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  Had his scouts and sentries missed a significant threat approaching, somebody was going to wind up staked out over an anthill before the sun now rising set. Hammerhand believed in being openhanded with his rewards and tightfisted with his punishments. But when he had to make a statement, he made it.

  He had slept well. The lodge was a traditional tepee, like about half the several dozen lodges in camp, made up of tanned bison hides and long lodge poles—in his case four, in the traditional Blackfoot style, as opposed to three, as most of them had. Aside from the fact he’d also grown up in one, he found them most practical: warm in winter, cool in summer and dry when it rained, along with being easy to lug along, assemble and take apart. Some of his growing tribe preferred white man–style tents, scavvied synthetic or present-day oiled canvas.

  It was their choice; he insisted on loyalty, bravery and skill from his people. It wasn’t his lookout to run their nuking lives.

  “What’ve we got?” Mindy Farseer asked, walking up beside him.

  As usual, he thought, she looked indecently chipper at this hour of the morning, not a hair, or a feather wound into it, out of place. She carried a Savage 110 bolt longblaster action in .270 Winchester, a common cartridge on the Plains, esteemed for its combination of good hitting power with long range and flat trajectory. The piece was mounted with a Swift variable power scope. She was lethal with it out to a thousand yards. She wasn’t called Farseer for nothing.

  “Intruder alert,” he stated.

  “Far out,” she said, dialing the telescopic sight up to its full 12-power magnification. She wasn’t bloodthirsty, but she did love to use her skills.

  Hammerhand called for his own telescope to be brought to him. The tepee flap opened, and Maia, one of his love partners from the night before, came padding out carrying his old-school folding spyglass in its blue velvet bag. She was buck naked as she approached Hammerhand, opened the drawstring, removed the telescope from the bag and handed both to her lover. Then with a cool smile to Mindy’s disapproving glower, she turned and walked back. Hammerhand watched her briefly, appreciating the added swing she gave her hips and buttocks.

  “Let’s go check it out,” he said, striding forward as he expanded the scope.

  * * *

  A KNOT OF BLOODS gathered on the eastern edge of the low hill they’d made camp on outside the laagered wags. They had added several to the stock they’d taken off the Buffalo Mob’s hands, although Hammerhand had found other things that needed doing and had yet to go back and collect the rest of the Buffaloes’ rolling stock.

  The Bloods were pointing down the slope to a figure about a quarter mile off, stumbling through the knee-high grass toward them. The dishing of the land meant it was clearly visible, not whited out in the dazzle of the rising sun. But details weren’t easy to come by with the naked eye.

  That was why Hammerhand had his spyglass. He held it up to his eye and adjusted the focus. Mindy unsnapped the lens covers from her own scope and shouldered her blaster.

  He heard her suck in a sharp breath. “Whitecoat,” she whispered. “Can I drop the hammer on the nuke-sucker?”

  “No,” Hammerhand said, studying the ragged figure. The man seemed to be on his last legs but still found the energy to adjust his eyeglasses at every single step. “It’s a whitecoat.”

  “That’s why,” she said.

  “Whitecoats’re evil,” Joe Takes-Blasters said between yawns as he walked up scratching the back of his neck.

  “Whitecoats are frauds,” Mindy said. “Rad-dust-eating, crazy cultists pretending to know the ancient ‘wisdom’ that burned the world, which I judge makes them evil, too, now I think on it. Say the word and he’s history.”

  “The word is, ‘no.’”

  “What?” his two lieutenants exclaimed, half a beat apart.

  “Boss, it’s a whitecoat,” Joe said, as if he thought mebbe Hammerhand had missed that part. Then, with a noticeably brighter tone he went on, “Unless you wanna save him for something special?”

  “We don’t do that,” Hammerhand said. “Without good reason.”

  “And being a whitecoat isn’t?” Mindy asked. That showed how powerful her loathing—or fear—for them was. As a rule, she was strongly opposed to any death that was dealt out any way but swiftly with minimal suffering. Especially when she dealt it out by blowing apart somebody’s head at a couple hundred yards.

  “I had a vision,” Hammerhand reminded them in tones of rapidly tiring patience. “In it I was told that a mystic adviser would stagger out of the wastelands to guide me. This was foretold. He lives.”

  He folded up the spyglass.

  “Go fetch him. Alive and uninjured. You, Joe. Take whatever backup you need.”

  Joe looked doubtful. “Backup? For one scrawny, tore-up-ass-looking whitecoat?”

  “Take two Bloods with you, just in case,” Hammerhand directed. His aide had a tendency to overestimate his own abilities, considerable as they were. Especially when brute force was concerned. He didn’t assess the whitecoat as posing any more threat than Joe did—on the surface. But he was a man who kept his eye on the fine and wavering line between triple bold and triple stupe.

  Joe nodded. “What if he resists?”

  “Then thump him some and restrain him. But nothing broken. No internal bleeding. Understood?”

  “Understood.” Joe set off bawling at the others—who were mostly sipping chicory and waiting for their breakfast stew of beans and Pronghorn to get hot—for one of them to volunteer.

  Half a dozen hands shot up. When he explained no chilling or hurting would be involved, the number of hands went abruptly down to two.

  “That’s the problem with us,” Hammerhand said. “We’re still not motherfucking subtle.”

  “I don’t like it,” Mindy told him, as Joe and his helpers, one male, one female, went trotting down the slope toward the figure. The intruder had collapsed and was crawling toward the camp on hands and knees.

  “I don’t like it,” Mindy said.

  “That’s your job,” Hammerhand stated. “Not to like shit. Noted. Now your job is not to say any more about it.”

  “I hear ya,” she said grumpily. But she did not sling her Savage longblaster.

  Hammerhand took up his spyglass and watched as the trio fanned out to approach the crawling man. He paid no attention to them, even as they surrounded him with handblasters drawn.

  “Keep your fingers off the nuke-withered triggers,” he murmured to his distant warriors. “You, too, Mindy.”

  “Rad-blast.”

  Joe had to have said something to the man, because he looked up. He had a dark beard and eyeglasses with heavy, dark frames, along with the whitecoat, which looked as if he’d wrestled a bobcat in it and lost.

  Whatever he said either satisfied Joe or got his mind right about his own boss’s firm commands. He and his helpers holstered their weapons, then Joe and the woman, Serena, who was powerfully built, hauled him to his feet.

  “Pat him down, Joe,” Hammerhand said. Of course the burly man couldn’t hear him at that distance. But saying the words made him feel better. “Just because he ain’t much of a snake, don’t mean he’s not packing venom.”

  To his relief his lieutenant did so, running his big hands up and down the whitecoat’s body and limbs to look for unpleasant surprises. To Hammerhand’s surprise, he came up dry.

  Joe handed the man off to Red-Eye, the male Blood, and he and Serena marched the captive toward the camp, although they seemed to be aiding the whitecoat rather than dragging him. Joe followed close behind, fingering the hatchet holstered at his side in a way that Hammerhand did not favor, under the circumstances. Orders or not, his lieutenant was a man who greatly preferred splitting skulls to splitting hairs.

  Hammerhand folded the scope, stuck it back in its
bag and hung it from his web belt.

  The group of Bloods standing around watching the little drama unfold had grown to twenty or so. Hammerhand heard a joint intake of breath as they saw the intruder was indeed a hated whitecoat. As he was half carried up to where Hammerhand stood waiting, blasters left holsters and longblasters were unslung.

  “Back up off the triggers, everybody,” Hammerhand said almost conversationally. “If any one of you really believes a lone whitecoat, let alone one who looks like it’d be all he could do to crawl into his own open grave without help, can take your leader down, feel free to walk away now. No comebacks.”

  He meant it, too. When he gave his word, he stood by it, no matter what. Of course, there were times when, if a body thought he was giving his word—well, that was his or her own lookout. He was a leader, after all, and that implied things.

  “Okay, boss?” Joe asked as Serena and Red-Eye brought the man staggering to a stop in front of Hammerhand. “I didn’t need any thumping at all.”

  “Good job. And try not to sound so disappointed. Can you stand on your own, whitecoat?”

  The man straightened his glasses on his nose and nodded. Then he straightened the specs again.

  “I—can,” he said in a voice that sounded like a rusty hinge. “W-water?”

  “Water,” Hammerhand commanded. A kid named Little Wolf obliged, holding up a skin bag for the stranger. He was too small a fry for Hammerhand to consider accepting into the band under usual circumstances, but the boy’s aunt, Shyanna, had vouched for him, and she was a warrior of merit.

  At a nod from Hammerhand, the two Bloods released the whitecoat’s arms. He lurched but managed to keep to his feet—barely. He seized on the uncapped bag with both hands and upended it. His Adam’s apple, covered with a thinner layer of dark stubble than his chin and cheeks, bobbed up and down.

  Water overflowed his mouth and ran down the sides of his face. Hammerhand made no comment. Water, clean water, was plentiful here. It was why they’d picked the site to bivouac in for a spell.

  At last the stranger finished. He handed the bag, now mostly empty, back to Little Wolf. Then he adjusted his eyeglasses again and peered through them with dark eyes at Hammerhand.

  “Are you—” He coughed into his grimy fist. “Are you Hammerhand?”

  “I am. Who the nuke are you?”

  “I am Dr. Alvin Trager,” the whitecoat said.

  “You got business with the boss?” Mindy asked. “Why were you sneaking up on our camp?”

  “I was not...sneaking. I was making my way here as best I could. I met with...mishaps on the way.”

  “Looks like it,” Joe muttered. The man wore filthy rags of a once-white shirt and black pants beneath the white coat. They were in better condition than the lab coat but still in sorry shape. There were red streaks of scabbed-over cuts visible through some of those tears.

  “What is that business?” Hammerhand asked. “Time’s blood. By which I mean, yours.”

  “Yes.” Trager nodded, then fiddled with the glasses again.

  If Hammerhand didn’t chill the bastard, he was either going to have to get used to that tic, or Trager was going to have to get that hand lopped off.

  “I was sent here to offer my assistance to the mighty Hammerhand.”

  “Glowing night shit,” Mindy said. “Who sent you?”

  “I have...associates,” Trager said. “Others like me. We keep alive the old-days science.”

  “So mebbe if you tell us where to find this nest of rattlers so we can rub it out, we’ll feel a mite better about letting you live,” Mindy said.

  “But—but we offer you our help! We can be of great service to you. It’s why I was sent.”

  “Before we talk about the service your buddies can do for us,” Hammerhand said, “first you gotta show us you can be more use to us breathing than with dirt hitting you in the eyes. Just because I’m not gonna let Mindy or anybody else chill you right now doesn’t mean the sun has set on that idea. Comprende?”

  The man nodded so vigorously he almost nodded his glasses off his nose. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.”

  “So what’s this about these other whitecoats ‘sending’ you?” Mindy asked.

  “They—we—know that Hammerhand is destined for greatness,” he said. “His is the strong hand that can unite the Plains. And perhaps the Deathlands.”

  “Whitecoats? Don’t tell me they had a vision, too,” Mindy said.

  Hammerhand frowned at her. Don’t talk about that outside the family, he signed to her. Though the signs were widely understood across the Plains, and not just by Indians, he felt fairly confident a whitecoat out of some weird hermit lab wouldn’t know them. And the beady eyes never flickered away from his face, behind the thick lenses that magnified and distorted them.

  Mindy’s eyes widened, and her face went slightly pale. She nodded.

  “Don’t think you can flatter me either,” Hammerhand told Trager, although the whitecoat had, and Hammerhand did not feel bad about it. “What good are you to me? To us?”

  “I can tell you things.”

  “Things are good,” Hammerhand said. He clapped a hand on the man’s stooped shoulder. Even though it was a light touch, the whitecoat almost collapsed beneath it.

  “Come back with me to my lodge and you can be a little bit more specific about ‘things.’”

  Chapter Eleven

  “Dr. Sandler!” the tech cried out in obvious alarm. “Dr. Oates!”

  Frowning at the man’s tone, which was altogether unprofessional regardless of what had occasioned it, Dr. Sandler turned to look at the man where he sat in the cool darkness, pierced by myriad flickering lights in green, yellow, orange and red, before a console in Lab Central.

  “What is it, Shaughnessy?”

  “It’s a Level 5 spatiotemporal disturbance in our target zone.”

  “Impossible!” Dr. Oates exclaimed.

  Dr. Sandler felt his mouth tighten slightly. Such an outburst, muted as it had been, was also thoroughly unscientific. Dr. Oates had a keen mind, no question. Otherwise Dr. Sandler would have disposed of her long ago. But he had to remind himself she was still just a woman and subject to the vagaries of her hormones.

  After all, that was why he was in charge, even if some in Overproject Whisper might harbor evolutionarily unsound notions of women’s complete equality with men. They were all in perfect agreement that most people were fit to follow orders, and only a scientifically selected and trained few were fit to give them, of course. But some fools nonetheless remained willfully blind to certain details of nature’s innate hierarchy.

  “Perhaps,” he said to his colleague. “Perhaps not. Are your detectors in proper working order, Shaughnessy?”

  “They’re all perfectly calibrated, Dr. Sandler,” the tech answered. “I’d stake my life on it!”

  “You have.” Dr. Sandler stepped up close behind the tech’s swivel chair and peered at the indicator lights. “What do we have?”

  Shaughnessy was a young man with a red crew cut that made his unfortunately prominent ears stand out even more. Dr. Sandler considered them a sign of genetic imperfection, but the man had proved himself good enough at his job to warrant his continued tenure. There was no point in expecting a technician to be the equal of a scientist. That was why they were technicians. Nature’s hierarchy was as iron in its castes as the distinction between genders or races.

  Despite his coolly rational reserve, Dr. Sandler felt his eyes widen when he looked at Shaughnessy’s screen. He, too, would have called the reading impossible had he been as lax in his control of his emotions as his female associate.

  “That is indeed anomalous,” he said, allowing himself a micrometrically precise nod. “What are its coordinates?”

  Shaughnessy worked
his keyboards. Latitude and longitude numbers appeared in the upper-right corner of the display, overlaid where they would not interfere with the visual representation of data.

  “Fifty-one kilometers west of the confluence of the White River with the Missouri and five point three kilometers north of the course of the former Interstate Highway 90, Dr. Sandler, Dr. Oates.”

  “How shall we respond?” Dr. Oates asked. She had stepped up beside him.

  Anger was welling within Dr. Sandler, a purely understandable response to unreasonable interference in their work. Even if it was kept secret from the rest of Overproject Whisper. And even more imperatively so from the umbrella project, the Totality Concept.

  “It is those genetic misprints Doctors Hamlin and Stone!” he snarled. “Those Operation Chronos bunglers will disrupt everything. Everything!”

  Dr. Oates reached out a pale, precision-manicured hand and almost, but not quite, touched the sleeve of Dr. Sandler’s immaculate white coat.

  “May I speak to you privately, Dr. Sandler?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  They withdrew to a space along the bulkhead of the compartment. Dr. Sandler felt the stirring in the airs on his eyebrows and arms as he stepped into the hush-field.

  “May I remind the senior scientist that even if this timeline is contaminated by anomalous events, at least four others nearby in the multiverse will still continue with satisfactory to near-mathematically certain chances of success of the introduction of the next phase?”

  “But the Baronial America Endgame is key,” he said. “Especially to our success. And may I remind the junior scientist that, by undertaking to bring it to fruition on our own, the only possible outcome that can preserve us from purgation is complete success?”

  Wisely, she nodded her narrow, close-cropped head.

  “Of course, Dr. Sandler. But let us consider alternate possibilities. What if this unprecedented disturbance is not due to the Operation Chronos renegades impinging on our timeline?”