“Lady,” McCallum says, “I have heard that bullshit so many times I could say it in my sleep. Let’s deal.”

Maggie ignores his second offer. “And Major Boudreaux has informed you that under military law you face a possible death sentence if you are convicted of the crime of rape, or of aiding the enemy, or both?”

The muscles around the man’s mouth tighten., accentuating the rawboned line of his jaw. His eyes, already narrow with the light directed into his face, become mere slits. “Why do you think I want to cooperate? You get me off, I give you information about the droids. Everybody’s happy.”

“And what information do you have that would be worth sparing your life, Mr. McCallum?”

“Excuse me,” Boudreaux interrupts. “Look,” he says, addressing McCallum, “I already warned you about saying anything at all. You didn’t listen. But any answer at all to that question will almost certainly make you guilty of the conspiracy charge and aiding the enemy.”

“Big fucking deal,” McCallum snorts. “And how many of them bitches is gonna testify I screwed ‘em against their will? By the time they get through with that, the rest won’t fucking matter.”

Q: Please state your name for the record.

A: Inez C* * *.

Q: What is your profession, Ms. C* * *?

A: I’m a nurse—an LVN.

Q: Ms. C* * *, were you one of the women imprisoned in the Corrections Corporation of America facility in Rapid City?

A: I was.

Q: And how did you come to be there?

A: The droids took several women there from the hospital.

Q: Can you describe conditions there?

A: We were kept two to a cell. They fed us twice a day—rice, potatoes, starchy stuff.

Q: Did you have any medical care?

A: They asked us when we’d had our last periods. They took our temps every day.

Q: Do you know why they did that?

A: They never said, but it was obvious that they were trying to keep track of ovulation cycles.

“Mr McCallum,” Maggie says, “I think you had better understand something. I’m not your prosecutor. I’m setting up the tribunal to try you and your co-defendants and am gathering preliminary information. Whether or not to grant clemency will be entirely up to the jury and the judges.” She straightens the already perfectly neat arrangement of papers and pens in front of her. “What I can do is make a recommendation. You won’t get any promises, not at this level.”

“Listen, bitch.” McCallum surges to his feet, pushing his chair back so hard it rocks on its legs. The MP darts forward to catch it, grabbing the prisoner by the arm. Boudreax half rises, then subsides when it is clear that the officer has him. McCallum glances toward the door, and Maggie can almost see him computing the odds of getting to it and out. Then he, too, settles back into his seat. His face has not lost its snarl, nor has Maggie taken her hand off her sidearm.

“Listen, Colonel,” he repeats. “You got no right to try me at all. The Constitution says I got a right to a speedy trial by my peers. My peers ain’t no goddam military kangaroo court .”

“True,” she answers drily. “The problem, Mr. McCallum, is that your only available ‘peers’ are facing charges similar to your own. The fact is, we’re the only law in town, and if you want to deal with the law, you’re going to have to deal with us.” She gives him a small, tight smile. “ Make your argument, though. If you persuade us we can’t hold you, we might just have to turn you loose. Right into the waiting hands of your victims.”

“You can’t do that!”

Maggie says nothing. She opens a manila folder prominently labeled with McCallum’s name, makes a notation, closes it again.

“She can’t do that!” McCallum turns to Boudreaux. “She can’t! It violates my right to due process!”

Boudreaux develops a sudden interest in the toes of his shoes. “Actually, Mr. McCallum, the Base authorities can hold you, or they can release you. There really aren’t any facilities for long- or even medium-term incarceration here. If you satisfy the Acting Judge Advocate’s office that there is no grounds on which to hold you—” he shrugs—“they will doubtless release you. What happens after that is your own responsibility.”

“And before you start telling us again what we can’t do,” Maggie adds, “I suggest you start spelling out what you can do for us. Because that is your best, probably your only, chance of saving your lousy life.”

McCallum glances at Boudreaux. “I wanna talk to my counsel here. Privately.”

Boudreaux glances at Maggie in his turn, his eyes wide as his hornrims will allow. She says, “Officer, shackle Mr. McCallum here to the table leg. Counsel, if I were you, I’d get out of arms’ reach.”

When the MP has the prisoner secured to the table, which is itself firmly bolted to the floor, Maggie slips quietly into the hall, taking her files with her. The MP follows and takes up station by the door.

“Esparza, if you hear even a whisper that sounds wrong to you, you give a yell and get back in there. I’ll be right behind you. Meantime, I’m going to get me a breath of real air.”

“Yes’m. It was close in there.”

“It was nasty in there, Corporal. The bastard’s a psychopath.”

*

Maggie lets herself out of the building into a day just on the cusp of spring. Melting ice makes runnels of brown water in the gutter that runs along the street that separates the brig from the old parade ground; by the steps of the building, a few blades of dessicated, grey-brown grass push up through the receding snow. The sun rides higher in the sky, veiled from time to time by cumulus clouds blowing northward on a warming breeze. If she were poetical, Maggie thinks, she would draw a metaphor out of that. Life returning. Springtime renewal. The beginning of a new cycle.

But the past months are too much with her. Too much is unexplained, too much beyond repair. To her the widening circles of snow melt over the lawn look like wounds, the transparent edges the dissolving margins of necrosis.

And there is, as yet, no medicine for this hurt, not in the pharmacology, not even, yet, in the spiritual power that has begun to make itself all but visible in Dakota Rivers. Maggie is a skeptic; a realist. Being a realist, unfortunately, sometimes forces one to recognize an uncomfortable and unprepared-for truth.

One of which, much as she hates to admit it, is that pond scum eating coprophage that he is, McCallum has a point. There is presently no adequate judicial mechanism to deal with him or with others like him. Hell, there’s no way to deal with a pickpocket beyond a person’s own fists. Or, more frighteningly, a person’s own gun.

It is not that the evidence is lacking. She opens her folder again, to remind herself why it is important to find a way to do justice, not just vengeance. The printed words convey so little of the timbre of the voices that spoke them, the emphases, the empty spaces that represent a woman’s struggle for control and coherence.

Her memory is not so handicapped. She will hear these cadences, these halting phrases, in her head until she dies.

Q: Please state your name for the record.

A: Monica D* * *

Q: What is your profession, Ms. D* * *

A: I’m—that is, I was—an artisan. I made jewelry.

Q: You were among the women liberated from the Rapid City CCA facility?

A: Yes.

Q: Can you tell me how that happened?

A: I was in my studio when the riot broke out. I hid in a storeroom in the back, under a tarp.

Q: They found you?

A. They set the studio on fire with my blowtorch. I ran out when I couldn’t stand the smoke any more.

Q: What happened at the jail?

A: I was raped. We all were. Almost all.

Q. Do you know why?

DEAD AIR ON TAPE: 1.4 MINUTES.

Q: Can I get you something, Ms. D* * *? Water? Tea?

A. No. No, thank you.

Q: Let me put it a bit differently. Did the—the men who assaulted you—ever give you any reason for it?

A: Reason! Reason!

Q: Ms. D* * *, I’m sorry, but I do need to ask. Did any of the men ever say anything that might tell you, and us, why the droids instigated the attacks?

A: No.

Q: Did the droids ever discuss the matter in your presence, or did you overhear anything that might indicate what their purpose was?

A: No.

Q: Can you come to any conclusion, given what you know, why they might have wanted to salvage and impregnate women of childbearing age?

A: No. Please, I can’t anymore . . . .

“Colonel.” The Corporal’s voice interrupts her memory. “The Major says they’re ready.”

Reluctantly Maggie levers herself up, feeling the persistent soreness in her right leg where the bullet grazed her. She wants nothing more than to be done with McCallum and all he represents, but she sees no prospect of that in any immediate, realistic future. She dusts a bit of soil and leaf mould off the seat of her uniform. “Coming,” she says.

Both men are seated when she re-enters the room. Only Boudreaux rises at her return, but something in the set of McCallum’s back is less defiant. Maggie glances at the Major and receives an almost imperceptible nod. She seats herslf at the table across from the prisoner and switches on a small recorder, stating her name and the names of those present, the date and time. Then she says, “Talk.”

McCallum shoots his legal representative a quick look; Boudreaux stares stonily back. After a moment he says, “All right. You wanted to know what the droids were up to. I can tell you.”

Maggie does not unbend by an ångstrom. “We’re waiting, Mr. McCallum.”

His knuckles go white under their tattoos, but he looks her straight in the eye. “You remember that the Jews and the A-Rabs never bought none of the domestic models, right? Just the heavy-duty military droids that don’t really look like humans.”

“I remember something about it,” Maggie answers, frowning. “Get to the point.”

“I am getting to the fucking point, you—” McCallum catches himself and glances down, away from Maggie’s hard stare. “They didn’t buy the MaidMarians and that junk because they’re imitation humans, get it? They’re images. And the Jew god and the A-Rab god Allah don’t want no images. The ones that are serious about it won’t even paint a goddam flower, much less somebody’s face.”

“I remember,” Maggie repeats. “Get—

“—to the fuckin’ point. I hear you.”

“Now.”

“So the goddam Jews and the goddam A-Rabs don’t got nothing but the military droids. They can control them all through their guvmint, their buncha fag princes royal families. And they can use those droids to control all the rest.” He looks up expectantly, as if every word he has said is self-explanatory.

Maggie waits.

”So they got the oil, right? And now they want to control all the rest of the world, so they use the drods to kill all us American and European Aryans off and probably the sp- uh, Hispanics and Ornamentals, too. That just leaves the Semite race alive.”

“That tattoo you’ve got there,” Maggie says, pointing to the impaled crown and cross. “That’s the Church of Jesus Christ Aryan, isn’t it? That bunch up of Neo-Nazis up in the hills in Montana?”

“Nazis?” The man’s voice climbs in genuine outrage. “Fuck, no! Old Schickelgruber himself was a Jew! Why the fuck you think he couldn’t make the Thousand Year Reich last even twenty? Naw.” He looks as though he wants to spit, glances around him and thinks better of it. “We’re White Nationalists. We’re Christians. That’s different.”

“I see.” Maggie steeples her fingers, willing herself to patience. If there is some chance, some minuscule chance, that this racist idiot has some clue about what has happened to the world, she is duty bound to hear it, even if McCallum makes her skin crawl. She promises herself a long, hot bath with double the lavender she ordinarily uses. “So why, having destroyed your Master Race, do these people want to breed more of you? How does that fit with your theory.”

McCallum leans across the table confidentially. It takes all Maggie’s willpower not to draw back. “They want to live forever.”

This is too much for Boudreaux. Even though he is an auditor, and, in Maggie’s view therefore used to lies, he apparently cannot quite stifle the sudden constriction in his throat. He covers his mouth and transforms the laugh into a cough. “Sorry, Colonel. Something caught in my throat.”

Damn right. Like this preposterous story. Aloud she says, “And this has what to do with—“ A wave of her hand encompasses the whole horror of the jails, the apparent breeding program, McCallum’s place in it.

“Spare parts. They grow the kids, see, then harvest their organs when they need ‘em. Replace a heart, replace a liver, a kidney—the bastards’ll never die. Just keep getting replacements