Thresholder

With the ship back on course and the remaining hijackers safely divested of their weapons and under armed guard, the loose command structure that was percolating on the Caster had a private meeting in one of the largest cabin rooms, one which was normally reserved for large families but had been given over to the dwarven engineer Moss and his elven wife Velli. It was the two of them, the mysterious Dirk, Casper, and another woman that Perry had seen but didn’t know personally. She was one of the few melekee onboard, small and fidgety, and she swung her tail back and forth behind her, swishing it from side to side.

Perry was a fly on the wall, thanks to a reconstruction by Marchand from audio, knowledge of the ship’s layout, and previous encounters with those involved — though Marchand didn’t have detachable cameras unless you counted the helmet, so didn’t have much video to go off.

“This was a clusterfuck,” said Casper.

“That’s the culture,” said Dirk.

“No, you know good and well that it’s not,” said Casper. “If it’s a failure, it’s a failure of —”

“Of vetting, of procedure, of bureaucracy, of philosophy,” said Dirk. “I was being glib, but I do think that this sort of failure is the culture, and that’s by design, or if not design, then by all the cultural forces that have been set up.” He was momentarily taking a professorial tone, a decided change of speaking patterns for him. “We didn’t have background checks on the passengers, we didn’t have dossiers, we didn’t even have soft enforcement like interviews.”

“I was told there had been some kind of investigation,” said Moss. He was up on a chair with Velli beside him resting a hand on his shoulder, or at least that was what Marchand was extrapolating. “Was that not true?”

“There were negative checks,” said Dirk. “We barred a handful of people who were in our files, known associates of monarchical elements. But that didn’t mean anything, because we’ve been underfunded for ages, we leak like a sieve, and their spies have never been more determined than they were for this. So far as we know, they’ve folded up shop in Kerry Coast City.”

“Set your grudges to the side,” said the melekee woman. Marchand had given her name as Kari. “It happened. The monarchy in Berus is dead, this is part of its death rattle, one last gasp. They didn’t find the contraption, and were only guessing at its existence.” She bounced slightly in her seat, unable to keep still. She turned to Moss. “It’s safe?”

“I went up and checked it,” said Moss. “It’s snug and secure. If we want to extract it, it can’t be in the city, not if we want to keep it safe, especially not now, but it was always the plan to drop the passengers off and go north to the fields, somewhere that we can control.”

“The mistake was bringing civilians,” said Dirk. “It was a bad ruse. We should have filled the airship with people who were within a degree of trust.”

“We need people from Berus who also have a foot in the culture,” said Casper. “We need to bridge that gap, get people who can integrate and don’t have problems with understanding the local conditions.”

“Talking about it now isn’t going to be helpful,” said Velli. “What’s done is done. We need to decide what we’re doing about them, and about our unexpected savior.”

“We’ll know more once I talk to him,” said Moss. “I was certain that he was on the fence, someone between two worlds, just like we’d wanted, but I’m less assured of that now.”

“He killed fifteen people and you’re worried about his loyalty?” asked Dirk. “There’s no way that this is an attempt to make a deep infiltration and gain trust. I can imagine a king having a plan as insane as that, but I can’t imagine them actually carrying it out, and to put so much on the line, with a single person? No way.”

“We don’t know who or what he is,” said Moss. “Not him, and not the woman he claims is his wife. Some of his power is coming from the sword, which is clearly an Implement of some kind. But the source of the Implement is unclear, and hoarded deep magic is troublesome.”

Dirk was shaking his head. “There aren’t that many Implements, and it doesn’t match any of the ones we know. It’s always been possible that an unknown one would appear as though from nowhere, or worse, that someone would figure out how to make them, but we don’t know which, and it’s entirely possible there’s something else going on.”

“I agree he’s on our side,” said Velli. Her voice was like velvet, and whatever decisions Marchand had made about how to depict her, she was even more attractive than in the flesh. “He stopped this from being a devastating loss for us.”

“If the last sixty years have had any lesson,” said Casper. “It’s that there are lots of ways for someone to be on your side but also create all kinds of problems in the process of trying to achieve the same goals.”

“What do we do with those we captured?” asked Kari, swishing her tail to the side. “We can keep them until Berus, but once we’re there, we can’t turn them loose.”

“Most aren’t guilty of much,” said Casper. He sighed. “All they did was to grab a knife and carry out a plot that in theory would have resulted in destruction of property and nothing more. There was a single attempted murder, that of the captain, and there’s only a single person whose head we can put that on, someone who’s now dead.”

Dirk chuckled. “Is that you looking through the lens of the justice-minded, or your actual opinion?”

“A little of both,” said Casper. He seemed to only have a single mode, that of someone closely tracking the plot. “We all know how easy it is to get swept up in something. Some of the hijackers are Berusian agents, trained and hardened, fanatics, but I don’t think we can say that all of them are. Some probably found themselves going with the flow, feeling nervous and uncertain.”

“Mmm,” said Dirk.

“What would you propose?” asked Moss with a grumble. “Not something that’s against the culture, surely.”

“It would have been cleaner if Perry had killed them all,” said Dirk. “Doing it now? Sending them to a watery grave? That’s not the culture, I know that, but we’re talking about fifteen people who have shown that the death of their king isn’t going to stop them from supporting a monarchy.”

“Re-education,” said Casper. It was a laden word, and Perry wondered whether it had the same connotations to them.

“That’s not going to work, and we all know that,” said Velli. “Maybe for one in five of them, if they’re separated, if we can go to work on them, keep them away from the wrong information, the wrong materials, with a support staff … but we’re going to be in a place under transition, where time and effort have to be counted in a miserly way.”

“It will be down to the symboulion in Berus,” said Casper. “I would hope that they choose re-education, but we’ve seen how different places take to the new way of doing things. Encouraging a softer touch with justice is one of the most difficult pills to swallow in the wake of a violent struggle.”

“Mmm,” said Moss. “So we might give them a reprieve only for them to be executed when we land.”

“It’s possible,” said Casper. “It’s a matter of culture building. Sometimes the rod is what’s called for, just so people know and understand what’s at stake. Unfettered action by the enemy would be the death of everything they’re trying to do, which means that fetters are in order. I’m not up to date on what methods of punishment are in use in Berus, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there was some barbarism that the symboulion wanted to keep in use, even if just as a matter of irony. Remember the bull they used in Gwyndolir?”

“This is the second to last time we deal with this,” said Moss. “For which I’m thankful.”

“Recriminations and imponderables aside, what’s our position on Perry?” asked Dirk. “I want to have a plan.”

“We keep him close,” said the melekee woman. “What else is there to do?”

“I was going to tell him almost everything,” said Moss. “Not the technicals, not the deep secrets, but some of the tidbits that he might have picked up by having an ear to the ground. Nothing that hasn’t already leaked.”

“We can’t unleash until the last kingdom is brought around to the right way of thinking,” said Dirk. “Thirlwell is going to be a threat until their king is deposed and the last refuge of monarchism is turned. They’re going to be more of a threat if they learn everything that we know, if they get their hands on the tools we have.”

“What’s the chance that this very airship contains more than just the hijackers?” asked Velli.

“High,” said Dirk with a shrug. “I don’t know how much you’ve made the rounds here, but was there anyone you suspected of being a subversive in disguise?”

“Absolutely,” said Casper. “It’ll take some time to cross-reference the hijackers with my notes, but there’s a good chance that they left fervent collaborators back. It’s what I would have done, just to get someone on the inside of any plots against their takeover of the ship.”

Dirk rubbed his face. “And how much of a problem is it that I’m here?”

“There’s probably a story you could spin,” said Moss. “Two hundred people? That’s enough that you could disappear among them, so long as there hasn’t been someone with their eye on the manifest. You could say that you were, ah …”

“A stowaway,” said his wife. “Or just in your room, feeling sick from the motion of the ship. Of course, we would need you to have a room — will need you to have a room.”

“I’m not on board with this level of deception,” said Casper.

“Well, it’s what’s happening,” said Dirk. “We can’t do the normal method of claiming classification. It’s too obvious what we’re classifying.”

“Now that you’re here, it seems like an overreaction,” said Casper. “We should have waited until we were in Berus, when it would be easier to cover your tracks.”

“It’s fine,” said Dirk. “Circumstances were exceptional. And this way I’ve got eyes on Perry, whoever he is.”

~~~~

They talked for a long time, and didn’t reveal much, which Perry thought was pretty rude of them.

“I think ideally, people should state a bunch of facts that they all know every ten minutes or so,” said Perry. “I’ve had this problem in every world I’ve been to. More basic facts, people.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I shall note that down in your list of suggestions for alterations to their society.”

“Well, it seems obvious that they have something like … teleportation,” said Mette, who had been listening without the marginal benefit of being able to see Marchand’s near-real time recreation of the scene. “It’s something that’s very heavy, not available to anyone else, not known to the two kingdoms, —”

“Just one kingdom now,” said Perry.

“I think calling the kingdom of Berus dead is premature,” said Mette. “At least, from reading through the histories that Marchand has made available, regime change doesn’t always stick. Even if it has in this world, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t come with some last gasps from vested parties. There’s apparently something called a ‘king in exile’.”

“Yes, I’m very familiar with the phrase,” said Perry. “And from what I’ve heard, Berus and Thirlwell together had about a dozen of them.” He gave a wry laugh. “I guess the writing is on the wall for them now.”

“Most of them would be destitute, sir,” said Marchand. “It is the way of kings-in-exile, who no longer have a teat to suck at. They are kept, when they are, mostly as a form of leverage, or possibly with some faint hopes of restoration.”

Perry looked at the suit of armor with a frown. He wasn’t sure when or why Marchand had developed anti-monarchist tendencies, but the AI definitely had some thoughts on the rule of kings. It was worrying, not because the position was incorrect, but because it was one of the few areas where Marchand had a strong opinion that wasn’t drenched in the snooty butler humor that Richter had programmed in.

“In the near term, I’ll ingratiate myself with the locals,” said Perry. “We pretty clearly have to worry about the military might of Thirlwell, especially once we’re in Berus, because the explosives they used against civilians were strong enough to take me out. I’m not going to tell them much, and if they think that I’ve got a mysterious magical Implement, then I guess they’re half right.”

“What do they think I am then?” asked Mette.

“You haven’t really come up,” said Perry. “And if Dirk is here, then he knows about Nima, and I don’t know what he makes of her either.”

“They think I’m just some random person,” said Mette. “Or your actual wife.” She seemed displeased by the notion.

“I mean,” said Perry. “What are you actually?”

“What do you mean?” asked Mette.

“If you’re not some random person, and you’re certainly not from Berus like we’ve been pretending, then … I mean, you are by your own confession not a proper engineer, but what’s your role?” Perry thought that she probably was an engineer, at least in the context of the worlds and their people. He was convinced that they had some kind of preternatural ability on Esperide, even if the explanation was mundane in origin.

“I don’t know,” said Mette. “But do they think that I can’t fight?”

“You can’t fight,” said Perry.

“I could, if I had a suit like yours,” said Mette. “And it wouldn't be that hard to make one, not with the technology they have. Microchips would be the big issue.”

Perry resisted the urge to laugh at that. “I think you’re still underestimating the enormous number of people it took to build it,” said Perry. “And you would also need a power source, which you’re not getting anytime soon.”

“The lanterns have a lot of power, at least with the right fuel,” said Mette. “I don’t think a suit of armor would be out of the question, not if I had a shop and permission to requisition materials, maybe an assistant or two. That’s something that we’re trying to get for me.”

“It’s possible that’s what they’ve got shoved up into the envelope of the Caster,” said Perry. “But it’s got to be a weapon, otherwise I don’t see why they would be so secretive about it.”

“It could be anything,” said Mette. “You think that it’s not the teleportation they were using? It’s something else?”

“Hard to say,” said Perry. “But if it were teleportation … I don’t know. I would assume they wouldn’t use the pretense of a passenger airship in the first place if that was the case, and I don’t really see why it would have to be secret.”

“Well that I can tell you,” said Mette.

“Alright, do tell,” said Perry. He folded his arms and watched her. He thought his grip on these people was probably better than hers, but he was open to being enlightened.

“First,” said Mette. “There seems to be some kind of prohibition on effluence, which means that if it ‘cost’ a lot of effluence, then they might ban it, or just not have the general public know about it. But second, their whole society is premised on things being under local control, right?”

“And if you could move between continents on a whim, then nothing would really be local,” said Perry, nodding. “Alright, I can see that. But there’s already a policy of open borders, and they have the Global Command Authority, so I’m not sure how much of a sticking point that would be for something that would be enormously useful, depending on what it costs, how often it can be used, and what the form factor is like.”

“They don’t want technology,” said Mette. “Or I guess they only want enough technology to get by, and nothing more, which is its own kind of insanity.” She cocked her head to the side. “Is that a thing? Worlds where everyone shares a certain sort of insanity?”

“Probably a thing, yeah,” said Perry. “But there’s no evidence for it here, and if there were evidence, an aversion to technology wouldn’t be what I would point to.”

“Mmm,” said Mette. “It’s not clear to me why they don’t just move their manufacturing out into uninhabited parts of the world, the deserts and tundras.”

“Then people would have to live there,” said Perry. “It wouldn’t be workable.”

“All they’d need is a way to survive the conditions, that’s not that hard,” Mette frowned.

“You come from a world where you’re constantly fighting against the elements in one way or another,” said Perry. “Surely you can see how that’s not normal or expected?”

“I’m just saying that they could,” said Mette. She folded her arms across her chest. “It wouldn’t be that difficult, and the ‘dirty’ lanterns are an order of magnitude more effective than the domes, at least from what I’ve read.”

“Sir, if I might bring another matter to your attention?” asked Marchand.

“Of course, go ahead,” said Perry.

“It appears that the meeting has concluded with no additional information of note, but I’ve been able to track Mister Gibbons as he moved through the ship,” said Marchand. “He appears to have gone into the envelope of the Caster to inspect whatever is there. It offers an opportunity to make some investigations of our own.”

“Can you show me a visual?” asked Perry, grabbing the helmet and putting it back on without waiting for a response.

“Sir, it occurs to me that this would be an ideal situation for sonic mapping, if it were possible for you to get on top of the airship,” said Marchand.

“That’s going to be risky,” said Perry. “There’s almost nothing around us, just open ocean, and people are going to be on edge. They know I can fly, even if they don’t know the specifics, and I don’t want to reveal more. Can you do it from here? We’re on the upper deck, the envelope should be right above us, shouldn’t it?”

“Very well, sir,” said Marchand. “I can’t promise that I’ll be able to make heads or tails of what the nanites are able to pick up in terms of audio, and unfortunately, their vision is rather rudimentary.”

“I could maybe take one of the cameras,” said Mette. “They’re small, aren’t they?”

“That would compromise the integrity of the offensive systems,” said Marchand with what felt like a scowl.

“Perry can use energy to make repairs, can’t he generate a new one?” asked Mette. “A pinhole camera, something like that? Surely you could spare it.”

“I think such an approach is ill-advised,” said Marchand, without adding a customary ‘ma’am’.

“Show me Dirk,” said Perry, who had been waiting with the helmet on.

“Sir, would you prefer embellishments or only what I can say for certain is true?” asked Marchand.

“Embellish the interior, and Dirk,” said Perry. “Only show me what you know for certain is true of the contraption they’re bringing in.”

The image came in. Because the sun was up, the interior of the envelope was brightly lit, the white skin of it allowing a lot of light to come through. There were relatively few struts compared to the inside of something like the Hindenburg, and most of them were in the center of the interior space, supporting two large lanterns which could only be reached through a ladder that came up from the engineering section. They had been burning through the whole trip, creating effluence as part of the cost of doing business, one of them shining bright to keep the envelope relatively rigid, the other removing air from the interior to create a slight vacuum effect that provided buoyancy. It was, overall, a pretty trifling expenditure of energy and effluence for the effect that it created.

Dirk was moving along the bottom of the envelope, wearing a non-magical mask to help him breathe. It looked like a nightmare out of the first World War, a thing of straps and rubber, connected to a hose that let him breathe. Perry had heard the inside of the envelope compared to high-altitude climbs, and the difference in air pressure was enough that you would pass out without supplemental oxygen.

The contraption was rendered incompletely, without color, just white lines and black surfaces that had white lettering on them with guesses about the materials, mostly stamped ‘METAL’. It had a concavity, which Dirk crawled inside to look at, running his hands over the interior of it. If he was looking for something, it wasn’t clear what, but when he was finished, he had something in hand, marked in the same way, ‘METAL’ and ‘GLASS’, a tube of some kind. He slipped it into his pocket and made his way out, humming softly to himself.

“Any idea what that’s about?” asked Perry as Dirk took off the mask and rubbed the place where it had sat against his skin.

“Just a moment, sir,” said Marchand. “There are nanites on his clothes, I’m sending some of them to investigate now. Even if the tube is sealed, their sensors should be able to give some sense of what’s inside.”

“Show me when you know,” said Perry. “Good to know where their secrets are. I don’t trust him, for the record.”

“You do find it difficult to trust, sir,” said Marchand. “It appears to be a sealed vial filled with blood.”

Perry frowned as the image of the vial was shown alongside the image of Dirk walking along the walkway. It was capped with brass and really did seem to be nothing more than a quantity of blood. Perry had some immediate flashbacks to the blood gems that Cosme had used, though he doubted that this was in any way related.

“Mette, any idea why you’d use a bunch of blood in a lantern?” asked Perry.

“No,” said Mette. “Are you sure it’s a lantern?”

“Absolutely not,” said Perry. “Could be some new form of magic that we haven’t heard about, or some creation that comes from their understanding of physics as it exists here. But I’ll call it a lantern for now, and assume that it’s known rather than unknown.”

“I don’t think there’s anything that you could do with blood,” said Mette. “When you shine things through a lantern, usually the effect is pretty mild, and changing the base effect is difficult. A lantern can make blood, I suppose, in the same way that it can make some egg loaf. But I don’t know how or why it would be a part of any device.” She shook her head. “Magic.”

“We’ll have to ask Nima, but I doubt she’ll know any better than we do,” said Perry.

“Sir, it appears that Mister Gibbons is on the move,” said Marchand. “He appears to be making his way to our room.”

“I’d rather talk to Moss,” said Perry with a frown. “Alright, time for you to get shoved into the shelf.”

Marchand was put away by the time Dirk came strolling down the hallway and knocked on their door. The shelf space would take a lot of time to clean, and Perry wasn’t looking forward to that, but the pieces of the armor would be fine there for the time being. Most likely the linens would have to be thrown away, which was a shame. The only piece that Perry left out was the helmet, which was hidden under the bed. It didn’t have terribly much compute on its own, but it would be able to follow basic commands, and most importantly, record everything that happened for later review.

Perry opened up the door with a smile on his face, and Dirk smiled back.

“So,” said Dirk. “Can I come in?”

“It’s cramped,” said Perry. “But sure.” He backed up and leaned against the wall next to the bed, where Mette was sitting with her knees held close to her chest. She was giving Dirk a wary look, because apparently she hadn’t gotten the memo about sardonic smiles. “This is my wife, Mette,” said Perry. “I’ve told her about you.”

“And what have you told her?” asked Dirk.

“That you’re with ICGCA,” said Perry. “That you definitely weren’t on this ship when we left. That you’re a spymaster or something like it, except a competent spymaster would have stopped this hijacking before it started.”

“You handled it,” said Dirk.

“All’s well that ends well, huh?” asked Perry.

“I suppose,” said Dirk. “There’s the question of how you handled it. A few of those men were nothing special, nationalist malcontents, a few of them not even really soldiers, just businessmen or visitors to our fair shores. Others, a select group, had at least a few years in the Berusian military, including some with masks. And there were two, both now dead by your hand, who were part of elite task teams.”

“Seems like maybe they shouldn’t have been here if that’s what they were,” said Perry.

“It’s easier to get information when you have a handful of men under swordpoint,” said Dirk. “It’s even easier when the information in question is about dead men whose identities don’t need to be protected.”

“Still seems like they shouldn’t have been here,” said Perry. “Like maybe people should have been checked more thoroughly before the airship took off. Maybe those masks and knives would have been found that way.”

“It’s not the culture,” said Dirk with a nonchalant shrug. “But I guess you wouldn’t know that, you being from … ?”

Perry smiled. “Abroad.”

“See, but there are so many kinds of abroad,” said Dirk with a smile. “I was wondering which one specifically.”

Perry kept up his smile, but said nothing in return. It was the time to press about the contraption in the envelope of the airship, which must have been put there with great effort and expense before it came to Kerry Coast City. Perry didn’t press though, mostly because he didn’t think that answers would be forthcoming. It was something that they wanted to keep secret, and because they had a general aversion to secrets, Perry figured that it was going to stay locked up unless they actually talked about its nature to each other.

“Look,” said Perry. “You know that something is fishy with me. You know that I have a sword that you don’t have on file and that by rights I probably shouldn’t have, because it should be a part of the commons. I’m admitting to all that. But I’m on your side here, and I want to help you with setting up your systems — your culture — in Berus. Isn’t that enough for now?”

“Depends on who you’re with,” said Dirk. He glanced over at Mette, who hadn’t said anything. “I don’t buy you as a married couple, but I also don’t buy you as an asset and his handler. But Moss seems to think that you’re someone worth keeping around, and it’s pretty clear that if you were on the side of the monarchists, you’d have acted very, very differently.”

“So we’re at an impasse, that’s what you’re saying?” asked Perry.

“I wouldn’t go so far as that,” said Dirk. “You’ll do what you want, as most people do, but you’re not getting read in until we have some understanding of you and your history. Until then, you’ve proven yourself as a soldier and a bodyguard, and if you want to stick with Moss as he helps build the domes, that’s workable.”

Perry shrugged as though he didn’t care.

“Good talk,” said Dirk with a smile. He rapped his knuckles against the wall. “I’ll be seeing you.”

“You’re staying?” asked Perry. “Or going through … whatever means you came here with?”

“Whatever you think it is, it’s not that,” said Dirk. “Better not to speculate. If we can clear you, you can be in the know, but until then,” he shrugged. “We have an expression in my business, ‘need to know’. Right now? You don’t need to know.”

Perry nodded, and Dirk stared at him for a moment, then took his leave.

“Yup,” said Perry. “I definitely prefer Moss.”

~~~~

So far as Perry could tell, there were only a half dozen people who knew anything about what was hidden in the airship, and they simply didn’t talk to each other about it all that much. It wasn’t that they had good infosec, since Marchand had called their infosec ‘quite dreadful’, and Perry wasn’t necessarily one to talk when it came to keeping a lid on things. It was more that whatever they had to say about whatever weapon or tool was squirreled away, they had already exhausted the conversion. The captain was one of those in the know, but he was still recovering from his injuries and pretty out of it, having not much he could recall about the hijacking.

Still, there were snippets here and there, fragments that suggested a whole. Velli and Moss were a particularly good source of those, since they were with each other almost constantly, but they were in tune enough that it was even more cryptic.

“Dirk seems normal,” said Velli as they laid in bed together. “I would have thought he would be … different. Changed, somehow?”

“No,” said Moss. “It works as advertised.”

Perry would have chalked that up to concerns about their teleportation method, but it sounded more serious than they were letting on. The vial of blood seemed to suggest to Perry that they had somehow pulled Dirk to them when the moment of crisis had happened, but that wasn’t entirely clear to him, and nothing actually helped to resolve the ambiguities.

Perry had seeded the whole of the ship with more nanites, enough that he had begun to put a serious dent in the supply that he’d cultivated. He had bugged the rooms of everyone who seemed the least bit important, along with the room they were keeping the hijackers in. Perry took on shifts on guard duty, which was incredibly boring even with the earpiece in to provide some entertainment. He was looked at with fear and disdain by the people he’d effectively captured. They seemed to be in no particular hurry to try anything. As Perry looked over them, he had plenty of time to consider that not all of them were soldiers who had felt compelled to act through sheer nationalist brainwashing — that many of them were just young men who had been trying to get home and had been convinced to add their bodies to the effort to take over the ship. That didn’t make them blameless, but Perry felt bad for them.

It was also very possible that some of them had been in the same position and then died to Perry’s blade. The only thing to say about that was “Ah, shit,” and then move on.

There were two that didn’t seem pissed off to see Perry. One was the masked woman who’d been about five seconds away from having her throat cut open with the edge of his thumbnail. The other was the guy whose arm Perry had graciously elected not to break. They were the ones who had witnessed him fight, and he had left an impression.

The guy came up to Perry, head held low like a dog that thought that it was about to be beaten for eating a loafer.

“I wanted to say … thank you,” he said.

“For what?” asked Perry.

“For not breaking my arm,” he said. “For not killing me.”

Perry gave him a nod, and he went back to sit down with the others. Maybe that was the chance to say something to make the whole thing better, to talk to him about the culture and what the expectations were, but Perry didn’t have that in him. He didn’t even ask the boy’s name. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, maybe still a highschooler by the standards of American education.

Perry didn’t talk to the woman at all, but every time he was on guard duty, he felt her eyes on him. She was wondering what such a powerful man was doing fighting for a system that didn’t reward power, if he understood her right. He felt no sympathy for her, and worried that he was going to see much more of her sort before his time in this world was done.

The sky changed as they came closer to the island nation of Berus. That was the effluence, Nima explained. She had been stand-offish with him since he’d saved the airship, or perhaps because of the highlight reel he’d shown her.

“They never said it was so beautiful,” she said. The sky shimmered like the northern lights, with ribbons of color, and the clouds took on strange hues, some of them pale green and vibrant gold.

“There’d be no reason to,” said Perry. “It’s a blight. It’s miscarriages and deformities, a slow-motion calamity in progress.”

“It can still be beautiful, for all that,” said Nima. “I wonder what it will look like at night.”

“Imagine the rain that comes from those clouds?” asked Perry. “Imagine drinking water that looks like that, because you have no other option.”

“Your world was like this?” asked Nima.

“Not here,” said Perry with a slight shake of his head. There were other people on the observation deck, and he didn’t trust the wind to bury their words. “But yes, at times.” Looking at the sky, he couldn’t help but think about the rainbows you sometimes saw in an oil slick. “I’d say that it’s strange to see such a stark effect, but I saw the monsters swimming in the ocean below us, and if people would be dissuaded from pollution with pink clouds, then I guess I would have to say that I don’t know people.”

Nima was silent. She still seemed to like the bright colors.

The city of Calamus was like hundreds of other cities, maybe millions given the many worlds. A long river wound its way through flat land to the sea, and a city had grown to drink that water up. There was a busy north side and an industrial south side, reminiscent of London to Perry’s eyes, with plenty of bridges going between the two, and there was a thicket of ships with huge engines on their backs, the age of sail having mostly passed by, at least for those who didn’t care about leaving effluence in their wake. There were slums, visible from the air as ramshackle places with haphazard construction and terrible building materials, and there were also cathedrals whose exteriors were kept white and clean, along with what had to be halls of power and periodic monuments. There were, surprisingly, some green spaces, but the colors were wrong, with blue flowers on the trees and sickly yellow streaks across the fields.

This was to be their home for the next however long. It wasn’t a place of quasi-utopian communal living, but a place of transition. In theory, that transition would be peaceful, but Perry could smell smoke in the air, and it didn’t seem like the smoke of wood fires. The parks were devoid of people, even though it was midday, and Perry could see scorch marks on some of the white buildings and flagpoles without their flags.

He steeled himself for what they would find when they landed.

His primary concern was finding the man who had killed the king.