The man drops his gaze and stares down at his feet. “Well….”
“I’m sorry, did you say something? I couldn’t hear you.”
The man raises his eyes, expression belligerent. “They were gonna.”
“Ohhhh,” Kirsten replies, nodding wisely. “They were going to. And you know this…how? Telepathic, are you? Maybe you could tell us when the droids are going to strike again. We could use a man with your talents.”
The man flushes brick red as some in the crowd catcall and elbow one another. Kirsten’s impenetrable gaze sits heavy upon him, and he finally has no choice but to drop his eyes, sagging visibly like a balloon with a slow leak.
Kirsten scans the rest of the group. “Anyone else have anything insightful to add?”
Feet shuffle. Heads hang. Crickets chirp.
“Alright, then. I’d suggest all of you go back to your homes and stop acting like idiots. Or better yet, go on over to the parade grounds and watch as a hundred soldiers, just like the ones you’re attacking here, get put into the ground for giving their lives so that you could stand around here acting like idiots.” She pauses for just a moment, letting her words sink in. “Am I making myself clear to everyone?”
The only sound heard is the shuffling of feet.
“Good. Then get the hell out of here. You’re using up all the good air.”
As the crowd, grumbling and shame-faced, begins to wander away, Asi takes that as a signal that his ‘guard dog’ duties are over for the nonce, and only then does he notice Dakota standing several yards away, looking on. Yodeling in canine joy, he tears off after her, his tail wagging so hard that it twists his body into all sorts of interesting shapes. Koda braces for the impact and catches his furry body as he all but launches himself into her arms, covering her face and any exposed skin he can reach with giant swipes of his tongue.
Chuckling, Dakota presses him back and scratches behind his ears with deep affection. She stills as she feels eyes upon her, the gaze’s weight as palpable as a caress. Straightening slowly, she turns her head until Kirsten’s brilliant smile comes into view. She swears she can feel her heart fluttering in her chest and wonders at the seemingly autonomic response to something simple—albeit beautiful—as a smile. She notes another instinctive response as she responds to Kirsten’s smile with one of her own—one that stretches her facial muscles in ways they haven’t been stretched in quite some time.
Asi a shadow at her side, she allows her long stride to eat up the distance between them until she comes to a stop no more than a foot away. The smile is still there as she gazes down into mesmerizing green eyes. “Hey.”
Kirsten touches Koda’s wrist briefly before dropping her hand away. “Hey. It’s good to see you awake. How’re you feeling?”
“Refreshed. You?”
“A little sore for a few days, but now? Pretty much back to my old self.” Her lips twist in smirk of self deprecation. “As you can see.”
Koda looks around a the now emptied street, then over at the MPs who are in amicable discussion with the two families who had started the confrontation. “Good work.”
Kirsten looks at Koda carefully, sure she’s being teased. When she realizes that the vet is serious, she blushes. “Yeah, well…my legendary temper has to be good for something, huh?”
”I think you were in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills,” Koda replies seriously. “At the very least, you prevented a riot, and likely saved some lives as well.”
Kirsten looks down at her hands. “Well, I….”
“False modesty is something I hope we can leave in the past, where it belongs.”
That stings, and, realizing it, Koda softens her voice and eyes. Reaching out, she gently grasps Kirsten’s shoulder. “You did very well out there today. You did something that none of us could have done. That’s a good thing, okay?”
Nodding, Kirsten manages a smile. “Okay.”
Koda rubs her hands together. “So, where were you off to before stopping in to play referee?”
Kirsten shrugs. “Just out getting some fresh air. Nowhere in particular.”
“Thank you for watching over me.”
Kirsten’s smile is shy. “You’re welcome. Even though Maggie told me not to be, I was still kinda worried.”
Koda notes Kirsten’s use of Maggie’s name without comment. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“I’m not,” Kirsten replies, laughing suddenly. “You saved our lives with that suicidal charge of yours. I’d much rather be worried than dead, thank you very much.”
“You’re welcome,” Dakota retorts, smirking. Then she executes a rather presentable bow. “Would you do me the honor of dining with me at the mess hall? I’ve heard that the mystery meat is even more mysterious than usual today.”
Kirsten bats her lashes, a true Southern Belle. “Why Doctor Rivers, I’d be delighted.”
Dakota cocks her arm. Kirsten slips her hand through, and the two of them make their slow way to the mess.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MAGGIE HAULS HER briefcase out of the trunk of her car, feeling the pull on shoulder and hip joints not yet recovered from the recent battle. “The late unpleasantness,” as some wag has christened it, apparently permanently. The dead have been buried, their own on one end of the old parade ground—as Kirsten put it rather forcefully to General Hart, there won’t be any more parades at Ellsworth anytime soon—the enemy in trenches beneath the broad meadow where the battle was fought. What remains of the droids and their vehicles has been gathered and sorted, to be scavenged for metal and usable parts. One engineering party is hard at work rebuilding the bridge. Another, under Tacoma Rivers and a handful of techs, has set out for the wind farm outside Rapid City, to study the feasibility of relocating two or three of the huge generators to the Base.
Life, she thinks wryly, getting back to normal.
Except, of course, that nothing is normal.
The unaccustomed pressure of a pair of Ace bandages around her right foot and calf remind her constantly of the graze she got off an M-16 round in that insane charge across the pile of rubble that had been the Cheyenne bridge. So does the limp. And there was “normal” for you: she, an F-14 Tomcat squadron leader, commanding dirt soldiers in the sort of battle that had not been fought in a century, abandoning that command to charge straight into hand-to-hand combat with the enemy on the heels of a for-gods’-sake veterinarian with a civilian cyberwonk as her right-hand buddy. A fragment of antique song comes to her, a whisky-roughened voice interspersed with the occasional bleat of a harmonica. Oh, yeah, the times they are very definitely a-changing..
She unlocks the kitchen door and swings the briefcase over the threshold, plunking it down just inside the door. Nothing, she reflects, is more indicative of those changing times than the half-ton load of books in that satchel. She has not carried around so much actual print and paper since her cadet days at the Academy. Even then, most of her courses and almost all of her entertainment came in CD jewel cases. But electricity is now at a premium or will be shortly—hence the raid on the wind farm—and computer use rationed to those who cannot make do without it.
Which means the medics, and the techs whose urgent job it is to convert airborne navigation and targeting systems from satellite-dependent GPS to old-fashioned radar and laser options. And, of course, Kirsten King.
Something savory is roasting in the oven; something with onions and—sage?—and a hint of other herbs. The oven light shows her the last of the chickens from her deep freeze, running with golden juices and browning nicely in a nest of potatoes and carrots. The silence in the house, though, and most of all the conspicuous absence of Asimov, tells her that Koda and Kirsten are out.
Out, and together. They have seldom been separated since Koda came out of her fatigue-induced stupor on the third day after the fighting at the Cheyenne.