So restarting and installing cmake while making the environment mamba create -n btk -c conda-forge python=3.9 cmake -y got past the above error ...
Edit: And 5 minutes later,, I found out why: microsoft/onnxruntime#26309 onnx is hung on support for Python 3.14, but there are nightlies in testing, so this'll get fixed upstream. Sorry for line ...