Unknown - The_Growing_589064

It has become almost a phantom pain, like nerves still wired to the ghost of a missing limb. She has seen it in one or two of Tacoma’s friends who did not come home from battle with all they had left home with and who could or would not be fitted with cyberlimbs or old-fashioned prostheses. She has seen it, too, in her own surgical patients, cows whose hip muscles twitch, attempting to move a leg no longer there, a fox biting at a gangrenous tail she has been forced to amputate. She glances up at Maggie, intent now on the speaker across the table from her, her handsome features animated by an underlying lust for life so strong that Koda cannot begin imagine her dampened by injury or illness. And that, she tells herself, is a dangerous thing not to be able to imagine about a battle-companion, much less a battle-companion who is also a friend.

“I’ll do it,” says Manny, glancing up at Maggie.

“So will I,” adds the Colonel. “I’d like to have some of the same troops that have been with me from the mutiny, General. They may not be strictly local, but they’ve had experience in skirmish encounters and in liberating civilians. We may run into caches of prisoners along the way, too.”

“Anything you need, Colonel.” Under his standard-issue smile, Hart looks relieved. “This operation is in your hands. What about the rest of you? Are you with Colonel Allen, Sergeant Rivers?”

“Of course.” Tacoma grins. “Anyone who can handle Flyboy here”—he gestures toward his cousin—“has my utmost respect.”

”Doctor?”

Koda nods her assent and watches as the rest repeat the gesture. There is a strange sense of slippage in her mind, as if time has somehow faulted and folded back upon itself. Scouts for the U. S. Army—“friendlies” cooperating in their own ultimate destruction as the Plains grew barren not only of the buffalo but of the human nations who lived with them and by them.

She feels her hands clench like Manny’s. Never again. It will be different this time. With the thought comes the recognition—the unshakable certainty that she has come to recognize as the mark of spiritual knowledge—that the world has changed irrevocably. Whatever she, and Manny with her, and Tacoma, help to bring to birth out of the wreckage of the old order will resemble nothing that has gone before.

Lakota oyate.

A Lakota nation, but not only a nation of Lakota. It is the time of the White Buffalo, the return seen, if seen unclearly, by the Paiute holy man Wovoka, the fulfillment of prophecy.

She blinks to clear the thought, and finds Manny looking at her oddly. The General has resumed his briefing, something about forming small parties and communications problems. “Koda?” Her cousin’s voice is very soft. “You with us?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Thanks.”

His face is a question. Tacoma, across the table, is watching her intently. “I’m fine,” she repeats. “Later.”

Without warning, the door opens. Kirsten stands framed in the opening, Asimov alert beside her. Her face is white with the rage that flares in her eyes, colder than the wailing heart of a blizzard. She says nothing. Sound dies in the room as all eyes at the table turn toward her.

After an awkward moment, Hart breaks the silence. “Dr. King, are you looking for someone? My secretary can direct you, if you’ll excuse us?”

Still Kirsten says nothing. Koda can feel the anger as it comes off her in waves, almost palpable in its strength. And with it there is a power she has not felt in the other woman before, something similar to the force she has sensed in Maggie. For a moment she is absurdly relieved that Kirsten is not holding a weapon. There is an authority in her that Koda has never seen before, not even in the moment when she stalked up to Hart and struck him across the face after the bombing of Minot.

Ithanchan winan. The thought comes unbidden. This woman is a chief.

Koda starts to push her chair back and rise to her feet, but Tacoma is there before her. Straight as a birch tree, he snaps to attention and salutes the woman in the doorway. Eyes on Kirsten, he stands motionless.

Manny follows by a heartbeat, then Allen. “Madame Secretary,” the Colonel says pointedly.

The Marine and the Corporal are on their feet, then, together with the civilians. Koda’s heart rises and lodges somewhere in her throat. Finally Hart does what he must. He moves away from the wall and salutes. “At your service, Ma’am.”

Kirsten holds them all with her eyes for a moment longer. Then she gives a brief wave of her hand. “At ease.”

Hart pulls out his own chair at the head of the table for her, and Kirsten makes her way toward the front of the room. Asi paces with the dignity of a wolf beside her, for once ignoring his new friends. Koda’s memory flashes on her first meeting with the big dog in the snowy clearing, his formal pose atop the log suddenly connecting with an image older by thousands of years, the jackal-god stretched out on a mastaba bench before the shrine of Pharaoh. Anubis the Watcher. Guardian of the King.

Quietly Kirsten takes her seat, Asimov still standing at her side. “Thank you, General Hart,” she says. “Please begin the briefing.”

Koda watches as Tacoma struggles manfully not to grin, gives up and coughs, turning his face away from the defeated General. The sparkle in his eyes is contagious, though, and it spreads up and down the table like February sun on new-melted springwater. The General is visibly relieved when he is able, finally, to order the lights off and run the video again. As it plays a second time, Koda memorizes the terrain; shapes of hills, angles of the moon, bare trees lining a rise against the sky, the course of a freshening stream, contours of barren fields where the dark earth begins to break through the blanket of snow.

When it is over, the Colonel reviews the information that cannot be gotten onto film, and Kirsten listens without comment. When Maggie falls silent, she says, “General, is it your estimation that this base is the only regional defense installation still operable in this area?”

“Ma’am, it is.” He gestures back toward the map. “If Ellsworth goes under, the droids will not only have access to all our remaining armaments but will be able to overcome any resistance the surviving civilian population can offer. So far they have no air power, possibly because other installation commanders have disabled their planes; possibly because some, like Colonel Allen and her squadron, were in the air at the time of the mutiny; possibly because some aircraft were destroyed in the fighting. Possibly, too, because they have no human pilots, and none of the military droids, that I’m aware of, are programmed to fly. We can’t allow those assets to fall into their hands. Nor can we abandon our remaining civilian population.”

“I agree.” Kirsten glances down the table at volunteers that are suddenly hers, her gaze lingering on Koda for an infinitesimal fraction of a second before moving on. Again there is that small, phantom pain in her heart, coupled with a sense of finality. It is not just the world that has changed, she realizes. It is my world, and the change is forever.

“Colonel.”

“Ma’am.”

“Organize your scout parties. Put me on one of them.”

All hell breaks loose. Koda finds herself wanting to shout with the rest, but clamps her teeth shut on words she knows will be useless.

“Dr. King—“

”Madame Secretary—“

“Ma’am, beg your pardon, but you can’t go. You’re too valuable to risk.” Hart wins out above the clamor. “You’re the only one who has any hope at all of shutting these godammed—I beg your pardon, Ma’am—these droids down. I can’t allow—that is, you can’t put yourself in danger.”