And you know where that’s going, Maggie m’girl, she reflects as she slips out of her uniform jacket and runs water into the kettle for tea. A blind woman could see the inexplicable bond that had—no, not formed, because that would imply that it was something that had a definable beginning—manifested between the two women, simply asserted itself as fact without any of the accustomed preliminaries. If she were honest with herself, she would acknowledge that she had seen it when Koda brought the scientist back from Minot.
And as long as she is being honest with herself, she might as well acknowledge that while she loves Koda and is aware that Koda loves her, it is not the same emotion that has been present from first meeting between Kirsten and Dakota. Because Maggie knows that her deepest passion is not and never will be for another person. If forced to choose between Koda and her freedom—her Tomcat and the blue intoxication of the sky, skimming its depths like a dolphin in the wine-dark sea—she will slip loose onto the currents of the air, like the flight-born thing she is.
And if there is sorrow in the recognition, as long as she is being honest with herself, she might as well admit that there is something of relief, too. She will miss the love-making, but her bond with Koda can shift smoothly into friendship. There will be regret, yes. But there will not be the heart-tearing grief she senses would consume Kirsten or Koda should either lose the other, even now.
While the tea is steeping, she unpacks the tomes—there really is no other word for books and loose-leaf binders half as thick as a foundation slab—she has brought home with her. One is embossed in gold: Uniform Code of Military Justice. The rest are the familiar rawhide leather law books with red and black bands on the spines, thick with case histories and precedents of both civil and military law.
Bet there’s nothing quite like what we’ve got here, though.
Nor anything like a flygirl turned dirt commander turned Judge Advocate, either.
Little as she likes him, Maggie is worried about Hart. She folds back the cover of her long-unused clipboard, and makes a note to speak to Maiewski about their superior. His exclusion from the battle of the Cheyenne seems to have shrunk him; there is a grey cast to his skin, and his cheeks seem sunken in upon the bones of his skull. As from this morning, he has also delegated to her the legal proceedings against the prisoners taken in Rapid City. There are none from the Cheyenne fight, and that is just as well. However the probabilities might weigh against all of the human collaborators just happening to have immediately fatal wounds, and however that might or might not jibe with the laws of civilized warfare, it would be worse to have to try and legally execute them by the dozens. Better that they die on the field, in the fire of battle, than coldly against a barracks wall.
Sipping at her tea, she spends the next hour making notes. When she has finished her preliminary search of possible charges, she has five to lay against the rapists, singly or in combination:
Item: Article 120. Rape and Carnal Knowledge
(a) Any person subject to this chapter who commits an act of sexual intercourse with any person, whether male or female, by force and without consent, is guilty of rape and shall be punished by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.
(b) Any person subject to this chapter who, under circumstances not amounting to rape, commits an act of sexual intercourse with a person not his or her spouse who has not attained the age of sixteen years, is guilty of carnal knowledge and shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
(c) Penetration, however slight, is sufficient to complete either of these offenses.
Item: Article 128 Assault
(a) Any person subject to this chapter who attempts or offers with unlawful force or violence to do bodily harm to another person, whether or not the attempt or offer is consummated, is guilty of assault and shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
(b) Any person subject to this chapter who—
(1) commits an assault with a dangerous weapon or other means or force likely to produce death or grievous bodily harm; or
(2) commits an assault and intentionally inflicts grievous bodily harm with or without a weapon, is guilty of aggravated assault and shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.
In the margin by Article 120, she scrawls: MAIN INDICTMENT, in forceful block letters. Assault will be a lesser included charge. Very carefully she underlines the penalty for rape: for three of the Rapid City men, she can cheerfully ask that they pay with their lives. The fourth— She frowns as she remembers Buxton’s abject shame, the guardhouse staff reports that he is sleeping little and eating less. Death might be a mercy for him.
Maggie is not at all sure she wants to be merciful. She makes a note to set him under a suicide watch. Then, reluctantly, finally giving a name to her own uneasiness about the man, she scribbles a reminder to herself to set up a second, less obvious, on Hart.
Briefly, she rises to check supper. Koda and Kirsten are not back, but the chicken is done. She sets it, covered, on the stove’s smooth cooking surface to await their return, then goes back to her newly-assigned lawyering.
Item: Article 104. Aiding the Enemy
Any person who—
(1) aids, or attempts to aid, the enemy with arms, ammunition, supplies, money or other things; or
(2) without proper authority, knowingly harbors or protects or gives intelligence to or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly; shall suffer death or such other punishment as a court-martial or military commission may direct.
Item: Article 105: Misconduct as Prisoner
Any person subject to this chapter who, while in the hands of the enemy in time of war—
(1) for the purpose of securing favorable treatment by his or her captors acts without proper authority in a manner contrary to law, custom or regulation, to the detriment of others of whatever nationality held by the enemy as civilian or military prisoners; or
(2) while in a position of authority over such persons maltreat them without justifiable cause; shall be punished as a court-martial shall direct.
Maggie sets down her pen and glances out the window. The sky is beginning to fade, the blue leeching out of the east as the sun drops toward the horizon. The light still lingers on the crowns of the young pines in her yard, caught like diamonds in the fall of melted snow, drop by drop, from its branches. Winter is beginning to break; the wind that soughs among the long green needles sits in the south. It will be the first spring in centuries in which humans will not interfere appreciably with the natural cycle of life and death, slayer and slain, in this part of the world.
Possibly not in any part of the world.
For a moment her neat kitchen falls away, and she looks down from an immense height on a sun-drenched plain. From horizon to horizon, the herds fill her sight: impala and springbok, oryx and gazelle. Along the flanks, seen only in the sinuous ripple of tall grass, lion and leopard stalk their prey. It is this earth, molded into her very bones, that calls to her, even as she knows that the template of the Black Hills, layer upon layer of molten rock and sediment, is somehow laid down in the double spiral of Koda’s heritage.
It is a call she is not free to answer, not in this lifetime. She shakes her head slightly, bringing time and place into focus once again. But the sense of hovering on the imminent edge of a new world lingers, and with it the sense of multiple possibilities. Choose one path and pursue it to awaiting fate; choose another and alter the woven strands of karma.
Even the droids, it seems, intended to remake the world in the image of—what? Something that required breeding human beings, hence the preservation of women of childbearing age and a small number of men to sire young. Herd bulls. But nothing she had encountered so far explained why the droids set out to breed their human cattle or why young children had apparently been taken alive. Which was another question—where? Into slavery? Droids hardly needed slaves; they could always replicate themselves, or at least they had been able to until the destruction of the Minot facility. Food? Droids did not eat. Nor, as far as anyone could tell, was there any surviving market on earth for either slaves or long pig. She and Koda had gone fruitlessly around the subject, around and around again. Some piece of the puzzle was missing, something vital.