Thresholder

Perry had been preparing for the new world for months. He had planned and strategized and theorycrafted, making little flowcharts for how things were going to go depending on what sort of world he ended up in. He had accounts from nearly thirty worlds, and understood the possibilities fairly well, and that would make it easier.

Once he stepped out of the portal, he found himself in a cafeteria, sword drawn. He spun around to see that it was empty. The metal chairs and tables were clean and devoid of food or trays. It was blandly institutional, utilitarian brushed steel and rubbery black tiles, the lights overhead bright and white.

“Full passive scan,” said Perry, kneeling down and placing his hand against the floor.

“Scanning,” Marchand replied. “Multiple signals detected. Protocols are unknown. Beginning deciphering protocols. Fixed-length packets detected. Packet headers identified. Basic packet structure identified. Payload is encrypted. Attempting decryption. Packets decrypted. Ah, the language is English, that’s good, sir, I was quite worried that I would be in the dark again.”

“You’re breaking through their encryption?” asked Perry, somewhat alarmed.

“It bears some similarity to an old standard, PBL, which uses static keys and a weak initialization vector,” said Marchand. “I believe I would be able to send spoofed packets, if I understand the protocol correctly.”

“Lax security, you’re saying?” asked Perry. His heart was beating hard. He was worried that someone was going to walk in.

“No, sir,” replied Marchand. “Thirty years ago, this security would have been state of the art. I would only describe the security as ‘lax’ if we are in a place which had every opportunity to update its security and did not.”

“Give me the map,” said Perry.

A building, or maybe part of a building, popped up on the HUD, showing the room they were in and a whole bunch of other rooms. It confirmed Perry’s feeling that this was a utilitarian place, but it was smaller than he’d thought it would be, given the large cafeteria. There was a tall spire, some kind of smokestack or something, its function unknown. There was some damage to one end of it, but the lights were still on, which meant that it couldn’t be too bad.

“Sir, I’m detecting dangerous levels of radiation,” said Marchand.

“How dangerous?” asked Perry. His heart was suddenly beating harder. He thought that he could probably channel his meridians to stave off the worst of radiation poisoning, but that was still a mess he needed to untangle.

“If we stay here for a period of one hour, your risk of cancer in the next ten years will rise by ten thousand percent, sir,” said Marchand. “I recommend we immediately exit the building.”

A green line showed up on the map of the building, giving March’s preferred route out, and when the map minimized to the corner, the green lines stayed up, this time showing Perry where to go. It was like a videogame tutorial trying to make sure an exceptionally stupid player didn’t get lost.

Somewhat reluctantly, Perry followed the line.

“What can you tell me about this place?” asked Perry. “Soak in the network traffic, don’t transmit.”

“I have been, sir,” said Marchand as Perry booked it down a hallway. “The facility appears to be empty of personnel, and every decrypted packet has been communication between automated systems. None of them seem to be particularly bright, but the conversations might be spartan by design. Would you like me to send a spoofed packet, sir?”

“To do what?” asked Perry.

“To inquire, sir,” said Marchand. “It might be possible to access help functions, or to acquire data from these systems.”

“Go for it,” said Perry, focusing on the line he was moving down. He could hear the sound of his feet on the floor. It was dead quiet. “How bad is this radiation, give me some numbers.”

March gave some numbers, which were in a system of measurement that Perry didn’t recognize. Some of the SI units were different in Richter’s world, and that was especially the case for units that came after the point of divergence between their Earths.

“Give it to me in terms I would actually understand,” said Perry.

“You are currently experiencing, per hour, a radiation rate equivalent to one hundred times the safe yearly total exposure for radiation workers,” said Marchand. “If two hours pass at this exposure rate, death from hematopoietic syndrome will typically occur within thirty days. Nausea and malaise are likely to occur within the next few minutes. It is likely that if we do not leave the source of radiation, you will die, unless you have excellent medical care and transplants. Additionally, as one of the early symptoms of hematopoietic syndrome is vomiting, I would recommend you remove the helmet at your earliest opportunity.”

“Noted,” said Perry. He wasn’t going to do that though.

The hallways were long, wide, and filled with doors. Everything seemed slightly overbuilt to Perry, and he saw a little vehicle like a golf cart that seemed like it was meant to carry people or equipment. He glanced in the rooms he was passing on the rare occasion he saw one of the doorways open, and saw desks with computers sitting on them, flatscreens and keyboards but nothing that would look out of place in the early twenty-first century. He was running, following the green line, not playing tourist.

“I have access to their main database, which I’m downloading now, sir,” said Marchand.

“Already?” asked Perry.

“Yes, sir,” replied Marchand. “Though I should warn that the database is compressed and encrypted, and it will take some time to get useful information from it. Given our imminent departure, my focus is on taking everything I can and worrying about analysis later.”

Perry came to the end of a hallway and slammed into the side of it, then launched himself down where the green line was pointing. There were more doors, all of them with the too-thick frames he’d noticed, and following that, a large room that looked something like a theater to him. He sailed through it with long strides, pushed off another pillar to shoot down a corridor, and arrived at the terminus of the green line.

The place was massive, the ceiling forty feet high, with a dozen different bays on the sides of it, all of them empty. The door at the end was equally large, and Perry had no idea what could possibly have been meant to come into or out of it. He launched himself toward the exit, and then darted to the left to look at the round window, the first he’d seen in the facility.

Perry was looking down on a brown planet and the stars shining behind it.

“Recalibrating,” said Marchand.

“What the hell,” said Perry.

“My apologies, sir,” said Marchand. “We appear to be on a space station of some kind.”

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Yup. Got that. And this was the place where they housed the ships?” He looked down at the ground, where there was a line of black and yellow stripes, which he realized must be a second door, one which dropped the ships down.

“I believe so, sir,” said Marchand. “Unfortunately, this means that removing you from the radiation is going to be somewhat more difficult than anticipated.”

“How is there gravity?” asked Perry.

“There isn’t, sir,” replied Marchand. “The force you’re experiencing as ‘gravity’ is in fact centripetal force, as the facility is spinning against a counterweight. That counterweight is the source of the overwhelming radiation, inescapable so long as we’re on this space station. I’m searching through the unencrypted documents and making several spoofed requests for the location of an escape vehicle, but I suspect that this vehicle bay is empty for a reason. It appears this space station has been abandoned for,” there was a very brief pause, “three hundred years, sir.”

“Alright,” said Perry. He looked out the window. “I’m going down to the planet. Open the doors.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Marchand. “The room is under pressure and will need to be cycled first.”

“How long is that going to take?” asked Perry. “Isn’t there some emergency switch?”

“This is the emergency option, sir,” said Marchand. “It will be finished in five minutes.”

“Fuck,” said Perry. “I can taste it in my mouth.” The radiation had a metal taste, like sucking on a penny. Something was going really wrong. It probably wasn’t the radiation he was tasting, actually, just some vital part of his anatomy liquifying.

“I apologize sir,” said Marchand.

The compressors or vacuums or whatever the hell else they were hissing, the air draining from the room, and Perry had no option but to wait. It felt insane to him that there was no quick-release option. This place was supposed to hold ships of some kind, wasn’t the whole point of a hangar to be able to shoot ships out into space at high speed? He tried to trace his meridians, and found that they were all tangled. He was going to have to get that fixed, but at the moment, didn’t want to spend much more time with it. It was still functional, in the way that a tangle of wires beneath a desk was still functional, even if it was difficult to trace what went where.

Five minutes came and went. If the walls were less thick, he’d have tried to slice through them with his sword, but the sword had trouble going through metal. He was on the verge of testing it anyway when the lower doors began to groan open.

Perry walked over and dropped down, the edges of the doors slipping past him, and once he was clear, let the sword tug on him to give a bit of extra speed. In atmosphere, the sword could pull him along at a speed of around thirty miles an hour, less with a headwind, but without drag, he was hoping that the speed would compound. He had no idea how the magic worked, but —

“One hour of oxygen remaining, sir,” said Marchand.

“Shit,” said Perry. “What are the odds air on that planet down there is breathable?” It seemed far away, further than pictures of Earth from the ISS, but maybe not quite as far as Earth seen from the Moon. He really had no idea. I’m in space. I’m technically an astronaut.

“I cannot speculate as to whether that planet has a breathable atmosphere, sir,” said Marchand. “Based on what I know of exoplanets, it seems quite unlikely.”

“Shit,” said Perry. He let the sword tug him along. It was impossible to tell how fast they were going in the vacuum of space. “How far away are we?”

“Our altitude appears to be twenty-two thousand miles, sir,” replied Marchand.

“Fuck,” said Perry. “ETA?”

“We appear to be accelerating rapidly,” said Marchand. “Assuming the unknown source of acceleration continues, we will reach the surface of the planet in approximately ninety-five minutes.”

Perry let out a breath. “Can you stretch the oxygen until then?”

“Yes sir,” replied Marchand. “However, when we arrive at the planet, our final speed will be approximately sixteen thousand miles per hour, which might present something of a problem.”

Perry swore again. “Alright, alright, we accelerate, then drift at a constant speed, then decelerate, can you figure that out for me?”

The process took five minutes, mostly because March needed Perry’s input, but once the math was done, March had put a bunch of information up in the corner of Perry’s view, timers and distances and how much oxygen was left.

After almost running out of air in Teaguewater, Perry had gone through some trouble to have Marchand refill the relatively small tank, a power-intensive process that used the suit’s built-in functions. Marchand had groaned about the air quality in Teaguewater and added caveats about the quality and purity, but settling for that had likely just saved Perry’s life.

Assuming he wasn’t going to die landing on a planet that very well might not have breathable air, anyway.

Once Perry was up to speed and the sword was no longer needed, there was nothing to do but wait and try not to breathe too much. There was almost certainly a second sphere technique to help him stop breathing, some alteration of his internal alchemy, but there was no way he was going to pull that out of his ass in thirty minutes, not with the tangled matrix.

Instead, he started looking through the information that March had gathered.

Three hundred and twenty-eight years ago, a spaceship had used some kind of advanced FTL technology to zip into the solar system of Kelchon-442. It was there with the specific intent of examining a planet, Kelchon-442b, which was promptly renamed to Esperide, apparently fairies of twilight from their mythology. These people were very much humans, or at least looked so close to human that there wasn’t a difference, but were also very much not from Earth, instead hailing from a different planet with its own history.

The space station had spun around to provide artificial gravity, with a counterweight where the FTL drive was used for power, until twenty years into their mission when something very large struck the space station very quickly, destroying much of the shielding surrounding the FTL drive and a large and important chunk of the space station. Evacuation to the surface was swift, and an SOS call immediately went out. It remained completely unanswered.

The space station had continued on, in spite of everything. The FTL drive was still running, and there were robots that fixed what they could using automated systems. Some of it had broken down once the repair parts had been run through, but the space station was designed for the long haul, and the fabrication lab and supply storehouse had mostly been spared. Without its full complement of crew, there was very little strain on the internal systems.

What hadn’t been spared was the observation platform and associated equipment, nor the data storage that had been housed there. Most of the major databases were entirely gone, in fact, their hard drives reduced to stardust. There wasn’t much about what was down there, nor was there much about the planet or planets they had come from.

What Perry had instead were mostly things from the personal computers of the people who must have been long-dead, since the dorms and living areas had been spared. There was nothing like Wikipedia or Gratbook, but there were the equivalent of e-mails, private missives between people, grumblings about shift changes and clean up details, more than he would ever have time to read, and nothing particularly actionable while he drifted through space at a thousand miles an hour.

The atmosphere was breathable, that he knew. They had ships that could make the journey down to the surface and then back up, and there had been a research station there, which was also the evacuation point. What had happened then was unknown. Whether there were people was unknown. Three hundred years shouldn’t have been enough time for the atmosphere to change.

Perry hoped there were people. He wasn’t sure how he was going to survive without people, though he was going to have to figure out the trick of not eating or drinking in a hurry if he couldn’t find a place to stay. Perry was built for a lot of things, but surviving in the woods wasn’t one of them.

“Sir, I have some unfortunate news,” said Marchand, which was not at all something that Perry wanted to hear while they were in the void of space, hurtling towards the planet at a thousand miles an hour.

“Give it to me,” said Perry.

“I’ve been building out a profile of the planet, both as it can be sensed from the onboard equipment and from what I can tell from the stolen data,” said Marchand. “The atmosphere is thicker than I had imagined it would be, and while it’s breathable, we’re currently aimed at the day side of the planet, which hovers at a temperature of four hundred of your degrees Fahrenheit. I can unfortunately not handle those temperatures for long.”

“Yes,” said Perry. “Unfortunate. And if we go to the night side, I’m going to die from lack of oxygen before we get there.” He almost took a deep breath, then thought better of it. “Alright, give me a heading, we’re going to aim for the border zone.”

“Based on my calculations you will likely die of hypoxia, sir,” said Marchand.

“Yeah, I’ll work on that,” said Perry.

Marchand provided a heading and Perry followed it, hoping that the calculations were correct.

The next step was, unavoidably, meditation.

The tangle of meridians needed to be dealt with, and it was going to have to be while Perry was in the void of space, floating toward a planet he knew next to nothing about, escaping a death by radiation poisoning, then escaping a death from lack of oxygen, all so he could escape a death from overheating.

Internally, nothing was where it should be. The meridians had formerly had some kind of correlation to the physical properties of the body, whether that was the nerves, circulatory system, or the other internal connections between things. Now, much of that had been disrupted. The body was still doing its own thing, more or less, but the energy was all flowing differently, some of it looping outside of his body. Similarly, the vessels were out of place. The Belt Vessel, which was supposed to regulate the flow of energy between the upper and lower body, had been pulled up a bit, and try as he might, Perry had no way to pull it down. He also had no way of knowing what that would ultimately mean in terms of whether his legs would be starved of energy, but so far they weren’t hurting.

Eventually, he had traced this new arrangement out as much as he could, and tried his best to transfer energy into his lungs, hoping that it would make up for the oxygen shortfall. He was feeling lightheaded, a result of rationing, and that certainly wasn’t helping him. But by the time he needed to use the sword once again, Marchand’s estimates had updated and were looking more optimistic.

“I’m going to make it,” said Perry.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t be certain of that,” said Marchand.

“You updated the oxygen,” said Perry.

“Unfortunately, sir, that update was based on some changes I’ve made to the system,” said Marchand. “The air you’re breathing now is fouled.”

“Oh,” said Perry.

“You will suffer from hypercapnia before dying,” said Marchand. “I believe it to be preferable to suffering from hypoxia from a survival standpoint, but headaches, confusion, and fatigue are common symptoms. Additionally, shortness of breath is a commonly reported occurrence, which would accelerate the consumption of oxygen. Hypercapnia is almost always associated with panic and fear of the worst kind, sir.”

Perry did his best to still his heart and slow his breathing. He was being pulled by the sword again, this time ‘backward’, though there wasn’t much change in how it felt. He was, by Marchand’s reckoning, going at very high speeds, but it didn’t feel like it because of the lack of references. Perry sent energy into his lungs, draining his vessels as much as he could, but he misunderstood something about the internal alchemy, or had fouled things up somehow, and it wasn’t changing the meters.

They hit the atmosphere while Perry was still slowing down, and the suit started to heat up.

“We’re not going to burn, are we?” asked Perry. They had nothing like ablative heat shielding.

“Recalculating,” said Marchand.

There was dead silence for a long few seconds, and Perry began pouring energy out into the suit, hoping to cool it down somehow, but that technique was beyond him too. The indicators in the top left corner were almost all red, low oxygen, high carbon dioxide, high heat, low distance to target.

The world below him had grown large in a hurry, and surprisingly, as they crossed over into the twilight region, it had become green.

March said something, and Perry blinked. He was roasting in the suit, and had either blacked out or was just running so low on oxygen his body had started deprioritizing his brain.

“Repeat,” said Perry. He was holding onto the sword for dear life, though the worst of the heat seemed to be gone.

“Take off your helmet,” said Marchand.

Perry did, one handed, and nearly dropped it down on the ground far below. The air was hot and windy, but it was fresh and clean, and Perry took in big gulps of it, which washed away the panic and slowly brought him back to his senses. He was high above the ground, maybe a whole mile up, where the air would still be thin, and he let himself slowly drop, descending down to where the air was even thicker, more full of precious oxygen. There was a faint taste of wet grass.

The ribbon of green in the twilight zone was maybe two hundred miles across, though the plants were like nothing that Perry had ever seen before. For one thing, they were all pointed east, toward the ‘rising’ sun, tilted to capture as much sunlight as they could. For another, they looked a lot different, with strange fluted pieces of wood coming up in certain places like thick reeds twice as tall as he was. Many of them had large pods coming up above where the leaves were, and some were releasing seeds into the heavy winds that went from the day side to the night side.

There were also animals moving down there, large ones, many of them insects with hard shells whose size would rival anything found in Earth’s prehistory. They were feeding on the plants, gorging themselves, and spreading out from what appeared to be a nest of some sort. Perry wasn’t entirely certain of the scale, but he thought that each was the size of a minivan.

Eventually, he placed his helmet back on.

“Replenish the oxygen,” said Perry.

“Right away, sir,” said Marchand.

“Scan for signals,” said Perry. “Passively, for now. Don’t send out any signals without my say-so, I’m not going to assume the locals are friendly.”

It was impossible to know whether the space station had been hit by some kind of weapon or blown up by an accident, but Perry suspected warfare, for no particular reason.

“Sir, we’ve been found,” said Marchand. “Someone is sending out an IFF request.”

“IFF request?” asked Perry.

“Identify friend or foe,” said Marchand.

“Tell them we’re a friend then,” said Perry.

“I believe they expect back a predetermined code, which would be impossible to spoof,” said Marchand.

“Send out radio, all channels, let them know we’re not combatants,” said Perry. “Identify their location, get ready for combat.”

An indicator flashed up on the HUD. “Sir, I must recommend that this suit was designed primarily for ground combat, as air mobility is limited.”

“Understood,” said Perry, dropping down without a second thought.

He was just in time to miss the opening salvo, visible only through the tracer rounds, as an enormous mecha crested a nearby hill and began firing. Perry started running as soon as his feet hit the ground, and the terrain behind him was chewed up. The soil was thick and loamy, providing good traction, and he sprinted forward, pumping energy into his legs and moving the armor at full tilt. He changed directions at random, hoping to prevent the guns from locking on, but they were tossing enormous amounts of metal at him, and it seemed like only a matter of time.

Perry juked left, leaping over the stream of bullets, then dashed forward, toward the machine.

It was thirty feet tall with reverse-joint legs, bulky weapons up on the shoulders and no ‘head’ to speak of, though thin, lanky arms were down at the sides, ending in articulated fingers. Those held weapons too, what looked like oversized pistols, but these weren’t firing at him, only held loosely as the shoulder-mounted guns fired on him.

The ‘handheld’ pistols raised as soon as he was within a hundred feet, and those locked onto him at once. Perry was staring down the barrels, ready to try a mad dash beneath the legs that was going to be hampered by scraggly undergrowth, when the rapid fire of the shoulder-mounted guns finally stopped. The pistols remained aimed squarely at his face.

“Identify yourself,” came a voice through his headset, digitized oddly, barely human.

“Peregrin Holzmann,” said Perry. “Independent, unaffiliated, wouldn’t harm a fly.”

The pistols stayed pointed at his body. He was keyed up, and thought he might be able to dodge out of the way, but not if he needed to react. He’d have to pre-empt the attack, dodge and then fling himself forward, slice through something vital that wasn’t shielded — except most of it was shielded, no hoses or wires on the outside, nothing that looked like plastic instead of metal. The best option, if it came down to a fight, was to simply run away and hope that wild movements could throw off the aim of the guns.

If there was someone inside the mech, Perry couldn’t see them. The voice was masked and didn’t have a robot’s cadence, but seemed to have been run through so many processes that it was difficult to make out anything at all about it. There were small bubbles and nodules on the outside that looked like they might be cameras or sensors, but it was hard to tell.

“I’m placing you under arrest,” said the voice. “Step out of your … micromech.”

“Takes me ten minutes,” said Perry, trying to stay calm. He looked backward, at the beetles, which looked much larger now that he was on the ground.

“What weapons do you have onboard?” asked the voice. There was a little bit of an accent, hard to place with the robotic overtones. It must have been deliberate cloaking, because anything accidental would have been cleaned up by March.

“I have the sword and a shoulder-mounted small-caliber gun, which is currently non-functional,” said Perry. It had been damaged in the fight with the grandmaster, and hadn’t been fixed yet. Either Perry had missed some pieces in the mud, or it needed to be reseated in its housing, like a bone being reset. “I have a small drone that slots into the back, but it’s not a weapon.”

There was a period of silence from the mech, which Perry assumed was either intensive thinking or communication with someone else over radio. March said nothing though.

“State your top speed,” said the voice.

“In the air, it’s maybe thirty-five miles an hour,” said Perry. “On the ground, sixty.”

“What is a mile?” asked the voice.

“A mile is from a different system of measure,” March quickly replied in Perry’s voice. “It’s roughly equivalent to a tenth-famen.”

There was another long pause. “What is the weight of your micromech?”

“The suit weighs,” Perry began, and let March finish. Apparently it was ‘eleven ten-lod’. It was more or less seamless, and happily, March had played along.

“Climb onboard,” said the voice from the mech as it dipped slightly. “Any damage to this mech will result in your life being forfeit.”

Perry nodded, then realized maybe that didn’t mean the same thing to whoever was in the mech. He jumped high into the air, out of the way of the pistols, then found a position on the back of the mech. There were, surprisingly, handholds and footholds between the big shoulder guns.

When the mech started moving, Perry was glad he’d secured himself. It rose into the air with a single leap, then began a mad dash through the strange greenery. He wasn’t sure what kind of speed it was doing, but there was a good chance that it was faster than he could have moved, in spite of being four or five times taller than he was.

They passed by lakes and rivers, through areas where huge pods were releasing fluffy seeds into the heavy winds, and went over a hill that led into a large plain with thick mud and crawling vines that the mech ripped up. Most of the creatures Perry saw were oversized, and almost all of them were insectile, lumbering creatures with hard chitin eating what seemed like impossible amounts of greenery. Twice, he saw something that had fur, but these were smaller, more like squirrels or housecats.

“Sir, the radio transmissions I’ve been receiving are, unfortunately, encrypted in a much more secure way than those on the space station,” said March and the mech dashed along with no signs of stopping. “Nonetheless, this armored contraption appears to be communicating with someone at what I suppose will be our destination.”

“I think this is our way in,” said Perry. “I’ll let them arrest me, but I won’t let them take you.”

“I should hope not, sir,” said Marchand. “After our misadventure in the last world, I shouldn’t like to think that we’d be separated again.”

Perry frowned. “You understand that, that we’ve moved worlds?”

“Respectfully, I do not accept it,” said Marchand. “I find the notion of moving between worlds ridiculous and unscientific. Nonetheless, it is the only method of reconciling many of the continuous stream of errors I’ve been recording, and as such, I have elected to indulge this insanity for the time being.”

“Good,” said Perry. “That’ll make things easier. And you can do that with the sword too? Accept that it’s magic?”

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “I’ve heard you say it on many occasions, too numerous to list, but I cannot accept that ‘magic’ is the answer to every error I’ve experienced. I believe that way lies madness.”

“I can turn into a wolf,” said Perry. “I mean, you’ve seen me do it.”

There was dead silence from the AI. Whatever March was thinking, he wasn’t thinking it out loud.

This planet had a moon, two of them, but they were small things, one no larger than a bright star, the other appearing only about a third the size of Earth’s moon. Perry was going to be short on moonlight, but he wasn’t even sure that he could turn into the wolf again, not with the Wolf Vessel currently sitting where March’s microfusion reactor was supposed to go. It was entirely possible that avenue had been cut off entirely.

The trip took an hour, which was much longer than Perry would have liked to be holding onto the metal bars on the outside of a mech that was racing across the landscape. They could have talked, but the person arresting him apparently had other things to focus on, or possibly other conversations to have over radio.

Perry saw it from far away, though he didn’t realize the scale of the thing until they started to close the distance. It was something like a long cruiseliner, with multiple decks and portholes, done in industrial grays, but it was moving over land instead of in the sea, crawling along like a millipede, each leg large enough that the mech Perry was riding could have slipped beneath it.

There were also, Perry noted, all kinds of armaments sprouting off the millipede, a combination of huge guns that could surely have blown a lake-sized hole in the ground, and smaller ones with long barrels, looking like they’d taken some inspiration from the reeds he’d seen growing where he’d landed. It was a city with legs, and unmistakably built for war.

From what he could tell, this was likely to be his home for the next while.