Recently she had deepened her relationship with the Armorer of the group, John Barrymore Dix, who’d sat next to her. About the same age as Ryan, J.B. was his oldest friend. The two of them had traveled for years with the legendary Trader, rising in the ranks to become his two most trusted lieutenants, as they ranged all across Deathlands.
Thinking about the Trader brought a flicker of memory to Ryan. Abe, another comrade from the savage days riding the war wags, had gone off to search for the man. How long ago? Weeks? Months? Years? Ryan couldn’t remember. He knew that his old leader had vanished during one long-ago night. Everyone thought that the rad cancer had overwhelmed him and he’d gone off to die like an animal in some cramped, dark place. Then the rumors started that Trader might not be dead after all.
“Abe?” Ryan said, trying to remember whether the little gunner had been with them in the gateway in Florida. He was sure that he hadn’t. But there had been others.
Krysty Wroth.
J. B. Dix.
Dean.
Mildred Wyeth.
“Doc.”
Of course. Doc Tanner, lying doubled up on the far side of the chamber, knees cracking as he composed himself, his mane of bedraggled white hair framing his lined face. Doc’s age was a bizarre enigma that Ryan had never been able to understand.
He knew that Theophilus Algernon Tanner had been born on the fourteenth day of February in the year of Our Lord, 1868. He’d been married to Emily, ne Chandler, on the seventeenth day of June, twenty-three years later. He’d obtained his doctorate in science at Harvard and a Ph.D. from Oxford University in England.
Tall and skinny, Doc had been a happy man, with a three-year-old daughter, Rachel, and a little son, Jolyon. Then white-coated, faceless scientists a hundred years in the future had destroyed his life.
He’d been plucked into 1998 from 1896 as one of the few successful guinea pigs from Operation Chronos, a time-trawling government project that generally brought only mangled piles of unidentifiable meat, blood and raw bones from the past.
Doc had proved so difficult a guest of that particular present that they had eventually pushed him forward another ninety years or so into Deathlands.
“And Michael,” Ryan announced triumphantly.
Michael Brother had been brought into their world as another faulty experiment of Chronos. Since his birth he had been an oblate, a trainee monk, in a closed community called Nil-Vanity, above Visalia in the Sierras. Nineteen years of age, he had been disciplined into the martial art of Tao-Tain-do and had the fastest fighting reflexes that Ryan had ever known.
That was all of them.
The name of Jak Lauren came unbidden into Ryan’s mind. Had Jak been with them in Florida?
“No.”
The albino youth had traveled with Ryan and the others through many lethally desperate adventures.
Now he was married to Christina, and they and their child, Jenny, lived on a spread in New Mexico.
Ryan managed to get himself upright, conquering the sickness, trying to get his brain working. They’d all been together as the jump began, but there had been some kind of electronic malfunction. He recalled that. Could that have been responsible for the jump going so wrong?
Were the others together, or had each of them been sent tumbling through time and space to different locations?
He breathed deeply, trying to deduce some clue from the taste of the air.
Most gateways were buried deep within old top-secret military installations called redoubts. They were generally powered by long-lived nuke generators that kept the heat and lights in the complexes functioning at survival levels.
The air didn’t smell like it normally did. Most jumps took the companions to gateways where the air was stale, dusty and dull. It often hadn’t been breathed by anyone for close to a century, since the nuke cataclysm of 2001 that had wiped away civilization.
This air was fresh and clean, warm, with a strange, foreign scent to it that Ryan couldn’t quite identify.
Automatically he checked through his personal armory of weapons, then adjusted the long white silk scarf around his neck, fingering the weighted ends that turned it into such a lethally effective garrote.