With a small whine, and a louder groan, Asi heaves himself up off the floor and trots, tail wagging wildly, over to the door of the bedroom. A moment later, the door opens and Koda and Maggie, dressed identically in pristine white jumpsuits, step into the living-room, their shoulders brushing casually together. For reasons she can’t fathom, the sight tugs at Kirsten in a most unpleasant way, and she finds she can breathe more easily only when the Colonel has absented herself from the tableau, moving on into the kitchen while the Lakota woman stays behind to scratch a positively ecstatic Azimov behind the ears.
Kirsten takes in the scene as the noises her dog is emitting sound like something heard on a rent-by-the-hour motel’s coin operated television set, and she can’t help but watch wonderingly as graceful, long fingers magically hit every single perfect spot on her normally standoffish canine companion.
As if sensing the rapt attention, Koda looks up from her pleasurable task, and their eyes meet and lock. Kirsten feels the fiery heat of the blush that crawls upward across her skin; embarrassed at being caught staring, embarrassed at the noises her dog is making, embarrassed, most of all, by her attitude of the night before.
It suddenly seems okay, somehow, despite the embarrassment and, if she goes deep enough within to admit it, her remorse. Things seem…possible. As if the chasm between them could be healed as simply as an “I’m sorry” or a “good morning”.
Part of her knows this is true, knows it would take no more than that, and her mouth opens, more ready to say those simple words than she’s ever been ready for anything in her life.
Maggie returns, two cups of steaming coffee in her hands, and the moment is broken like a child’s brightly colored party balloon that drifts too close to the fireplace.
Kirsten turns resentful eyes to the intruder and is met with a friendly smile and a salute from a coffee mug. “Thanks for brewing this.”
“No problem,” Kirsten manages before levering herself up off the couch and giving them the most civil nod she can. “If you don’t mind, now that you’re both up, I’ll shower and get ready for my day.”
“Not at all,” Maggie replies, completely unfazed by Kirsten’s grumpiness. “We won’t be here when you get out. We’re taking down a prison up north.” Her smile turns conspiratorial. “If we’re lucky, we’ll bring back a working droid for you.”
“That’s a very dangerous thing to do.”
Maggie actually laughs at this, though what she could possibly find funny in the situation is something Kristen can’t begin to fathom. “Of course it is. That’s why I’m a soldier.” With a wink and another coffee-cup salute, the young Air Force colonel turns away, leaving Kirsten flat-footed and speechless in the middle of the living room.
Asimov simply whines, tosses himself on the floor, and covers his snout with his massive paws.
2
The compound huddles low against the snow, its walls seeming to rise out of the drifts piled against them in a seamless extension of the frozen earth. The central building appears to be both Administration and cell block, its colorless concrete block façade broken only by ranks of steel louvers over the high, narrow windows. None of them is open to the fading light. Even those closest to the heavy metal door, which must have been offices or reception rooms for the Corrections Corporation of the Northwest personnel, are shuttered tightly. Coil upon coil of concertina wire tops the eight-foot walls which surround exercise yard and parking lots. Here and there the low sun strikes off its razor edges; the barbs take the light in bursts of flame. The frigid air lies over the jail and its snowy matrix like glass, trapping the evening for all time in its clarity: the rising dark in the east, bands of gold and crimson fading in the west; the land and the double handful of humans crouched in a streambed long since gone to ice to the south.
“How many?” Allen’s voice is no more than a raspy whisper. The heat of their bodies will give them away well before they become audible to sensors at the jail, but habit dies hard.
“Metalheads?” Andrews consults his readouts again. “Colonel, I’m getting only a dozen for sure. There are a couple blips that might be double—say fifteen, max.”
Koda frowns. “That’s not many for a jail this size. There were more than that at Mandan—twice that. Will that thing pick them up if they’re deactivated or on standby?”
“It should, Ma’am.” Andrews points to the LED display, which is broken down into a series of arcane number strings. “It reads off their metal mass, specifically the titanium. It doesn’t pick up their transmissions.”
Allen gives a wry grin. “Yeah. The first models kept picking up filing cabinets and calling them military droids. Goddam near got a couple Marine units fried the first time we used them in Baghdad. The troops steered clear of the “droids” and ran smack into the Republican Guard instead.”
“Okay,” says Koda. With a frozen sycamore twig, she rapidly sketches out the plan of the jail, courtesy of an overflight by one of the gunships that await their signal a couple miles off. “Show us where they are.”
Glancing back and forth between his readout and the diagram, Andrews positions their enemies. Ten in the building, apparently stationed at doors and along corridors; two in what may be the kitchen. The others seem to be a moving patrol, working the perimeter in mathematically precise rounds at equally precise intervals. “With a bit of luck,” he says, “these will be less sophisticated models than we encountered at Minot, with fewer built-in logic branches and more stereotyped responses. No boidroids, no ‘creative’ types with psuedo-HumIntel capacities.”
Allen nods. “Johnson.”
“Ma’am!”
“You’re smallest; there’s a chance you’ll read as a large dog or a deer on their heat sensors. When I give the word, and the patrols are here and here”—Allen jabs the diagram with her white-gloved finger—“you scramble out there and set the charge on the east gate. Then get back around to the south side. Give yourself thirty seconds. Andrews.”
“Colonel?”
”Give me your droid reader. Rivers, you take him and half a dozen others and get through that gate when it blows. Make lots of noise; you’re partly a diversion. While they’re busy with you, I’ll take the rest in through the front. Meet in the middle. Everybody got it?”
Koda nods, and with Andrews and the rest of her troops behind her, begins to move upstream—what would be upstream if the water were not frozen blue to the bottom—under the shelter of the bank. Crawling on hands and knees where the overhang is high enough, humping seal-fashion on knees and elbows where it is not, she breaks trail through the snow for them. White snow, white Arctic camo from head to foot, white breath hovering in clouds about them. White faces, even her own, smeared with grease paint where the ski mask does not cover the skin around the eyes.
White is the color of the North, and in the North there is death. A shiver passes over her that has nothing to do with the temperature. As she looks up, the shadow of an owl passes overhead, great wings spread on the silent air. Without thought, Koda brings a hand to her medicine pouch where it hangs about her neck. Lelah sica. The white owl, Hinhan ska, is an unpropitious sign. Ina Maka, she breathes silently, Mother of us all. Do not let me lead my people into death.
Behind her she hears a muffled curse as someone catches his foot in a root of one of the centuries-old sycamores that line the stream. Someone else sets too much weight on a branch invisible beneath the snow, and she turns to see Larke pitch forward abruptly as it snaps, only to be caught by his belt by the man behind him. No harm done. Koda slows as the creek leads them in a wide curve around to the east of the compound, the light growing dimmer here where night already spreads across the horizon. Peering above the stream bank, she can just see the outline of the wide metal gates that control vehicular traffic in and out of the prison. For several meters in front of it, shallower snow lies in a wide, straight band that must mark the driveway.