Other than her skills as a medic, Mildred had also proved herself invaluable as a tenacious survivalist. She had won a silver medal for free pistol shooting in the last-ever Olympic Games, and she was the best shootist that any of the companions had ever seen.
Doc Tanner, unlike Mildredwho had bobbed unknowingly down the temporal streamwas the subject of a cold-hearted scientific practice known in pre-dark days as trawling. Since the 1940s, American military scientists, and their counterparts in other countries, had tried to reconcile relativistic physics with quantum mechanics. By the late 1990s, the reconciliation attempts had spawned the supersecret experiment known as the Totality Concept. There were several subdivisions of the experiment, such as Over-project Whisper, Project Cerberus and finally Operation Chronos.
With the use of a complex matter-transfer device called a gateway, the project scientists had tried time and again to snatch subjects from a past temporal line and trawl them to the present.
Their only success was a man from 1895. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, Ph.D., scientist and scholar, was plucked from the bosom of his beloved family and deposited in a sterile subterranean chamber a century down the timeline.
Though he learned all he could about the twentieth century, Doc never abandoned the hope of returning to his wife and two children. His constant attempts to return to his own era so angered the whitecoats of Operation Chronos that they eventually used him as a trawling subject again. Rather than send him back, they opted to transfer him to a year nearly a century in the future. The wrenching changes left their marks on Doc. In his worn frock coat, his skinny frame looked gaunt, and his face old beyond his actual years.
Sixteen-year-old Jak Lauren had all the hard, bitter experience of a man twice his age. He had whiter than white skin, with fearsome ruby eyes and a shock of blindingly white hair. He possessed incredible hand and eye coordination and favored bladed weapons over blasters. Scars from several near-fatal encounters marked his body, the least of which curved up from the corner of his mouth and across his high-planed face. Though Jak had buried two sets of families during his young life, he hid the tragedies behind a taciturn mask and an eerily calm, detached manner.
Ryan Cawdor and J. B. Dix had been companions for many years, since they traveled the Deathlands in a pair of war wags with the legendary Trader. Tall and hard muscled, with a scar running down his face from the edge of the patch over his left eye, Ryan was a natural-born leader.
J.B. was an armorer, and he had served Trader’s war wags as a weapon smith. His wiry, short frame and unmemorable face disguised a devious mind and a facility with weapons that approached the artistic.
By contrast, Krysty Wroth was tall and slim. Because she possessed the empathic ability to sense danger in the offing, she was, by Deathlands definition, a mutie. Her fiery mane of thick red hair was the outward manifestation of her mutation, stirring, curling, moving as if it were a separate, sentient organism.
Krysty was also gifted with a power that had been passed down the female line of her family. The women were in tune with the electromagnetic energies of Gaia, the great Earth Mother. By tapping into these energies, the geopower field of the planet itself, Krysty could gain superhuman strength for a limited time.
Though Ryan was the group’s undisputed leader, he and Krysty were equal partners in their relationship. Though he rarely spoke of it openly, Ryan loved her fiercely. The other great love of his life was his eleven-year-old son, Dean. The issue of a brief encounter between Ryan and a young woman named Sharona, Dean had been united with his father for only a short time. Recently Ryan had enrolled the lad in the Brody School in Colorado, and he missed the boy far more than he had thought he would. He found himself thinking of his son often, concerned for his safety. But travel was hazardous, and the locational jumps unpredictable. So he bided his time to give Dean a chance for independent growth, to let him cope on his own.