Unknown - The_Growing_589064

The crowd begins to mill, movement coalescing somewhere around its center. Some of them clearly do have problems with that, and have come here in hopes of finding someone to tell them what to do. Others, their faces clearly relieved even in the flat glare of the floodlights, have heard what they needed to hear. Slowly, infinitely slowly, its members begin to bleed off, backing out of the gate on foot, others getting into their vehicles to inch away in reverse. The MP’s begin to pace them, moving in line, shields locked in a solid wall.

Kirsten raps out, “Hold! Let them go voluntarily.”

The line halts as if frozen, and as the last of the would-be mob filters out, the duty guards roll the second panel of the gate into place. It locks with a soul-satisfying clang.

Maggie jumps down from the top of the cab, stumbling a little on her right leg.

Koda slips a hand under her arm to steady her. “You okay?”

A smile plays for a moment about Maggie’s mouth. “Rapists, mobs, oh yeah, just a day in the freakin’ life.” To the MP Captain, she says, “I want half a dozen more guards on this gate and as many on the side entrance. I want staggered patrols all around the perimeter. M-60s’. We’re in lockdown. Nobody gets in and nobody gets out until we know precisely who’s on Base and who has what useful skill.”

“Yes, Ma’am.” The Captain salutes and turns to sort his troops out into patrols.

“And Captain,” Kirsten adds. “If anybody comes over the fence, shoot to kill. This Base was a restricted area before; it’s a restricted area now.”

“Ma’am.” Again, he salutes. “I’m on it.”

Asi, standing down from red alert with an ease granted to none of the humans, begins to wave the plume of his tail. Whining, he paws at Koda’s leg, then noses at her pocket, looking for treats..

Kirsten reaches down to ruffle his fur. “He’s right,” she says. “It’s past suppertime. Let’s go home.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

FOR THE THIRD time in less than an hour, Dakota looks toward the window, then frowns distractedly before returning to her duties. The base vet might have been an excellent diagnostician, but his office skills were decidedly lacking. She has had to send two sets of volunteers on trips to the nearby towns to raid the vet facilities there and return with any usable supplies they can, and it still isn’t close to being enough. As groups of people continue to stream onto the base, they bring their pets with them; pets who have often-times suffered as much, if not more, than their owners. The clinic is bursting at the seams; full of frostbitten dogs, half-mauled cats, dehydrated turtles, constipated snakes, sick birds of all kinds, and a number of more exotic species, along with several army canines who are slowly recovering from injuries suffered during the initial battle with the androids.

With a soft grunt, she tosses the pencil down and pushes away from the desk, running weary fingers through her disordered hair. She checks the window again, then the clock. Something is nagging at her, and has been for the past hour or so, but she can’t put a finger on what it is, and that fact is driving her just shy of nuts.

“What?” she barks in response to a light tap on her office door.

The door slowly opens and a curly-mopped young woman pokes her head in, expression slightly nervous. “You asked me to let you know when I walked Condor, Doctor.” Condor is one of the army dogs who had taken several bullet wounds to the belly and flank. It has been touch and go with him for the past weeks but he appears now well on the road to recovery. “He did fine. I think he can be discharged in a day or two.”

Nodding, Koda forces a smile to her face. “Thank you, Shannon. You’ve done very well with him.”

The young woman blushes under the quiet praise, then calms, her eyes concerned. “Are you…okay?”

“Mm?” Koda drags her gaze away from the window yet again. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“I asked if you were alright. You seem…distracted?”

“Oh.” She shakes her head slightly, clearing it. “No. Just,” one hand waves toward the paper-strewn desktop, “trying to deal with this mess. I never was all that fond of paperwork.”

Shannon brightens. “Well, I might have a solution for that.” At Dakota’s raised eyebrow, she continues. “I have a friend, Melissa, who used to be an Admin Assistant for Kuyger-Barren-Micholvski, the law firm? She’s been going crazy with nothing to do. I’m sure she’d be happy to pitch in, if you like.”

This time, Koda’s smile is more genuine. “I could use all the help I can get.”

“Great! I’ll let her know tonight.”

“Fair enough.” Dakota rises from the chair with fluid grace and grabs her Stetson from the coat rack and settles it on her head, sweeping her hair behind her broad shoulders. “I’m going for a walk. Hold down the fort, will ya?”

“With pleasure, Doc—Dakota.”

*

Maggie sorts through the folders in her briefcase as she waits for the clock on the wall to tick officially around to 11:00. Like the conference room, like everything else in the Headquarters building, the walls and floors are grey with occasional Air Force blue accents. A silk ficus to one side of the General’s door and a faux pothos ivy under the window offer the only relief. At her workstation, the General’s secretary bites her lip and dabs at a drop of sweat rounding up under her heretofore perfect mascara. Kimberley has always seemed to Maggie to be forty-going-on-twenty-five, with her acrylic nails and seamless make-up, short skirts and years-out-of-fashion high heels. Now her heart-shaped face is pinched with effort as she struggles with an old-fashioned manual typewriter, resurrected from God-knows-what basement or storage building. An equally antiquated adding machine perches on the edge of her desk, the kind with a handle that is pulled after each entry to crank up a sum or tax percentage. Maggie recognizes it only because her accountant grandfather kept one of the things on top of the barristers’ bookcase in his office, part of a collection that included such other relics as a slide rule and a solid-black metal telephone with a rotary dial that clicked satisfyingly when she stuck her finger into the perforated disk, pulled it around to the stop and watched it spin back..

That had been nearly forty years ago. A lifetime now; an eon. At five she did not go in for elaborate existential metaphors. She is not pleased that she has begun to see them everywhere now.

The sense of temporal dislocation that has plagued her intermittently for the past week has begun to solidify into a reality she is still not quite prepared to face. Finally and irrevocably, the world has changed. The crisis is not temporary, not just a matter of devising a widget or developing an anti-viral, biological or cyber, that will allow the technological world to right itself onto its accustomed axis and go on spinning. Even if Kirsten King manages to cause every last remaining droid to self-destruct in a single ecstatic nanosecond, there is no way to restore much, maybe most, of what has been lost. And here, an icon of that brave new world folding back into its own past, is a goddamed Olivetti typewriter, its uneven clack of metal keys without doubt the harbinger of more and worse to come.

And aren’t we Ms. Congeniality this morning? C’mon Allen, snap out of it.

Though she has not put it so dramatically to herself, she is here to try to save a man’s life. She can afford neither depression nor woolgathering in the middle of such a sensitive rescue operation.

Because we can’t afford to lose anybody now. Not even an asinine General who bombs first and asks questions later. Not even couple dozen decent citizens of Rapid City who had come within an angstrom of morphing into an out-of- control mob less than eighteen hours ago. Every asset must be deployed and its utility maximized.