It is a better one to live.

Ahead of them, the APC’s slow even further and begin to fan out across the width of the interstate. Andrews brings the Jeep to a halt beside the truck that will house the command post, parked now facing back the way they have come so that Maggie, Kirsten and their staff will be able to see out the open back. Kirsten’s hand tightens on Koda’s almost convulsively. They will separate here.

Maggie gets out of the Jeep and begins to move toward the line of APC’s disgorging their loads of troops. Koda can hear the rattle of their gear as they jump to the pavement, the occasional "Moth-er-fuck!" as someone drops a piece of equipment or jostles the soldier ahead. She will have to sort out her own squad and lead them into position behind the rise that lifts dark against sky to the south. Andrews has also found urgent business ahead, leaving Koda and Kirsten a small moment of privacy in the midst of chaos.

"Dakota—" Kirsten breaks off, her voice catching. Then, "Be safe."

Koda lays a hand on the other woman’s cheek, feeling the helmet strap under her palm. Awkwardly, because the night sights project from above the rims of their helmets, she bends and kisses Kirsten gently. "Till morning," she says. "This is the easy part."

"I know," Kirsten answers. "I’ll just be glad when we’re through it." Under her hand, Koda feels her lover’s mouth quirk up in a wry smile. "Can’t wait to get to that hard stuff."

Koda kisses her again, lingeringly, and turns to go. Before she can move from where she stands, a whistling howl splits the air above them, a metallic shriek that is followed by another and another. Koda tracks the sound as it dopplers down the highway. A mile beyond them to the west, a flame-shot cloud rises from the pavement, roiling with the violence of the explosion. A second flares just beyond it, and a third.

"What the hell was that?" Kirsten demands of the sudden silence.

Maggie appears again beside them. "Howitzers." Even in the darkness, her grin is visible. "We just got lucky. The bastards are overshooting us."

* * *

Kirsten walks the line in the darkness, feeling as much as seeing the mass of the metal wall thrown up across the width of the interstate. The moon gives light enough to make out the crumpled metal rammed into barricades; here and there it glints off chrome trim or the arc of a hubcap. Here and there, too, it catches the shape of an M-16, where a soldier crouches at one of the firing slits left open or perches six feet up, straining to catch some glimpse of the enemy. They nod and salute as she passes, their movements visible only in the shift of shadow. At the other wall, the one a hundred yards behind this one, Maggie is doing the same thing, checking their defenses, rallying morale. In the hollows of culvert and the drainage ditch that runs along the road, soldiers crouch with grenade launchers held ready. Ideally, the enemy will not breach the first barricade. Practically, they are certain to do so. And when they do, they will be trapped between the two barriers, caught in crossfire from three directions. Kirsten cannot see the ambushers, but is aware of their eyes on her as she moves. The howitzer shells still scream overhead at regular intervals, still landing well behind them.

Kirsten grimaces at Manny, walking beside her. "I’m beginning to think they’re just trying to keep us awake."

The light gleams off the glass of his night scope as he nods. "Weakens morale. Or maybe they’re just trying to cut off our retreat by tearing up the road."

"Or maybe they’re just dumb. They’ve got to wonder why we’re not shooting back."

"Goddam metalheads. Who the fuck’s in charge over there, anyway?"

"Or what’s in charge."

"Yeah." Manny pauses a moment, listening. "Here comes another one."

The round shrieks as it flies over them, landing with force that shakes the ground beneath them where they stand, half a mile away. With the wall behind them, she cannot see the fireball rise. "Good thing we don’t plan on retreating. Maybe they’ll run out of ammo eventually."

"Nah. Ammo, small arms, they’re just like us. They’ve got more stuff than they have troops to shoot it."

Kirsten gives him a wry grin. "Well," she says, "that’s a comfort."

* * *

Koda moves among her troops, stepping without sound over the springy new grass that carpets the meadow below the rise that shields them from the interstate. She does not speak to them, but touches a shoulder here, an arm there, letting them feel her presence and her concern. They will not let her down; she must help them know that she will not fail them.

Just like an old war movie, she thinks with a fleeting bit of self-mockery. Patton, maybe or Prince Hal moving among his men before Agincourt, pretending to be a common soldier.

Except that she knows that it comes from no film, nor from any history book. This is instinct with her. Memory. She has never doubted that she was born to be a shaman. Has never doubted, either, that she required every moment of learning and practice her father and grandfather demanded of her. Her leadership has come to her as easily as her breath, and that frightens her.

Because I don’t know what I don’t know. And what I don’t know can get us all killed.

She shivers a little in the night wind. Another of the seemingly interminable hail of howitzer rounds passes to the north of her position, to impact somewhere on the other side of the main force’s position on the highway. Either they cannot find their targets or the Ellsworth force is within the big guns’ minimum range.

Or they want us to think we are. Spook us bad.

She completes her round of her squadron, finally settling on a rocky outcropping where she can just see over the crest edge of the embankment. The hollow beyond is lost in shadow. In the moonlight, she can just make out the irregular shapes that she knows to be the barricades and the strings of empty vehicles behind the second one. Kirsten will be there, operating the main communications net. It ought to be a place of greater safety, but Koda knows that it is not. None of them is any safer than any other, which is to say that none of them is safe at all.

The moon climbs as she watches, the stars pacing across the sky in their myriads. Ares the ram, Taurus the bull, constellations of spring, both associated with the turning of the seasons and the time of planting from time immemorial. Both, in their own time, gods who saw the rise of civilization and who may now see its ending.

The sweet scent of the grass comes to her, mingled with the sharper tang of gun oil. Above her, the sound of a thousand voices skims the air, and she looks up to see a wedge of geese pass before the moon, followed by another and another, the flocks arrowing north to the tundra’s edge to mate and rear their young. In the fall, their passage will blacken the sky as they fly south, fearing none but eagles, their human predators all but vanished.

A hand tugs at her sleeve, and she turns to find one of the Minot men just below her. "Ma’am, look," he whispers.

Koda follows his pointing finger to the meadow behind them. Fog is rising, billowing up from a small branch of the Cheyenne. "Damn," she says quietly. "God damn."

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN

TOWARD DAWN, THE big gun falls silent. The fog, rolling in from the stream to the south, blankets the highway and the ground to either side. The figures that emerge from it from time to time to speak to Kirsten, or to Maggie, trail mist through the back door of the command truck, like ghosts with fragments of shroud still clinging to them. At her post , numbers marches across the screen of Kirsten’s computer, tallying their strength, coding the position of their forces. Maggie, beside her, studies a map of the field, searching for the overlooked weakness that may give advantage to the enemy.

Tacoma and his armor have spread out on their left flank, reaching north into the open ground that once was a wheat field. Behind him lie the trenches and barricades that will funnel the enemy into the two-pronged trap so carefully laid for them. On their other flank, behind a rise to the south, Koda holds her force in reserve to hit the droids and their allies from the side and rear once they commit fully to the attack. The task of the center is simple: to take the brunt and hold. If they break the way to Ellsworth lies open, and humanity has no more defense.

Maggie glances at her watch, then looks up to catch Kirsten’s eye. "That’s twenty minutes since they’ve fired. They’re getting ready to move."

"Relay," Kirsten says, and Manny begins to speak quietly into the radio. Kirsten can make out a few of the Lakota words—mazawaka is "gun;" toka, "enemy" --and allows herself a fleeting second of satisfaction as the replies come in. "Han," she says, adding her own sign-off to Manny’s "Hau." Out of the corner of her eye, she catches Maggie grinning at her. For once she does not blush, her answering grin part pride, part the rising excitement that comes with the approach of battle.

"Hoka hey," Maggie says, "you’re learn—" She breaks off abruptly. "I hear them."

Kirsten’s touches a finger to her implants, boosting the volume. The low vibration, felt as much as heard, becomes the crunching of treads on asphalt, the high whine of powerful engines. "It’s their tanks," she says, just as the door bursts open on one of the corporals from the forward barricade.

"Col—I mean General, Ma’am! They’ve got their armor out front."

"We’re on it. Rivers," she raps out. "Tell your cousin we need two of his tank killers on the south side of the road ASAP. Herd them off toward our left flank."

"Ma’am." Manny turns back to the radio, rattling out orders in Lakota, this time too rapid for Kirsten to follow. She concentrates instead on the mounting crescendo of the enemy approach, sorting out the grinding of the armor, the steady stamp of mechanical and human feet. The low "whump!" of the lead tank’s cannon comes a fraction of a second before her own cry, the shock of explosion as the shell plows into the road just ahead of the barrier drowning out her voice.

"Shit!" Maggie swivels in her seat. "Kill the bastards! Now!"

* * *

Koda watches the slow approach of the enemy column as it makes its way down the highway toward the center of the battle line. The mist drifts green and eerie in front of her nightscope, allowing her hardly more than a glimpse of the lumbering shapes of tanks and Humvees where the headlights of the troop carriers strike them. The growl of their engines comes to her muffled by the fog, the vibration of their movement a steady rumbling in the earth. Behind them come ranks of marching troops, their height uniform, their guns all canted at identical angles, their step perfectly paced and synchronized. Droid soldiers. And behind them, followed by more heavy vehicles, supply trucks perhaps, come the fully militarized androids, some on treads like the tanks’, others on more human-looking legs with nothing else human about them.

A chill runs down her spine. The charge across the Cheyenne had been easy, the warrior spirit overriding her mind to take possession of heart and body and drive her like an arrow straight at the enemy. Here she must wait until the first blow of the droid advance falls against the Ellsworth center—against Kirsten, against Maggie and Manny—to close from behind in a pincer movement calculated to trap the enemy between their forces.

Then she had run her prey to earth. Now she must lie hidden, stalking silently until the time comes for the killing charge, each move calculated in cold blood to a margin without tolerance. It is the way of the warrior, the way of the cat.