Manny complies, with a wave and a mouthed “Makshké” at Koda.

“Schic’shi,” she answers, too weary to do more than lift a hand as she settles her back against the hull of the chopper. She can feel the vibration of the rotors as they begin to turn, then pick up speed, in every cell of her body. She should move, she tells herself, but her muscles refuse to obey her. The Black Hawk rocks slightly on its wheels, then lifts off with its tail high and its nose low. It is the nature of this peculiar airborne beast that there is nowhere more comfortable than the spot where Koda half-slouches on the deck, unless it is one of the litters suspended on heavy straps from the opposite side of the craft, or the pilots’ seats.

Just audible above the chopper’s racket, she can hear Allen shouting into the mike.

“We’re clear! Send ‘em in!”

Koda closes her eyes as the chopper begins its ascent, banking to the north and west. When she opens them after a moment, she can see the half moon riding high, glinting off the snowscape as it falls away beneath them. The winter stars spangle the night, Orion and his dog, the Bull and the Ram. As she watches, two of the stars seem to move toward them at tremendous speed, and it is only when she sees the green and red lights winking at their wingtips that she recognizes them for what they are.

Then she sees them dip and streak in low above the prison compound they have just left, their afterburners glowing like small suns in the enveloping dark. As they pass, fire blooms behind them, reaching into the night sky in unfolding petals of flame. She nods at Maggie in acknowledgment. Her mind tells her that they have denied a tactical advantage to the enemy, but deep in her soul she knows that the fire is necessary to cleanse the evil of the place. She leans back once more against the vibrating hull of the aircraft and lets the darkness take her.

CHAPTER TEN

AS SHE STANDS off to one side with the others, holding her hair back out of her eyes as the beating rotors of the approaching helicopters stir the air into a mini hurricane, Kirsten tells herself that her reasons for being on the landing field are purely scientific. If her heartbeat is slightly faster than normal, it is because she will soon have a working android to examine. The sense of anticipation warming her from within is surely only a scientist’s eagerness when given the experimental opportunity of a lifetime.

And if she finds herself looking for a particular glossy black head that towers above the sea of mostly red and gold, and if she imagines she can see, even from this distance, a pair of piercing eyes that rival the winter sky, well, those things are inconsequential. She is a scientist, and scientists are trained to notice things.

Or so she makes herself believe.

The injured come off the helicopters first, young men and women bleeding their lives away on litters borne up by strong, resolute soldiers who run toward the bright red cross of the hospital double time. The dead follow, pristine white sheets covering their faces. Their entrance onto the base is more stately, as befits their heroic sacrifice.

Three men follow, heavily guarded and chained at the belly, ankles and wrists. Two sport an unkempt jailhouse pallor that is a perfect accompaniment to their frightened, darting eyes and heavily tattooed flesh. The third wears his shame like a shroud. Shoulders slumped, head bowed, he shuffles along staring only at the slush-covered ground beneath his feet, all but cringing at every new sound he hears. Kirsten feels a tiny shard of pity for him, though it’s obvious what he’s done and why he’s chained and guarded so very heavily.

The victims disembark next, their faces displaying a wide range of emotions, from the hollow-eyed pallor of an Auschwitz camp survivor, to a kind of quiet joy, to everything and nothing mixed in between. Those with enough awareness looked around curiously, taking in their new surroundings with a distinct lack of surprise, but with, perhaps, a burgeoning hope that their lot might, indeed, be improving.

A group of ten women, most of them former captives themselves, approach these newly freed survivors, offering soft words, soft expressions, soft touches as they lead the group toward the base hospital and the first step on the road to eventual—much hoped for—recovery.

Last to come off the choppers is a small group of heavily armed men and women, Dakota and the Colonel included, who surround what Kirsten can easily recognize as a fully functioning android bound by titanium chains and cuffs.

Watching, she finds herself biting back a smirk. They might as well have bound the thing with construction paper chains made by first graders for all even titanium will hold against the unsurpassed strength of even a single determined android. The very fact that it has allowed itself to be captured, and chained, and is making no effort to escape to fulfill its obviously prime directive to kill them all gives Kirsten a moment’s pause, though she waves her concerns off for the moment, confident in her ability to have at least that one question answered by the droid itself. Eventually.

She meets the group halfway, nodding to Allen and Rivers and carefully examining the android as it approaches. Through the receiver in her ear, she can hear the almost desperate data streams it is sending out in an attempt to contact others of its kind. This alone is enough to tell her that it is “injured” in some way that is making it difficult, if not impossible, to fulfill its primary mission. Finding the source, and the cause, of the “injury” is, she knows, the first step toward learning how to disable them all.

For the first time since the disaster of Minot, Kirsten allows a shard of hope to enter into the darkened landscape of her thoughts.

“General Hart was kind enough to give me an interrogation room in the brig. If you’ll please follow me.”

Allen gives a quiet nod. Dakota and Manny continue to bracket the android, weapons at the ready, while the rest peel off, headed for some much deserved down time. The Colonel stays with the denuded group, falling into step beside Kirsten as they head for the brig.

2

“Don’t bother with those,” Kirsten orders, casually waving away the chains Dakota and Manny are preparing to use to strap the android to the chair directly behind the desk she has commandeered. A smile curls her lips as she looks directly into its optical sensors. “If it wanted to kill us, we’d be dead already.” A beat of silence. “Isn’t that right, RJ-252711-RTLL-2199-RC?”

Again, that look of near shock that she’d seen at Minot. Clue or red herring? Without enough evidence to structure a credible hypothesis, she lets the information sit at the back of her thoughts as she continues her visual inspection of the android. Standing, she rounds the desk, seeing the others back off in the periphery of her vision. She feels a little like a star player in a “good cop/bad cop” melodrama of her hardly misspent youth as she stalks the helpless droid, her lips curved in a shark’s feeding-time grin.

“I’m confusing you, aren’t I,” she remarks conversationally, touching it briefly on one shoulder as she circles. “I’m receiving all of your transmissions, but you’re receiving none of mine. What does that make me?” Her smile is almost seductive as she stands before it, one finger rubbing across her full lower lip, as if in serious contemplation. “One of you?” Her smile broadens. “One of them?” One rather elegant hand flips a careless gesture toward Dakota, who stares back, eyebrow perfectly arched, arms folded across her chest. “You can’t tell, can you. You don’t know what the truth is, and that makes things…difficult…for you, doesn’t it.”

The android doesn’t answer, though its fingers twitch on the arms of the chair, much like a nervous suspect who has been brought into the police station for questioning. It is sending out continuous pulses of data, an SOS beacon that Kirsten can read as clearly as if it were printed on a scrolling board in the middle of Times Square. She smiles and, temporarily turning down the heat, returns to her desk and sits down, spreading her hands against the rough wooden top.

“Tell me,” she resumes after a long moment of silence, “why are you breeding humans? What do you hope to gain from this venture?”

The fingers twitch again. “This unit is not programmed to respond in that area.”

“Ah. Just a drone, then. If you can’t tell me why, can you tell me who? Who gave you these orders?”

“This unit is not….”

“…programmed to respond in that area, yes, I understand that.” She sits back in the chair, eyeing the droid. “I can’t help you, RJ-252711, if you don’t help me. You have data circuits that need repairing. I need answers. So….”

The data pulses are almost frantic now, and Kirsten hides a wince as a high pitched squeal of feedback enters her implants and loops through her brain.

“I can help you, you know. You can feel it. You want to trust me, don’t you.” Her voice is soft, seductive.

A louder blast of feedback wings through her and her eyes close for a long moment, willing the pain away. There is something almost…compelling…in the messages traveling along her nerve bundles. She fights off a heaviness, a lethargy that seeps into the very marrow of her bones; a sweet siren’s song to an end she’s sure she’d be better off not knowing.

Dakota notices, and takes one step forward, only to be waved back by Kirsten who straightens and leans forward. “Answer my questions, RJ-252711. Answer my questions and I’ll give you the help you need.”

“I…am…not…programmed…to…to…to…to…to…”

“Answer me, RJ-252711.”

“…cannot….”

“Answer me.”

The android stiffens, all electronic joints locked as a whine emits from its vocal sensors. Subliminal at first, it grows in pitch until the humans present instinctively step back and raise desperate hands to their ears in a fruitless attempt to block out the sound.

Kirsten feels the code as it buzzes along her nerves like electric shock. She tries to raise her hands to snatch at her earpiece and dislodge the implants, but her muscles will not obey her. She cannot speak; only attend, helplessly, as the systems shutdown command speeds its way to her lungs, her heart, her brain. Koda has risen, leaning over the table to grasp her wrist, but she feels nothing, hears nothing as the other woman’s lips form urgent words. Absently, she notes that the improbable blue eyes have gone wide with—fear? Surely not. And surely not for her. That amuses her for some reason, but she cannot laugh, only stare, her own gaze fixed on the wide black pupils that spread and spread like ripples in a midnight pond, and she is drawn into their blackness, falling infinitely down and down, drawn into the deep, into the dark and the silence, falling, falling down the rabbit hole to lose herself in the infinite lightlessness of space beyond the stars.

How long she falls she does not know nor care. The blackness slips past her as she spirals downward, companied by wind that whispers with the voices of her dead. So precocious . . .. That’s my girl . . .. I worry sometimes . . .. Then there are the other sounds: the staccato rattle of machine gun fire; electronic devices speaking to each other in strange tongues, ditditDAHdit oddly musical as it speeds along the fiberoptics; the thrum of the blood in her veins as it slows, grows sluggish, stops. They ride along the rising wind that carries her spinning toward a point of light star light star bright, infinitesimally small, somehow above her now as she falls upward—and how did that happen, she wonders—with up so floating many bells down and voices are in the wind’s singing, singing its own song now. Its blast strips the flesh from her, whistles through the cage of her bones. Yet it cannot drown out the deep baying of the hunter who runs lithe beside her now along moonlit snow and is gone again in a glimpse of driving muscles rippling under grey fur that turns in upon itself, moebius-like, to become a small pointed face with eyes burning like molten gold out of a black mask. The narrow muzzle opens, and the creature speaks in a voice to silence thunder, one long-fingered hand raised to bar her passage.

Go back. The time is not yet.

But she hurtles past him as the pinprick of light suddenly bursts, brighter than a thousand suns. Pure thought now, with no crude matter to hold her back, she streaks toward its incandescent heart. Out of its center a woman leaps to meet her, brandishing a spear and an oval shield with a boss of bronze. Her naked body is painted with blue spirals and runes of power, and her hair streams behind her like flame. From somewhere behind her comes the slow rhythm of a drum. Her shout rises above its pounding.