Thresholder

Perry had never really experienced ‘true’ snow. He’d experienced snowfalls, but Tacoma had wet and mild winters, and the snow never stuck around for long before being washed down the storm drains. He’d never gone on vacation to a snowy place, having skipped out on a ski trip to Colorado with some friends in high school because of a girl. Almost every other trip he’d taken, whether to Europe or around America, had been to other places without true snow.

The night side was filled with snow, vast blankets of it, and the mech stepped through it, sometimes sinking down to the first joint. They were still in the twilight zone, with the sun occasionally peeking over the horizon when the hills weren’t in the way, and this snow was sometimes slush, with the air warm enough to melt it, given time. It was cold enough to require a heavy jacket, but not so cold that his piss would freeze mid-stream, which was apparently how cold it was going to get when they were further in. Of course, once it was that cold, trying to piss outside would mean a frostbitten dick. When it got cold enough, going outside was impossible.

For the time being, the mech was pleasantly warm, not spending any additional power on heating.

Two mechs moved through the snow with Perry’s. The sloshing of their feet through piles of half-melted snow was one of the only things that was audible when Perry deigned to turn the outside microphones on.

Ruben was hearty and good-natured, and his mech was as burly as he was. The onboard weapons he was bringing with him were shoulder-launched micro-missiles that were better at laying down wide-area damage than killing individual bugs with thicker shells. He was carrying backup batteries on the back of his mech, which could be swapped out when necessary. The journey into the snows was going to take quite some time, longer than was usual for the mechs, and it wasn’t clear how easy it was going to be to find the exact location of the Heimalis.

Largen was even taller than Ruben, but slender, and with hair that was pulled back in a ponytail. He kept his face clean-shaven, which wasn’t the norm for these men, and moved in a languid way, as though he didn’t see the rush. On first meeting Perry, Largen had a number of questions about what the society of Earth had been like, but they weren’t posed with the burning intensity that Brigitta or Mette had used. Instead, when Largen asked his questions, it was like they were only just occurring to him, and might as well be answered so long as they weren’t doing anything else. His mech had attachable runners, which in theory would allow something like a skiing motion through the snow, but that theory had yet to be put to the test.

They had trained together for relatively little time, only a day or so, which seemed to Perry like it wasn’t enough, but Ruben was a fast friend, and Largen seemed like the type of guy who was too aloof to make friends with anyone — though not aloof in the way the people of the Great Arc had been. Largen was aloof like a cat, affable and detached.

Two weeks after Perry had been presented with his mech, he was trekking through the hills to the west, watching the temperature fall with every step he took. He was in his armor, which was inside the mech, so wasn’t feeling it, and in theory, he wouldn’t feel it for the whole trip.

The interior of the mech had everything he’d need for two weeks, including fresh water and food. Depending on how cold it actually got in the Far West, breathing might become a bit of a problem, so there were some tanks toward his back, just in case. In theory, he could just depend on the second sphere for everything, but that was still very much a work in progress, and at best, he could reduce his food intake by half and ensure that he would go as long as possible before having to slip out of the armor enough that he could take a shit in the mech. Taking a shit in the mech was a whole process, one that Brigitta had gone through with him, and it seemed like something Perry would avoid if at all possible.

“This is Big Bear to Flamingo,” came a voice from the radio. “Status?”

“Still walking, Big Bear,” said Perry. “Like we always do.”

One of the fun things about the translation of intents was that he could arbitrarily and smoothly swap in words. Ruben had no idea what a bear or a flamingo were, and was using words for different varieties of animal native to the planet, both of them approximately mammals — only in the sense that they had elongated cilia that were essentially fur — but Perry liked it better to just swap in words that actually made sense to him.

“Your man doesn’t see anything?” asked Ruben.

Perry’s ‘man’ was Marchand, which was how Ruben always referred to the AI.

“If you’d prefer, sir, you could address me directly,” said Marchand, whose codename was Weaver. “I can also feed information directly to your mech, if you would prefer.”

“Keep your hands off my mech,” said Ruben.

“Understood, sir,” replied Marchand. “But as with the last time you asked, sir, I have seen no signs of the enemy.”

“We should have gotten a flyover by now, or at least had them fly near us,” said Ruben. “Do they know we’re here?”

“Impossible to say,” said Perry. “But we have at least a hundred miles to go, right?”

“At least,” said Largen. “I’ve been enjoying the solitude so far.”

Perry was enjoying the solitude too. He’d been letting March drive, since March was responsible for the positioning of the legs anyway. It was giving him time to work on his internal systems, which were still acting up a bit, even if he’d managed to get a few of the lines of energy back in place. The left side of his thigh would go numb sometimes, and he wasn’t entirely sure why that was, except that the Liver Meridian had been pushed slightly outside his body in the calamity and was now perhaps not in the right position. Still, the energy flowed, and he didn’t seem to be suffering for it. There was also no lingering sign of radiation damage, which might have been because he dodged the worst effects of it, or because he’d spent a great deal of time on ‘active healing’ techniques.

They were only going about fifty miles a day, mostly in the interests of conserving battery, and because the terrain was difficult. The other two had to sleep, and had rejected offers to have March pilot their mechs. Perry had to sleep as well, but he could sleep while March marched.

In theory it was a recon mission, nothing else. There was radio contact between the two camps, but the Heimalis were cagey about their actual position. Attempts at triangulation had been made, but for the long-distance broadcasts used for communication between them, they were apparently using movable relays. The source of the signal was different every time. Pinpointing the exact location was step one, and finding out everything they could about the city was step two. There was a reason these people were secretive, and knowing all their secrets was surely going to help.

Perry had kept a few things from the people of the Natrix. The nanites were one of them. He hadn’t meant to keep them a secret, but they were too good, too useful, for him to share them unconditionally. Besides, they didn’t hold all that much promise given that he was the only one who could make more.

When he got to the snow city, he planned to plaster it with nanite listeners.

After all, he had already done that to the Natrix.

~~~~

It had taken two weeks for the mech to be fully finished. That had proven to be the major blocking issue for the expedition into the ice in the west. It was enough time for Perry to properly explore the ship, give whatever advice and information he could, sit through several meetings, and have sex with Brigitta.

She was spending a lot of time with Marchand, which meant spending a lot of time in the penthouse with Perry. Technically, all of her work could be done via terminal, but she sometimes had questions that Perry could, in theory, answer. In practice, Perry was pretty useless to her, but he enjoyed her company.

For Perry, most of the time was spent in meditation, trying to move his vessels and meridians back into place and drawing from the energy around him as much as possible. This was often done on the terrace, where he had free access to the open air and a view of the valley they were parked in. The energy on the planet had stayed consistently high, and it was all Perry’s. Beyond that, he had been pushing the academic tether, mostly by having Marchand help to prepare ‘pamphlets’ regarding certain aspects of Earth.

Perry had asked Brigitta whether there was any testing equipment on the Natrix that he could use, and when he explained what he wanted it for, she laughed and took him to one of the equipment storerooms. As it turned out, there were all kinds of measurements that mech pilots needed (or wanted) to take of themselves. Perry’s would just be changing a little more often than your average mech pilot’s.

It troubled the academic in him that he hadn’t gotten a first sphere baseline, but he at least had information from March and the Natrix’s own logs of everything the pilots had ever recorded. A lot of this data was messy and bespoke, since they were a small community without a lot of the infrastructure that a larger place would have had, but it was still good for comparison.

Perry’s reaction times were a whole order of magnitude faster than even the fastest baseline humans, and probably fast enough that he was breaking some kind of biological laws. March insisted that the results were an error, and simply didn’t believe that Perry was capable of responding to simple stimulus within ten milliseconds. Olympic sprinters worked very hard to get their responses down to a hundred milliseconds.

Perry sprinted down one of the corridors that went through the belly of the Natrix, having March time him. He held his breath, which got very tedious very quickly. He lifted weights and did a puncture test on his skin, and checked his range of motion. He got all kinds of stats about himself that he hadn’t had before. In every category, he was superhuman, record-shattering if he’d been on Earth. It was the first thing that had made him really want to go back home, just so he could show up and crush Major League Baseball by hitting pinpoint home runs or something. He had Marchand put all the data points into a spreadsheet.

Then he watched as the superhuman numbers changed over the course of two weeks.

It wasn’t a huge change, but with enough data, it was a noticeable trend. Through the practice of meditation, widening meridians and expanding vessels, which went along with trying to shove everything back into place, Perry had seen about a five percent improvement. He didn’t expect to be able to keep that rate up, and was probably already well on his way to slowing down, but if he could get another twenty percent over the next year, that would be more than enough to make a substantial difference in combat. It meant that there was a benefit to him staying in this world for as long as possible, especially if Mette was able to make some headway on the firmament and share her findings with Perry.

Things with Brigitta had gone fast. She was into him, and hadn’t really made that much of an attempt to hide it. She’d watch him working out or doing meditation, especially the more esoteric exercises he’d come up with that worked to isolate and strengthen individual parts of his body. With great concentration, he was capable of doing a one-handed handstand push-up, balancing his entire body weight on one hand and bending his elbow so his nose was nearly to the floor, then pushing himself back up, feet pointed at the room’s ceiling. He’d do a set of those, then look over at Brigitta, whose eyes were on him.

He found excuses to put himself in close proximity to her, sitting beside her and doing his own work while she did hers. At one point she reached across him for something, and he leaned forward and kissed her exposed neck. She had seemed surprised by it, and looked him in the eyes for a moment, then he kissed her again, and she abandoned whatever she’d been in the middle of to focus on him.

He had thought, before that, that he didn’t want to get into anything personal like that, and if it happened, he’d take it slow, especially since he had little idea what the social norms for that kind of thing were like on the Natrix. But that planning went out the window, and he found himself hurriedly undressing her, then lifting her up, hands gripping her thighs, to bring her over to the bed.

It had been a long time, a dry spell that had lasted a whole world, and afterward he felt clear-headed for the first time, as though there had been something pressing on his mind for months and just now lifted.

It was in that moment he realized that he’d rushed things. There had been something on Brigitta’s face when she’d been laid on the bed, a hesitation maybe, or something she wanted to clear up first, and he’d just not responded to that look in the slightest. Once they’d been in the middle of it, she had responded with touches, kisses, and moans, but there was something he’d missed, and it had him worried.

“I should get back to my work,” said Brigitta after their breathing had gone back to normal. She placed a hand on his chest and kissed him lightly there, then went to the bathroom to clean up before getting her clothes back on. Perry sat up in the bed and watched her when she came out.

“Sorry if that was — I don’t know,” said Perry.

Brigitta pursed her lips. “It was good.”

“But?” asked Perry.

“You didn’t dig very far into the archives?” asked Brigitta. “Or ask Marchand to?”

“No,” said Perry. “If there’s something I should know —”

“I can’t have children,” said Brigitta. “I'm infertile.”

“Oh,” said Perry. “That’s, uh … not … I wasn’t thinking that —” He stopped, not sure how to phrase it. “That’s kind of irrelevant.”

Brigitta cocked her head to the side and looked at him. “You weren’t trying to impregnate me?”

“What?” asked Perry. “God no, why would I want to do that?”

“Why wouldn’t you?” asked Brigitta, now seeming somewhat offended.

Perry laughed. “We barely know each other.”

“You’ve seen enough of me to know me,” said Brigitta. “And I’ve seen enough of you.” She frowned at him. “This is a question of cultures, how your people do things.” The frown didn’t let up. It wasn’t enough to say that this was a difference of cultural attitudes, she wanted answers.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Look, I wasn’t thinking about any of that stuff. Where I’m from, they have widespread contraception and I just kind of wasn’t thinking that, uh, it would be an issue. I hope you didn’t take that as more or less than it was. I wasn’t trying to have a child with you.”

“It was just for fun?” asked Brigitta.

“I mean … it was fun, wasn’t it?” asked Perry. He placed his hand on his chest. “I had fun.”

“I had fun,” shrugged Brigitta. “I had wanted it. But I do need to work.”

After that, Perry had done what he probably should have done before all that, and got a digest from Marchand with a few choice examples from the archives to explain things. March had expanded access to the archives, which included direct messages in the case where both participants were dead. Given that the digital archives went back more than two hundred years, there was a lot to draw on.

They were a society with an explicit and vocal focus on having lots and lots of children. This was something that dated back to the very founding of their society, which only existed because there was an emphasis on having lots of children. The role of sex was complicated because of this, and it was seen as a natural instinct that needed to be indulged in for the good of the colony. In some senses they were extremely progressive and in other ways so regressive that Perry started getting angry about it. There were plenty of stories in the archives about women not really wanting to be pregnant for one reason or another, and maternal mortality was, in spite of their best efforts, still enough of a problem to be noteworthy, maybe because most women were having so many children.

“It is what it is,” said Brigitta when Perry tried to talk about it the next day. “For this, you’d want Leticia or Mette.”

“I kind of wanted to talk to you,” said Perry. “Because, you know.”

“We fucked,” said Brigitta.

“Right,” said Perry.

“It is what it is,” said Brigitta again. She shrugged. “It hurt, when I was younger, when it became clear what was happening for others wasn’t happening for me. I spoke with the doctors.”

“But the system,” said Perry. “Having your worth tied to how many children you have, all that stuff, it’s —”

“I’m not in the mood for talking about this,” said Brigitta. “I do Engineering, not the other stuff. Doctors, mothers, infants, it’s all beyond my interests. If you need something to do with metal, we can talk.”

“And all that stuff had nothing to do with the coup?” asked Perry.

“I wish you wouldn’t call it that,” said Brigitta. “I’ve looked through your books, the meaning is different. But no, we took power because the Natrix was being driven by those who had made themselves fat, elders who had no connection to the generations beneath them.”

“And even though the old regime was selling children, you’re not actually changing anything about the importance of children,” said Perry.

“For pregnancy?” asked Brigitta. “No.”

That seemed to be that.

For a few days, they were uncomfortable around each other. She spent less time up in his room, and he didn’t go down to the mech bay. He had his own work to do, and she had hers.

Then one day she came up to his room, kissed him, undressed, and laid on the bed, which was all the invitation he needed. Afterward, they kissed, but they didn’t talk, which was perhaps for the better. They continued like that right up until the point he left, physically intimate but keeping it as something they didn’t put into words. It was very clearly a ‘just for fun’ arrangement.

He sometimes thought about Richter afterward.

The problem was that Brigitta seemed to feel as though Perry should find someone else, someone that could fulfill his sexual needs while also having a chance of getting pregnant by him. He absolutely didn’t want children, and the thought of leaving a child behind on one of these worlds — a werewolf child, even — felt abhorrent. There was no way for them to bridge that cultural gap though, and him saying that it was ‘just fun’ didn’t just fall on deaf ears, it seemed to actively upset her. From her perspective, he wasn’t doing his duty to their colony.

Sex was sex though, and it wasn’t like either of them was trying to pump the brakes.

It was a bit of a discordant note, but not the only one. Perry had requested a replacement for Liv, the child from Ops who was supposed to be his minder, and had gotten someone older and more senior. Child labor in general was something he grudgingly understood but had a lot of problems with. He tried to avoid depending on the children as much as possible, but they were very often used as runners and menial labor.

It was Leticia who Perry had most come into friction with.

“From what you know, what would be the best way to utterly destroy their city?” asked Leticia.

The question had been posed in a private meeting between the two of them, though March was also ‘there’, since March was virtually everywhere.

“Is that on the table?” asked Perry.

“Not really, no,” said Leticia. “But we plan for all circumstances, and having a plan in our back pocket would certainly be nice, especially if we have another round of negotiation.”

“Which is likely to happen?” asked Perry.

“After your return, yes,” said Leticia. “We have talks scheduled, over the airwaves. They send their planes every few cycles as a way of keeping pressure on us, on me, and I’m hoping for some pressure in return. So if you wanted to wipe them out, how would you do it?”

Perry considered this. Atomic weapons were his natural go-to, but they didn’t have atomic weapons, and even with all their abilities, he didn’t think it would be workable within the timeframe they had available to them. He also didn’t want to give them that knowledge if at all possible. It didn’t appear to March that atomic weapons had been invented, but their neighbors to the north were the ones who had experience with nuclear power. It was March’s opinion that it was very likely that atomic weapons were within easy reach of that other tribe, but if they had nukes, they hadn’t tipped their hand. Atomic weaponry had been redacted from the public-facing resources that March had made available.

“Digital warfare,” said Perry. “They’re dependent on their machines to keep things running, and those machines are dependent upon computers somewhere.”

“But how do you do that?” asked Leticia. She leaned forward slightly. She was wearing another dress that showed off her cleavage. She apparently had four children, but motherhood had been kind to her. Perry couldn’t keep the word ‘MILF’ from entering his head, though she was only three years older than him.

“Personally, I would use Marchand,” said Perry. “If they have encryption like your encryption, he won’t be able to break it, but there are a lot of ways to crack an egg, and good encryption is only a single part of good operational security. Most places get lax if they don’t have a red team, and you don’t have a red team.” Perry had been doing some reading on the subject.

“Marchand would be able to infiltrate our networks if we hadn’t given him access?” asked Leticia.

“Likely, yes,” said Perry.

“Has he done that?” asked Leticia.

“No,” Perry lied. “But only because I’ve told him not to. From what we know, the elder mechs have much worse security than your modern outward-facing computers. They’re beyond your capabilities, both in terms of the reactors and the computers and the software that’s running on the computers. So they have old code that wasn’t built to withstand outside attacks, for whatever reason.”

“I’ve read the histories of your Earth,” said Leticia. “We never knew war like that, though our whole history as a species.”

“If their systems are like your systems, there’s a vulnerable heart,” said Perry. “Right now, they’re mired in the snow, with temperatures that are cold enough to kill.” He shrugged. “That’s how I would do it.”

“Mmm,” said Leticia. She tapped her lips.

“Do the others know you’re considering it?” asked Perry.

“I’m not,” said Leticia. “It’s leverage, nothing more. But for it to work, we would need to get you and Marchand access to one of their terminals, if they even use the same setup we do. They wouldn’t need to, given their ability to make microchips dwarfs our own.”

“Sorry,” said Perry, holding up a hand. “You are thinking about it. A first strike.”

Leticia watched him and drummed her fingers on the table. “It’s my responsibility to consider all options.”

“Like killing them all,” said Perry. “Including lots of children who originally came from here.” He wasn’t going to be a party to that. There were places he drew the line.

“If we had control of their fusion reactors, we would have options,” said Leticia. “We wouldn’t need to shut them down and freeze everyone out, we could simply make a credible threat.”

“And if they have credible threats to make back?” asked Perry. “By its nature, the Natrix is a juicy target. They also know exactly where it is, and since they take engineers from you, they know your defenses and capabilities.”

“You’re trying to avoid war?” asked Leticia.

“No,” said Perry. “Or, yes. Ideally, you’d both get what you want without anyone getting hurt.”

“I can hear the criticism in your voice,” said Letiica. “It doesn’t do to hide it. Let’s have it out, if you think I’m acting like a villain.”

“I never said that,” said Perry, though he had, in fact, thought it. “I think you’re considering things that would be war crimes where I’m from, especially since they involve so many civilians.”

“Your confusing people, with their confusing terms,” said Leticia with a sigh. “War crimes, as though there can be rules when one group of people wants to steal from the other. Civilians, as though only certain people are soldiers. We’re all soldiers. The totality of our civilization is bent to a singular task.”

Perry stayed stone-faced, which had found a lot easier now that he was second sphere. “I know your people, but I don’t know theirs. Any plan to shut their reactors down, or to threaten to shut their reactors down, is necessarily going to have to go through me. They buy children from you and treat them poorly, and you don’t see any need to honor the deals of the past regime, I get that, it makes sense. I won’t put anything into motion until I’ve seen their society with my own eyes.”

“I suppose that will have to be enough,” said Leticia.

She didn’t seem to like it though.

~~~~

Ruben and Largen had nanites all over the interior of their mechs, which looked like nothing more than a little black soot. It was hidden away behind panels, stuck onto pieces of electronics, particularly the radios and primary control boards.

Brigitta had seen the wisdom in giving March the ability to remotely control the other two mechs, and had installed the equipment necessary for that to happen. That required input from the pilots though. This other method didn’t. It was a bit of a dick move, but it was the kind of dick move that might save his life, so he tried not to feel too bad about it.

If it came down to it, if he really had to, he could potentially stop his allies from firing.

The temperature fell with every passing day, as they wore down the miles. It was eerie to see the sun gradually setting as they moved, obscured by lower and lower hills. In another few months, it would be visible in these places throughout the day, quickly melting through the snow and allowing the seeds that blew in through the winds to take root. Now, it was a land of winter, and where Perry was going, it would rival the lowest temperatures ever recorded on Earth.

After the third day of the march, the mechs were working against the cold. To do this, they’d been installed with a series of tubes that pumped a liquid through the interior, and there were sensors all over the place to give readings of how cold each of the limbs was getting. If they had to go further into the snow and ice, even that wouldn’t be enough, but the base they were looking for would, supposedly, be in an area that was still getting some of the warm westerly winds.

It was pretty miserable inside the mech. Space was extremely limited, and there was only really a chair that could swivel slightly to the sides when it was unlocked. It was, Perry thought, probably something like what early astronauts had to deal with. The meals were in small tins, just as they’d been in the promena, but they were all cold, with no hope of heating them, taken from a cache that Perry could only reach by pulling them out from behind him. Once that was done, he would discard the waste down a slot that was made for it. It would collect inside of the mech to be emptied out later, once they were back at the Natrix.

Biological waste was a whole other thing, and that too was collected within the belly of the mech. Perry had tried his best, but hadn’t been able to eliminate those needs through studying martial arts. His body was self-cleaning, which meant he wasn’t sitting there in his own sweat and oils, but the human body still wasn’t meant to be sitting in essentially the same position for multiple days in a row. It also wasn’t meant to be doing that while entirely encased in power armor.

The others were handling it better than he was, and in worse conditions.

“I’m ripe,” said Ruben with a laugh. “Once we’re home, they’ll have to peel me out of this chair. Last cycle I slept on my side, just for a change of pace for the body, but now my neck is hurting.”

“Never sleep on your side,” said Largen. “It’s a trap. But this is why you should have had a chair that can tilt back all the way.”

“See, that’s a trap,” said Ruben. “You give up so much to have that work. I’ve seen your schematics.”

They hadn’t talked much when they’d started out, but were talking more as the time went on. Perry hadn’t seen another person in four days. He would have been bored out of his mind if not for the two people he was with and the ability to focus on his meridians and vessels. He also had Marchand, who was communicating with the others wirelessly, able to feed them entertainment that they didn’t have on their own. The people of the Natrix had visual media, but it was all homegrown stuff that they’d filmed using their own cameras and with their own people as the actors, writers, and directors. Perry had sampled some of it, and most was awful.

The three mechs had impromptu watch parties of the media that Richter had loaded onto Marchand. There wasn’t as much as there had once been, thanks to the damage that Marchand had taken, which meant that Perry had to explain the third episode of a magical girls anime to the two men before they could continue with the series. The fact that Perry barely understood the alt-Earth tropes or animation tradition made the whole thing more complicated.

When they were in their fifth day, there was a lull in the wind, and Perry launched the drone up into the air. It had been modified to launch from a port on the mech itself, rather than the power armor. The Natrix was capable of producing drones of its own, they just didn’t have the necessary on-board computing power for them, which made them far more niche.

“The sensors which Miss Karlquist installed are working admirably even with the cold, sir,” said Marchand. “However, initial scans show very little of note. The heat signature should be obvious, assuming our understanding of the city we’re supposed to find is accurate.”

“Hmm,” said Perry. “Alright, return the drone, I guess we keep going.”

The fact that the Natrix didn’t actually have the location of the city was worrying. The whole point of the scouting mission was to nail down where the enemy actually was. They had to be close, otherwise the fly-bys of the planes wouldn’t be possible, and the plane technology they had couldn’t be that good given what could be analyzed of them from the outside. The planes had some added bulk to be able to handle the extreme cold, and had been buzzing the Natrix since the last move, which had been another two hundred miles away.

They marched on, through snow that was now far thicker and gave a heavy crunch beneath the feet of their mechs, no wetness or slush to be heard as the cold froze all.

“We’re going to need to head back,” Ruben said eventually. “We’re running through the batteries faster than planned, and we’re cutting into the margin of safety.”

“Is it possible we’re too far north or south?” asked Largen.

“Sir, before we left, I was able to clear up some issues with the radar tracking you had been using,” said Marchand. “Though the size of the radar dishes is pitiful, I do believe that the planes have been landing somewhere in this area, and they traveled along this heading, though it’s possible that they’re engaged in some manner of deception.”

“That’s not really helpful unless we know what that deception is,” said Perry.

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “One option might be for them to fly very low to the ground at a certain point to disappear from radar as they approach their base.”

“And still no fly overs,” said Ruben. “They’d been doing them every few cycles, there’s no reason for them to stop now, not unless they knew we were coming, or if we’d been spotted.”

“I’ll launch the drone again,” said Perry. “But I’m not hopeful.”

“Sir, in these conditions, launching the drone doesn’t seem prudent,” said Marchand. “While the winds have died down, the area is simply too cold, far below the drone’s ideal operating temperature.”

“It’s not going to get any warmer,” said Perry. “Keep the flight short, and let’s hope that it doesn’t freeze up before it gets back.”

“Very well, sir,” said Marchand. “I defer to your judgment on the matter.”

The drone was launched into the cold sky. Perry watched as the cameras tracked it. He was worried about the drone, which he’d somehow not lost across so many worlds. It was a minor part of the power armor, but it came in handy from time to time, providing a bird’s eye view of a battlefield or allowing for some reconnaissance. It had been to space with him.

This time, it picked up something, a bright spot in the infrared. It returned to the mech, sliding back into its hatch, where it was warmed back up once more. Perry hoped that it was okay.

“We’ve got them,” said Perry. It was cold inside the armor, because it was cold inside the mech. He had half a mind to take the gloves off so he could rub his hands together. “Twelve miles. We could be there by nightfall.”

“Nightfall?” asked Ruben.

“You know what I mean,” said Perry. He hadn’t bothered to translate. “End of cycle.”

“Can they see us from there?” asked Largen.

“Given the short distances involved,” said Marchand. “I should imagine we’ve already been picked up by their ground radar.”

“That’s not great,” said Perry.

“Stealth was never assumed,” said Ruben. “It would just have been nice to have.”

“And at what point do you think they blow us up?” asked Perry.

“We’ve never shot down their airborne mechs, despite having many chances,” said Ruben. “We have to hope they show the same restraint.”

“We were never keeping the Natrix a secret,” said Largen.

“I’m transmitting the information back now,” said Ruben.

“There’s movement on the horizon, sir,” said Marchand. “Moving to alert, readying weapon.”

The long, oversized rifle swung down, held with the mech’s two hands, pointed right in the direction where the heat signature had been detected. It supposedly had an operational range of twenty-five miles, though it was accurate only with March calculating everything. That meant blind firing over the horizon, and was only realistically possible with the drone up to provide data or fairly high elevation.

“Hold,” said Perry. “Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”

“They open fire, we open fire,” said Ruben.

That had always been the plan. It seemed like a skirmish was possible, but they didn’t want it to be cause for escalation to outright war.

It took time for the mech to reach them. When it did, it was like nothing aboard the Natrix. To start, it was half the size of their mechs, and it had on snowshoes or something equivalent, which let it stand on the hard crust of snow. Weight had apparently been a major consideration, because it had slender legs and a cockpit barely large enough to hold a person. It was also unarmed, in the sense of having no weapons and also in that it had no upper appendages. It was more sleek than Perry had seen, with curves and some sense of aesthetic design. Two antennas stuck up from the cockpit, making it look a bit like a rabbit. The joints on the legs bent backward, like an ostrich, and it ran up quite close to them.

“Halt!” a voice came over their radio, over a different channel than their encrypted short-range one. “You are not authorized to come within range of Heimalis City Seven. Leave now!”

“We’re far from home,” said Perry when it seemed as though Ruben was experiencing some hesitation. “We’ve shown your people hospitality in times of need. We have batteries that could do with topping up, and a long march ahead of us. It’s better for everyone if we return unscathed.”

Perry didn’t think there was any way that they would buy that. It was clearly a spy mission, or if not spying — given they’d been seen almost at once and had expected that outcome — then at least a testing of the waters.

There was a long pause. “Heimalis City Seven does not allow visitors.” There was a slight pause on the word. “Return to where you came from or face the consequences.”

“We’re not sure we’re going to make it back,” said Ruben, who seemed to have come out of whatever shock or hesitation had stopped him before. “We’re outside safe operating parameters, and all it would take is one bug attack for us to dip into danger.” Perry didn’t actually think that was true. “You let us come in, warm up, recharge, shake off some rust, and we don't see a single thing but a walled off mech bay.”

Again, there was a long pause. Perry was still sure that this wasn’t going to work, but the long pauses were promising.

“Are you authorized to make deals on behalf of the government of the Natrix?” asked the small mech.

“No,” replied Ruben. “But we can talk, and take back information to our leaders.”

Again there was a long pause. Whoever was running things in ‘Heimalis City Seven’, they were either taking their time to think, or more likely, they were a committee trying to figure out what to do. Perry was trying to think through what they would have to gain by taking in these three mechs for half a day, and could see lots of upsides, though none which he thought he could verbalize.

They could take prisoners, scan the mechs to see what technology they had, interrogate the would-be spies, and possibly, get the people inside the mechs into a position where they could be easily killed. None of those were things that Perry would say out loud.

“Follow,” the small mech finally said.

It darted off through the snow, and they followed, trudging behind it.