rivers among the bare rock where the relics of eons past lie open to the sun that stands now halfway down from noon, raking the landscape with harsh sidelight. The rocks stand forth like nightmares out of legend; giants turned to stone, Lot’s wife, looking back toward her burning city, transformed to a pillar of salt. Now blindingly bright, now running in shadow, streams that feed into the White River wind through them, the sun striking upward from their surfaces in sheets of light.
And there, in a bend of a narrow stream, the glare off their metal bodies blending with the reflection of the water, they are.
Thousands of them. Motionless, they stand in ranks as stiff as the terra cotta soldiers of Tchin-tsche Huang-ti, as unaware of the heat that beats off the dry rock as the rock itself. As she passes, a shiver of movement runs through them; their sensors are not shut down. But by the time they can react, she is far away again to the west, entering the bomb-release sequence into her console as she loops back. She passes again, high above them this time, laying down the long stick of 500-pounders that will reduce them to shards of molten metal. Her vid shows her the perfect string of explosions that follows in her wake, clouds of smoke and dust rising up out of the canyon, here an overhang toppling onto the wreckage of the droids beneath, there a tower of basalt crashing down.
Hoka hey. It is a good day to kill.
Maggie allows herself a grim smile as she makes a second, then a third, turn to check for enemy till standing. She finds none; nothing on the visual but tumbled stone and scrap metal. Satisfied, she allows relief to break over her and gives her wings a waggle, partly just in case Manny or someone on the ground can see her, partly out of sheer satisfaction. She can feel the knots loosen in her neck and in the muscles along her spine, unraveling like strands of rope.
Mission accomplished. She takes her heading and turns for home.
As the land slips by beneath her, badlands and prairie, she allows her mind to turn to what awaits her on her return. Obviously the droids and their human allies—or perhaps masters? At this point she is not sure what Hart was, dupe or agent, hostage or mole—had meant to pound them senseless with artillery, tear up the runways to ground their air defense, and move in at leisure. Not necessarily in numbers, though. She will need to make the circuit of the Base, spending her remaining missiles on the gun emplacements. They won’t destroy the howitzers or heavy mortars, but they should reduce their crews quite nicely to smithereens. Two keystrokes shift their mode from air-to-air to air-to-ground; the big guns generate enough heat to home them in. Always assuming Manny hasn’t already bombed them right into their next lives.
Q: Where does a bad droid go when it dies?
A: Helliburton.
The joke is as old as Westerhaus’ first military models, a dart aimed at his rival Army contractor. Ancient history now.
Maggie passes over Rapid City, looping around to the north to scan the valleys around Ellsworth. She sees only the river, running gold in the westering sun, the woods, the mass of the Black Hills thrusting up toward the sky. She feels an odd sense of homecoming, partly the welcome she always associates with the completion of a successful mission, partly something she cannot quite name, something that emanates from the sacred ground beneath her. All clear.
At the far eastern arc of her circle, she passes over the highway where the wreckage of the battle lies strewn for miles. Her monitor shows her only the tortured metal remains of tanks blown open and burned out from inside, the tumbled length of the first defensive wall. Nothing moves except the wind in the trees. She can go home.
As she banks, the sun glances off something miles up the road to the east. Something bright, something metal.
Something moving.
Maggie pulls back on the stick and streaks for the clouds again, kicking in the afterburners for speed. Once she levels off, she scans the stretch of tarmac that stretches out beneath her.
More droids. Not thousands, perhaps no more than several hundred, marching in a tight column toward Ellsworth. Reserves? Latecomers? She has no way of knowing. Neither has she the firepower to take them out. Manny might, but Manny obviously has not seen them. With luck, they have not seen him, either. She will not break radio silence.
She has only one weapon left. She checks her fuel guage. The Tomcat carries close to 20,000 pounds of jet fuel; close to half that remains in her tanks. Enough for the job.
Her premonition returns to her. With the runways and hangars pounded by enemy guns, this is her last flight. She will make it count.
Carefully she calculates the distance and trajectory to the enemy column and enters the coordinates into the autopilot. Loosing the last of her missiles, she aims the Tomcat’s nose toward the earth with one hand and jerks on the ejection lever with the other.
Nothing happens. The ground rises up at her, the column of droids growing clear in her sight. She pulls the lever again, and again.
On the third try, the bubble pops and she flies free of the plane as it gathers speed in its descent. But the delay has cost her, and her head strikes the canopy, hard, as her seat becomes a projectile. She sees the flash of silver as her Tomcat streaks toward earth, the blue sky above her.
And then the dark comes down.
The night is blue around her, the deep blue of the deepest sea. Overhead the stars dance in stately patterns, throwing off streamers of flame as they spin and whirl, jewels burning cold in shades of amethyst and emerald and sapphire, blazing ruby and topaz with hearts of fire. A breeze slips cool over her face, soothing against her skin. It stirs the pine needles that ring the clear space where she lies, soughing softly.
There are voices in the wind. If she tried, she could make them out. But she is tired, so tired. She lies under a billow of white silk. Perhaps she is dead, and it is her funeral pall.
If she is, she decides, death is not so bad after all. She knows that one leg lies twisted under her and is undoubtedly broken; from the way the blood pounds in her head, that may be broken, too. She can feel the grass through a cool wetness above one ear; more strangeness. Something has apparently happened to her helmet. Perhaps whoever has laid her out has removed it. Odd, though, that she seems to be lying on earth. No coffin, no burial platform, no piled wood. Just the silken pall.
With effort, but with no pain, she turns her head. Just beyond her reach, a large cat sits watching her, fur silver-gilt in the strange not-moonlight that shimmers in the air, eyes deep amber rimmed in shadow. The paler fur on her belly lies in darker swirls, made, Maggie knows, by her nursing young. Elegant in its length, her tail curls about her feet.
You wander, sister, the cat says in the silence, Igmu Sapa Winan.
Where? Maggie answers without sound. And why?
You stand with one foot on the Blue Road. If you wish, you may cross over.
If I wish?
Or not. Do you want me to summon help from your own kind?
Her own kind. She thinks about that for a moment. She knows of only three of her own kind, maybe four, who might hear a call like that. None of whom can be spared from duty.
It would be easy to slip away. A picture forms in her mind, unbidden, of sky-tall trees ringing a lake whose deep purple waters lap at shores dotted with gentians and spurred columbine. As she watches, a winter buck limps up to the shore, blood oozing from a wound in his shoulder, laid open to the bone. Maggie winces for what must be the pain of it, but as he bends to drink, the blood stills. Flesh folds back on itself, skin and fur spreading to cover it, and he stands there whole, sunlight streaming down through the trees about him. A woman stands beside him, her leather dress died green, yellow shells and beadwork running in rows down its length like kernels on an ear of corn. Her black hair spills down her back almost to her knees; silver shines at her ears and wrists.