John Barrymore Dix. Male. Similar age to Ryan. Sixty-eight inches tall and one-forty pounds soaking wet. Hair thin and dark brown. Complexion sallow. Eyes brown. Lean build. Wire-rimmed spectacles. Clothes included jacket and pants with endlessly capacious pockets filled with all manner of miniature tools, picklocks, wrist chron and microsextant. And his beloved fedora hat.
He had two blasters, the M-4000 Smith amp; Wesson 12-gauge scattergun with a folding butt, pistol grip and its unique ammo, eight rounds of Remington flechettes. Twenty of the lethal inch-long darts were in each shell. His Uzi automatic machine pistol held twenty rounds of 9 mm ammo.
Krysty Wroth. Female. Mid-twenties. Seventy-one inches and one-fifty pounds. Green eyed, with fresh complexion. Well built. Long red hair. Nearly a century after the nukecaust there was still residual genetic damage throughout Deathlands that led to all manner of mutations in animal and vegetable life. The comps were thrown by Krysty Wroth’s fiery hair, puzzled by its sentience. In times of stress it would seem to shrink and curl closer to Krysty’s skull, almost like a cap. When things were going well, then it would flow luxuriantly across her shoulders.
White shirt. Blue pants and jacket. The system reproduced precisely what she’d been wearing. The unusual boots, Western style, dark blue leather, with chiseled silver points on the toes mid embroidered with silver spread-winged falcons.
Her weapon was a Smith amp; Wesson double-action Model 640, 5-shot, .38-caliber blaster with a stubby two-inch barrel.
The unseen mutations that were an integral part of Krysty’s persona were also duplicated. Her strange gift of “seeing” a threat of danger. Or “feeling” when there was any life force in the immediate area.
Krysty’s other mutie talent had been inherited from her mother, Sonja, back when she’d been a teenage girl in the ville of Harmony up in old Colorado. At times of direst need, Krysty could draw on the power of Gaia, the Earth Mother, which would briefly give her phenomenal, almost supernatural strength. But she would pay a dreadful price for utilizing this power and would collapse, utterly drained and barely conscious.
The mat-trans system had some problems with Jak Lauren. Male. Late teens. Only sixty-four inches tall and barely tipping the scales at one-ten pounds. Deep facial scars. Hair of purest white. Skin white. Eyes of ruby red. Full-blown albino. Very athletic build.
Leather-and-canvas camouflage coat over ragged fur jacket. Denim pants. Combat boots.
Satin-finish Colt Python Magnum, .357 caliber. Six round. Six-inch barrel. A man-stopper. A cannon of a blaster for the skinny albino teenager. He also carried a number of leaf-shaped throwing knives, with heavy taped hilts, concealed all about his person.
Mildred Winonia Wyeth. Female. Age indeterminate. Either late thirties or one hundred and twenty. The comp found that aspect of Mildred difficult to handle. It had no way of knowing that she had been born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on December 17,1964. A doctor and expert on the medical freezing of human beings, she had gone into hospital for minor abdominal surgery a few days before skydark, on December 28, 2000. Ironically things had gone badly wrong, and to save her life it had been necessary to freeze her cryonically.
She had been plucked back from eternal sleep by Ryan and the others.
Skin, black. Hair, black, in beaded plaits. Height, sixty-four inches. Weight, one hundred and forty pounds. Eyes, brown.
Wore quilted denim jacket, reinforced military jeans and calf-length boots of black leather. Mildred’s weapon was typical of the woman and her unusual skills.
In the last-ever Olympic games, held in Atlanta in 1996, she had won the silver medal for the free-shooting pistol event. She had scored three ninety-eight from four hundred and was arguably the finest shot in Deathlands.
She carried a target revolver, a ZKR 551, made at the Zbrojovka works in Brno, Czechoslovakia. Designed by the Koucky brothers, the blaster held six .38-caliber rounds. The beautiful handblaster had a solid frame side-rod ejector and short fall thumb cocking hammer.
With it Mildred could put all six rounds into a three-inch target at fifty yards.
Last of the six was Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, whose genetic makeup was so unusual it completely freaked out the computer. Most of Doc’s mat-trans facts were simple and reasonably straightforward.