December 27, 1873
Hunter was in the snowy Sierra Nevadas tracking down a kidnapped girl. This put him five days’ walk away from Rainwater hoping that Stout didn’t get to Ariko before he did. But the missing girl came first. Last time she had died because he hadn’t expected a second kidnapper. This time he knew better.
Though he didn’t need them, the pack on his shoulders and the shearling coat on his back made progress through the mountains only slightly harder. They were for the girl, to get her back down the mountain to her folks Barry and Linda. The kidnapping had been a betrayal by Barry’s business partner Al; a cur low on money and even lower on integrity. Al wanted Barry to walk away from his half of their stagecoach station, but Hunter wasn’t going to let that happen.
He’d spent his forty years on this planet aimlessly wandering from situation to situation like this trying to do some good, but after Taak’s village was slaughtered, he questioned himself. Stout was still alive out there putting more misery into the world than any ten men could take out. They’d had a tense truce on that life raft floating through space, he and Stout. If they found a rock to land on, their little terraformer would make a piece of it habitable but if thoughts of a potential eternity lost in darkness ever became too much, there was always the suicide injector.
A fiery plunge into Earth’s atmosphere spared Hunter the use of the injector though he was ashamed to admit he had thought about it. Ship and engines went one way, the terraformer another. And after they crashed, he and Stout went their separate ways; Hunter to inhabit the body of friend-less, family-less cowboy dying in the desert, and Stout to possess the body of a genocidal New Orleans slave driver. But Ariko’s giving me another chance at him.
Last time it had taken him two days to find the kidnappers but this time he went straight to their crumbling derelict cabin at the top of a steep slope; some small forgotten piece of a failed homestead. So many of them rotting as withered dreams across the unforgiving northern California landscape. Settlers far from home. A reminder that freedom itself isn’t freedom from failure.
Hunter couldn’t help but wonder what would have been waiting for him if his ship had made it to the new planet with the rest of the settlers. Would it be hostile, or could they call it home? Would they succeed or would they fail like the poor homesteader whose cabin was now infested with kidnappers? He’d never know.
After hiding his coat and pack behind a rock, he crawled close to the ground up to the cabin door and buried himself in the snow beside it reducing his body heat to keep the snow intact and remain hidden.
He could hear them arguing. Al’s partner was obviously an opium addict and getting antsy. That must’ve been why he shot the girl before, he thought. The last time he opted to take out Al from a hundred yards with a Henry repeater unaware of the addict in the cabin with the girl. Going to have to kill them both up close.
It was a few hours and near dusk before Al came out the door to collect firewood. While Al was still in the doorway, Hunter jumped up and put a bullet under his chin and another in the opium addict’s forehead splattering the little red headed girl beside him.
“Bethany it’s okay,” he said re-holstering his gun and holding up his hands. “Your father sent me. I’m taking you home.”
Hunter returned Bethany to tears and hugs from Barry and Linda, but he couldn’t stay to celebrate; he needed to get to Taak. Understanding Barry’s worry and bewilderment at his request for a stagecoach ride to the middle of the badlands—it was an unorthodox request to say the least—he appreciated when Barry obliged.
From there it was a day’s walk before he entered the canyon where the Karuk village of Pírishkunish was hidden. The warriors on the cliffs above recognized him as a friend and let him pass. Through a barren alley of rocky shadows, he stepped onto a green carpet covering the canyon floor to see a robust and verdant village full of people and wooden houses and smiled. This was the least that this group of Karuk deserved after being hounded eastward by the Army and killed along the way.
They came into this canyon to hide and found trickles of water generated by the damaged terraformer lying at the bottom of a hole. Taak’s brother Keesich had gone down to investigate and never came out. It had claimed him, taking his nervous system as an improvised circuitry template by which to patch and reset itself.
By chance, Hunter just happened to be in the area close enough to hear the machine and entered the canyon. Taak was the first to engage him in a fight and after getting set aflame with a knife made from a gaasyendietha tooth and having a quarter of his body blown away with a tomahawk made from a wendigo bone, Hunter convinced them he was no threat and wanted to reprogram the terraformer for them so that Keesich’s sacrifice might not have been in vain and the village honors Keesich to this day.
But Hunter understood Taak’s initial reaction. They had every right to be suspicious of him after what they had been through. It made him think back to the settlers he was with and the planet they were heading toward. Would there have been people already living there when they arrived? And if there were, would his people have been more gracious to them than the settlers of this land were to those who already lived here? Could his people have defied the same genocidal mania that had taken hold here? Given his planet’s history he would have to say no.
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But now he was standing in a cool fertile garden not far from the spot where six months from now he died on hot sterile sand. They had built an earthen mound with a log-framed doorway over the terraformer pit where Taak came out to greet him. “Stout is coming for your village unless we stop him first,” Hunter said cutting straight to business as was the way between them.
“When? How did you find out?” Taak asked.
“There’s a lady who can reverse time.”
After the miracle of the terraformer and the knowledge of what Hunter was, nothing was in the realm of surprise for Taak.
“And six months from now, after Stout slaughtered your village, we died trying to avenge it and that lady brought us back to this time.”
“And you have this knowledge, and I don’t?”
“It has something to do with what I am. Which means Stout knows too. We can feel when the lady uses her power but only if we’re close enough to her. We need to get to Rainwater.”
Rainwater was a three-day walk away but because Hunter didn’t need sleep and could go longer than that without water and Taak’s meditation techniques reduced his need for both, they made the trip in one.
Hunter thought the streets might be crawling with Stout’s men waiting for their arrival so they got into town under cover of darkness when a White man traveling with an Indian would be less noticeable and he was still surprised to find those streets empty. Ariko would likely be with the other Asians on the outskirts of the far end of town.
When they got to the maze of shacks and wooden buildings, they were greeted at the main thoroughfare by a short man in a simple dark blue samue set with nothing but a haori to keep off the cold who made a motion with his head for them to follow.
Ariko was in the basement of a noodle house; an empty but surprisingly well-lit brick room with a few shelves of food and utensils along the walls and a wooden table at the center where Ariko rose and bowed to greet them. “Good. You are here,” she said as the man in the haori took his leave of them. “I’ve had someone on the lookout for you since I got here two days ago.”
“I thought Stout might be here ready for us,” Hunter said.
“No. Fortunately the mayor and sheriff hate him and have banned him and his people. It’s a fight Stout finds it more convenient to avoid. And Mr…?”
“Just Hunter.”
“If we are to take on Stout, we need to know as much about him as possible. You say he is like you. What exactly is that?”
“This body used to belong to someone else.”
“Who?”
“Someone alone. Someone lonely. Someone who wanted his life to matter but it didn’t. Born and orphaned early in Texas, he moved out to San Francisco for a change but ended up living the same life he had moved away from. He got separated from his crew when a dust storm stampeded his herd and I found him dying in the desert. He willingly gave up his body because nothing mattered to him anymore. I still have his memories, his feelings, his mannerisms. The being that came out of that merger is a mix of us both.”
“And what is the benefit?”
“Together we’re faster. I can heal this body rapidly. As long as there is a piece left, the rest will grow back.”
“Even if you burn?”
“I’d estimate it would take something like a blast furnace to possibly kill either of us.” He reached toward the back of his belt and produced a metal cylinder about the length of a dollar bill with a narrow glass viewport along its length that displayed a black liquid. “But this would kill us almost instantly. It’s a suicide injector of microscopic machines that will disassemble us at the cellular level.”
“What is your ‘core’? Where do you end, and this body begin?”
“My core could be described as a plant that looks somewhat like a house centipede wrapped around this body’s spine. Any more questions?”
Taak stepped forward. “I have one—when is Stout going to slaughter my village?”
“This is what he tells me,” Ariko said extending a hand at Hunter. “I don’t know when this happens. Stout isn’t my priority.”
“Then why are you here?” Taak asked with a curl in his lip.
“Yes. Forgive me. You do not know me. I come from a long line of samurai who have served the Emperor’s family for generations. You had asked me how I did what I did. The only explanation that makes sense to my family is that I was born different after my pregnant mother was exposed to a rock from the sky that glowed blue under the water.”
That blue glow sounded like the radiation Hunter had seen in reactors. Her mother had been exposed to a radioactive meteorite and Ariko’s power was some sort of one-in-a-trillion mutation.
“When Emperor Meiji was restored to power, he did away with the title of samurai but he’s allowed me to keep it in my unique service to him. Currently my country is trying to throw off the shackles of feudalism and come into the modern world. The Emperor’s sister Princess Junko is a vampire—an object of superstition—and he felt her presence would turn our faces from the future back to the past, so he confined her to the palace. This displeased her and she wanted to run as far away from her brother as she could, which led her here where, as far as I can tell, she married Joseph Stout. I have come to bring her back home.”
This made no sense to Hunter. “Only to be locked back up again?”
And he found Ariko’s answer unsatisfying. “The Emperor is a proud and sometimes… petty man. I have no interest in divining his motives.”
Taak jabbed a finger on the table and leaned closer to Ariko. “Well, I need to know that when we face Stout, you will have our backs.”
“Only to the extent it doesn’t jeopardize my mission.”
Taak folded his arms and turned partly away from her. “Of course. You have a country to return to. Mine has been destroyed and what’s left of my people might be soon as well. Yes. I think I know you now.”
“Hold on,” Hunter said holding up a hand for Ariko to reconsider. “How do you know Stout’s not going to keep coming for her? You’ll be looking over your shoulder the rest of your life. It’s in all our best interests to defeat him now.”
Ariko put a hand to her chin. “There is wisdom in this. Stout has to die. And Hunter—I need to know I can trust you as well. You say that you have that body’s feelings and memories. Isn’t there some small part of you that resents an Asian woman and a Native taking down a White man that’s also the same species as you?”
Hunter turned to leave as he spoke. “I’ll say this: if some dirty bastard beats his wife and gets convicted by a jury of women, you don’t get offended for him on behalf of men unless you identify with dirty wife-beating bastards of the world. No. It’s the wife-beating bastards that offend me.”
This was good enough for Ariko. “Then we begin surveillance on Stout right away.”