A hive-drone murmur sweeps its way through the crowd. Snippets of conversation stand out here and there, and Koda listens with half an ear, an ever-widening smirk on her face.

“…King…”

“…robotics lady….”

“…saw her on TV just last month!”

“…great….”

“…can’t believe….”

“...shorter than she is on television!”

Dakota bites back a smile at that remark, watching as one of the MPs moves stiffly forward, as if drawn to Kirsten simply by the strength of her aura. Kirsten’s cool voice carries easily through the still air. “Mind telling me what’s going on, Corporal Hill?”

“Yes, Ma’am. Both sets of subjects were attempting to forcibly procure this family dwelling when….”

“English please, Corporal. I left my military law dictionary in my other coat.”

Snickering is heard from the crowd, and a slow flush creeps up the young Corporal’s neck and dusts his cheeks with clown spots of crimson. “Ma’am. Corporal Smythson and myself were patrolling this sector when we came upon these two families,” a crisply uniformed arm gestures in the direction of the families in question, “fighting over this house. As we attempted to intervene, a crowd began to gather. Sergeant Li and her squad then approached from the south and asked the crowd to disperse. They refused.”

“Damn right we refused!” a middle aged man yells. “We’re not a bunch of jarheads you can get just bully around! We’ve got rights, you know!”

Kirsten turns to Li. “Is that when you pulled your gun, Sergeant?”

“No, Ma’am.”

“And when did you pull your gun, Sergeant?”

“When the rock hit me, Ma’am.”

Kirsten is taken aback. “Rock?”

“Yes, Ma’am. That rock.”

Following the direction of Li’s pointing finger, Kirsten spies the crumbling chunk of gravel at the Sergeant’s feet. She looks up slowly, lancing her gaze out over the crowd.

A dozen rocks leave a dozen suddenly limp hands, hitting the ground in sodden thumps.

Kirsten bares her teeth in a parody of a smile. “So,” she begins, voice soft, lethal, “these are your ‘rights’, hmm? I wasn’t aware that the right to assault someone was in our Constitution. Would anyone like to point it out to me?”

“They’ve got guns,” one man mutters, gesturing toward the soldiers.

Kirsten turns her full attention on the speaker. He pales appreciably.

“Did they pull them? Threaten you in any way?” She holds up on hand. “Before that rock was thrown?”

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.

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.