“Got it, Ma’am.”

Koda sprints down the branching hallway, following the increasingly sharp reports of automatic weapons, their own arms and the droids’. As she runs, she can hear the beginning of resistance from the cells she passes, prisoners shouting encouragement to their jailers’ unseen enemies, the sparse metal furniture of the prison banging against walls and doors. Somewhere up ahead the shouting becomes a chant, reverberating rhythmically in the narrow passageways, taking strength from the beat of steel on steel within the cells.

Kill the droids! Kill the droids! Kill the droids!

As she turns a sharp corner, Koda almost slams into Andrews, skews off to the right and slides in beside him and the rest of the unit where they hunker behind a improvised barricade of overturned desks. The space before them is an open intersection where three hallways meet. Two droids, their heads blown to fragments, lie frozen in a bizarre mechanical rigor mortis, joints still bent at elbow and knee. Another form sprawls between them, an enormous charred red hole where its right ribs should be and no arm or shoulder at all. The blood beneath it has already begun to congeal with the cold.

“Johnson?”

“Yeah. She went down just as we got here. The droids are over there—“ Andrews points toward a corridor to the right. “—and they’ve got a fifty-caliber. The Colonel and the rest are around the corner to our left. They’ve got a couple injured, but she doesn’t want to call in the gunships yet. We’d lose too many civilians if we did.”

“Damn. We need to get behind them.”

“There’s another entrance over on the other side; we might be able to get through there.”

Koda shakes her head. “That would take too long. There’s a quicker way.”

“Yeah?”

Koda points upward, toward the acoustic ceiling tiles. “You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

Andrews’ bright blue eyes take on a sparkle in the midst of his featureless ski mask. “No, Ma’am! Lead the way.”

Koda drags a chair over to a spot beneath a light fixture, climbs up onto it and begins tossing down the large tiles. Wiring runs thickly tangled under the first two; the darkness behind the third glints with the lights’ reflection off the aluminum sheathing of the HVAC ducts. The fourth gives access to the crawl space. “Paydirt,” she observes, turns on her flashlight and pulls herself up and into ceiling and its snarl of pipes and wires.

The going is incredibly slow. The prison is carefully built, and the wire ends she can see are all properly capped. One exception, though, will fry them and the mission with them. Koda squirms forward on her elbows, avoiding as much of the brightly colored strands as she can, lifting her weight gingerly over pipes they cannot afford to break. Behind her she half senses, half hears, her soldiers, some of them slithering along with the ease of rattlesnakes, others with about as much finesse as a bear raiding a dumpster.

“Shhhhh, dammit.”

Reese, two behind her, tries to quiet the others. With the droid’s sensors, though, they cannot be quiet enough. Andrews knows it, too. “We need more cover, Ma’am.”

“Right,” she says. By dead reckoning, they should be over a cell facing the corridor they have just left, some distance behind their abandoned redoubt. “There should be somebody—“ she pulls off her mask and pries a tile loose“—right about—here.”

In the dim light of the cell, two startled women stare up at her. One holds the room’s only stool, battered half to splinters where she has been pounding it against the door. The other has a metal bowl in each hand, their unpalatable contents spilled dirty white along the floor. Cymbals.

“We need more noise, please,” Koda says simply. “Cover us.”

The younger woman of the two, perhaps eighteen, loses her frozen expression and bares more teeth than Koda has seen outside an alligator’s mouth. “You got it!”

Koda nods her thanks, and as they push themselves again along the narrow crawlway, the redoubled clamor becomes a vibration in the walls of the prison itself, a low, deep drumming of voices and metal shifting into a simpler, more primal rhythm. Cold creeps along Koda’s spine as the chant pounds through her blood, an echo of war drums pounding down the centuries.

Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!

She hears her men behind her take it up in breathy whispers, keeping with the women’s voices as the mantra spreads, intersecting at first with the earlier chant and running counterpoint to it, then overwhelming the more complicated rhythm with its purer line.

Kill! Kill! Kill! Kill!

They have traveled perhaps fifteen meters in little more than half an hour. It feels like an eternity, though. Koda does not panic in elevators, but nor does she have any love of spaces that fit her like underwear. Motioning Andrews and the others to wait, she creeps forward alone for another few meters, pausing every couple of feet to listen with an ear pressed hard against the ceiling struts. Once she lifts a tile a centimeter or so and sees only a darkened cell with a dim form doubled up almost into fetal position; once she freezes like a rabbit who sees an eagle soar above its meadow, straining to pick up the oddly musical electronic tones or voder-generated voices by which the droids communicate with each other. In the end it is the shockingly loud burst of fire from the large-calibre machine gun almost directly beneath her that charts her location for her, and she waves her troops forward.

They drop from the ceiling directly behind the droids, howling. The sound that rips from Koda’s throat is none that she has never made before in her flesh, a full-throated baying that speaks of the spoor tracked to its source, of blood and death. Andrews, plummeting down beside her, screams like a panther as he raises his M-16 and presses the trigger down onto full automatic, spraying destruction across the brilliant metal surfaces of the droids, the dull green walls, the the light fixtures that shatter and fall in minute glass shards like snow. “The gun!” Koda bellows as she braces her own rifle against her hip, raining armor-piercing rounds upon the nightmare things before her. “Get the machine gun, dammit!”

But one of the droids, quicker than the rest, is already turning the heavy weapon to face them. Spinning on her heel, Koda turns her fire on the M-50 and its operator. Andrews takes down the droid sliding into position to reinforce the gunner, the fall of its metal body indistinguishable from the cacophony of battle. Reese, though, darts from behind and charges the machine gun head-on, falling over the barrel and toppling it just as its fire rips through him, spattering blood and gouts of flesh over the walls, the ceiling, his comrades behind him. Andrew screams again and empties his magazine into the droid gunner. Hardly audible through the gunfire and the incessant chanting of the prisoners, Koda hears the clatter of booted feet stampeding across the concrete floor. Allen’s troops, the Colonel herself in the lead and snarling like the bobcat emblazoned on her sleeve, come swarming over the barricade, pinning the droids between the two forces.

It is over, then, in a matter of seconds. As Koda raises her weapon to destroy the last of them, Allen yells, “No, take it!” and swings the butt of her M-16 to send its Uzi skidding down the passageway, out of reach.

Andrews makes a flying tackle that topples the droid, followed by Koda. It bucks under them, its mechanical limbs flailing to throw them off with a strength that is literally inhuman. To Koda it is like nothing so much as her one attempt to ride her grandfather’s bull on a summer day when she was ten. Now as then, she can feel her spine rattle with the frantic twisting beneath her, now as then she can only hold on and try to keep astride. Then two more soldiers are sitting across its legs, keeping them still by their sheer weight, and yet another pair pins its arms.

“Good work, guys,” Allen commends them, panting. She has both hands clamped down on the thing’s wrist, a knee jammed into its elbow. “Somebody get a hand in my pack and take out the shackles. We’re going to take Dr. King a little present.”

Koda, just behind her, fumbles with the zipper and then draws out a length of bright titanium chain attached to a metal belt and four manacles, two each for hands and ankles. The droid fights frantically to break free, striking Ramirez in the jaw with its foot, almost throwing Andrews and Koda astride its back. Limb by limb, though, they struggle to immobilize it, sliding the belt under its waist to fasten in back, bending back the arms to chain each hand to its opposite foot. Just as the last shackle snaps shut, the droid gives up the struggle and lies still.

It is not disabled, certainly not destroyed. Its logic chains have simply returned a null set upon evaluating the possible success of further resistance.

Koda pushes herself up from the steel caracass, suddenly weary beyond telling, and makes her way toward Reese, still slumped across the disabled machine gun. She knows there is no hope of life, yet she kneels and turns him over onto his back gently, not to hurt him further. His blood smears the white of her winter camo, already stained from tending Larke’s wounds. Marked, too, by Reese’s own torn flesh. She feels a void open inside her, black and deep as space beyond the stars. Her fingers clench in the folds of Reese’s clothing, almost as if somehow she could hold him back from this last journey. But his eyes are fixed and vacant. The blood trickling from his mouth has already begun to congeal.

Maggie kneels softly beside her, setting a hand on her shoulder. “It’s tough, leading men to their deaths. Especially the first one.”

Almost as if in a dream, Koda turns toward the other woman. The warrior of only minutes past is gone. Allen’s eyes are huge and sad in the brown face of a grieving Madonna, the face almost of Ina Maka herself. As if from a distance, Koda hears her own voice. “Does it get any easier? Ever?”

“No.” Maggie shakes her head slightly. “It never does.”

A moment of silence stretches out, then Allen squeezes her shoulder gently and asks, “Larke? Martinez?”

“Larke’s hurt. Martinez is taking care of him in the kitchen.”

“Good,” she says. “Very good. Let’s start clearing this place out.”

The chanting of the prisoners has fallen silent. Laying Reese gently down, Koda gets to her feet beside Maggie. “I’ll go check on Larke.”

The Colonel nods. “Make it quick. I’m going to need you when we get these cells open.” Then, more loudly, “Anybody got any idea where they keep the freaking keys?”

Koda sprints down the corridor toward the kitchen. She finds Larke pale as his camouflage but conscious and not in shock. On the floor at Martinez’ feet is a small mountain of bloody and discarded dishtowels. Koda is pleased, though, to see that the compress that he has bound tightly into place is not soaked through. When she lifts it up to check the wound, she can see that the blood that still oozes slowly from the wound is dark, with no evidence of arterial spurting. Larke’s pulse is shallow and faster than she would like, but steady nonetheless. “So how am I doin’ Doc?” he asks with a faint attempt at a smile. “Gonna live?”

Koda tightens the cotton strips that hold the compress in place. “Going to live; going to walk. And you’re going to get to keep everything you were born with, which is more than I can say for a lot of my male patients.”

Martinez starts to snicker, but apparently thinks better of it. “Hey, buddy.” Larke lifts his head slightly to stare at his fellow trooper with mock indignation. “You just remember it could be you lying here next time.” He makes a snipping motion with two fingers of his right hand.

Koda flashes a grin at the Pfc.. “He been giving you a hard time, Martinez?”

“Ma’am, he’s a rotten patient. If he hadn’t made himself dizzy just trying to sit up, he’d have taken off after you and Andrews.”

“Oh, yeah? Ma’am, Leo was gonna help me get up. He wanted to go himself. Told him to go on, but he wouldn’t.”

“And good for you that he didn’t.” She turns to Martinez. “We’re starting to mop up. He stays here.” Koda jabs a long finger at Larke, then at Martinez. “You stay with him and keep an eye on the bleeding. If anything changes, come get me. Otherwise just wait here till we call the choppers in. We’ll take him out to the Medevac on a litter.”

She turns to go, but Martinez touches her sleeve lightly. “”Ma’am . . .?”

Koda can see the question in his hazel eyes, pleading with her. She does not want to answer it, but she says, “We lost two. Johnson and Reese. Otherwise, Larke here’s the worst hurt.”