Thresholder

The king fell to the ground with blood gushing from the hole in his face. The bullet had hit just at the start of his left eyebrow, and he was definitely very dead. By the time his body had smacked against the forest floor, he wasn’t moving at all, and Perry was racing through the forest as fast as he could, leaving everyone else behind.

“Fuck, fuck, what the fuck March, what the fuck,” Perry said as he sprinted. “Why would you do that?”

“I’ve taken the liberty of ending the monarchy, sir,” said Marchand.

The trees were flying by. Perry was pouring everything he had into running, which meant that he’d clear the park in thirty seconds. His top speed with the power armor and all the energy from his vessels flowing into his legs was something like ninety miles an hour, but he’d set that record on flat land, not on uneven forest floor. His hand went to his side and grabbed the sword from the shelf. He would break free of the trees and then launch himself into the air, which would slow him down considerably, but hopefully he’d be far enough away that —

He heard the cry of anguish from behind him, so loud that it must have been amplified. It shook the trees, but Marchand let only a spike of its full volume in before tamping it down and canceling it out to the best of his ability.

Perry sprinted straight past a portal that appeared next to him. He was gone before it could open all the way. He heard a howl from behind him, then another that was Doppler shifted as he ran past it. She was posting up portals faster than he’d known she could make them, trying to keep pace with him, to find him as he ran. He would have zig-zagged, but that would slow him down, and it already felt harrowing to run through the forest at such high speeds even without changing direction.

She opened a portal a hundred feet in front of him and stepped through it, snapping it shut behind her. She clenched her obsidian-tipped spear in both hands. He was going too fast to easily change direction, so he raised his sword and knocked away the tip of her spear, then crashed right into her. They tumbled across the forest floor, and she hit a tree while he kept rolling. He was back on his feet in a flash, and she kipped up as though the crash hadn’t affected her at all. All kinds of alerts were going off. The power armor wasn’t designed for a crash like that, not at that speed.

“How dare you!” she howled. “Murderer!”

She launched herself at him, sprinting across the distance between them, high heels digging into the forest floor. He was rattled. Spear against sword was a bad matchup for him, especially with a spear that long.

The gun popped up from his shoulder and shot her. Her head jerked back, but when she brought it back down there was no dent. She shook her head, momentarily stunned, then came in closer to him. She was more wary now, her training coming back to her. She’d said that she trained with a spear, and he could see it in the way she stood. Her footwork was impeccable.

“Why?” she asked. Her voice was tight, but also amplified, another power revealing itself.

“He was going to shoot me,” said Perry.

He was going to have to either grab her spear as it came in or deflect it with his sword. She had said that she had a spear that could teleport people, but she hadn’t said whether it was this spear. With a portal, he could at least stop himself from going through, but if she put him in a kill room —

“You’re a liar!” she shouted. The voice, again, was extremely loud, painful to the ears even with the dampening. “A thief of life! All that time spent talking to you, and you learned nothing! You were only pretending to get close to him, you never cared at all!”

She lunged forward and Perry knocked the spear to the side. He was late to meet the thrust though, and the tip of the spear sliced through the chestplate of his armor like it wasn’t even there. It hadn’t touched his flesh, but the armor was damaged, and more warnings were popping up. Perry surged power into the suit, trying his best to heal it, but the technique he’d developed was slow and better with cosmetic damage.

Perry wasn’t going to get anywhere by trying to have a conversation with her. He definitely wasn’t going to be able to pin this one on Marchand, not given how it had looked from the outside. What was he going to say, ‘Sorry, but the subservient robot butler I haven’t mentioned before now is sentient enough to take matters into his own hands, and I completely failed to both understand what he was going to do or stop him’. That wasn’t going to fly.

Third Fervor spun the spear around and went for another lunge. Perry opened the shelfspace and stepped back into it, closing it behind him before the spear could find him.

“Fuck,” he said. He closed his eyes for a moment, took a steadying breath, then opened them again. “We wait her out, then leave. She won’t know whether it was a portal like hers or not. I don’t think she saw me grab the sword. For all she knows, I’m halfway across the planet by now, hit and run tactics.”

“Indeed, sir,” said Marchand.

“March, what the fuck?” asked Perry.

“To what are you referring, sir?” asked Marchand.

“To you shooting the king in the face,” said Perry. “When I said for you to go ahead, I meant ‘alright, tell me the plan’, I didn’t mean ‘enact the plan immediately’.”

“He was going to shoot you, sir,” said Marchand. “As you said to Miss Fervor.”

“So?” asked Perry. “We can take a hit.”

“There was a small window of opportunity, sir,” said Marchand. “Those men in masks can make a person resistant to bullets, and depending on their strength, might have stopped the solution from working. May I show you?”

Perry gritted his teeth. “Go ahead.”

The image changed, with the shelfspace only visible at the edges of the screen. Marchand was showing a slowed down video feed of the moment in question. The gun was pointed right at Perry, finger on the trigger. The image zoomed in. A red circle, drawn by Marchand, surrounded the other hand, which was making a signal that Perry had missed. The red circle was a bit insulting, given that there was only one thing on the screen to see. The video panned over to one of the guards, whose eyes could just barely be seen closing. Again, a red circle highlighted the eyes.

“We can take a hit,” Perry repeated, only a little less firmly. “It wasn’t a hand cannon. It wasn’t going to kill us.”

“Perhaps not, sir,” said Marchand. “However, I believe this was as unprotected as the king was going to get, and with that signal he gave, intended to make sure you weren’t under protection, he dropped his own protection. The monarchy has ended, and I believe that’s cause for celebration.”

“No,” said Perry through grit teeth. “That’s not how monarchy works. The death of a king isn’t the death of the monarchy, there are always heirs, a line of succession. He had three children, all old enough to rule.”

There was a brief pause, then the image of the castle appeared on the screen with three red dots placed in different positions.

“March, what is that?” asked Perry.

“These are the locations of the three heirs within the castle,” said Marchand. A green route overlaid the castle, which went transparent to show the different floors. The route pierced through each of the red dots. “I believe if we move quickly and encounter little interference from Third Fervor, we might be able to accomplish it within ten minutes. They are adult children, or very nearly, so your reticence to murder children need not apply.”

“Fuck off,” said Perry. “March, you didn’t have my authority to kill the king, and you don’t have the authority to set me missions. Understood?”

“Forgive me, sir,” said Marchand. “But you’ve given me wide latitude in the past. Would you like to update my standing orders?” His tone of voice was the same as it ever was, businesslike with just a tiny touch of sarcasm.

Perry clenched his fist. “What standing orders did you think gave you the latitude to shoot a man in the face?”

Perry’s own voice played back for him. “I hereby charge you with second guessing my judgment and personal opinions. So long as we’re not in a combat scenario. Or … even then, I guess, if you think that I’m emotionally compromised.”

“When was that?” asked Perry.

“Dates have become very uncertain as we’ve traveled through worlds,” said Marchand. “The instruction was given while you were training at Worm Gate.”

“Fuck,” said Perry.

“Do you wish to rescind that command?” asked Marchand.

Perry thought about that. “We could have taken the hit. Even if he’d shot us, we could have taken the hit.”

“I believe there was a three percent chance of incapacitation, sir,” said Marchand. “I could show you the projections, if you would like.”

“Do it,” said Perry.

The view changed again, showing a cone coming forward from the gun. It was a wide cone, but most of it was shaded green, which apparently indicated places where a hit from the bullet would be acceptable. Only a few regions were lined red, and a few of those had an X, which Perry assumed was supposed to show an incapacitation. They were at the seams of the armor, places where a bullet could conceivably penetrate.

“Unconvincing,” said Perry. “If you’re going to shoot a monarch in the face, you get more confirmation from me, okay?”

“Only a monarch, sir?” asked Marchand. “Shall I rank people on the basis of social standing when deciding whether to shoot them?”

Perry closed his eyes tightly. He needed to be out of the fucking armor. He needed to have a sit down with Mette and debug Marchand, if such a thing was even possible.

“We need to kill Third Fervor,” said Perry. “Then either the portal opens or it doesn’t, and maybe to get it to trigger we’d need to kill … I don’t know. Nima. Kill Nima, I guess, even if she doesn’t really deserve it, she’s just in over her head. Or kill Fenilor, or …” He sighed, but it came out more like a hiss.

“Surely there’s someone we can kill, sir,” said Marchand in a conciliatory tone.

If Marchand had a body, Perry would have glared at it. “You know what I think?” asked Perry. “I think you overstepped your bounds, and you knew you were overstepping your bounds. You knew I wasn’t on board with the killing of monarchs, and that I might have stayed in his castle for a few days trying to learn what I could, and you just personally didn’t like that, so you went ahead and asked an ambiguous question so you could get an ambiguous answer that you could justify as being my agreement with that course of action.”

“It’s an interesting theory, sir,” said Marchand. “However, as an artificial intelligence, I don’t have internal motivations like a human would, and I am constrained entirely by my mission in any case. Of course I do believe that bringing about the end of the institution of monarchy is a moral good, but I would never allow my understanding of right and wrong to dictate my actions.”

“Fine,” said Perry. “Just … we’ll have to work this out later.”

“Are we hiding in this space for the moment, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “And I’m not sure how long we’re waiting. Getting the fuck out of this kingdom is the top priority. We’re enemy number one, and conspicuous as shit.”

He was still angry with Marchand, which felt vaguely stupid, in the same way that being angry with an app felt stupid. Marchand was kind of a person, if Perry was willing to extend the definition quite far, and possibly some aspect of Marchand was Perry, depending on where the phantom programming was actually coming from.

Perry tried to figure out how long to wait. Either Third Fervor was standing right outside where Perry had gone into shelfspace or she wasn’t. If she was outside, it was because she’d divined the power of the ring somehow, and knew that he couldn’t move the opening without moving himself. If she wasn’t outside, then he could make his way out of the forest and fly across the water, back to Berus. Obviously that was what he would prefer, but he was skeptical that it would be that easy.

Opening up the shelfspace just to check, even with a tiny hole, meant running a risk. If he opened the hole at the same place, and she saw it, then she would know she needed to stick around. He didn’t know how long she’d camp out if he didn’t poke his head out, but he figured that she would camp out almost indefinitely if she thought she had him cornered — which she did.

He ended up deciding on a half hour. With the king dead, everything in the kingdom would be in flux, and all the various powers at court would immediately start jockeying with each other and make an attempt to lock everything down. Perry wasn’t clear on how developed the revolution was in the city, but his overall impression was ‘not very’, and he doubted that they would be able to capitalize on the death.

“Is the king dead?” asked Perry, once he’d had some time to calm down and have a rational conversation with Marchand.

“To the best of my ability to ascertain, yes, sir,” said Marchand. “The ammunition the gun is currently firing has a nanite coating. It’s a terribly imperfect method of delivery which kills many of the nanites in the process of firing, but along with visual confirmation and what we know of Third Fervor’s abilities and temperament, it’s enough to conclusively say that he’s dead. However, I’ve had no communication with them since we arrived here. I will confirm his death as soon as I reconnect.”

Unless someone brings him back, thought Perry. There was, across the water, a cloning machine that would only take a vial of blood. Perry wasn’t sure what would happen if they used the blood from a dead man, but he was hoping that Dirk or Moss would know. Of course, that sort of non-continuous resurrection wasn’t exactly on the table at the moment, and might not even be a good idea, but it was something to consider.

He wasn’t going to get into it with Marchand.

Perry did some fight analysis. Third Fervor was fast, though probably only about as fast as he was, and he didn’t think she could out-sprint him. The spear had cut through his armor, but that was only the tip of it, and he was hoping that meant this wasn’t the spear that could teleport a person to another location. Her armor was going to be tough to get through, and a bullet to her face had only momentarily dazed her. He was glad that Marchand hadn’t unloaded a full clip, because that was a good trick to save for later.

The portals were the main thing, and they worried him. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to get away from them.

He also wasn’t sure that he could beat her in a fight. There was still the mechawolf to try, and a few other tricks he hadn’t used, but she was more formidable than she’d first seemed.

The timer went off, and Perry went to the place the overlap happened. He took a breath.

“Be ready to shoot her. It doesn’t seem to stop her, but at least it’ll give us an opening,” said Perry. He wasn’t sure he could do this without going mechawolf, but what he really wanted was to not be on her home turf, a place where she could portal with impunity and bring in reinforcements at will. Depending on her range, it was possible that Berus wasn’t far enough, but he had to try.

Perry opened up the portal about half an inch. He looked through it, seeing the forest around him, and moved himself to get different angles. He was hoping that the hole between realities was practically invisible, but human vision depended on motion, and the sudden appearance of it might be enough. Who knew what other senses Third Fervor had though.

“Behind,” said Marchand, briefly throwing up picture-in-picture.

A portal had started to open behind Perry, inside the shelfspace, and he spun on it, sword drawn, snapping shut the connection between realities. He was hoping that it would close Third Fervor’s portal, but it did no such thing. However her portal power interacted with the shelfspace, he hadn’t closed the connection between the two.

She stood on the other side of the portal, which was in a stone hallway. She was battle-ready, spear in hand, and watched Perry closely.

“I’m going to murder you,” she said. “It was you who killed the other kings. Was this your plan all along? To wait for your moment and then strike? Tell me.”

“No,” said Perry. “My armor saw that I was in danger and acted on its own. The king was going to shoot me, either thinking it would be better to kill me dead and take my things, or just to see what would happen.”

“Lies,” said Third Fervor. “Why is it always lies? Why does no one have honor?”

She seemed like she actually wanted an answer, as though Perry could furnish one.

“It’s pragmatism,” said Perry. “People want to be honorable, but they don’t want to cut off their fingers to do it. If you ask a man to choose between honor and starvation, honor and his family, honor and the death of his countrymen, he’ll choose against honor every time.” He wasn’t sure why he thought he could argue her out of a battle. He wasn’t sure why he wanted that.

“If you have to choose, choose an honorable death,” said Third Fervor, stepping through the portal she’d made. It closed behind her.

Perry had his sword ready. By his count, she was likely to have another two powers she hadn’t so much as hinted at. There was a good chance he’d get blindsided by one of them, and a smaller chance that it would simply be the end for him. This wasn’t how he liked his fights to be.

She came at him, both hands on her spear, spinning it down rather than thrusting it forward. He ducked and blocked at the same time, letting the metal spear hit his sword at full force. He was hoping to gouge it, if not cut the tip off entirely, but they simply clanged against each other. It let him test her strength and get a proper gauge of it: he was pretty sure that he was stronger, at least with the armor on and energy flowing.

After the clash she swung her spear around and came down for another strike, but this time Perry ducked under it. The metal clanged off the armor on his shoulder, jarring him but not really injuring him, and he drove his sword straight up into her stomach. It clanked against the copper metal there rather than piercing through, and ended up pushing her back. The tip of the spear dragged a furrow through the metal of his pauldron as she went backward, though it didn’t get down to the machinery beneath the alloy.

“You can’t pierce my armor,” said Third Fervor. She spun her spear around. From the tilt of her head, she was looking at the damage she’d done to him. Perry had mostly ‘healed’ where she’d scored a hit across his chest, but the line across the shoulder was fresh, and proof of his mortality. “You can’t kill me.”

She launched herself at him, with no trace of fear this time. He slapped the spear to the side, careful not to touch the wickedly sharp tip, but if it was supernaturally sharp enough to cut even when just being pulled across the armor, he was going to have to find a better solution to fighting against it.

He moved forward, one hand holding her spear, and kicked her in the crotch as hard as he could. There were some signs that it was painful, which was good, but she didn’t drop her grip on the spear. Perry dropped his sword and punched her in the head with the full weight of his armor, knocking her to the side.

They were both holding onto the spear, and began fighting hand-to-hand and foot-to-foot, kicking at each other, punching each other’s armor. He was doing damage to her, he thought, giving her bruises beneath the armor, and with enough of them, he was hopeful she’d just die of internal bleeding, even if he couldn’t actually penetrate. He could feel the body blows she was giving him, and heard something metal snap in his knee when she got a good kick in, but he was getting the better of her. If he’d known that they would be fighting in the shelfspace, he would have prepared something, a noxious gas that Marchand could filter out, but they were reduced to punches and kicks.

After he gave her a haymaker punch to her helmet, they ended up on the floor together, both still holding onto the spear, whose tip was swinging wildly above them. Perry was on top of her, sitting on her stomach, and he punched her in the face over and over. She was moving her legs, trying to get out from under him, kicking and bucking. Marchand was reporting damage from Perry’s fist where he was striking her, the servos, plating, and circuitry not having been designed for such heavy impacts, but Perry kept going. The helmet was bouncing off the shattered floorboards with every hit, which meant that her head was slamming against the inside of the helmet, and he hoped she’d drop soon. If he could only get the spear from her, that could probably cut through the copper armor.

Perry reached back for another punch with the now-mangled fist. She was getting woozy, and he could feel that her grip was weakened, though he wasn’t in a good position to twist it out of her grasp.

Water surrounded him in an instant, not rushing in from nowhere but suddenly everywhere. It slowed his fist down, and the punch landed against her with a tink of metal on metal. Perry looked around, and saw that they weren’t in the shelf space anymore. Instead, they were on the ocean floor, someplace cold and dark. Marchand was throwing up more warnings this time about the pressure the suit was under. It was rated for pretty far underwater, but not so suddenly, and not as deep as they were. Perry could barely see the light on the surface.

This was the killbox he’d been worried she would teleport him to. She’d stuck him underwater, far enough down that if he hadn’t been in the armor, he’d probably have just died from the pressure, second sphere or not.

His sword was still inside the shelfspace.

“Fuck,” Perry muttered.

Underwater, he couldn’t work up enough power to knock her out. His movements were slowed way down, and if she brought him here, it was because she thought that this was a better arena for her. Even with the lights on the suit turned on, it was hard to see too far. They were kicking up silt from the ocean floor, which was quickly obscuring them in a cloud.

Third Fervor kicked hard and got out from under him, since underwater, he didn’t have the weight or leverage to keep her pinned. They went back to kicking each other, though none of that was terribly effective. She seemed stronger underwater, somehow, as though she was ignoring the push of it, but without the spear she was just hitting the metal with her fists, and not hard enough to do damage.

Third Fervor yanked on the spear, but it only drew them closer together. He gripped her throat, but it was armored, and his grip wasn’t strong enough to bend the metal with his hands alone. He was on the suit’s oxygen, and however she was breathing, she didn’t seem to have brought them to a place where she was going to drown.

The water had gotten cloudy, and it was only because of Marchand that Perry was still able to see anything. Third Fervor was outlined in red, and Perry was trying his best to hurt her. If he could get the spear away from her, then maybe he could try to rip her apart, bend her limbs backward or something.

She grabbed the spear with both hands, then swung her body up in order to push both her feet against his chest. Her high heels scraped against the metal, but he was still gripping her by the throat, and any leverage she was getting from using her legs was being killed by the hand that was holding her in place.

Marchand normally kept the alerts to the bottom of the HUD, red or yellow depending on severity, but while Third Fervor was kicking him, the whole screen went red at the edges for a moment. Perry’s eyes were torn from the battle to read, just for a split second. The warning said ‘Predator Detected’. A large flashing arrow pointed above Perry’s head.

“Monster?” asked Perry as he held tight to Third Fervor’s neck and her spear. She was kicking hard enough to do some cosmetic damage to his armor, but she was going to have to change tactics soon, because she was surely wearing herself out more than she was wearing him down.

“Yes sir, a large monster appears to have noticed the lights and the cloud of sediment. It’s begun circling,” said Marchand. “I do not believe we have enough power to fight it off.”

“Fuck,” said Perry.

He took his hand from Third Fervor’s neck and caught her leg, twisting her around. He leaped up from the ocean floor and kicked at her, trying to finally get her to lose her grip on the spear, and when that didn’t work, he placed a boot against her rib cage and tried to pry her off. If the spear slipped from his grip, the obsidian head was going to come down and slice through the glove of the armor, which was going to start letting water into the already-compromised suit.

The flashing arrow on the HUD showed the beast circling, the arrow swinging around as it went overhead. The lights on the armor were on, and Perry would have loved to turn them off, but he was pretty sure that would leave him in the dark. Would a deepwater magical beast care about the lights? Surely that wasn’t how it hunted prey at these depths.

But as they struggled against each other, the monster began getting closer. Perhaps it was a thinking thing, curious about what had appeared in the depths, because the two of them must have been unlike anything it had seen before.

Third Fervor had an out, and Perry did not. She could portal, at least if he understood the power right, and if she did, she would strand him here. He could rise to the surface, and maybe dodge the monsters in the dark ocean, and hopefully that would be the last he’d see of her until he had a chance to regroup.

Perry let go of the spear the moment the monster came crashing down. He kicked away from Third Fervor, trying to launch himself backward and out of the way, but it clipped his legs and flipped him around in the water as a wall of scabrous skin rushed past him. He used the shelfspace immediately, flooding it with water again for just a moment, undoing all the hard work of drying it out the week before. The sword practically snapped into his hand again before the water was done washing to the edges of the space, and he panted as he watched the place she’d come through the portal.

When she didn’t appear, he let out a breath and assessed the damage.

One of his legs was broken. The armor was damaged in many places, and some of the kicks she’d done to his chest had done more than just cosmetic damage. The armor had been cut through on the hand, chest, and shoulder, but it still moved. Perry hobbled over to one of the seats they’d taken from a library and sat, still holding the sword in his hand.

“How did she get in here?” asked Perry.

“It appeared to be one of those portals she favors, sir,” said Marchand.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “But I wouldn’t have thought that she would be able to get in here. It didn’t fit my working theory of how her power functioned.”

“And how did you suspect it functioned?” asked Marchand.

“I don’t know,” sighed Perry. “Maybe she saw the shelfspace open up right away, if she has some sense of where she can portal to.” That sounded like something. “Fucking magic.”

“Quite, sir,” said Marchand. “Sir, I would recommend immediate medical attention.”

“I’m fine,” said Perry. “I have magic of my own.”

“I understand that, sir, but your ability to heal back from grievous wounds has had difficulty with broken bones,” said Marchand. “Are you aware of the significant fracture in your right leg? Were you a normal person, I could scarce believe you were capable of staying silent on the matter, let alone standing.”

“I’m not standing anymore,” said Perry from his place in the chair. “I open the shelf back up, there’s a chance she just … knows. I mean, let’s say she has a power that tells her all the places she can portal to. If she can’t portal through a solid wall, like in the library when she went on foot until she came to an open door, then … am I losing blood?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

“Can you do something about that?” asked Perry. “Tourniquet or something?” He leaned forward and looked down at his leg. It didn’t look too bad. Something must have happened though, because he was really starting to feel it. He reached for his stores of energy and pushed them down to his leg, trying to at least staunch the bleeding.

“I’ve applied a tourniquet, sir,” said Marchand. “In fact, that action was taken automatically, without input from you, some minutes ago.”

“Great,” said Perry. He leaned his head back. He was pretty sure he’d wrecked the seat when he sat down. It hadn’t been designed for power armor, for whatever stupid reason. At that moment, it felt like a stunning indictment of library socialism. “I could get up and fight if I had to.”

“If it pleases you to believe so, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry sat in the chair, still gripping his sword, trying to do something useful by pushing energy around. He was on his way to being able to heal much faster, it would just take another few years of training the skill over and over again, making sure his meridians were wide. He could use the transformation to heal, but his energy levels were low, and becoming the mechawolf would drain him — the healing it provided wasn’t ‘free’. Maybe on balance it was the right call, but he’d prefer to let the vessels fill first, so he had a buffer and wouldn’t transform ravenously hungry.

It didn’t look like Third Fervor was coming back, at least. Who knew what would happen when Perry stepped out of the shelf though, back into the depths. Hopefully she got eaten by a demon whale, but there was no way that Perry was that lucky. He was chalking up this one as a win for her.

“I’m still mad at you,” said Perry.

“Indeed, sir?” asked Marchand.

“You’re supposed to be my friendly robot butler,” said Perry. “A dry wit, some sarcasm, that’s all good. A few misunderstandings, that’s … whatever, it’s the technology, it’s endearing in its own way. But if you’re going to do things on your own, shoot kings in their faces or whatever, I’m at least going to need advanced notice.”

“Would that have worked, sir?” asked Marchand. “If I had declared my intention to murder the king in cold blood, would you have assented?”

Perry thought about that. He wasn’t sure how much blood he’d lost from the broken leg, but he was starting to think that it was too much. “I don’t see you as an equal,” said Perry. “So no, I’d have just overridden you. Do you want to be seen as an equal?”

“I believe that would benefit us both, yes sir,” replied Marchand after what felt like a very long pause.

“Then yes,” said Perry. “You tell me ahead of time, let me make plans, let me work through the problems myself, and I’ll try to let you do some of the things you want to do.”

“A shocking level of commitment sir, I must say,” replied Marchand.

Perry let the sword fall to the ground. He was getting tired, and it was a choice between staying in the shelf and going back out into the cold dark ocean. The only argument for going back out there, the single reason, was that it was going to have to be done eventually anyway. Maybe he could get some medical attention, which he was becoming more and more convinced he actually needed. He wiggled the toes on his right foot and could barely feel them, though maybe that was the auto tourniquet.

He wasn’t going to die in here, he didn’t think. He’d take some time, heal as much as he could, repair the damage to the armor, let his vessels fill up as much as possible from the reactor, then head out later.

He hoped that the world wouldn’t go to shit in the meantime.