Thresholder

Perry ended up staying in the penthouse, though he spent little time there. With the sword revealed, he was free to fly out of the balcony, and needed a good spot for that. He also needed a secure place to house Marchand, and the locks on the penthouse doors were quite good, better than could be found anywhere else on the Natrix, which overall had quite poor physical security once past the guns and inside the metal skin. He spent little time in his room though, instead preferring to move about the ship, integrating himself with them as much as he could by spending time in the mess, the mech bay, the atrium, or outside with the farmers.

He did this partly because after the Great Arc, it was a relief to be among people who were, by their nature, pretty friendly. The other thought, at the back of his mind, was that they would be more likely to help and protect him if there was some kind of personal connection. That was a more mercenary way of thinking than he preferred, but the various betrayals of the Great Arc had made it a necessary consideration.

Thankfully, he had the ear of the three leaders of Natrix, and all of them had their own interests in him.

“Lift me,” said Mette. She was holding the sword in Perry’s room.

Perry complied, commanding the sword up. When he did, she became weightless, floating after it. She giggled at the sensation, then released the sword and dropped to the ground.

“But what makes it only work for you?” asked Mette. “How does it read your mind?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. It was so so tempting to say ‘magic’, but he knew that didn’t explain anything. “There are books for you to look through.”

“I can’t make heads or tails of them,” said Mette. “It’s truly terrible documentation.”

“In truth, I don’t think that the wizards of that world understood it all that well either,” said Perry. “It seemed like there was a lot of cruft and superstition, things that they don’t know.”

“I’ll figure it out,” said Mette. “I have the files, there are just so many of them.”

“I’m not sure that it will work for you,” said Perry. “I mean, I’m not sure what’s going on with, uh, basic physics.”

“You can do the magic though?” asked Mette.

Perry concentrated and made the sparks come from his fingers. It was the only magic trick he knew, and had taken far, far more practice than he would have liked to admit.

“Again,” said Mette.

Perry did it again, and this time, paid attention to the energy in the room, which could be felt just outside his body like the oppressive humidity of a hot day. He hadn’t done much investigating of the overlap between the firmament and energy as used by the meridians and vessels. That was mostly because his singular magic trick was weak and useless, the very entry level. He suspected that it would use up or depress the energy available to draw on.

Instead, he was quite surprised that it did the opposite, causing an elevation of what was available in the air. He took in a lungful, feeling its character. The sensation was, somehow, like rock salt. It was intriguing, but he wasn’t a wizard except through the technicality of this single simple spell.

“Amazing,” said Mette. Her eyes were on his fingers. “You think that I can learn this?”

“No idea,” said Perry. “You have a job though, right?”

“I have enormous amounts of work,” said Mette. “I chart the region and set the course, not just for the trips we take with walking legs, but for the Natrix as a whole. It’s my job to look ahead.” She looked at the sword. “It’s a job that’s more complicated now.”

“I don’t think magic is going to complicate things for you,” said Perry. “I’ve managed to check, and none of your people have the spirit root necessary to transition from first sphere to second sphere. The magic of Seraphinus, if it can be learned at all, would take a generation to pay off.”

“My role is charting the path of generations,” said Mette. “I look out for the children of children yet to be born.”

“That’s far-thinking,” said Perry.

“It’s necessary,” said Mette. “That’s the work of generations. And it’s not enough to have ideas about the future, you need to have plans, and those plans require knowledge, not just of the basics, but of every system in play. Leticia makes the moves in the present, I’m the one who is, ultimately, responsible for what happens decades from now.”

“And then Brigitta is responsible for the past?” asked Perry.

Mette thought about that. “In a way, I suppose. She doesn’t actually handle the pieces of the elder mechs, those have dedicated teams that she’s thankfully not inserted herself into.” She tapped her lips. “Past, present, future, I think that’s something that Leticia might like. I don’t think it’s true though. Much of what I do is making sure we put the ship in the right place. The more metaphorical navigation requires less time, and is more limited in scope.”

“And now you have to worry about magic,” said Perry.

“Magic, systems that will replace hundreds of workers, genetic engineering the next generation, all of it,” said Mette. “I’ve had some time to push my mind into it, even if I’m only looking at the effects, not the base truths that create those effects.” She had grabbed onto the sword, which was still floating, and let herself be lifted up by it.

“You know you can’t have the sword, right?” asked Perry.

“Yes, but I want it,” said Mette. “And I’m hoping that within all those books, which are now sitting on my tablet, there will be the secret.”

Mette did eventually leave, since she had a significant workload, but no sooner was she out the door than Brigitta had shown up.

“I shouldn’t have spent that time in quarantine with you,” she said by way of greeting. “I had put some work to the side, and now I have to make up that work while there’s something more exciting than you.”

“Hurtful,” said Perry.

“It’s a machine with all the intelligence of a man,” said Brigitta. “If we had the processors to run him, we would have a thousand, ten thousand, one for every person aboard the Natrix, one for every mech. We would manufacture mechs by the thousands, giant assembly lines, each with a robot pilot.” She was slightly breathless, and given how good of shape she was obviously in, it wasn’t because of the trip up.

“My people have a lot of thoughts on how and why that’s dangerous,” said Perry.

“Oh, yes,” nodded Brigitta. “Insanely so.”

“I’m not sure I would say insanely,” said Perry.

“It’s insane, absolutely,” said Brigitta. “Can I show you something?”

“Sure,” said Perry.

She went to the terminal, which no longer had March sitting in front of it, and began some rapid typing. “I know you don’t know about this sort of thing, but you might be able to tell me whether I understand this right.”

“Sure,” said Perry.

The terminal brought up an image, a graph with hundreds of nodes in it, and as it backed out, it showed more of them, until there were so many that it was just a fuzzy mass.

“What is this?” asked Perry.

“It’s the heart of Marchand,” said Brigitta. “It’s not my visualization, it’s his, and a full visualization wouldn’t even really work, so this is an approximation.”

“Alright,” said Perry. “It … kind of isn’t meaningful to me.”

“Me either,” said Brigitta. “And it’s not meaningful to Marchand, and certainly not to the people who built him. But this is the thing that allows for Marchand to exist. There’s so much built on top of it, solid logic and prompting strategies and flowcharts within the code, and systems that feed into each other, clearly made by different people with different design goals, but none of it would mean anything without … this.” She stared at it. “It’s a graph.”

Marchand cleared his throat, something that Perry always found hilarious. “I have said before I don’t find that to be accurate, ma’am,” said Marchand. “While it can be represented as a graph, and while a graph representation can give some insights, the structure is a very large parametric function which maps multimodal inputs and outputs.”

“It’s a graph,” said Brigitta dismissively. She looked at Perry. “All decisions it makes are run through this. They made it by creating a randomized graph and then changing that graph with what they call training. They only know how it will react because they’ve tested its reactions. There’s a hugely complex flow chart which covers very many circumstances, but it can alter the flow chart on its own, rewrite the overcode.”

“So it’s useless to you?” asked Perry.

“No no,” said Brigitta. “It’s very useful, but also insane.”

“But there’s the flowchart, right, the stuff outside the neural network?” asked Perry. “I mean, you could freeze that, right?”

Brigitta laughed. “Even if you did, it all depends upon this monstrous thing in the core of it all. And the flow chart — that really does reduce down to such a thing, doesn’t it?” This was directed at Marchand.

“It’s true enough that I don’t feel the need to issue a correction, ma’am,” he replied.

“The flow chart must consult the graph at every step,” said Brigitta. “If the flow chart says that he must protect innocents, it must consult this spider’s web of arbitrary math to know what ‘innocent’ and ‘protect’ and all these other things are. It must do this with every single concept.”

“I don’t really see the problem,” said Perry. “I mean, they tested all the outputs, that’s —”

“They cannot have tested the outputs,” said Brigitta. She pointed a finger at the armor. “Even if not for the fact that you’re traveling worlds, it would have gaps in its testing, gaps in its training. And in those gaps, what happens?”

“Errors,” said Perry. “Historically, at least. Loads of errors get logged and then I give explicit instructions on what to do, which helps to get around those errors.” Actually changing March’s understanding of base reality didn’t work too well, and many of those errors didn’t interfere with functionality, so were ignored.

“Most of the time you give instruction,” said Brigitta. “But you allow it some leeway.”

“Sure,” said Perry. “You’re the one talking about thousands of mechs piloted by AI.”

“Because it’s useful,” said Brigitta with a huff. “The work of generations is premised on needing thousands of people, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, all so that we can progress to a point where we can build our own stable power sources, kill the bugs for good, and launch off into the sky, returning there with our own powerful drives that can let us cross the stars. You must see that this is an opportunity to shorten the work of generations by a hundred years. It might be accomplished within my lifetime.” There was an intensity to her eyes. “If you had told me this was what you had while we were in quarantine together, I would have laid myself at your feet and promised you my soul.”

“In the last world, when they learned of Marchand, they took him from me and threatened me with execution,” said Perry.

Brigitta shrugged. “I can see why. It is, after all, insane. If we had stability here, comfort, if we had no ambitions, I might be tempted to cast it into the furnaces.”

“I shall consider myself fortunate, ma’am,” said Marchand.

Brigitta looked over at the armor. A slight frown crossed her face. She looked back at Perry. “You trust it?”

“Yeah,” said Perry. “I do.”

“Because you trust it, or because you trust the people who made it?” asked Brigitta.

“Marchand has saved my life more than once,” said Perry. “He’s offered good advice and always stayed his hand when I told him to.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Marchand.

“Insanity,” said Brigitta, shaking her head. “But of course I’ll use it too, I’d be a fool not to.” She looked at March for a moment. “Do you want to see the mech I’m building for you?”

“Absolutely,” said Perry.

~~~~

The mech bay was easier to understand now that Perry had seen more of the Natrix. It was a gritty, mechanical place, worn and greasy, with the smell of shaved metal in the air, but it seemed a little kinder and gentler than it had before. Every mech had its bay, and they came in all sorts, each one a reflection of the particular choices of its creator or the role they were trying to fill.

“It’s not often that someone gets to build a second mech,” said Brigitta. “You build one, then build up parts for it, sometimes cannibalized from other mechs, or traded with the other mech pilots. There’s not much time for a total rebuild, and we don’t let the pilots stockpile too much, like some of them would, because most of us would build a half dozen if we were allowed to.”

“And that doesn’t change for the head of engineering?” asked Perry.

“No,” said Brigitta. “I lead by example.” She seemed to feel that was all that needed to be said on that score. “Here.”

Perry found himself standing before a tall, lanky mech, possibly the tallest in the entire mech bay, with legs that were folded up beneath it so it wouldn’t hit its head on the bay’s tall ceiling. The arms were comparatively short, just barely capable of holding an extremely long rifle whose barrel was as thick around as Perry’s arm. The cockpit was open, accessible only by a long ladder, and the internals of the mech were a mess of wires and buttons. Perry could only imagine it as an iron maiden, ready to clamp down on him.

“I’ll run you through some of the design choices,” said Brigitta. Perry didn’t think there was much he could say that would have stopped her, but she had grown animated, energized, and he liked her like that. “It’s tall, almost absurdly so, we had to use a special alloy for that, but there’s a purpose to that, which is that we want to leverage your advantages. Most of those come from Marchand.” She gestured at the long legs. “Marchand has better ability to place a foot, which means that there’s less worry about traveling fast.” She pointed at the long-barreled rifle. “Similarly, the firing algorithms we use are put to shame by the calculations that Marchand employs, and his solutions are fully general, which means that they map directly to this weapon with little in the way of interface. This is the primary weapon, designed for precision strikes at distant targets, spotted using either your drone or Marchand’s superior audiovisual sensors.”

“I’m meant to be a sniper?” asked Perry.

“No,” said Brigitta. “You’re meant to investigate the enemy, make a show of force, and then return to us.” She considered the weapon. “However, if it comes to battle, you’re meant to strike from a great distance and run very fast, yes.”

“And the power … draws off March?” asked Perry, looking at the cockpit.

“It can,” said Brigitta. “But only in an emergency. The microfusion reactor uses some of the same technology of the elder mechs, just down a different development branch. I’m still digging into the files that Marchand has supplied, but there’s some promise that a decade down the road we might not need to rely on the elder mechs as heavily. Fusion reactors of our own … that’s another thing I never thought we’d have in my lifetime.”

“But the microfusion reactor can’t power this?” asked Perry.

“Like I said, in an emergency,” said Brigitta. “You could limp home, possibly. It’s not so much that the microfusion reactor couldn’t power this, it’s that there’s no good way to transfer the energy.” She gave a little laugh. “Marchand is against me meddling with him too much.”

“He said that?” asked Perry.

“We wouldn’t have survived if we hadn’t taken the elder mechs apart,” said Brigitta. “We cracked the eggs and used every part of them, including the shell.”

“I think I can see why he’d see it that way, when you put it like that,” said Perry. He was mildly surprised that they had eggs, which hadn’t been served to him yet.

“I look at those miniature cameras, their sensors, and think about how many of them are pointless,” said Brigitta. “It’s a marvel, that suit, but it screams of waste to me. Even with the design goals, even with everything else.”

Perry looked up at the mech. “I’ve just got one question,” he said.

Brigitta grinned at him. “You want to take it out for a run?”

“Well, that, if it’s possible,” said Perry. “But I was going to ask how the holy hell you got this done in so short a time.”

“Old parts, old projects, Marchand’s help,” said Brigitta. “Fabrication has been running smoothly under my watch, and they have spare time, as they always do when we’ve come to a stop.”

“Still,” said Perry.

He was thinking about how long it would have taken a mechanic’s shop to build a car. He didn’t really know how long that would be, but he expected that most of the time it would be weeks or maybe months. If it was a team of mechanics who had everything all set up, with tons of planning ahead of time, and all the tools in place, and a gun to their head, they could do it in a single day. Maybe. It was even more possible if they’d built that exact car before.

If Brigitta had come away from the meeting and immediately began constructing this mech, she’d have had perhaps three full days — cycles, since there was no true day on the planet. He could accept that she was a mechanical genius, but even just trying to add up all the time necessary for each individual part, it seemed superhuman. Maybe it was superhuman. That certainly hadn’t been ruled out.

“Alright,” said Perry. “Then let’s take it out for a test.”

“You’re going to need Marchand,” said Brigitta.

“Need?” asked Perry.

“You’ve been piloting a micromech that responds directly to your movements, amplifying them,” said Brigitta. “And half the time, you rely on the mess of numbers to help you. Can you even aim a gun?”

“I can,” said Perry. “I just don’t.”

“You need Marchand,” said Brigitta. “The cockpit was designed for you to be wearing the micromech.”

“Mechs within mechs,” said Perry. “Alright, fine.”

“I should have everything running by the time you get back,” said Brigitta.

“It’s not already?” asked Perry.

“Feh,” said Brigitta. “There’s always more work. Tests, tuning, the details.”

That did make him feel a little bit better. Maybe not fully superhuman.

When he came down, Brigitta was still working on the mech. She was up in the cockpit, perched precariously on the ladder.

“Fucking thing,” she said when she saw him. “It’ll be another half hour.”

“I got dressed up with nowhere to go?” asked Perry.

“Walk around, impress the other pilots with your little thing,” said Brigitta.

“Glad to know you’re human,” said Perry.

“It was working well enough to walk before,” said Brigitta. “There’s a wiring error, I was working fast, with many hands helping.”

“If you’d like some help,” Marchand began.

“Take your micromech away,” said Brigitta. “Be back here in half an hour, I’ll have it sorted.”

Perry decided to wander the mech bay, which he was only doing because he hadn’t been told not to. There were markings painted on the ground, and they had been opaque to him, but knowing something of how the mech bay was laid out and how people were assigned, he could start to infer. The yellow markings showed what area belonged to which bay, usually fairly expansive, beyond what an individual engineer would normally need. The red lines marked free space, like the walkway down the middle, where no one was supposed to have any equipment. And the blue line apparently, showed the many paths that the large robot arms normally took. It was a bit frightening seeing them zip by overhead.

Fewer of the pilots were children than Perry had first thought, he just hadn’t been used to children. Most of the children he saw weren’t pilots or engineers, they were runners or helpers, handing over things when necessary and taking lessons from the teenagers, who were running systems checks and working on installations.

Someone called, “Outing!” and Perry momentarily froze as a mech lumbered down the corridor that had been outlined in red. A small child, not more than eight, dashed forward and pulled Perry to the side by one hand.

“You’ve got to get out of the way, you don’t step in the red when there’s an outing,” the boy said. The mech went past, heavy guns hanging from its hips like an exceptionally lethal belt.

“Sorry,” said Perry. He was standing in a yellow-outlined area, someone’s workshop. “I wasn’t sure where to go.”

“You could get killed if you’re out there,” said the boy. He was looking the micromech over. “It’s so small.”

“Yeah,” said Perry. “It was built for me, for every part of me, down to the fingers.” He wiggled the fingers of the power armor, which had considerably more articulation than the mechs did.

“Wow,” said the boy. “But a single round would kill you, wouldn’t it?”

“I would dodge,” said Perry. He hoped the boy could hear the smile in his voice.

“That’s snot,” said the boy. “You can’t dodge a bullet.”

“Can too,” said Perry. “Or at least deflect it.”

“Thom!” said the boy, turning to a gangly teenager whose head was inside a mech’s cockpit. “Can I have the gun?”

“No,” said Thom.

“But he says he can dodge a bullet,” said the boy.

“I heard,” said Thom. “And that’s ridiculous.”

“I’d really rather not have a child handling a gun,” said Perry.

Thom ducked his head out from the cockpit. Perry guessed that he was seventeen, but it was so hard to tell with teenagers. He had acne about his cheeks and wild blond hair. “So you’re fine with me shooting you?”

“Not here,” said Perry. “I’d be too worried about a ricochet.”

“Guns aren’t allowed to be fired inside the Natrix,” said the boy.

“Fine, I have time, we can go outside,” said Thom. “It’ll be our break though.”

“Aww,” said the boy. “Alright, let me grab water and a snack.”

To Perry’s faint surprise, Thom got up into the mech when the boy went away, and after a shrill warning beep, the cockpit closed around him. A brief systems check later and there was another warning beep, with some lights flashing on around the yellow area, and Perry made himself scarce, this time running down the walkway and then flying with the sword at his hip up into the air, settling down on a bit of matted plants.

It was crazy how fast the plants grew. Perry had heard that some species of bamboo grew as much as three feet a day, but on Esperide that seemed to be every plant. The mats of plants had grown substantially, becoming bushy, and there were a handful of trees sprouting up from them, some of them four or five feet tall. He wondered how large they would get with time.

The farms, which were mostly large areas of metal framework, had already filled in with plants, most of them sitting in a grid of nets, brought in from a cramped nursery that Perry had gotten a tour through by one of the children. Most of the plant matter that the Natrix needed would be sourced from the area around the Natrix, foraged, but some of it was grown close to the ship, those things that they would want fresh and uncompacted, like the little fruits that Perry often had for breakfast.

The policy on the Natrix was to stockpile as much as possible, filling holds, then do huge production runs on everything that could be made from base materials, like clothing, data pads, furniture, rugs, soap, or whatever else. Food was pretty much the only thing not included in that list, though there were also lots of foods that were made in bulk and then fermented, salted, desiccated, frozen, and stored for years. There was no day or night on the planet, not in the same way there was on Earth, and there weren’t seasons either, but the humans had created their own cycles, the stopping and starting of the Natrix dividing the ‘year’ up into times of hot and cold, with attendant changes in both diet and clothing.

Perry turned at the sound of the mech. The machine was fairly quiet, all things considered, and it had less in the way of weaponry than Brigitta’s mech had. There wasn’t really a way for a mech that size to move elegantly, but it did a passable job of it. It turned toward Perry, two long guns aiming his way.

“Not yet!” called Perry.

“Fine,” came the voice. “We need to move some distance away.” The mech turned and began walking, putting more distance between it and the Natrix.

“Sir, are you quite sure this is wise?” asked Marchand.

“No,” said Perry. “But I have a strong feeling that I’m going to have to deal with gunfire of the sort that won’t just plink off me, and doing it in a controlled circumstance is going to be a lot easier than when I’m dealing with hundreds of bullets. Richter shot at me with a handgun, this isn’t so different.”

“The caliber of those guns is much higher, sir,” said Marchand. “There are limits to what this armor is rated for, as we well know.”

“If you get hit, I have enough time to heal you,” said Perry.

“And how do you propose to do that, sir?” asked Marchand. “From everything I have seen of their fabrication facilities, they do not match the quality of what Miss Richter could provide.”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Perry. “If you want to make yourself useful, run some simulations on what that gun will do to me if I can’t deal with the hit.”

“Has Miss Karlquist’s earlier talk of insanity inspired you, sir?” asked Marchand.

“If you tell me that a direct hit will kill me, then I’ll call it off, bite that bullet, as it were,” said Perry.

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “I’ve run as many simulations as I care to, and must say that there is only a small chance of your death, assuming you get immediate medical attention, and there’s only a single shot from the firearm, assuming I’m correct about the power behind it. The damage to the armor is cause for alarm, particularly if there’s a direct hit to the microfusion reactor.” A diagram of a thousand hits showed up on the HUD, with various areas marked in red, indicating that a direct hit would be quite bad. There was a helpful little graph too, with the tail end in yellow and red. It was almost enough to make Perry reconsider.

He had rewatched the footage of the fight with Zhang Lingxiu enough times to know that parrying away a bullet was possible for a second sphere. It undoubtedly took skill, but it wasn’t actually a skill that Zhang Lingxiu had possessed, because Zhang Lingxiu had only learned about firearms a few seconds before attempting his parry. And Zhang Lingxiu had done a terrible job with the parry, slicing the bullet in half and getting hit with both halves, something that Perry had only realized on reviewing the footage.

Even with the armor, Perry was nowhere near as fast as a bullet. The trick, he thought, was going to have to be to angle the sword, anticipate the bullet, lock in place, and then hope that a tiny twitch at the right moment would do the rest. But a bullet from a gun wasn’t always a nicely predictable thing, and even a perfectly positioned sword might miss one that had gone off in its own direction.

The thought of backing out was growing louder in his head. The proper way to do this was to practice with a bullet going half speed, less gunpowder, smaller caliber, something that would have no chance of so much as damaging the armor. Really, you’d want to work your way up and do it with an actual plan.

But unexpectedly, people were turning out to see the demonstration. There was a whole troupe of people wading through the water, and more coming with every passing second, most of them from the mech bay, but a few who must have been from elsewhere in the Natrix. It would be pretty embarrassing to say ‘no, I can’t deflect a bullet, and certainly can’t dodge one’ at this stage. Of course, it would also be pretty embarrassing to die or get seriously injured.

Eventually they had found their place, and people had gathered around to watch. Part of the point of going so far away was to reduce the risk of a ricochet, but now there were bodies, many of them children. He didn’t particularly like that, but they were off to the side, and the chance of a bullet coming back the way it came after striking his armor was minimal.

“Ready,” said the boy inside the mech. Perry had already forgotten his name.

Perry steeled himself. He looked at the gun that was going to fire on him. It looked longer, but it wasn’t high caliber. Whatever it was meant for, it wasn’t punching through the thickest of shells on the insects. He had his sword drawn and in position. People were still walking across the water to come see them.

“One shot only, to start,” said Perry. His grip on the sword was firm, and the enhanced energy of the world was flowing through him. The HUD lit up, with Marchand seeming to understand what was going to happen. The barrel of the gun was being tracked, the likely path of the bullet plotted, with little hash marks to show distance.

The crowd was whispering, with some of the whispers quite loud. A few were puzzled by what was going on, having arrived late and only knowing that there was to be a demonstration of some kind.

“Do it Thom!” yelled one of the boys.

Perry was watching the gun intently, pushing his perception of time to the limit. He caught a flash of light from the muzzle, and then the bullet was coming at him so fast that he had no time at all to change the angle of his sword or even twitch it into a different position.

He felt the hit in his arms, and for a moment, the sword vibrated slightly in his grip. Marchand wasn’t complaining about any damage, and Perry seemed, miraculously, fine.

Perry held up a hand, and the mech raised its gun toward the sky.

“Did you do it?” asked Thom in the mech.

“Review the footage,” said Perry.

“You do appear to have deflected the bullet, sir,” said Marchand. He showed it picture-in-picture, slowed down as much as it could be, enhanced and zoomed in. The bullet was only captured in the form of small sparks against the sword for a single frame.

“Holy shit,” said Perry.

“Marvelous, sir,” said Marchand. “Now, have we brought this exercise to its natural conclusion?”

Perry looked up at the mech. “Yeah, that was it. Give me a second, then do it again.”

Perry faced down the mech again. This time, he changed the angle of his sword, holding it just so. He knew what to expect now, and while he hadn’t been fast enough to have much of a reaction that first time, he didn’t think that was a true limitation.

Thom tried to get a little more fancy on the second shot. The barrel of the gun was obviously under manual control, and he was moving it around slightly, which meant that Perry had to keep the sword in motion, adjusting how it was positioned. But while the bullet was so fast it was just a flash of metal, the barrel of the gun was practically glacial, even when Thom swung it quickly.

Perry wasn’t properly ready for the second shot, but his sword was in position all the same, and again, the shot was deflected. This time, as Perry had planned, the angle meant it was deflected down, striking the water with a splash.

This was, to the audience that had gathered, much more impressive, and there was no question about whether the gun might have misfired. Perry had never really used guns prior to meeting Richter, but she’d told him that it was always more fun to shoot when you had some demonstration of the forces involved, which mostly meant shooting things that would deform or explode when you hit them, cans of soda or jugs of milk.

Thom, unfortunately, took this as a sign that what Perry was doing was easy.

Five bullets came one after another, and it was only because Perry had been tracking the line that Marchand had put up on the HUD that he was able to block the first one. By the second one, Perry had expected it, and by the third, it was almost routine. March was dampening the sound and dimming the light, making it not quite as much of a shock, and even if Perry hadn’t had the power to lock his arms in place, the armor would have helped with that too.

Five bullets, five deflections with the sword, five splashes of water.

There was a moment of silence, then cheering from the children.

Perry held up a hand, and the mech raised its gun once again. This time, instead of waiting there, the mech squatted down and the cockpit opened, allowing Thom to slide out.

“I really didn’t think you would be able to,” he said.

“Can we have the bullets?” asked one of the boys.

“Sure,” said Perry. “If you can find them.”

A dozen small children came forward and began poking around in the cold water, looking for bits of metal. Perry took pity on them and helped them to look, which was much easier with advanced image processing. It was in the midst of this bullet-hunting that Brigitta came up with the long-legged mech she built for him. She took some time getting down from it, then walked over, a smile on her face.

“What’s all this?” asked Brigitta as she made her way through the water.

“His magic sword can block bullets,” said Thom.

“Not really, no,” said Perry. “The only thing that the sword can do is not break when a bullet hits it. But … I actually think a normal sword might be able to do that.”

“How do you do it then?” asked Thom.

“Move the sword to where the bullets will be,” said Perry. He was surprised that it worked, and didn’t think that it would be as easy at longer ranges.

“An algorithm?” asked Thom.

“He said he could dodge bullets,” said the little boy. “But it wasn’t really dodging, was it?”

“Not really,” said Perry. “I had never actually tried that before.”

“Show me,” Brigitta said to Thom.

Perry had no idea what that was supposed to mean, and hoped he wouldn’t get shot at again, but Thom went over to his own mech and pulled a screen down from inside it, which was attached, with wires, to an arm with many joints to it. It was obviously the same screen on the inside of the mech, and once it was down, he brought out a keyboard, which sat awkwardly on his hand for one-handed typing.

The video wasn’t all that high of quality, but in it, Perry looked like a god. The shots had come faster than he thought they had, more tightly grouped. Everything looked smooth and clean rather than panicked and slap-dash, which was how it had felt. An outside observer might think he’d spent half his life parrying bullets. It had been a long time since he’d seen himself, thanks to a complete lack of cameras for three worlds in a row. It would have been simple to get March to capture some images of him, but there never seemed like there would be a point. Now he was thinking that it might be necessary, since he needed to know what impression he was making.

The armor had that second sphere quality to it, looking like it had just rolled off the factory floor, polished to a shine with the paint in vibrant hues. There were none of the chips or scratches that it had accumulated on the other worlds, and something about it looked unreal, like a render that was missing some kind of lighting pass, baby’s first Blender model of a blue power armor suit. Perry had always found the second sphere to look a bit uncanny, and that was how he felt about himself now. He wasn’t sure how he’d feel about seeing himself outside the armor.

“Stunning,” said Brigitta, looking at the video as it played a second and third time. Her eyes were sparkling.

“I give March a lot of credit,” said Perry. “Bullet prediction was a lot of it. Most of it, maybe.”

“We should get you a sword,” said Brigitta. She looked at the mech she’d rode over, the one that Perry was going to ride into the wastes. “Something large to swing around.”

“A giant honking sword to bat away missiles, sure,” said Perry with a smile.

She turned back to Perry. “But for now, let’s see what you can do.”