Thresholder

The evacuation from the space station was supposedly orderly. There had been plans in place, along with training and drills, and there were enough escape ships and mechs to bring everyone who hadn’t died in the initial strike or its after-effects down to the surface.

They were left with no way to communicate across the stars, but a radio signal was going out the slow way, and would be heard by anyone in the stellar system. That the stellar system was empty was a problem, but someone might come looking, and would find evidence. The space station wasn’t thought likely to continue in its orbit for that long, not with the radiation as high as it was and the damage so devastating, but it was hoped to be enough. There were robust automated systems, but they hadn’t been designed to continue on long-term without human intervention, especially not with the enormous amounts of radiation. It would be a miracle if it lasted more than two decades, they thought.

But the transmission shouldn’t have mattered. There had been regular updates from the space station to their home world, sent at least weekly, and when those stopped, someone would come to investigate. There were also yearly vessels, which came to their space station to transfer crew and resupply whatever couldn’t be fabricated locally. It wasn’t that expensive to cross the stars. A rescue mission would be incoming, it was only a matter of time.

There were ninety people, most of them scientists and engineers, along with a full dozen mechs, most of them configured for movement across the planet’s surface. There were three ships, which had been preloaded with rations and drinking water, and had transported most of the people in cramped conditions. And on the planet’s surface, there were scientific stations and shelters set up for research and study, though these were temporary given the nature of the planet. That was all these people had to survive with until they were rescued.

The insects were the largest problem, ravenous and wide-ranging, but they were a known problem, and the dozen mechs were enough to keep them at bay, though the damage accumulated, and damage to the machines could not be fixed, with broken parts that could not be replaced. New weapons were hastily built, defenses automated, and the wait went on. One of the mechs was lost as they learned to deal with the insects, but after that, no more.

Water wasn’t a problem. It was easily collected, and naturally fairly pure. The life on the planet had not grown up alongside humanity or anything too much like it, which meant that there were no germs in the water, no contamination to worry about aside from a few heavy metals in various places that were easily avoided.

Food wasn’t a problem either. While life on the planet wasn’t something ancestral humans had ever eaten, it was made up of many of the same things, proteins and fats and sugars, whether that was because of some common panspermia origin or convergent evolution or simple chance. The food needed to be processed, sometimes extensively, but with the power of the mech reactors, water could be heated to a boil in seconds and mashers could exert tremendous force.

They had to move at regular intervals, and became nomads in their own way, with the dozen mechs to pull their buildings along on runners. They would set up in defensible places, lasers pointed outward, weapons permanently drawn.

No help, rescue, or even message came.

A three month project proved capable of launching one of the mechs into space, at great expense. It was supposed to go to the space station, but never returned, and the signal was lost.

The colony began work on more permanent solutions to living on the planet, just in case rescue continued to take longer than expected. The planet was geologically active and metal deposits had concentrated in several places. With high powered crucibles, metals were relatively easy to refine. It was often the case that power was being drawn from two or three of the mechs to ensure their mobile foundries were running. Sites with abundant metals were heated with the raw power of the full-sized fusion reactors, and the hard, heat-resistant rocks meant that metals would melt out of the seams like molten tears, copper, lead, tin, and silver all flowing down into sand casts to make ingots.

They worked with what they had, and after the fifth year passed, when they had moved fifteen hundred miles around the planet, work began on the larger projects, the ones that would secure the future.

The power the fusion reactors could output was immense compared with their needs, and the mechs were precious, irreplaceable. The solution was to use the comparatively crude metals pulled from the ground to build larger containers, huge moving homes that the Natrix would later put to shame. These weren’t just better than the sledges the mechs had pulled before, they offered a controlled environment for the invaluable reactors and a thick layer or armor on top of it. A mammoth elder bug could slam into the side of one of these moving homes, denting steel, but the mech within it would be safe. These new homes were slow-moving things, but a pace of a mile a day was all that was needed to keep ahead of the sun, and that was easy to make, even when the terrain offered mountains to climb or rivers to ford.

In those first five years, no children were born. There had been two children aboard the space station, and both had survived, but no one wanted to bring more children into the world, to introduce them to a harsh life on an alien planet with technology that was slowly degrading.

Whether or not to have children was, perhaps, the first schism, though it wasn’t recorded as such. There was an ancestor of Brigitta’s who had twelve children, all with only a few months between pregnancies, and she was venerated for her duty, but there must have been some discussion and some argument about it between those who were willing to live for as long as they could but not bring new life into the picture, and those who wanted human life on the planet to be the work of generations.

There was an argument then that it was possible they were the only humans left in the universe. Something had struck their space station, and something else had stopped them from ever being rescued. It didn’t seem too foolish to posit that these were the same things, perhaps enemy action, or possibly something unintelligent, or an accident, the station hit by FTL debris from a calamity that had wiped out everyone else, or at least caused civilizational collapse.

Certainly if they believed they were the last humans, that introduced some duty to procreate, to seed the planet with human life, to forge on ahead instead of just sticking their proverbial gun in their collective mouths.

The breeders won out, and if there were staunch opponents, nothing survived of their objections.

If not for the mechs, it’s possible that the humans would all have died. The bugs were too large, too vicious, too attracted to the goings on of humanity. But if humanity had survived without the mechs, it was possible that they would have been much better off. The twilight zone was only two hundred miles wide, but that was wider than the island their remote ancestors had hailed from. Stretched out from north to south, there would have been room for hundreds of small kingdoms. Schisms could happen and people would have been free to start their own colonies, maybe even with some material support and best wishes.

Humanity was dependent on the mechs though, painfully so, and differences of opinion couldn’t be solved that way. Moving across the planet's surface seemed unworkable without the power of the mech in one way or another, even if it was only being used to power laser defenses or mass drivers, as well as putting power to mechanical legs from time to time. During the times of movement, of which there were many, it was the mechs whose energetic hearts provided the power to move huge amounts of material, and it was that energy that refined the metals and produced the crude plastics made from collected flora.

The first schism happened early on, among the second generation of settlers, while their parents, who had known the stars, still lived.

The argument had started as one of differing strategic vision, but quickly spiraled into all aspects of life. The central cleaving difference that had started the schism was whether humanity should stay with the Twilight March and fight off the bugs while gathering the abundant and every-changing landscape, or whether they should go into the Long Night, where they could set up stationary cities like those on their homeworld, farms that wouldn’t need to be moved, mining operations that could be more intensive than what came before. Boiled down, it was a question of how long they expected to live on the planet and what relationship they would have on it … but of course the division grew, and voices of reason were pushed to the fringes of the discussion, and people had their different camps.

It was thought that those of the Long Night were bitter, pessimistic people, and those of the Twilight March were seen as having their heads in the clouds, denying reality and pretending that the world around them was not trying to kill them. Those of the Long Night were stoic, simple people, wanting to reduce their survival down to a single battle, that of them against the cold, while those of the Twilight March were varied and nuanced, ready, perhaps foolishly, to take on all comers. There were many ways of seeing the division, a whole mythos about how they differed from each other.

(Aboard the Natrix, more than two hundred years later, many of these ways of characterizing their snowbound neighbors still persisted. There were no names in those early days, but they would be called the Heimalis later.)

Eventually, an accord was reached, likely to avoid war. They were down to ten mechs at that point, and five of them were marched to the dark side of the planet. It was amicable, or as amicable as it could be. There were some agreements to trade with each other, which could only be done by a mech venting heat given how cold the night side of the planet got — cold enough that carbon dioxide fell as snow and most metals, steel included, would become brittle and prone to cracking. They had radios that could bounce signals off the atmosphere so they could keep in touch with each other, which was done intermittently.

Following the split, the remaining marchers placed more emphasis on social cohesion. The second generation birthed and trained the third, and they were more careful with what lessons they taught. The accord that had split the survivors in two had meant that both were less likely to survive, a fact which had been acknowledged even when it happened.

New mechs were built, smaller than the originals, and with technology that was far worse, sometimes powered through biofuels but often with large battery packs that would store power leeched off the sophisticated elder mechs. The fusion reactors could, in theory, run forever so long as they received their fuel, but the engineers knew that ‘forever’ was a very long time. Even a decade was a very long time. The elder mechs were retired from regular use in defense and industry, and all ensconced in larger, slower structures. Eventually, no one could remember a time when these complex and beautiful machines walked the lands. They had only their poor facsimiles for comparison.

The second schism was one borne from these two tiers of technology, which in turn stemmed from a stratification of society.

The elder mechs were important, linchpins of the nomadic society, and those who tended to them and controlled them had a special status. A project could live or die on the basis of whether one of the minders allowed you a piece of the power budget. The position of minder was highly coveted, apprenticeships fought over, and the minders of course had some of the best rooms, since they needed to be close to the fusion reactors which were, naturally, at the heart of the moving colony. The colony in that day looked nothing like the Natrix, of course, as each mech was on its own, and there was room for only a fraction of the people to actually live on or in these mobile fortresses. Instead, most people had homes that could be folded up every two months or so for a long march, and unfolded again when they reached the frigid edge of the twilight.

What came from this was, in some sense, a schism of class. There were engineers who knew that they would never have one of the elder mechs for their own. They were just as good, in some cases, as the others they had competed against for apprenticeship slots, but the population was growing, easily doubling over the course of thirty years. There was simply no possible way that most people could go from walking along the migratory mechs and living inside a fabric tent to the relative safety, security, and luxury of one of the mech rooms.

No way, that is, except to build mechs of their own that could match a fraction of the elder mech’s power.

Power was the primary issue, especially as it needed to be independent power, not just leaching from the aged fusion reactors. Many options were tried, from biofuel to solar power, but all of them failed until a scholar, looking into the old records of their starborne ancestors, had discovered nuclear power. Those in power, who controlled and minded the elder mechs, declared that this was not the path forward, that nuclear reactors were inherently unstable, that the technical issues were too great, that manufacturing precision was too low, and that radiation would imperil an already perilous existence. There were necessary technologies that would need to be developed, equipment that would need to be built, and all of that would detract from the success of the colony, from the defense against threats.

In the end, the work required an alliance. One of the minders of the elder mechs was sympathetic to the nuclear proponents and courted by them. The planet was relatively rich in uranium, which meant that it was just a matter of developing the processes, crafting the equipment, and waiting until a proper deposit was found within the sweep of twilight. When it was, the elder mech split from the others and moved across the lands, breaking off from the others, a pack of dissidents moving with it. The intent had always been for the elder mech to return to the others, but the mission went long, and after a time, it became clear that there would be no return.

The nuclear tribe kept in contact via radio. They were the third established branch of humanity on the planet, and this was generally considered a good thing, though they had a reputation for recklessness and instability, not helped by two separate nuclear accidents that had scarred the planet and nearly doomed their branch. Their single elder mech was still in good repair, the fusion reactor thrumming along with studious care, though they claimed not to be entirely dependent upon it anymore, instead having a full fleet of thirty mobile reactors, with new ones being brought online at regular intervals. They had different concerns from the Natrix, and their own fractious internal politics. Perhaps because of their social considerations, or the radiation, they seemed to want people, always promising population growth and never achieving it.

~~~~

“Wait,” said Perry. “So … there are multiple factions on the planet, all descended from those who came down from the space station. But how many total, just so I can get a feel for it?”

Brigitta shrugged. “We don’t know.”

“Er,” said Perry.

“News is infrequent,” said Brigitta. “And we are not the only ones with schisms and problems. It is, in some sense, a great boon to have multiple groups on the planet with their own different strategies. Diversity ensures survival. But those that live in the ice had five mechs, and we don’t know exactly where they settled, except that they must move every sixty years or so in order to stay icebound. A single elder mech could keep an entire city warm with its reactor, and they might have spread out to different locations. It’s what I would have done, in order to collect different resources. We intercept radio signals sometimes, but they’re encrypted.”

“You don’t have spies?” asked Perry. He could feel his tongue trip over the word though, the second sphere translating finding something that didn’t quite match.

Brigitta frowned. “Spies?” she asked. “Seers?”

“People whose job it is to watch what others are doing, often in secret,” said Perry. “Not scouts, people who would ideally enmesh themselves with the enemy, pretend to be one of them.”

“They’d be found out right away,” said Brigitta. “No one could come aboard the Natrix and pretend to be one of us.”

“Right,” said Perry. “But they could pretend to be a defector, or someone who got lost, or something like that.” It occurred to him as he said it that he could easily have been describing himself.

But Brigitta was shaking her head. “We listen in, as best we can, but they are no neighbors to us. Even now, as twilight approaches them, we’re six hundred miles away.” The translation of units was so seamless that Perry almost didn’t notice it happening.

“Huh,” said Perry. “And yet you’re worried about attacks.”

“That’s not a matter of ancient history,” said Brigitta. “It’s the present.”

“And your guess as to how many factions there are?” asked Perry.

“Five,” said Brigitta. “Possibly six, if there is a desert tribe, which might well be a myth. The nuclear contingent has split twice, one going to the northern pole, another crossing over to our south, though without animosity. ‘Factions’ … that’s not the word. Some are like brother and sister, living on opposite sides of the ship, friendly when they meet but content to live apart. We feel that way about our counterparts to the north. Others have animosity, as we have with those in the snows.”

“Which you’ll explain?” asked Perry.

“Yes,” said Brigitta. “There is still history to cover.”

~~~~

In the wake of losing another of the elder mechs, the first skeletal bones of the Natrix were forged. The social rift had been a serious one, and it needed mending, especially when it became clear that there were now other places that a determined person could possibly leave to if they had a well-equipped mech and some expertise. The process started with building larger mechs, built with more in the way of housing, and something that came closer to approaching equality. The mechs moved slower with the extra weight, at a virtual crawl, and were single file across the lands, a convoy.

The social problems were only partially the sort that could be solved with huge infrastructure projects, but huge infrastructure projects were what they knew best, and by god, that was what they were going to go with. They made designs for new mega-mechs which would run off the same fusion reactors which were meant to power something much smaller. Alterations were made to the reactors to draw more from them, careful adjustments that could have gone calamitously wrong. The focus was put on making everything as light-weight as possible, maximizing the interior space that would be available for everyone to live in, with rooms for even the lowliest of the workers.

The Natrix was not the product of that first round of design and construction, but the third round, much later. The first version had looked more like a train, with methods to detach the mobile mega-mechs from each other. There was housing aboard them for everyone, semi-private bathrooms and shared spaces that unfolded out of the sides when the convoy wasn’t in motion.

These people saw themselves as being uniquely descended from those who had come down from the space station, in a way that their brethren were not. They saw it as their duty to continue the work of returning to the stars, and because that return did not seem like it would come from without, it would have to come from within. The work of generations was laid out in a series of long posts to the local network, read by almost everyone, and agreed to by the vast majority. It was a codification of things which had been felt for a long time, aims which had often gone unstated. The return to the stars would need people, it would need resources, and it would need research, particularly research into something like the FTL drive that had launched their ancestors to Esperide in the first place.

Every generation was meant to be larger than the last, ideally by a considerable margin. The raising of children was of the utmost importance, and their training and education couldn’t be left to the side, entrusted to apprenticeship or whatever someone was on hand to teach them about. Society was reshaped to accomplish this, sometimes in ways that rankled, but often with a deft hand and due consideration to those most affected. After the earlier defections, it seemed as though they had gotten everything under control, their four elder mechs being essentially — if not literally — inseparable, the communities intertwined and the people moving in lockstep.

When the second version of the train was being made, there was even tighter integration, but it wasn’t only a question of what trade-offs would be made in the design, but what those trade-offs would symbolize. There were four elder mechs, reduced largely to their reactors and their computers, as many things as possible replaced and repaired over the course of many years. For the sake of practicality, it would have been best to have them detachable, so that a problem with one wouldn’t cause the others to fail as well, and so that their order could be reconfigured if different needs presented themselves. For the sake of unity, it was best that they be indivisible.

In the end, practicality won out, and the changes were made over the course of many months, carefully staged when the mega-mechs were at the chilled edge of the twilight zone, sometimes moving far enough in that there was proper night, just to give them enough time to accomplish all they needed to.

Defense against the insects had become rote by this point. The mega-mechs were well-defended, with plenty of automated weapons to use against the waves of attacks, only a fraction of the power output and materials allocation of the colony. It was the expeditions where loss of life occurred, trips with the lesser mechs to secure a huge crop of native plants or to mine out another deposit that wasn’t large enough to warrant diversion of the convoy. Often, the mechs served as scouts, though usually toward the cold side of the twilight zone, where the insects were smaller and less common, though not unknown.

It was a society of unequal burdens. There were, on the one hand, the mothers, expected to birth as many children as they could, sometimes as many as a dozen, though not all women could endure. On the other hand, there were the mech pilots, who faced a risk that others did not. Neither group could be properly compensated for those risks, as much as efforts were made to do so.

It happened that one of the four elder mechs broke down, the fusion core becoming non-functional. It was able to limp along under power supplied by the other three, but all efforts by its crew to fix the problem and restart the core proved fruitless. The convoy came to a halt as additional efforts were made to fix the issue, but as the days wore on, the sun grew large in the sky, and the temperatures began to go up. Similarly, the giant insects began to attack more often, as they were more active in the warmth.

A decision was made to abandon the fourth mega-mecha. Plans were made to strip it of everything of value, to cannibalize everything that they could, perhaps to drag it along to the frost edge, but the crew refused and made their threats, and there was little enough time to transfer more than personnel. Eventually, an agreement was made with the engineers: they would be given mechs and personnel, and left to bake in the ever-increasing heat. Either they would get the core restarted and rejoin the convoy, or they would abandon it and travel with their guardian mechs to join the convoy in defeat.

That fourth mega-mech had been home to many, a place where they had been born, lived, and formed families. There were schools, dining halls, and even gardens aboard it. Some of those who were supposed to evacuate stayed.

When the three remaining mega-mechs left their brethren behind, it was clear that they were losing more people than they had hoped, and that any march back to the convoy would be a tragedy of thus far untold proportions. There was little that could be done though, not with the sun pressing down on them.

The fourth mega-mech never rejoined the others, nor did a group of smaller mechs shepherd back hundreds of people on foot.

It was considered a major blow to the colony, a loss of personnel and one of the irreplaceable fusion reactors, even if it had undergone some manner of catastrophic failure. It was a chilling reminder of both the importance of unity and the colony’s dependence on the fusion reactors, which were, by this point, two centuries past the operating lifetime they had been designed for.

When it came time for a redesign to support a growing population and aging equipment, what they settled on was the Natrix. It was fully enclosed and heavily armed, built to expand out when it had found a temporary home, but capable of continual movement if need be. A focus was put on heavy cargo, slowing the craft considerably compared to its forebears. Like all previous iterations, it needed to be built while in transit, a massive challenge given how many other things needed to be going on at the same time to keep the children educated, the food stores full, and the insects dead. This time, the three elder mechs would be connected together, welded in place, so that there could be no question of losing another. It was, perhaps more than a practical move, a decision borne of symbolism.

That had been the work of Brigitta’s great-grandparents.

Inequality came slowly, as a creeping thing. Someone with the power to requisition and approve requests would take a little more for themselves, and they would elevate others, who would in turn elevate themselves. It was a question of corruption and cronyism creeping into the fabric of their society, sometimes justified by those in charge needing to have creature comforts so they wouldn’t be distracted by their physical needs, and other times simply done without any excuse. The population ballooned, as it was designed to, and more resources and labor were skimmed from the top with every passing decade.

New excuses were invented, or reinvented through convergent processes, the same things that those at the top had said since time immemorial across many worlds. The opulence would be declared a matter of symbolism: a leader must have fine things, because otherwise no one will respect them or their station. Or those at the top would simply say that they couldn’t possibly find the motivation to do their best if there were no reward for hard work. They would say that strict equality is first, impossible, and second, disruptive to the order of things.

The natural ending point for all this might have been those of the penthouses and fine wines securing the loyalty of the police force, but there wasn’t much police force aboard the Natrix, and at any rate, they had ensconced themselves away from the working and living conditions of the others. They didn’t realize that a coup was brewing until it was at their doorstep.

It was bloodless, which was good, because no one knew that much about close-quarters fighting aboard the moving ship. The Natrix had never suffered a riot, nor wide-spread civil disobedience, and the few police had never been turned to the task of violence against the population. Instead, three women with a groundswell of support had walked in and declared that they were going to be in charge moving forward. There were no threats except the implicit ones, no violence except that which was promised by well-muscled men standing behind these women.

The Natrix had marched on.

~~~~

Perry frowned. “This was … a handful of years ago?”

“Two years,” said Brigitta.

“But it’s stable now, the leadership, the social structure?” asked Perry.

“Yes,” said Brigitta. “As stable as it can be with a population growing so quickly.”

“But you didn’t get to the Heimalis,” said Perry. “It’s not clear why you expect an attack from them.”

Brigitta frowned. “There are advantages to the place they live, to not moving around. They have resources that are more difficult for us.”

“Microchips,” said Perry.

“We can make them,” said Brigitta. “But ours are not as good, with more waste, and even then … it’s a difficult process, error-prone, if you know anything about lithography.”

“And from you, they get what?” asked Perry.

She looked away from him. “People.”

“Children?” asked Perry.

“No, not children,” said Brigitta. “But young, moldable, many of them ten years old, ready for their first apprenticeship.”

“Where I come from, those would be considered children,” said Perry. He was trying to keep his voice level. It sounded like selling children into slavery as a form of payment for microchips. “Are these children you send over, uh … well treated?”

“They weren’t, no,” said Brigitta. Her lips were thin. “It’s something that stopped when we came to power. It’s one of the reasons for the current aggression.”

“They want the children,” said Perry.

“They want us to honor a debt they feel owed to them,” said Brigitta. “And they see our takeover as lacking legitimacy. They think it will surely lead to the Natrix having a decline. Possibly they’re just saying that. They have air mechs, which buzz by us like threatening dragonflies.”

“And you’re getting closer to them every day,” said Perry.

“For now,” said Brigitta. “We’re some distance from the place they call home. They’ll be journeying far to the west soon, to resettle in the snow, but without our help, it’s not certain they can do it. It’s not just the children they need, but skilled engineers, people who can spend the next two years getting as much of their city on skids as possible.” Her eyes were on Perry. “You’re a fighter, skilled in the ways of battle, war.”

“Yes,” said Perry. “I was a knight, for a bit.”

“I think that’s the wrong word,” she said. She brushed hair from her face. “It’s one we use for an ancient warrior, from the time of kings.”

“I went to a world with a king,” said Perry. “Technically, I went to several worlds with kings, but I was only a knight in one of them.”

“We’re hoping to settle this conflict without firing on each other,” said Brigitta. “But if we can’t —”

“Then you might need someone who knows more about war and what it means to kill other people,” said Perry.

“Yes,” said Brigitta with a firm nod.

“And you’re not leaving anything out in your story?” asked Perry. “Some inciting incident that makes you look bad?”

“There’s more history,” she said, as though it wasn’t worth considering. “There’s always more history. We’ve been stymied by problems they’ve made for us. Especially now, as we draw close together, there’s evidence of what they’ve done to the environment, scars on the land, places where food will no longer grow. We mine deposits as we come to them, but here, we’re within range of what they’ve taken, and find meager scraps. Sometimes they leave equipment in place.” She shrugged. “We’re not going to give them the people they were hoping for. We’re also not going to give back what they had already delivered to us.”

Perry nodded. “And if that means war, then that’s war,” he said. He looked around the penthouse. “Knowing the history here, I’d really rather this not be my home for the next however long. And I think it’s high time I got to see the rest of the Natrix, got to meet its people.”

He didn’t entirely trust her story, not if she was part of a revolutionary movement, and wanted a chance to see what this place was like for the common people. From everything she’d said, they were on the right side of history.

It made him all the more concerned about where the other thresholder was going to end up.