by James Axler
He scoffed. “You disappoint me, Dr. Oates. What else could it be?”
“As scientists,” she answered coolly, “is it not our duty to find out? To gather evidence before coming to a conclusion?”
He scowled; she did not flinch.
And then he realized, She’s right. If she seeks to use this to her future advantage, she will discover, also, how very wrong she is.
Aloud, he said, “You are correct, Dr. Oates. We shall dispatch our asset to the scene. I trust our operative continues to foster close relationship with the Primary?”
“His reports indicate success, in exact alignment to your own predictions, Dr. Sandler.”
He nodded, feeling gratified—and mollified—at her acknowledgment of his prowess.
“Most satisfactory,” Dr. Sandler said.
He turned away to study the interrupted Goode homolosine projection that glowed on a gigantic display above the instrument consoles at the front of Lab Central. There the map of the current target timeline of twenty-second century Earth showed a wealth of information: environmental, population, economic and political indices. As well, a few red dots indicated potentially serious disruption of their ultimate secret offshoot project to achieve a key step in the realization of Totality decades in advance of even the most optimistic projections of Concept Central Authority. A new red dot, brighter than the rest, would soon be added.
“But make no mistake, Dr. Oates,” he said, unable to keep a note of harshness out of his voice. “This is far and away the ripest timeline for our plan. And should it suffer significant disruption—even, or perhaps especially, absent interference by our subcompetent rivals—we could lose it utterly.”
“But the parallel timelines—”
“Remain suboptimal, Dr. Oates. Given the stakes, we can simply not afford anything but the highest probability of success. The very survival of our genetic lines depends upon it.”
* * *
“WHAT CAN I tell you?” Mariah asked. She sat with her back propped against the side of a pickup grille. The vehicle’s shadow stretched far off to the east, cast by the low blood-red sun.
In spite of everything, Krysty’s heart went out to her. The two of them had grown close in a surprisingly short time. How—why—even Krysty wasn’t sure.
“The truth might do for a start,” Ryan said harshly.
He stood a bit apart from the rest of the companions, who slumped in various postures of near exhaustion. The exception was Jak, who had recovered his weapons and jacket and headed off on his usual lonesome patrol, keeping a watchful eye over his friends.
Krysty shot Ryan a reproachful look. He didn’t pay her any mind. He was fixated on what he saw as his duty. To her no less than the rest.
“That big cat didn’t mysteriously vanish,” Ryan said to the girl. “You made it go away. That was that nuke-awful screech we heard.”
Mariah hung her head. Her pigtails hung limp to her shoulders.
“Yes.”
And she didn’t tell me the truth either, Krysty thought. Even though—as a secret mutie herself—she could understand the girl’s reticence, she still felt betrayed.
“And the stickies back at that farm where we found you. You knew why they left you alone, and you knew why they looked like they exploded. Because you made them explode. You sicced that—that cloud on them, and it tore them apart like ripping up so many sheets of paper.”
“Yes,” she said.
They were still where they’d been dragged as captives, in plain sight of Duganville—them and the four wags the Buffalo Mob had abandoned in their panic flight. Three of the four ran fine, even the one that had gotten hung up right on the brink of the ditch bank. Only the truck whose radiator Ryan had punched a hole in with a shot from his Scout longblaster refused to start.
At some point the residents of the barony were going to venture back out into their crop lands to find out what had happened out there. Ryan seemed content to leave that for when it happened—if they were even still here when the locals nerved themselves up enough. Clearly, he needed this matter settled, and settled now.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” he asked.
“I was afraid.”
“Ryan, get real,” Krysty said. “What if she had told us what happened? Would you have even believed her?”
He frowned, then nodded. That was one thing out of so many Krysty admired about him: his intellectual honesty, as relentless in its way as everything else about him.
“Mebbe after the thing with the tiger,” he admitted. “But not the first time. No way.”
“I thought you’d get scared of me,” Mariah said.
“I’m sure the hell scared of you now. That’s just with what we’ve seen. I’m not taking account of any other world-shattering secrets you might be hiding from us.”
Mariah just shook her head wearily. “You want me to go away. I’m a monster. That’s all right. People always send me away when they find out.”
“We’re not sending her away!” Krysty said. Ryan was startled to hear genuine anger in her tone.
“It sounds like a double-good idea to me,” J.B. stated. “Or should I just keep my trap shut?”
“That second thing,” Mildred said dangerously.
“Fireblast, Krysty,” Ryan said, “what’s gotten into you? The girl’s as dangerous as old dynamite that’s sweated nitroglycerin all over. She could chill us all at any time.”
“Yeah,” Mildred agreed. “And exactly who among us couldn’t? Isn’t that the reason we’ve all stuck together—because we’re all deadly? And that it takes a passel of us working together to stay alive in this bad old world?”
Ryan looked at her. For one of the rare times in his life, the one-eyed man found nothing to say.
“She does make a persuasive point,” Doc said gently.
J.B. sighed.
“Well, since now you go and put it that way, Mildred,” he said, “I’m minded what Trader’s old pal Abe always used to say about dangerous folk... I’d rather they be on the inside pissing out than on the outside pissing in.”
“And there you have it,” Mildred told them.
“Ryan, she’s right,” Krysty said.
“She did save us all when the coldhearts were—” Ricky began. Then his words choked off as if he’d had his gullet slit. His cheeks turned pink and his dark eyes grew as round as predark silver dollars. He was mortified at the fear he’d spoken out of turn—and humiliated at the very thought of what the Buffalo Mob boss, and by his order much of the rest of the gang, had been about to do to Krysty.
“You’re right, Ricky,” Krysty said hastily. “No need to be ashamed. She didn’t hurt us. She didn’t leave us to our fate and hope to sneak away unnoticed in the commotion. She helped us.”
It was Ryan’s turn to heave a massive sigh. “Yeah,” he said. “Reckon she did.”
“You have wondered aloud on more than one occasion, Ryan, why we let her tag along if she was not of any use in a fight,” Doc said. “Well, it would certainly appear that she can be powerfully useful in battle, indeed.”
“True.”
“But we don’t want you using that power more than you absolutely have to,” Krysty told Mariah, going to the girl’s side and placing a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“I don’t,” Mariah said to the furrowed gray ground. “It...scares me.”
Krysty threw her arms about her. For a moment the girl held herself as rigid still as a rigored chill. Then she melted to turn and throw her arms around Krysty, lower her head and sob against the redhead’s bosom as her own skinny body was fixing to tear itself apart.
Krysty cradled Mariah and murmured soothing sounds at her. They didn’t make sense, but they didn’t need to. Her black hair, tightly parted in the middle, smelled of the lila
c soap, another product, somehow, of Baron Dugan’s distilling operation.
The girl’s tears soaked into Krysty’s shirt.
The shirt had been hastily repaired. Not so much because of modesty, which was a commodity they could afford a limited amount of, the way they traveled and generally stuck together, but because Krysty felt vulnerable with her breasts exposed.
Ryan grunted, loudly enough for Krysty to know he wanted her attention. She looked up at him.
“Time’s blood,” he reminded her. “We need to do something about all these wags, weapons and other gear that have fallen into our hands, before the ville folk come out and decide to make some kind of issue about it.”
“Where shall we go?” Doc asked. His voice sounded muzzy. Krysty realized his mind, damaged by his captivity at the cold and soulless hands of the Operation Chronos whitecoats, had begun to wander. Doc’s mind focused to razor sharpness at times, especially when it was most sorely needed, such as in fighting for their lives. But when the inevitable adrenaline-depletion slump set in after combat, he sometimes drifted away.
To Krysty’s surprise, Ryan chuckled.
“Right straight back to the ville,” he said. “If we say we’re entitled to this loot by right of conquest, who’s going to contradict us? They had to have seen what happened here.”
“How do you plan to explain—” J.B. tipped his head toward the still weeping Mariah “—you know?”
“Well, we hope they didn’t see it in that much detail,” Ryan said.
“Even if they saw the scary parts,” Mildred added, “I don’t think there’s any way they can accept it. It was too freaking strange. I bet all Ryan has to do is flash that devilish smile of his and spin them some of his vintage bullshit.”
“Reckon I can do that,” Ryan said, grinning.
Krysty stroked Mariah’s head. The girl seemed to be trying to unload all at once a weight of grief that had built up over a long time. Perhaps her whole life.
“What about her?” Krysty asked Ryan.
“She can help with the chores. Plus, who knows? We might find ourselves in another tight place, where that...talent of hers could prove a big help.”
“She can come with us?”
“For now,” Ryan said. “As long as she doesn’t slow us down, same as before. So what do you say you get her bundled into one of the wags so we can load up and shake the dust of the rad-blasted field off our boots?”
Chapter Twelve
“I’d rather die than tell you anything!” the captured Buffalo Mob underboss exclaimed. Spittle flew from his bearded mouth, striking Hammerhand’s buckskin pants.
“Suit yourself,” Hammerhand said. He pointed his .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson Model 29 blaster point-blank at the coldheart’s head and fired.
The blaster had heavy recoil and a wicked muzzle blast. But Hammerhand had strong wrists, and he liked a weapon that could make a statement.
The captive’s head split down the middle, like a melon hit by a machete. Handfuls of gray brains slopped out, and his right eyeball burst from the socket to flap from the nerve as he fell forward.
“Right,” Hammerhand said, tipping the revolver’s muzzle to the sky. It was still barely stained with pink in the west, the attack had happened so quickly. “Anybody else want to go in for any macho posturing? You might’ve noticed I’m in a literal frame of mind today.”
He was walking in front of their fifty-odd Buffalo Mob captives. Most knelt in the long grass of what had been until a very few minutes ago their camp. Others tended to the dozen or so wounded, all under the blasters of their watchful Blood captors.
Their fifteen chills still lay where they had fallen—except for the ones being unceremoniously dumped out of their wags by Bloods instructed to secure the rolling booty and make sure they were all ready to shift out of there at Hammerhand’s command.
“That detailed information you gave us on the Buffalo encampment was spot-on,” he said over his shoulder to Trager, who followed a pace or two behind.
The scruffy little whitecoat had not taken part in the attack but had waited behind with a small sec team until Hammerhand sent for him. The leader of the Bloods did not want his magical-mystical superadviser getting in the line of fire. If he came across—and so far, he sure had—then his value was beyond price. If he didn’t in future, Hammerhand favored chilling the man himself for wasting his nuking time and making him look like a dick.
“Our powers are great,” Trager said smugly.
“Better than average, certainly.”
Hammerhand stopped and turned to face the prisoners. He struck a contemplative pose, with his blaster hand tipped back almost to his shoulder. Then, as if coming to some decision, he lowered his arm. At the same time he rolled the weapon in his hand, cocking it with his thumb as he returned it to a firing grip.
It wasn’t necessary. He was an ace shot, his aim hardly less true when he fired the revolver double action despite the far lighter and quicker trigger-pull needed to shoot single-action. But the distinctive metallic clacking, he had noticed, tended to make an impression.
“So,” he said, pointing the handblaster first at one and then another prisoner at random, “who wants to talk to me about what happened outside Duganville last week, where you got your asses handed to you by half a dozen ragged-ass outlanders you had the drop on?”
“That’s it?” demanded a brown-haired woman with a dirty green bandanna tied at a slant around her head to bandage a scalp cut. “That’s why you took us down? To ask us some nuking questions?”
The blaster shot was very loud. It echoed among the low grassy ridges surrounding the one, slightly higher and flatter than its kin, the late Buffalo Mob supremo Bull had picked for his bivouac. Long before the reverberations had chased each other away down the shallow draws, the woman was lying on her back, folded straight back with her knees still on the ground and her eyes staring at the sky. A darker, wetter stain was spreading across the sternum of her faded black cotton T-shirt, in the hollow between her breasts.
“My tribal elders always taught me there were no such thing as stupe questions,” Hammerhand said, rolling the blaster back in his hand again. “They were wrong again, as you can see. They knew nothing of the real world, really, obsessed instead with maintaining some kind of pure Plains tradition, when not one of our band has as much as half the old Blackfoot blood rolling in our veins. Including me.
“So, some ground rules before we continue. You can answer a question with a question if, and only if, you really do need more info before you can give me a proper nuke-sucking answer. Everybody got that? I have a lesson plan all prepped for slow learners.”
Heads nodded vigorously.
Using the info Trager had supplied, courtesy of his shadowy “associates,” Hammerhand had carefully mapped out his predawn attack to complete his destruction of the Buffalo Mob. The Buffaloes had about eighty souls in their camp and six wags, three of which were big cargo trucks.
To ensure victory, Hammerhand had brought more than twice their number. Heroic battles against desperate odds were all good and well—warriors loved to sing about them, especially around the campfires late at night when the Towse Lightning flowed like the blood that all too likely would soon follow. But he had early learned that in the real world, if there was one thing warriors loved, it was a winner.
His scouts had watched the camp all night and done reconnaissance right up to the now-thinner line of wags they surrounded themselves with. The Buffaloes still weren’t up to spotting skilled Plains sneakers. They had confirmed that the info Trager gave Hammerhand about their dispositions and security was righteous.
Then it was time to use some of the other gifts Trager had given them: four modified M4 carbines with sound suppressors and third-generation night-vision scopes. In the hands of four of the best Blood lon
gblaster shots, naturally including Mindy Farseer, they had taken down four key armed and alert sentries spaced around the perimeter.
Meanwhile Hammerhand and Joe Takes-Blasters had led two forces of Blood warriors creeping up on two sides of the camp—not opposite, but about sixty degrees apart.
The reason they had picked the last half hour before dawn to make their final stealthy advance and then attack was that the human body hit a lower ebb at about that time—and visibility was especially tricky. Though Joe led sixty fighters, and Hammerhand almost a hundred, they had achieved their objectives unseen.
Night-bird calls from the snipers confirmed they had downed their targets. Joe had the honor of leading the first attack, suddenly jumping up screaming and opening fire from close range on the sleeping camp.
It had not—quite—been a feint. When the Buffalo Mob began to fight back, fixing their attention on the yelling, blasting assault, Hammerhand had led his unit in from the flank.
Being caught from their left-hand rear utterly demoralized the Buffaloes. Such resistance as they offered was quickly blasted or hacked down. A few escaped into the weeds; Hammerhand was content to let them go. Most of the opposition surrendered within minutes.
The cost to the Bloods had been three chilled and five wounded. Only two of the wounded were badly hurt and they were expected to get better. Especially if Trager delivered on his promise of unknown med tech, which was more valuable than any amount of scavvy.
Now, still elated by his one-sided triumph on what was still a powerful and formidable foe—even if one outgunned and outfought—Hammerhand was working on doing the thing Trager had asked of him. As well as satisfying his own growing curiosity.
“Do I need to shoot somebody else, just to get the ball rolling?” he asked. “Do you really want to take it there?”
“You’re not gonna believe it,” said an older Buffalo, a man with straw-blond hair and a face that looked to consist mainly of seams. “We’re afraid you’ll chill us for lying.”
Then he set and jutted his jaw. “You gonna chill me for saying that?”
