It is what she does not know that frightens her. "All right!" she shouts, stepping up to the crest of the ridge. "Move out!"

* * *

Kirsten crouches among the snipers strung out in a line from the south end of the wall to the drainage ditch beside the road. The tramping of mechanical feet, marching in inhumanly perfect unison, comes to her as a steady drumbeat, a vibration through her bones. Grenades rain down on them from behind the barricade, but do not slow them. They are not programmed to tend their fallen companions; their survival overrides, designed to remove them from a hopeless situation, will not kick in until they are trapped between competing priorities. Walking into a minefield or getting picked off by snipers, for instance.

Underneath their steady cadence, perhaps audible to no one else, the steady grinding of treads comes to her. Not so heavy as the tanks, nor even Bradleys; the next wave to break against their defenses will be the heavy-duty military droids.

And with them, the counterprogrammed models whose mission is to destroy their own kind. Please-- Kirsten stumbles over the prayer. She is a scientist, agnostic, does not believe in the god of her childhood, perhaps never did. She bites her lip, drawing blood salt on her tongue. Listen, Ina, Tega, Wa Uspe—Uspewika—Whothehellever. Listen. We need help. Not just for us. For all the earth. If you have a stake in this, too—then let the goddamned things blow up on schedule. Please.

A ripple of laughter runs through the back of her mind, partly human, partly not. Appealing to enlightened self-interest, are you? Fight without attachment, Iktomi Zizi of the Lakota. Trust your actions and move on.

For instance, you might blow away a couple of droid sympathizers—right--about—now.

The first rank of the enemy steps into the minefield. The roar of multiple explosions echoes off the metal barricade, doubling and redoubling as smoke, laced with fire, billows out into the mist and pieces of fragmented droid clang off the wall to take down more of their comrades on the rebound. Kirsten cannot make out individual figures, but she can see, green in her night sight, swirls of motion where intact droids or their human allies have broken formation to veer away to the side of their inexorably advancing column. Kirsten aims into the middle of one such vortex and is rewarded with a man’s scream, high-pitched and cold with his death. She seeks a second target and finds it as a soldier stumbles blindly into their position; she fires point-blank into his face and shoves the body aside with her rifle’s butt.

From the ditch come sounds of a brief struggle, then two shots, then more fire into the mist. Behind her, Manny alternately swears and shoots, swears and shoots again. "Don’t let ‘em get down into the pasture! Koda won’t be able to see the bastards coming—they’ll give away her position!"

Kirsten’s world shrinks to the small space before her, where the mist hides an enemy she cannot see. She fires until her magazine is empty, shoves another one home keeps firing.

There is only the enemy and her finger on the trigger.

She kills coldly, human and nonhuman alike. Without attachment.

CHAPTER FORTY EIGHT

THE NIGHT SCOPE shows the mist that surrounds them as green wraiths, the uneven ground beneath their feet as an uncertain patchwork of black and green. Koda can see the man on either side of her and little else. From time to time she catches a glint off the gear of a troop a few feet further down the loose skirmish line, but none of them can spare much attention for anything but the jutting rocks and tussocks of thick grass that can send them tumbling, turn or break an ankle. The one good thing, Koda reflects wryly, is that they do not need to see where they are going. The sound of battle draws them steadily toward the highway, where they will attack the droid army on its vulnerable—and with luck, unsuspecting—flank.

They are perhaps halfway across when the minefield goes up. A collective gasp runs up the line, punctuated by one clear "Jesus god damn!" and a grunt as someone elbows her vocal compatriot in the ribs.

Except as a matter of discipline, the exclamation hardly matters. The roar as half a hundred claymores and as many Bouncing Betties go off in chorus will drown anything but the report of a big gun. In the red-lit chaos ahead of them, Koda can make out the vague shapes of bodies pitched into the air, their severed limbs arcing above them to rain down on their fellows and clatter against the barricade. Others, still apparently on their feet, make for the edge of the highway and relative safety, only to run into a solid line of rifle and small arms fire. The fog muffles their screams to vague cries out of nightmare, distant, contextless.

Without warning, a burst of white light cuts through the mist along the highway, etching the scene for a microsecond into her memory: scattered arms, legs, some human, some not; the asphalt slick with blood; craters gouged into the roadway. And it shows her two things more. Behind the ranks of cannon fodder, the military droids grind inexorably on toward the wall, the hard light from the phosphorus shell sheeting off their metallic hides. And along the edge of the road, a troop stands looking directly toward the gorge, raising his gun to his shoulder.

"Down!" she bellows. "Keep moving!"

Dropping to knees and elbows, she humps her way over the damp earth, crawling a space, then levering herself up to a crouching run. Behind her, where she had stood a handful of seconds before, an M-16 round kicks up the water in a small puddle. A second whistles over her head to land silently in the earth beyond. She jabs the man to her right, harder than she had meant because she cannot judge distance. "Hold fire. Don’t give ‘em our position till we have to. Pass it on." She gives the same message to the sergeant on her left.

The shooter at the edge of the road has apparently been joined by others. Enemy fire quickens, becomes heavier, pelting down on the length of the line. Koda puts her head down and keeps on crawling.

* * *

The M-1’s and Bradleys run with their lights high now, lurching over the uneven ground at top speed, spraying dirt from under their treads. Tacoma’s Jeep bucks and yaws in their wake, throwing him alternately against the straps across his chest and the unyielding back of his seat. In the occasional beam of light that rakes over him, he can see the steering wheel spinning under Jackson’s left hand, his right taut-knuckled on the gear shift. It occurs to Tacoma that after this he will never need a chiropractor if he lives to be a hundred and ten. He might never need a dentist either, except for his helmet’s chinstrap. Pitching his voice just under a bellow to make himself heard above the din of the surrounding engines, he yells, "Did you"—thump!—"drive like this"—bang!—"when you went"—slam!—"with Kirsten to"—whump!—"Minot?"

"You kidding, man?" Darius favors him with a thousand-watt grin for a split second, then turns his eyes back to the road. "And have that sister of yours"—he pauses to steer around a large chunk of limestone—"hang me up by my heels and skin me?"

"The General’d—get you—first. Koda’d—just take—your hair!"

A shell from one of the droid tanks sails overhead, to gouge a crater in the field to their right. Turning to look behind, Tacoma can see their halogen lights where they punch through the fog. What he cannot see, and with luck the enemy cannot either, is the other half of his armored cavalry, running dark behind them, ready to cut them off once the lead units lure them onto the Interstate and into the trap that has been laid for them.

"Pull us off when we get to the road," Tacoma shouts. "Get us in under the overpass!"

"You gonna lead from behind?"

"You got it!"

The tanks at the front of the column take a sudden hard left, ploughing their way over the soft shoulder to the highway access road. As they sweep up the on ramp, Jackson steers the Jeep out of the line and into the shelter of the huge struts and pylons holding up the highway above the Elk Creek interchange. The racket as the behemoths lumber up the slope is beyond deafening, and Tacoma hunkers down and covers his ears as they pass. The metal plates above him rattle against their bolts, and it seems to him that every bone in his body hangs loose, clattering against its neighbor. Then the last of them is up and racing west, the whine of their engines fading with their speed.

The silence lasts for perhaps a minute. Tacoma savors it, the first respite they have had since the droid howitzers began their siege. Then, "Here they come," Jackson says quietly.

Bursting out of the fog with engines howling, the enemy armor follows their own forces up onto the highway. As the first of them commits to the ramp, Tacoma feels his shoulders go slack with relief. Bait taken.

Perhaps five minutes after the last of them has passed, Tacoma hears the growl of their second unit’s engines. "Here we go," he says, and Jackson keys the engine and the lights, steering the Jeep out onto the access road and into the lead as the half dozen M-1’s speed for the ramp. "Gonna send all those good little droids home to cyber-Jeezus!"

* * *

When the smoke from the mines clears, Maggie looks down on a scene straight out of Hieronymus Bosch by Bill Gates. Mechanical body parts litter the highway below the wall: a leg with its struts and dangling wires jutting up out of an asphalt crater here; a head there, recognizably non-human only by the absence of blood; impaled on a spar of steel protruding from the barricade, a hand still clutching an automatic rifle. Fanned out on the margins lie the human casualties, most of them picked off by snipers as they tried to flee. To her right, from the north lip of the gorge which Dakota must cross, she can hear the pop and rattle of rifle fire. Not good. Even in the fog, even with enemy shooters they can pick off by sound, Koda and her troops are at a disadvantage, their whole traverse exposed. And the phosphorus shell would have shown them to their enemies, mercilessly trapped in its glare.

Mentally, Maggie reels through a catalogue of her troops. The worst of the attack is yet to come; the full-bore military droids have halted their advance, but the lull will not last, not beyond the few minutes required for them to assess their losses. She can, perhaps, spare a platoon.

Clambering down from her vantage point halfway up the wall, she snares one of the men crouched at its foot. His helmet shows three stripes; his shirt pocket proclaims him McGinnis, Ralph. "Corporal, I need you to carry a message to Dakota Rivers in the gorge. Can you do it?"

McGinnis’ face, pale beneath its black grease-paint, goes paler still. But he snaps off a salute. "Yes, Ma’am!"

"Good man. Ask her if she needs reinforcing. I can send her a dozen troops if she does."

He salutes again and is gone.

Maggie takes advantage of the momentary calm to walk the length of the barricade again. Supply runners race past her, carrying ammunition and grenades. She is halfway back to her post when she hears the grinding of treads on pavement. Her heart bangs once against her rib cage, then steadies. They will hold because they must. A passing runner carries grenades; she snags a belt of them and a launcher, finds a gap in the wall big enough to admit its muzzle. She loads and waits.

* * *

There is no time. Koda has no idea how long she has been humping over the wet earth of the gorge. The new grass, slick with the mist, slides easily beneath her body. The musty scent of sodden vegetation mingles with the sharper smell of black powder and cordite drifting down from the battle. Direct fire from above has tapered off, become sporadic as the enemy has either given up wasting ammunition or has found more immediate matters to occupy them.

Or simply decided to pick them off later, when they come into visible range. They had been on the edge of the burst of light from the Willie Peter, but almost surely the enemy has marked their position. It is not a comforting thought.

From the highway comes the sound of small arms fire and the occasional concussion of a grenade. The mines have gone up in a roar, presumably taking out the first wave of droids. For a moment the fog had glowed red, then settled into its pervasive grey, hiding the road and what she hopes is the successful completion of the first phase of the battle plan.

"Hey, Chief.’ The sergeant appears out of the void to her left, his helmet and night scope protruding over his eyes giving the shape of some early cinematic Martian. His hoarse whisper is the sound of wind in dry grass. "You got any idea where we are?"

"About halfway, I think," she answers. "Ground’s leveling off."

"We need to pick it up, Ma’am. If we’re caught down here once they get past whatever’s keeping ‘em busy up there, or they start picking us up with the infra-red, we’re fucked."

The thought is not new. They need to be in position when the ringer droids blow, and position is within seconds of the highway. "Pass the word down," she says. "Tell the troops to get to their feet. We have to risk it."

"Ma’am." She can just see his form rise and lengthen as she levers herself to her own feet, feeling rather than seeing the woman on the other side of her do the same, the order rippling down the line. She plods on, straining her senses to pick up the breathing of the troops closest to her, the faint variations on grey nothingness where the fog eddies and pools.

She picks up the thudding footfalls from yards away. Half-running, half-stumbling, a man solidifies from the mist, his hands up. "Friendly, Doc! Friendly!"

Her M-16 slaps down into her hands and is leveled at him before the first word is out. The sargeant and the man next to him haul the newcomer down to his knees, pulling back his collar to inspect his neck. It is clean flesh; no silver collar. "Doc Rivers?"

"That’s me." Koda does not lower her weapon.

"McGinnis, Ma’am, Third Montana Reserves. General Allen’s compliments, Ma’am, and do you need any reinforcements? She says to tell you she can spare a platoon."

The droids Kirsten programmed to destroy their own kind have not yet detonated. For the first time, Dakota allows herself to think that they might not. If their destruct program fails, Maggie will need every weapon, every pair of hands she can muster at the wall. She makes her decision almost without conscious thought. "Tell the General we’re doing fine, Corporal. We’ll see her topside."

"Chief." It is the sergeant. "We’re spread thin."

"No." Koda’s voice is firm. "If we take none of the troops from the main front, they’ll have a better chance of holding when we hit the metalheads from the side and drive them against Allen’s line. Tell the General we’re doing well, Corporal. There’s no other message."

"Ma’am." The Corporal salutes and disappears once again into the fog.

"Sergeant," says Koda. "Pass the order to pick up the pace. We need to get at least part way up that slope before they recoup. Continue to hold fire until I say otherwise."

There is a small pause, and Koda shifts the muzzle of her rifle slightly. She cannot tolerate disobedience, or even discussion. Not now.

Even in the fog, though, she can see the sudden grin break across his face. "Ma’am, you got brass ones, if you don’t mind my saying so."

"I don’t mind. Now move it."

The fog swallows him again as he begins to move along the line. They have passed the mid-point; land begins to rise again, punctuated by deep ruts where snow has melted off the flat surface above, cutting down the side of the embankment and carrying gravel and asphalt pellets with it across the winter-bare ground. The treacherous footing slows them. Koda swears softly when her ankle turns, pitching her down on her right hand and knee. Up and down the line, she can hear the crunch of pebbles under boots, the troops’ heavy breathing as they negotiate the ragged slope. To her right, she sees a woman pitch forward onto her face, tripped up by a jagged ridge of flint justting out from earth. The man between them grabs for her, helping her to her feet.

She sees them. Faintly, she sees them. The fog is beginning to thin with the dawn. Carried on a gathering wind, its tendrils whip by her face, scattered in the growing light.

With the realization comes a crack of gunfire from above, the enemy shooting almost straight down on them. There is no point in silence now. "Return fire!" she bellows. "Hose ‘em!"

Up and down the line, the M-16’s open up on full automatic, their rattle punctuated by the clang of rounds off metal and the sharp, strangled scream of a man going down somewhere to her right. Koda braces her weapon against her shoulder and empties the magazine at the enemy still invisible along the highway shoulder. She wrenches it free, slams in another, and keeps firing as she storms up the slope. Without warning the ground shakes beneath her, tumbling her back onto her butt, and the wave of sound washes over her, huge, apocalyptic, the thunder at the end of the world. Fog glows crimson and burns away, leaving clouds of red-shot black smoke roiling over the battlefront. Kirsten’s trap has sprung.

She scrambles back up onto her feet, seeing for the first time the line of soldiers stretched out along the lip of the rise above her. "Come on!" she yells at her troops. "Take the fuckers down!"

Yelling and whooping, they charge up the slope, into the hell of lead blazing down on them.

* * *

Tacoma’s Jeep speeds along amid the thunder of his armored cavalry. The smaller vehicle darts in among the Bradleys and M-1’s, nimble as a dolphin among great whales. The wind of their passage tilts his helmet back on his head, snags his braids from under its rim and sends his loosened hair flying behind. Here on the road, steadily rising as they race west, the low sun has begun to burn through the fog, tingeing the mist with a strange, golden iridescence. Ahead of them, the enemy still runs blind, though the sun will soon show them what even their high-intensity spotlights cannot. Neither will there be any cover for this rear half of his split force, should the enemy have the wit to look behind them. Given a few more minutes, though, that will not matter.

Muffled by mist and distance, the roar of guns comes to them on the wind. "That’s it!" Tacoma yells. He keys his mike and shouts into it. "Slow down! Form a line across the road! Make it tight!"

The behemoths around them lurch as their drivers stand on their brakes. They maneuver the M-1s into a long-legged, inverted V that rapidly becomes a flying wedge in reverse. Bradleys take their places on the on the fringes. There is barely space for an armed infantryman to squeeze between them, no more than a meter from vehicle to vehicle. A second, staggered line closes in behind. Jackson swerves the Jeep to take up the outlier position along the south flank, and the line begins its inexorable grind forward, to take the enemy from behind.

"We got ‘em!" Jackson shouts in his ear above the lower, but still deafening, racket.

"We got ‘em as long as they don’t turn and bust back through!"

A second volley rolls over them, louder, more than one cannon this time. Up ahead, a column of roiling black smoke rises above the road, burning fuel. As it coils upward into the thinning fog, the tank’s ammunition goes up in a series of short explosions. There is no way to tell yet if it is one of their own or an enemy. Cannon reverberates around them, rattling the glass in the windshield, shattering the air to echo off the hills that rise, black against the sky, to the north of the highway.

Just ahead of them, the road curves sharply to the right. As they round the bend, Tacoma can see the two lines of armor, his own drawn up in tight formation to block the path westward, the other straggled out across the front, individual units angled to try to wedge their way between their opponents. Some have forced their way so close that they cannot use their cannon or swivel their turrets. Behind the enemy line, the torn hulk of a burning tank lies heaved onto its side, ragged holes in its armored carapace, its treads still running clanking over its wheels. The smoke stinks of diesel fuel and scorched meat.

"Damn, looks like a bunch of dinosaurs fighting!" Jackson shouts. "Those things with horns on their heads!"

Tacoma laughs. "And here comes T. Rex to finish ‘em off!" He thumbs the button on his com. "All units, close in and fire at will--just watch your range!"

* * *

Kirsten lies flat on the shoulder of the road, her elbows propping her up, as she methodically searches the thinning fog for more solid patches. The mines have done their work on the first lines of the enemy. The casualties are mostly droids, but the severed fingers of a human hand dangling from a metal strut in the wall testify that humans had been among them. Kirsten has no time for them, no pity. She knows better than most what bargain they might have made, the safety of a family, the remnant of a life, even a life of slavery. Other renegades string out the line on the edge of the gorge, mingled with android troops.

Kirsten picks off another; behind her Manny’s rifle stitches a line of fire up and down the road’s shoulder, steady and careful. From several hundred meters away, her implants pick up the faint whine of the military droids’ motors. They are still waiting, perhaps allowing the Ellsworth forces to expend time and ammunition before closing in for the kill.

Got a surprise for ya, motherfuckers. Any time now. She sights carefully and picks off two more hostiles.

The explosion, when it comes, rattles the scrap metal in the wall that looms above her, and one sniper, less securely perched than he might have been, slips down to land sprawled beside her, shaken loose by the blast. "God damn!" he yells above the echoing blasts. "What the hell was that?"

"Suicide droids!" Manny shouts back. "Takin’ their friends with ‘em!"

Kirsten smiles tightly, feeling the knots in her shoulders relax a minute fraction. The program worked, and however many metalheads come grinding down on them, it will be fewer than it would have been before. Maybe the difference will be enough to make a difference. At least give them a better chance. In the lull that follows, she hears human voices off to her right. Koda’s troops, closing in to trap the enemy between their force and Maggie’s.

The pitch of the droid’s motors changes suddenly. Mingled with their high humming,

Kirsten can make out the tramp of flat metal feet, the snarl of treads biting into the pavement. "They’re coming!" she yells over her shoulder at Manny. "Send someone to tell the General!"

The freshening wind tears at the last rags of the fog. She can see them now, the sun glinting off their titanium hides as they grind toward the barricade. The first volley from their M-60 caliber arms clangs against the wall, a drumming like fist-size hail on the roof. Grenades plow into the pavement ahead of them, some landing in their ranks to knock the droids over onto their sides. The ones on treads cannot rise, and lie with their wheel belts spinning, like upset beetles. Others step or crawl over them, unheeding.

A LAAWs rocket tears into the line, sending bright fragments flying in the growing light, like spray off a fountain. To her right, the snipers on the edge of the gorge pot steadily away at Dakota’s troops as they attempt to scale the slope, but Kirsten can also see that they are beginning to fall in greater and greater numbers before Koda’s advance. So far, so good.

There is a microsecond’s warning, no more, as the howitzer shell screeches toward them. It rips through the barricade to land somewhere in the midst of the line of vehicles drawn up between the two walls, sending metal debris and bodies fountaining into the air, the roar of the explosion rolling on and on, unfolding like the cloud of smoke and flame that billows up from the pavement. A section of the barricade groans, its rammed steel blocks grating against each other, and very slowly, almost gracefully, begins to slide toward the ground. The treaded droids crawl up its slope, followed more slowly by the flat-footed models. Too close. Kirsten swivels her rifle to aim at the optic shield of the nearest, but Manny grabs her belt from behind and jerks her out of the way just as a twisted chunk of steel tumbles down to l and where she had crouched a moment before. A cartwheeling fragment strikes her helmet, and darkness, sudden as thunder, closes in about her.

CHAPTER FORTY NINE

THE WEDGE OF armor closes inexorably in on the enemy where they stand locked with the first line. The Bradleys swing wide, speeding to block escape off the shoulders of the road, while the crews of the advancing M-1’s crank up the angle of their cannon to lob their shells high and short into the droid tanks. Hatches on the roofs of the Bradleys crack open, sprouting the long tubes of tank-killing missiles. As Tacoma watches, two of the launchers send their warheads streaking toward a single enemy tank, slamming through its armor and sending it up in a ball of fire and smoke. A cannon shell lands short of a second, gouging a crater in the pavement but doing little other harm. A second finds its mark, and a Bradley fragments, spewing glass and bolts, flesh and blood, for a radius of half a hundred meters in all directions. Red spatters cover the tread and turret of one of their own tanks near it; a human crew in that one. An enemy tank flounders as it attempts to turn its guns on the closing force behind it, the turret still mobile but its cannon wedged against the bulk of its neighbor. Its gears snarl like a rabid thing, snared and careless with its pain.

A missile takes one of the Ellsworth Bradleys in the side, tearing open its plating and spinning off the road to tumble down the embankment and come to rest with a final clatter thirty yards away. A second sweeps up from behind to take its place in the wedge, blocking off an APC that suddenly breaks from its hulking companions to attempt to dart through the narrow gaps in Tacoma’s line. The Bradley rams it headon, turning it end for end and slamming it into the path of an enemy M-1 as it attempts to extricate itself from its deadly embrace with one of its own allies. A shell from the center tank in the wedge settles its difficulty, blowing the fuel tanks of both and sending their ammo up in a series of short, sharp explosions that leave the highway pocked with craters and scars on the flanks of friend and enemy alike.

Tacoma, watching, takes a quick count. The enemy are outnumbered and blocked off. It comes to him that the battle is decided; has in truth been decided ever since the enemy took the bait and followed the forward unit onto the highway. It remains only to end it as quickly as may be. Keying his com to universal frequency, Tacoma shouts into the microphone, " Ellsworth, hold your fire! Droid forces, surrender! You are surrounded, with no hope of escape! Humans among you will have the protections of prisoners of war! Androids will be reprogrammed! Surrender now and spare yourselves!"

And, though he does not say so, spare the tanks and fighting vehicles that they may well need another day. No one will be manufacturing any more anytime soon.

There is no response. More quietly Tacoma adds, "You have sixty seconds." He glances down at his watch, and the luminous sweep of the second hand. "Mark. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven. . . .."

On thirty, Tacoma raises his hand to signal resumption of the attack. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Jackson’s taut face, watching not him but looking beyond for signs of compliance or attack. On twenty-five, Jackson guns the engine, ready to move again. Tacoma’s breath comes short and hard. Please, Ina, let this work. And on twenty, a tank hatch cracks open and two humans climb out, waving a white T-shirt.

A wide grin splits Jackson’s face. "Well dayyyum. And I thought your sister was the magic one."

Tacoma’s pounding heart and lungs slow toward normal. He grins back. "No magic to it. Appeal to enlightened self-interest’ll do it every time." He climbs out of the Jeep and signals the Bradley crews to dismount. "Let’s round ‘em up."

Twenty minutes later, the human prisoners have been separated from the droids, hogtied and deposited by the side of the road for later pickup. The androids, no more than half a dozen, pose a different problem. They stand together, guarded by two troopers armed with grenades. Tacoma glances around the field, where his men and women are busy untangling the traffic snarl and lining up the enemy armor for a run back to the barricades. They cannot spare anyone to stand guard over the droids, cannot leave them unsupervised, either.

"Waste ‘em, Major. You don’t need to keep a promise to no damned metalhead."

Tacoma turns to confront the speaker, a tanker of twenty years and four wars’ experience. "If I do that, then the humans have no way of trusting my word, either. You know the code."

"That was then, Major." There is only weariness in the man’s leathery face; no cruelty, no vengeance. "Now is different."

Tacoma nods, agreeing. He has fought in Kashmir and in the horn of Africa, in Macedonia and Korea. This war is different beyond imagination. A warrior’s honor is still worth preserving. He claps the man on the shoulder. "Thanks, Reilly. All the same, get one of those Bradleys off the road. We’ll pull the wires out of the engine and lock ‘em in it till we get back."

Shaking his head, Reilly moves to obey, and Tacoma turns his attention back to reforming his line. Beside him, Jackson says, "That was a tough one."

"That was a necessary one."

"That’s not in the UCMJ, y’know."

Tacoma gives him a half smile. "Different code. Lakota."

The wedge forms up again, this time pointing east and augmented by the captured armor. By the side of the road, Reilly has a fighting vehicle pulled to the side, its engine on the ground beside it. Not one to do things by halves, Reilly. Tacoma, satisfied with his formation, makes one last circuit to check for external damage. Jackson shadows him, one hand on his sidearm, his eyes on the knot of androids preparing to load into the Bradley. Tacoma gives him a grin. "Relax, Darius. Nothing’s going to hap—"

He never finishes the sentence. With a yell, Jackson springs, flattening him to the tarmac, rolling over and over away from the spot where a spray of M-16 rounds clangs against the side of an APC and the air shudders with the explosion of half a dozen grenades. When the roaring stops, he is lying on his face in the loose dust of the road shoulder, with Jackson on top of him. He lifts his head slightly, gasping for air. "What—What the fuck—was that?"

"Reilly," Darius says shortly. He pushes up to his feet, leaning down to help Tacoma up. "You okay?"

Tacoma takes a quick mental inventory. No blood, nothing broken. "Yeah. Just winded." He grins at Jackson. "Thanks, man."

"Yeah, well." Oddly, Darius does not meet his eyes, finding a sudden interest in the scorched hole in the embankment where Reilly had stood. Reilly himself lies yards off, his rifle gone, his helmet and the back of his head crushed. A pry bar lies among the remains of the droids. "That’s gratitude for you. At least we won’t have to deal with the metalheads now."

"You okay?"

"’M fine." Jackson tilts his helmet back, and for a moment his eyes meet Tacoma’s. Fear is there, and relief, and the hint of something else, gone as soon as it appears.

There is no time. But a small warmth has settled in somewhere around Tacoma’s breastbone, something that will bear more attention on the other side of battle. For now he turns back toward the Jeep and says only, "Let’s move ‘em out then. We got work to do."

* * *

"Goddammit, Manny, put me down!"

Kirsten’s head, sore but clear, bangs against Manny’s ammunition belt. From her inverted perspective, she can see only the rubble-strewn pavement and the backs of his heels as he jogs away from the breached wall, herself slung over his shoulder like an untidy bedroll.

"In a minute!" he yells, tightening his grip across the back of her knees. "Hang on!"

Swearing, she digs her fingers into the loops of webbing that holds his gear around his waist. A roar like the rush of a great river pounds in her ears. Some of it, she knows, is her own blood; some of it the report and recoil of the big guns at the rear of their line. And some of it is fire. The red sheen on the asphalt, on the heels of Manny’s flashing boots, is not all blood. A wave of heat washes over her from somewhere on her right. Something is burning. Something large.

"Manny--!" She tries again, "Lieutenant Rivers, I order you to put me---"

"—Down. I know. Hold on!"

She thumps against his back as he takes an obstacle at a running leap, then another. I’m going to bust him back to private. I’m going to put him on permanent latrine duty. I’m going to make him peel potatoes right into the next ice age—

From her upended position, she sees a pair of soldiers crouched behind the wreckage of a Humvee, feeding grenades into an array of squat, tubular launchers that slam back against the pavement as the belch out their rounds. Others scramble to assemble an M-60, weighting down the legs of its tripod with the detached wheel of a truck, its tire stripped off. Someone has set up an impromptu med station in the lee of another wreck, Shannon from the vet clinic using the injured troops’ own T-shirts and sleeves to bind off wounds. With a start, Kirsten recognizes the half-burned truck as the command post. She had known they were in trouble, but not just how much. It’s bad, then. It’s really bad. Gods, I wish Dakota—

Were a million miles away and safe. Fat chance.

She grits her teeth and involuntarily tightens her grip on Manny’s belt as another howitzer shell screams overhead. This one lands somewhere beyond the second barrier. To cut off our retreat. Then they’ll get around to finishing us.

Abruptly, Manny comes to a halt and bends at the waist, decanting her gently into a hastily thrown-up bunker of torn metal and sandbags. Maggie looks up from the battered laptop where she is apparently keeping track of her units, holding one half of a pair of headphones tightly to her ear and tapping on the keyboard with the other. When she sees Kirsten, the tightness in her face relaxes visibly. "Are you hurt?"

"Just banged about a bit. Give me—"

She does not even complete the sentence before Maggie shoves the computer into her hands. "Rivers, stay with her. Nice one with the suicide droids," she says, and is up and gone.

* * *

The battle has become a siege. It was always intended that it should; Maggie and her forces are the anvil, Koda and her troop, swinging around to flank the enemy from the south, are the hammer. All she has to do, she reminds herself as she pushes the computer into Kirsten’s far more knowledgeable hands and sets herself to make the round of her nest of machine-gunners and snipers, is hold firm. She has enough heavy munitions to stave off the swarming mass of killing machines for half an hour more, perhaps an hour. If the enemy manages to cut Dakota off, if they delay her advance up the embankment and onto the road, she still has a pair of options left. Both are suicide.

Crouching, she watches as the droid line shifts slightly. One of their number, a humanoid model, leans out from between the heavily armored models, aiming a shoulder-held rocket launcher. Before it can bring the tube to bear, a LAAWS fired from one of the upended Humvees behind her finds its mark, leaving a break in the line where the droid had stood. Two of the heavy models go down with it, one smashed to metal flinders, the other decapitated, its sensor array blown straight off its mountings. In some weird cyborg version of spinal reflex, it raises both its arms and sprays 60-caliber rounds across the space separating the two lines, kicking up asphalt pellets from the roadway, clanging off the armor of trucks and personnel carriers. The others join in the barrage, the sound trapped between the two metal barricades that hem them in. From somewhere to her right, Maggie hears a man scream; closer to, she can see another slump against the sandbags of his post, blood and flesh from the melon-sized exit wound in his back spattering the troops next to him.

From behind the wall, she can hear the higher-pitched rattle of M-16’s, the occasional heavier thump of a grenade. Koda must have made her way up to the rim of the embankment, then. That will not take pressure off Maggie’ forces, though. Not yet. Not till Dakota has fought her way past the android contingent set to block her, not till she has gotten p ast the first barricade, over it or around it. Hammer and anvil, with the titanium and steel of the enemy between.

A trooper sprints across the open space between Maggie’s position and Kirsten’s makeshift com center. He dives and rolls under the hail of gunfire, landing half on his face beside her. Levering himself up beside her, he manages a credible salute. "General—Dr. King’s compliments. She says to tell you Major Rivers has neutralized the enemy armor and is on his way back. Instructions?"

"Yeah," she says, a laugh that his half relief, half amusement at the young man’s formality. "Tell him get his ass back here as fast as those tanks’ll go. We need him yesterday."

* * *

Koda pulls herself up the slope, using her rifle butt to steady her, hugging the ragged outcrop to keep within the angle of fire raining down on her troops from above. The fog still shrouds them, but only faintly. The freshening wind tears it, whipping it by in tatters. From time to time she catches the glint of metal from above, weapon or droid, she cannot tell. Her men, strung out on the face of the embankment, appear as clotted shadow in the mist, here and there a glimpse of mottled green camouflage or the clear shape of a weapon. And always there is the rattle of automatic fire above her, unremitting. The enemy has only to hold them in the gorge until full light, and they will die.

She cannot allow that to happen. They have to get up and over. Now.

Fumbling at her belt, Dakota slips one of her two remaining grenades from its loop. She pulls the pin with her teeth, then counts the seconds as the fuse burns down. With a high, wordless scream, she sends it arcing up over her head to land among the enemy on the road above. Its concussion beats at her like great wings flailing the air, but she strains against it, hauling herself to within striking distance of the top as the droids shift and reform. All up and down the length of her skirmish line, other grenades go sailing into the enemy ranks. Through increasing gaps in the fog, she catches sight of her troops. One man, only yards away, sprawls face-down on the earth, his left side soaked in blood, his arm gone. She cannot stop to tend him. She screams again, part anger at her helplessness in the face of his helplessness, part red blind lust for the destruction of those who have killed him. Her second, and last, grenade flies true, gouging out a hole that sends asphalt particles stinging into her face as she crests the top of the ridge. The last of her squad’s grenades explode somewhere down the line. They swarm up over the top, screaming, shooting point-blank into the sensor arrays of the few enemies left standing. All about her lie the broken remains of droids, wire and shattered circuit cards, metal fragments and titanium bolts bright in the sudden sun that breaks upon them as the last of the fog whips away. And there are the wrecks of the droids’ human allies, blood and bone and muscle spattered over half the width of the highway. The air smells of iron.

Down the line from her, her troops set about mopping up anything still functional. At her own feet, a prone droid’s arms make futile paddling motions at its sides, and she places the muzzle of her M-16 carefully against the back plate that covers the power supply. The gun jerks against her elbow. Two rounds, and the thing lies still.

To her left, the bulk of the first barricade wall appears, half of its middle section tumbled to the pavement where the howitzer shell has torn through. From behind it comes the din of battle—the rattle of M-60’s and automatic rifles, the dull whump of grenade launchers. A quick survey of the field shows her no more enemy troops as far as she can see to the east. They are all behind the wall, then. And most of them will be the military models, mindless killing machines, impervious to small arms.

"Where now, Ma’am?"

Their task is to squeeze the enemy between their line and Maggie’s. The men and women trotting toward her down the curve of the road are fewer by a third than those she set out with across the gorge. If she sends them around and through the wall, crashing into the droid’s line from behind, the enemy will simply turn and cut them to pieces. "Sergeant," she says slowly, "How many big guns do you think they have back there?"

"Ma’am?" He blinks into the sun that strikes glare from the broken metal all around them, sweat running down his blackened face into his eyes. "There’s a couple howitzers back there, maybe a couple big mortars, too."

"Good," she says. "Let’s go."

She begins trotting east, toward the back of the enemy line, stepping nimbly as a dancer among the scattered debris. Her troops form a wedge around her, their faces puzzled, as they jog away from the fight. None of them asks what she is about, and for a fleeting moment their obedience frightens her. Behind them the noise of the fight lessens, buffered now by the remains of the barricade and the trees that line the north of the road here. The sergeant, keeping pace with her, pants, "Ma’am. Ma’am. The range is off. We can’t fire those mothers now—we’d hit our own people."

Koda flashes him a grin. "We’re not gonna fire ‘em, Sarge."

"Wha— Oh. Gotcha."

The droids have left no rearguard. Their vehicles, clustered a mile and a half back from the battle line, sit neatly parked across the road, Humvees and troop trucks lined up as carefully as if they were about to stand motor pool inspection. There are no hospital trucks, no rations supply. What the hell did they expect their human troops to run on? But Dakota has no time for the thought. "All right," she says, coming to a halt before one of the APC’s. Her squad form a knot around her, some of them heaving with the effort of the run, others bright-faced and eager. "Anybody here have experience with heavy machinery—cranes, tractors, anything like that?"

A half dozen hands go up: the Sergeant, a couple reservists, armored cavalry that Tacoma had no place for. "Good. You come with me. The rest pile into a couple of these carriers, get the ammo threaded, and get ‘em started. We’ll be back."

With that, she sets off at a run toward the hulking shapes she can just make out in the distance, where the fog lingers along the course of a small stream. Two howitzers loom out of the mist, their barrels, huge-seeming as ancient sequoias, canted upward to shorten their range. The squatter shapes of self-propelled mortars hulk beside them. Koda slows, dropping her M-16 from her shoulder into her hands; there may be no guards, but the droids may have left gunners behind. With the thought, the sun glints off the barrel of a weapon aimed from behind the nearer howitzer. She pulls and holds the trigger of her rifle, spraying the pavement, the tread, the armored side of the monster. "Split up!" she yells. "Go around!"

They move to obey, two lines swinging wide to flank the big guns. Koda charges straight for the middle, aiming not for the enemy gunner’s position but for the howitzer itself. A flying leap lands her on its tread, and she pulls herself up its curve, using its metal grips like rungs on a ladder. On top, she clambers past the driver’s perch and scrambles over the main gun mount to the rear. The sniper lies sprawled at the rear of the tread, blood seeping from beneath him. Dakota fires a single shot, straight between his shoulder blades, to be sure. From the end of the line, behind one of the mortars, come two more sharp reports, then silence. "Got ‘em, Ma’am!" a trooper sings out, and a moment later the Sergeant appears atop the other howitzer, making for the controls.

"Okay," Koda shouts. "One operator and a back-up on each of the guns! Let’s go!"

She slips into the driver’s seat aboard the howitzer, taking a moment to study the dashboard. Ignition is no problem; she turns the key and the huge diesel motor under her kicks to life, shaking and shuddering like her grandfather’s ancient John Deere with its front-loader exhaust pipe and its metal bicycle seat. Only bigger. Much bigger. Fit to rattle her teeth loose, she thinks as she straps herself in. Gonna join the Polident crowd way too young, here.

One of the sticks is obviously the gearshift. The smaller one—she shoves it away from her, and the huge barrel over her head begins to descend like a falling tree. "Timber!" somebody shouts, and she gives it an abrupt push in the opposite direction and keeps pushing until it is as near vertical as it will go. Down the line, the other drivers crank their guns up; the barrels will foul each other when they begin to maneuver. "Man, oh, man!" yells the driver of one of the mortars. "If that ain’t the biggest goddam hard-on I ever saw!"

"Dream on!" the Sergeant sings out. "Good to go, Ma’am!"

"All right!" she yells above the din of the engines. "We get back to the line as fast as we can. Then we flatten the bastards!"

Her back-up slides into place behind her, perched between her seat and the tread housing, as she lets out the gearshift and the huge gun lumbers forward. It is not so bad once in motion; maybe just a three-legged mule, not the antique tractor. "You okay back there?" she yells, half-turning her head.

"I’m hangin’, Ma’am!"

"Strap yourself to one of those eye-bolts back there, or you’ll come loose when things get serious. This is not gonna be a joyride!"

It is not. The going is rough for the first several hundred yards as she explores the controls. Slow and awkward, the guns must have been what kept the enemy to its crawling advance, even more than its foot soldiers. Most of those, after all, were droids, who did not need to sleep or eat or fall out to pee. No. They had brought the guns with the idea of laying siege to Ellsworth from a distance, maybe using them to disable the fighter squadrons and bombers before making a direct assault. Damn. Better park the Tomcats out on the runway where they can take off at a minute’s notice. There may be more of these motherfuckers where this one came from. And more droids.

The noise of battle comes to them over the roar of the howitzers’ engines. Most of it is small arms fire, M-16’s and M-60’s. Koda has begun to be able to tell the difference; it is what she does not hear, though, that alarms her. No grenades. No LAAWS.

Nothing left but the little stuff.

Fuck.

She throws the throttle wide open, bracing as the huge gun lurches forward, grinding under its treads the remains of droid and human alike as they round the curve and enter the straight mile of highway remaining between them and the ruined barricade. She can see it clearly, the tumbled wreckage where the wall was breached forming the ramp that let the attackers through. Whether it will hold something as large as the gun, though, is an open question.

One about to be answered. Koda waves the mortars on either end to go around the wall, and they break off to comply. Setting her teeth, she pulls back on the joystick, slowing the howitzer as it finds its traction in the crumpled metal beneath it. The bulldozers have done their work, though, and after a split second in which the gun seems to sink, and Koda’s heart with it, its treads bite into the steel slope and propel it up and over, spilling it out onto an even steeper angle on the other side. Koda stands frantically on the brakes, her breath stopped in her throat, the weight of her back-up thrown sharply against her shoulders, the barrel of the howitzer wobbling visibly above her head.

And then they are on the level pavement, lurching toward the battle, which seems to be concentrated behind the remains of the Ellsworth vehicles. With a stab of fear, she recognizes the command truck, overturned and half-burnt, black smoke still billowing out of it. But I would know, dammit. I know I would know.

Swinging around the wreckage, she can make out the fight now, only half a mile distant, backed up against the second barrier wall. The droids seem to be almost entirely the military models, the humans invisible behind bunkers of sandbags and overturned APC’s and Humvees. "Here we go!" Koda shouts, shoving the gearshift forward into first.