Kirsten nod, wondering at the simple, unaffected kindness of this stranger. In her world, offers are made with the expectation of gain. Nothing is for free, and each act of faux-kindness is greed dressed in sheep’s clothing. “Thank you. I…thank you.”
A casual grin leaves Kirsten feeling dazzled. A moment later, Dakota is gone.
Left alone, Kirsten blinks twice to clear her head, and, with a deep sigh, turns and enters the small office. Setting her laptop on the desk, she sinks into a chair that is a little rickety, but serviceable. She rubs her head as her ears continue to ring from the bombs dropped earlier. It is an unfortunate side-effect of her implants, and one she wishes she knew how to correct. For now, she does the only thing she knows will help. Reaching up with both hands, she touches a spot behind her ears, and the world falls away to wondrous silence.
She then boots up her laptop, inserts the chips, and is soon lost in the world of streaming data.
6
“Yo, cuz, i know you’re hungry, but man…eating for two?”
Koda shoots Manny a look over her shoulder and continues to scoop unidentifiable, but presumably edible, substances onto two plates. “I’m getting our guest settled.”
“Ah, the good doctor. Has she warmed up any?”
“Physically.”
Manny laughs softly. “Yeah, she’s a tough nut, that one. And she really hates the press. I remember watching CNN once. Damn, she almost fed a reporter his microphone. Enema style.”
“I’ll be sure to remember that the next time I decide to apply for press credentials,” is Koda’s dry response.
“I’m warnin’ ya, cuz. She may be small, but she’s got brass ones.”
“I’ll…keep that in mind.”
Manny claps his cousin on the back, grinning. “If you’re not doing anything later, drop by rec. We’re getting up a dart game, and I feel the need to pull you in for a ringer. Later, alright?”
“Later.”
7
When Dakota re-enters the house, Asi greets her with a soft bark and a furiously wagging tail. Placing the dinner trays on the kitchen table, Koda gives the dog a fond scratch behind the ears before straightening and calling out to Kirsten.
“Guess she fell asleep after all, huh boy?”
Approaching the closed office door, she gives out another soft call, accompanied by a knock. Neither are answered. Turning the knob, she opens the door and enters the room to see Kirsten, quite unexpectedly, wide awake and enraptured by whatever it is that is on her computer screen.
“Dr. King? I have your dinner.”
Still no answer.
Dakota watches for a moment, then crosses the room and lays a gentle hand on the scientist’s shoulder.
Only to pull back and catch a swinging hand a split second away from clouting her across the face.
“Woah. I’m a friend, remember?”
Stone deaf, Kirsten stares up into impossibly blue eyes, trying to ignore the radiant warmth emanating from the large hand encircling her wrist. Dakota’s lips are moving, but Kirsten can’t quite find the wherewithal to decipher what she’s saying.
It is only after the hand releases its grip on her that she is able to gather herself enough to realize what she’s almost done, and why. Flushing, she touches the spots behind her ears, and sounds once again flood into her consciousness.
“You startled me.” She winces internally, part of her wishing that those words didn’t sound quite as accusatory as they do.
“I apologize for that,” Koda replies smoothly. “I didn’t realize you had implants.”
“Well, it’s not exactly something I needed others to know.”
Accepting the rather terse answer, Dakota nods, then gestures to the door. “Your dinner’s in the kitchen.”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll take it in here. I’m in the middle of some things that I don’t want to leave.”
“No problem. I’ll get it for you and leave you in peace.”
“Thank you.”
8
Several hours later, Kirsten’s body wins the battle it’s having with her mind and, with some resentment, she finally shuts down her laptop. Her work thus far has been far less successful than she’d hoped.
Damn General and his damn bombs. Ten minutes more, an hour at the most, and I would have had those goddamned codes in my hands. Now? I’ll be lucky if I find a goddamned recipe for carrot cake in this goddamned mess.
Heaving a deep sigh, she pushes herself away from the desk and looks through the slats in the blinds covering the office’s only window. Darkness and snow have fallen once again. “Great. Just what the world needs. More snow.”
Stretching, she turns from the window and heads for the door, fully intending to take up Dakota’s earlier offer, if that offer is still on the table. Asi greets her as she steps outside, rubbing his face and body along her own as his tail beats a steady tattoo against the wall.
Kirsten looks over at the bedroom door, surprised to find it closed. “Must be later than I thought.” Listening, she hears quiet murmurs coming from the room in question, then once again damns the acute sensitivity of her implants as those murmurs resolve themselves into something quite a bit more intimate.
The blush starts from the inside, warming her belly before spreading its way up her neck and face until her ears are burning with heat.
“C’mon, Asi,” she grunts, walking over to grab her borrowed coat, “a bit of cold air seems about right right now. Let’s go for a walk.
Asimov happily follows.
9
A burst of warm air greets Kirsten as she pushes open the front door of the Colonel’s house. The luxury of it almost unsettles her, familiar as she has become with the cold and the near offhand acceptance of her own death. She is not yet quite resigned to life, still less to comfort. Like the restoration of her hearing years ago, this seems more an intrusion than a healing. Something she has never asked for. A prosthesis that does not fit, rubbing insidiously against her accustomed rawness. She feels as she believes some death row inmates must when, at the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour, the phone call from the governor arrives, granting them a temporary reprieve. When you’ve accepted your death, sometimes life doesn’t look all that special.
Asi has no such qualms. He shoulders past her, still shedding snow onto the entryway rug, and makes a dash for the warm tiles of the hearth. At least, she thinks sourly, that is where he comes to a sprawling stop. Perhaps it is only coincidence that the Lakota she-giant with the improbable blue eyes—fullblood, my ass!—sits on the couch with her outsize boots propped on the hassock, strategically placed to deliver a down and dirty belly rub. As if he is reading her mind, Asi rolls over onto his back with a whine and cocks his head up at the woman, tongue lolling. Rivers laughs, lowers one foot, and commences scratching. Asi’s tail thumps.
Sitting beside her is another woman, dressed in flight fatigues and boots, her long, elegant legs crossed before her as she laughs, a low and throaty sound. It seems to Kirsten that the distance between the two women is both entirely decorous and non-existent, as if they have slipped into some Riemannian fold of space-time. Kirsten’s own sense of exclusion is almost palpable, an ache she has known and largely ignored since childhood.
Outside looking in. Again.
Deliberately, Kirsten stamps her feet to dislodge the last clinging snow from her boots, rattling the clasps of her jacket as she hangs it on the old-fashioned hall tree. Nice and noisy. Sister King’s Traveling Resentment and Incoherent Outrage Band, tuning up the drum kit for the concert of the century.
Damn them for snatching her out of the droid factory just as she had come within seconds of having the codes she needed to shut the goddam things down.
BANG!
Damn them for bombing the droid factory in the first place and sending its codes and programs into a cyber-oblivion of melted fiber optics and fused circuit boards.