The Defiant Agents

A team of Apache volunteers is sent to colonize the distant planet Topaz, part of a Cold War race to claim new worlds before Soviet rivals do. When a mind machine floods them with the ancestral memories of their people, they wake confused, half convinced they are warriors of an earlier age. Nearby, a group of Russians has undergone the same process and now believes itself a Mongol horde. Caught between the two, Travis Fox slowly recovers his sense of purpose and discovers he can reach the minds of the planet’s coyotes. Andre Norton weaves frontier history, identity, and interstellar rivalry into this entry in her Time Traders cycle. Available here as a free PDF and EPUB edition.