It was cold, and starting to snow, and they were out in the woods at the edge of some messed up looking farmland; like a serial killer’s idea of what a farm should look like, with dead trees everywhere. It would be getting dark within an hour, and this was a night he just knew he would regret. Three-Rivers and T.T., yes, and the squirrel, were dressed in tuxedos. He was in his leisure suit. They certainly looked out of place among the war party of ninety-eight Cherokees and eleven Piscataway and Potomac. These dudes were a really scary looking bunch, and Bruco was scarier yet, just spoiling for a fight in his bare feet and wearing nothing but a loin cloth. Unfortunately the people they had come to fight had a small walled city, cannons; and a small army with armored murderers, guns and swords and mean horses that were pinning down the remains of the war party they had come to rescue.

At least they don’t have a navy. Look at that mess out there!

The small city was surrounded by a wall made of timber as were all of the buildings except for the stone church. The entire place merely encompassed the west side of the Inner Harbor and most of the small peninsula that had become Federal Hill and Locust Point in his time. They were standing at the edge of the woods on the hill where the Washington Monument would be, and looking down a frozen track of mud that would become Charles Street. A few miles northeast of them, in a valley that would probably be Herring Run Park—the very place he had dropped off Three-Rivers for his starving squirrel dance—was a Spanish army of perhaps 300 soldiers, with horses and cannons and everything. This army was besieging a camp of perhaps a hundred isolated and largely wounded warriors; Potomac, Piscataway, Powhatan, and Nanticoke. The last group, he was told, would be related to Jay, as he had married a whole bunch of Nanticoke widows about 70 years past on this time-line.

What are we even going to do?

He felt a little better when he shifted his gaze from the walls to the scuttled Spanish fleet in the harbor. Apparently a Spanish treasure fleet coming up from Mexico was driven up into the Chesapeake Bay by some bigger fleet of even more bloodthirsty killer White People. According to Bruco they must have been English, and he believed that the Spanish sunk most of the ships themselves to block the entrance to the harbor where the docks, walled parade ground and landward gate were and force the enemy to try and take the high fortified portion of the city. The harbor looked like a forest of half-submerged dead ships. He counted eleven of various sizes, some being larger than a row house.

At the moment they had lookouts posted and were gathering in a circle under some very large trees around Three-Rivers. The Indian boy, who now looked like a full-blown Mexican teenager, was applying war-paint to his squirrel. Gerald stood on his hind legs with his little clawed arms crossed on his very own stage—Doctor Robinson’s briefcase. The squirrel was viewed with great interest and respect by the warriors, one of whom even stuck a black feather in the squirrel’s chin-strapped pimp-hat!

T.T. and Bruco towered over Three-Rivers like guardian gargoyles; one in tuxedo, the other in almost nothing and hairy as an ape! Three-Rivers was looking up at RavenSong, the super-scary Cherokee war chief, while he stripped down to his skin from the waist up. Eddie nudged Angh. “Dude, is he gonna get sick like dat?”

Angh was very precise with his whispered answer, “I do not believe so Eddie, though it may be that his remarkable state of being is not sustainable and his biology could soon crumble under the stress. But any prediction would be guesswork. Eddie, I do not have the ability to describe a ‘singularity’ in layman’s terms. Suffice it to say that Three-Rivers has more energy potential housed within his abdomen than a Nimitz Class carrier has in its nuclear reactor.”

The kid’s a walking reactor?

As Three-Rivers began a shortened version of his ‘demon-summoning dance’ Eddie could not help but ask more questions. Angh was one of the original time-travel technicians and was real smart.

“Angh, what’s he doin’? I mean I know what he’s doin’, but how is he doin’ it?”

“Three-Rivers has had the ability to perceive our internal capacitator codes—at least of those with whom he has shared events with. He is summoning Doctor London and Jay—who’s code he does not know. But, Daniel was keyed just to the right of Jay, and will have a negative difference of one in the last digit of his code. He is summoning them both according to his mythic understanding of the device that has somehow integrated itself into his biology. He is like a music savant who can’t read sheet music. He is a metaphysical person, not a scientific one, and has somehow linked intuitively to the artificial intelligence that governs the singularity within him. No one saw this coming Eddie, but here we are.”

Eddie patted Angh on the shoulder. “I hope Doc London knows how to stretch a first aid kit, ‘cause dats all we got son. I’m sure he’ll be rollin’ in naked. Tell you what—I’m about sick of this naked people express we got goin’ here. Dare ought’a be a law of clothativity ta go with dat law of relativity.”

Three-Rivers began to light up like a gas station sign and thunderclouds started to roll in…