Thresholder

Perry walked down the hallway, sword drawn, adrenaline pumping. He had March in his ear, but he’d have felt a lot better if his armor was on. The armor, unfortunately, was in the mech bay, and that was almost certainly flooded with the same gas that had put Ruben down. He wasn’t sure how much time he would have if he tried to go back there.

It was pretty concerning that they had knockout gas on hand. That didn’t say anything good about them or the society that they had built here. The strip along the bottom of the door had been freshly installed, and that meant that they didn’t often do it here, but he could see a world in which work camps used a specially formulated gas like that. He hoped it was specially formulated anyway, because if it wasn’t, and they were using it without fully understanding it, Ruben and Largen were both in trouble.

He dashed down the long hallway, taking long strides, sword drawn. His chest was bare, since his shirt had been used to stop up the vent in the meeting room, but the fabric wasn’t going to do much. He was pretty sure he looked like a madman, especially given the sword, but that was good, because it meant he could count on at least a little intimidation.

There was the question of the enemy thresholder.

They’d gone to the knockout gas contingency for a reason, and he didn’t know what that reason was. There was either something they were hiding, or they hoped to gain some leverage. Having three enemy mechs with their pilots all captured would be a boon, clearly, along with whatever information could be extracted. They’d have hostages, at the very least.

Perry came to a T-junction and slowed down, taking a taste of the air to see whether it had the same effect on his body. When it didn’t, he took in deep breaths, replenishing what he’d been spending, and peeked around the corner.

He was nearly shot in the chest and only saved by having noticed the robot’s weapon right as it was lining up the shot. He’d reacted on second sphere instinct.

He sat there for a moment, heart beating hard in his chest, taking in more energy while trying to figure out what he’d just seen.

It was a robot, not humanoid in the slightest, a stripped-down thing with just some treads, three cameras, an antenna, and a long-barreled rifle. It had pretty much nothing else, not a manipulator arm, not shielding, only a way to move, see, and shoot. In comparison to the mechs that the people of this world used, it had only the bare minimum.

Perry tightened his grip on his sword, steeled himself, and put as much power as he could into his legs.

When he rounded the corner, the barrel tracked him, but whatever mechanism was driving it, it had been built for slower targets. He held his sword up, put it in line with the barrel, trying to track the barrel that was trying to track him. Without Marchand’s HUD as a guide, this was immensely more difficult, even with all his energy being poured into speed and perception. The robot was fifty feet away, and only needed to move its barrel slightly to track him, but there was a delay when he moved, and by zig-zagging slightly, he was passing in front of it only every two steps.

He had only fractions of a second to react when the gun fired, which happened right as he passed across the barrel’s path. He felt his sword jerk in his hands, and the realization that he’d blocked the bullet came a full half-second — an eternity — after it happened. He was already taking another long stride down the hallway when he had to cross to the other side of the hallway a second time, legs pushing hard, doing a half-kick against the wall.

Again, his hands felt the jolt, though he had only barely been able to register the gun firing before it happened. He kept feeling surprised that this was working, that he could, in fact, bring a sword to a gunfight and walk away unscathed.

The closer he got, the easier it was to dodge the barrel as the arc it needed to swing in became wider and wider. It didn’t get a chance to fire again before he had vaulted over it, and once that was done, it was as simple as grabbing the barrel and holding it in place.

Perry set the sword down and ripped off the robot’s little three-camera setup, twisting the plastic mount until it snapped, leaving it connected only by a twist of wires. He pointed it at his face.

“Whoever was controlling this?” he asked. “I’m coming for you. When I get to you, you had better be waving a white flag of surrender. I don’t want to kill you. I’m on the side of peace. But if peace between colonies means killing whoever gassed that room and sent this robot here, then I will not hesitate.”

He picked the sword back up and sliced through the robot’s exposed wires, then ripped out whatever he could. He was surprised by his own strength and the ability to twist metal with only a small push of energy. It was easy to forget just how strong he was.

He stood, looking down the anonymous hallways. There was no way to tell what went where, though the two paths down the T-junction curved slightly, which implied that City Seven as a whole might have a layout of concentric rings.

“March, can you give me directions?” asked Perry.

“I appear to be dealing with an artificial intelligence at the moment, sir,” said Marchand. “Its sophistication is above that of the elder mechs, and I believe it must be running on one or more of their processors.”

“They can’t hack you, can they?” asked Perry, suddenly worried.

Marchand, however, gave a little chuckle. “No, sir, quite the opposite. But it will take me a moment to have the spare processing power to index the available public material I’ve downloaded given the difference in formats.”

Perry frowned and trotted down the hall, going the direction the robot had come from. He kept his sword up, ready for another one of them. The design had been so sparse and simple, he felt like there must be more. It, too, really seemed as though it were the sort of thing that this place shouldn’t have had. A mobile police robot was one thing, but a mobile police robot that could only shoot and not communicate, arrest, or detain was another. That meant life was cheap here.

Unless …

The thought came to him only as he came to a room labeled ‘ARMORY’.

The door was thick metal, and a hard punch into the drywall left his fist stinging, because there was metal beneath that too.

His thought was that a place like this didn’t really need knockout gas or robots with guns, not for a small civilian population … but they might need both those things if they were planning to go to war. Flooding rooms with gas wasn’t something that he could really conceive of a use for on a native workforce, not when the robots meant there would be so little need for hard labor, but against the Natrix? He could picture in his mind’s eye the gas flooding through the walking city’s corridors. He could also picture dozens of those tiny little robots rolling down the halls, swinging the barrels of their guns from side to side.

“March?” asked Perry.

“One moment, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry waited, watching the door, but also watching the hallways.

“My apologies, sir,” said Marchand after almost half a minute. “The negotiations with the enemy artificial intelligence have been concluded. Would you like me to open that door, sir?”

“You can see me?” asked Perry, looking around.

“With the systems under my control, I can sense you, yes sir,” replied Marchand. “However, I must warn that as Heimalis City Seven became aware of what I was doing, it irreversibly delegated control of a number of systems to lower algorithms.”

“Good work,” said Perry. “You cut off the flow of the gas?”

“Yes, sir, and I am venting the rooms now,” replied Marchand.

“Open the door then,” said Perry.

“I believe there are nineteen individuals in that room,” said Marchand. “Additionally, there are an unknown number of robots.”

“I’ll handle them,” said Perry.

“Very good, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry carefully stepped to the side of the door. The thick metal walls would protect him from gunfire, he hoped. When the door’s lock clunked open, he turned the handle and pushed it in, then extended his sword to peer inside with the blade’s reflection. Though the magic sword had been used to block multiple bullets, it was still in perfect condition, and because of the second sphere bullshit, it was almost perfectly clean and polished.

It was dark in the room, all the lights off but one in the back, which made it difficult to see. He saw at least seven men with guns hiding behind a makeshift barricade, and two robots of a rather different design standing in front of the barricade. These looked more like very minimal dogs, their legs bent slightly, some kind of hard plastic surrounding thin metal. On the back was a rifle setup similar to the one that had been on the smaller wheeled robot.

“I don’t want to hurt you!” called Perry. “Your computer systems have been taken over, retreat now!”

He heard one of them say to the others, ‘Does he have a sword?’

Perry pulled the sword back and took a breath. He hadn’t yet won, not if they had disconnected some of their systems from central control, and certainly not if there were still armed men. Anyone using an AI system to run their colony would have a way to shut it down in an emergency, and there wasn’t much bigger of an emergency than ‘we’ve been pwned’.

“I’m going to attack now!” Perry called.

He stood behind the metal wall and drew his sword back. Tossing the sword had, historically, been somewhat of a last-ditch effort. The sword wasn’t meant to be thrown, and it couldn’t be thrown like a spear, so had to be thrown sidearm in the hopes that a spinning blade could cut something. It wouldn’t have anything near his full weight behind it.

Perry reared back and threw the sword as hard as he could, going only by what he had seen in the room from the reflection. He didn’t let enough of himself show for them to get a split-second shot off.

There were screams of terror from within the room, and they only got louder when Perry called the sword back to him. He held it out again to look into the room through the reflection. He didn’t seem to have hit any of them, but he’d cut halfway through the big plastic crates they were using as their barricade, and might have clipped one of the robots, which had repositioned itself and was leaking a black fluid. They were ducking low behind the boxes now.

“That was a warning shot!” Perry called. “Next one goes through someone’s skull!”

He didn’t actually have the ability to call a shot like that, but he didn’t think they knew that.

“We give up!” one of them called. There was something weird about the voice.

Perry watched them through the blade’s reflection. Only two of them had laid their guns down and were holding up their hands. He frowned at that. They had seen the sword go sailing through the air and weren’t wavering.

He prepared to throw the sword again, this time hoping to actually hit them, when he realized what was off about the voice, and the men that he was looking at. Maybe it was the dim light that had made him fail to notice it, or he was willfully blocking it out, but they weren’t men at all, they were teenagers, a mix of boys and girls. Nineteen of them, Marchand had said, but only seven were visible behind the barricade. Either they had put the young ones up front to fight, or these were the old ones.

“Last warning!” Perry called, but he didn’t want to slice straight through some fifteen-year-old kid.

When they didn’t put down their guns, he threw his sword, trying his best to aim for the robot dog. This time, they were ready for it, and got a few shots off, but they hit either the doorway or the back wall that the doorway led to. Perry still had all his fingers. He couldn’t hear screaming or shouting, which he took as a good sign that he hadn’t murdered one of the child soldiers.

When he tried to pull the sword back, he felt resistance, but with more power put into it, he felt it moving toward him anyhow, though with the sound of scraping metal. Eventually, the sword appeared at the doorway, dragging one of the robot dogs behind it. The blade had cleaved into the electronics assembly on top of it, and the whole thing was thankfully dead, but the sword had lodged itself inside.

Perry placed his foot against the robot and removed the sword, bringing it back up to look inside the room.

All seven of the kids had their rifles down and hands up.

“If I go in there, is that dog going to shoot me?” he asked.

“Dog?” one of the children asked.

Perry winced. With their English being so close to his, it was easy to forget that certain words weren’t in their vocabulary. “The robot, is it going to shoot me?”

“No!” one of them shouted.

Perry moved into the doorway and was almost immediately shot at by the robot. His sword was up though, and the bullet deflected off it with a ping. Before it could shoot again — before whatever algorithms inside it dictated attempting a second shot — he whipped his sword at it with full force, cutting cleanly through the mechanisms. He’d done it almost on instinct, his adrenaline pumping, and he called the sword back to his hand, where it landed with a slap from the wrapped grip against his palm.

He floated up into the air and looked down on the seven teenagers.

“Which one of you fuckers told me it wasn’t going to shoot?” he asked.

“It wasn’t supposed to!” one of them squeaked. “I hit the stop switch.”

Perry floated over to them, using his muscles to hold his body stiff so the sword wouldn’t make him look like he was weightless. He landed himself gently on the small barricade they’d made, feet among the abandoned weapons, and looked around the room. There were a lot of weapons along one side of the room, some the rifles that the teens had been using, and there were also many tanks of pallets of supplies, some of which he suspected were probably knockout gas. The smell of it was stronger in this room than it had been on the outside. There were also a dozen different robots, and machinery to make more of them, crates of ammo and what seemed to be body armor. Much of it was able to be quickly carted around, and some was definitely meant to supply the mech bay. The room was tall, as tall as the mech bay had been, and a small office with a metal staircase leading up to it was at the back.

“Who’s in the office?” asked Perry.

None of the children spoke. Perry looked down at them. Their ages ranged from twelve to sixteen. Kids had been put in charge of defending the armory. He wondered where the adults were, but that was a question for later.

Perry pointed his sword directly at the oldest boy, so the tip was a foot away from his face.

“Tell me who’s in the office,” said Perry.

“The apprentices,” he said, voice cracking. “And our manager.”

“Are they armed?” asked Perry.

The boy nodded slowly.

Perry looked at the windows of the office. He was at risk of getting shot then, if they peeked out a window to see him, and had a rifle, and could make a shot like that. It wasn’t impossible. He frowned.

“This isn’t a war,” said Perry. “This is a dismantling of your defenses, yes, but it’s an opportunity for peace between the colonies.” His sword was still in the boy’s face. “I need information.”

“I —” said the boy, letting out a breath and then struggling to draw in a new one. “I’ll tell you anything.”

“Who runs this city?” asked Perry.

The boy swallowed. Maybe the sword was a bit too much. He wasn’t actually planning on hurting any of these kids. Maybe he should have just done a growling Batman voice instead.

“Sir, I do have information on that,” said Marchand.

Perry frowned slightly but didn’t reply to Marchand.

“The computer runs it, sir,” said the boy.

Perry stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“The computer runs the colony, sir,” said the boy. His sirs had none of the snideness that March’s often did, and they were translated anyhow, but they made Perry feel bad.

“Who runs the computer?” asked Perry.

The boy looked at the others, maybe thinking that it was unfair that he’d been singled out. He was doing well, Perry thought, confronted with a shirtless sword-wielding man and the existence of magic.

“I … don’t know what you mean,” he said. “The computer runs itself.”

Perry sighed and hopped down from the crates, landing on the floor next to the wrecked robot. He started picking up the fallen weapons and disassembling them, which he did more with brute strength than finesse or an understanding of how the parts moved.

“Marchand, what do you know?” asked Perry.

“They are substantially correct that many systems and aspects of their lives here are guided by the AI I put a stop to,” said Marchand. “However, the premise that the computer runs itself is, I believe, substantially incorrect. A council of five citizens have been granted special authority to check the computer system and make alterations. Their identities are unknown to me, as this information was wholly anonymized prior to my infiltration — moments before, in fact.”

Perry sighed and looked around the armory. “Who has the authority to get everyone to stand down?” he asked.

“As the identities are secret, no such authority exists,” replied Marchand. “They would likely listen to the computer, but have shut it down, and I do not believe they will easily trust it when it comes online until some checks are done. I also do not believe I am capable of corrupting it with our preferred code.”

“How many people in this colony?” asked Perry.

“Two thousand, seven hundred, twenty-two, sir,” replied Marchand.

“Fuck,” said Perry. That was too many to try to corral them all. He had hoped to find their leader and put an end to it that way, but they didn’t have a leader, or didn’t know they had a leader. “Can you send a message through the whole colony?” he asked.

“I cannot, sir,” said Marchand. “There are physical switches that have been flipped, and in fact my control of what remains is quite limited.”

Perry looked at the teenagers. “I don’t want to murder anyone,” said Perry, though his heart was thumping in his chest, and that wasn’t strictly true. He’d have readily murdered three or four people, if it would have gotten the colony to bend the knee. “Jorn, you know Jorn?” One of them nodded mutely. “Where can I find him?”

They looked at each other again, still seeming worried that they would get in trouble. Their arms were still up in the air, though they were starting to flag. He’d have told them to drop their arms, but he was worried that they might get some ideas about the guns that were still sitting there.

“The gardens,” the smallest boy said. “Jorn is in charge of the gardens.”

“Which way?” asked Perry.

“I can guide you sir,” said Marchand, just before one of the boys began giving directions.

Perry nodded when the boy was done. “He’s probably not there, because he was talking to me just a bit ago, do you know where I could find him?” They looked at each other again. “I’m not planning on killing him.” Though I sure wouldn’t mind.

“The gardens aren’t far, sir,” said one of the boys.

Perry tapped the hilt of his blade with his fingers. “Alright, I’ll go there,” he said. He looked around the room. “Do I need to destroy all this?”

They shook their heads.

“You’ll behave?” asked Perry.

They nodded their heads.

“If someone comes in here and tries to take out weapons, or someone tries to activate more of these murderbots, you stop them,” said Perry. “You stop them, and explain in detail that I will have to get serious about things, okay? They won’t believe you about the sword, so tell them whatever lies you need to, because I have to find Jorn and have a very pointed discussion with him.”

Perry paused for a moment. “One more thing. Have any of you seen or heard of another person like me?”

“Tall?” asked the smallest of the boys.

“No,” said Perry. “A foreigner, someone with powers, someone who came from outside, but not the Natrix.”

They shook their heads.

Perry sighed, turned, and left, moving down the hallway again. He was worried there would be another robot waiting for him, but if that one had been sent from the armory, then he wasn’t sure that he’d see another. Two of them working together would be far, far more difficult than one, and even with one he felt like it was a miracle every time putting his sword in the right place actually worked.

“March, guide me to the gardens,” said Perry.

Navigating the hallways by Marchand’s voice was, on the one hand, very easy, but on the other hand, made it easy to get lost. Perry wasn’t certain how they did their day-to-day navigation down the bleak corridors, but there were few identifiable landmarks for him to use.

When he slowly pushed open a pair of metal doors and saw fields of green, there was no question that he was in the right place.

The plants were all in vertical shelves, each with their own light sources. It was arranged like some libraries were, so you had to pull the shelves apart if you wanted to get at them, and by doing it this way, they were able to fit enormous amounts of plants in. Even then, the interior space was huge, with high ceilings and endless rows.

Perry had his sword drawn and moved inside. There would be an office here, or a storeroom, or some other place that Jorn would be hiding. If Jorn weren’t here, then Perry would find someone who knew where the man had gone.

The air was hot and humid, a change from the cold of the mech bay and the armory. Perry felt it on his skin, and breathed in the grassy smell in the air. They used hydroponics or something like it, though the bottom layer did use soil, probably compost.

“Sir, Ruben is waking up,” said Marchand. “I’ve contacted him via radio, but he seems out of it.”

“Tell him to go to the mech bay,” said Perry. “Shoot anyone else that tries to enter. Except me, I guess, or … uh, don’t shoot any kids.”

“Yes, sir, I shall endeavor not to murder an innocent child,” said Marchand.

Perry made his way through the plants. There was more variety to the crops than he had expected there would be, but maybe that was because a drive through Iowa had once shown him how little variety there was in agriculture. He was on the lookout for more of the robots, either the small wheeled one or the doglike ones. The humid air was clinging to his body.

He wanted to end this. He had wanted to end it earlier too, to be able to make peace between the factions, somehow give them both what they wanted. With the technology he’d brought over and his ability to reach space, he’d thought that might be enough. When it came to violence, that was one thing, he could understand violence, but if there was a puppet master to this colony, a power behind the throne, then this was all so much more difficult than he’d thought it was going to be. There was no neck to grab, no one to threaten, or at least no one that he’d be able to find.

Perry was pretty sure that the Natrix did need Heimalis City Seven, or whatever iteration they ended up on. Working together was the way forward for both of them. It had been the way forward before he’d come there. Most likely their nuclear cousins to the north should also be a part of some grand web of unified interests.

That was far, far outside of his area of expertise though. He was simply a shirtless guy with a sword.

But if this colony was ostensibly being run by AI, and Marchand thought he could put some version of himself onto the elder mechs, then eventually they could have some kind of harmony, especially if they could stay in constant contact with each other, and —

That idea was percolating in Perry’s head when he saw Jorn. The old man had walked out among the plants with his hands up. He had seen Perry first, and once Perry knew that, it wasn’t hard to find the CCTV sticking out from a small support halfway up a greenhouse wall.

“What have you done?” Jorn asked.

“Me?” asked Perry. “What have you done? I had thought we were getting somewhere, and then you tried to gas us. What was all that ‘we’d poison you using the air’ shit, a joke?”

Jorn didn’t show any emotion. “It was meant to disarm. If we had known what you were —”

“You’d have shot me,” said Perry. “But I think you know now that wouldn’t have gone so well for you.”

He still had his hands raised, but he was at least a hundred feet from Perry. “You did something to our computer systems, to Heimod.”

“Heimod,” said Perry. “The thing that’s supposed to run this place.”

“We had thought ourselves secure against attack,” said Jorn. “You must understand that system controls everything here. Without it, we will die.”

“You don’t get to bring it online again until I say so,” said Perry. “You don’t get to ask for mercy.” His hands were tight on his sword. He didn’t know how much of what he was saying was emotional and how much was strategic bravado. “Here’s what needs to happen. You need to turn your production capacity toward giving the Natrix everything that it needs to survive, all the chips, all the metals, everything you’ve been stockpiling and hoarding. Then we set up an exchange, a way for you to get people, even if they’re people that are only coming here because they know it’s their duty.”

“I am not the one in control,” said Jorn.

“I know your tricks,” said Perry. “If it’s not you, someone is in control, someone can pull the strings to the program that’s supposed to run everything.” He glanced at the camera. That someone was watching him now, or would watch him in the future.

Jorn’s lips went thin.

“I’m going to leave,” said Perry, lowering his sword. “Six hours after we leave, you reboot your systems, get everything in place, and when you speak with Brigitta in a few days, it’s with the understanding that if you don’t see eye to eye with her, this entire colony is going to crumble. You’ll stay here as it gets hotter and hotter, and eventually, there will be nothing to protect you from the bugs, nothing to protect you from the heat. You didn’t build this place to withstand the day side. Do you understand?”

Jorn swallowed. “I understand what you ask. I don’t know if it’s possible.”

“I haven’t killed anyone here,” said Perry. “Not yet. I’d like to not have to.”

“Thank you,” said Jorn. His voice was tight.

“That camera can see me?” asked Perry nodding at the small black blister attached to the pole.

“Yes,” said Jorn.

“Then I want to show you a fraction of my true power,” said Perry.

He threw the sword to the ground and transformed.

The transformations weren’t the same since blowing out the Wolf Vessel. They were slower, more belabored, and it felt as though something vital was missing from them, a damaged element of strength, or simply a blockage, even though the meridians were clear. The fur was slower to grow, the bones of his face more hesitant to turn into a muzzle, but he could still do it, and if anything, the slow nature helped make it more impressive.

Jorn had been playing it cool, both in the negotiation and when confronted by Perry, but when Perry transformed, Jorn broke completely. He screamed and ran, turning to look back at Perry to see whether he was giving chase, and in that moment, he tripped over his own feet and fell.

Perry huffed and loped away, commanding the sword to follow.

Control of the wolf was easier now, even if it was weaker, or because it was weaker. There was an urge to kill, to bite and mangle, and there was hunger, but he could suppress it, ignore it, so long as nothing raised his hackles. The earpiece had stayed in his ear, but it was moving around uncomfortably in the larger canal. He had practiced this some distance from the Natrix half a week ago, but hadn’t realized how irritating it would be. He felt some urge to scratch until the earpiece came out, but he was more aware of himself than he had ever been before.

When he came to the door of the mech bay, he transformed back, feeling a slight bit of pain as the earpiece settled back into place. He took it out and inspected it, gave it a brush off with his fingers, and placed it back into his ear, then grabbed his sword from the air.

Ruben stared at him. “Why in the name of the frigid wastes are you naked!” shouted Ruben.

“Intimidation,” said Perry. “Come on, let’s go.”

“We’re going to be trapped in that airlock,” said Ruben. “Largen is up, back in his mech, but barely breathing. I put your man in charge of it.”

“Good,” said Perry. He cracked his neck.

“They gassed us,” said Ruben. “You saved me.”

“Yeah,” said Perry. He looked at the door behind him, and the silent mech. It seemed it was just a robot, or was doing a good job playing dead. “We’re leaving.”

“We are?” asked Ruben. “They’re not going to shoot us in the back?”

“Hope not,” said Perry. He let out a breath. “Their systems should all be offline, right March?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Marchand. “I would be very surprised indeed if they worked.”

“Did you set us on the path to war?” asked Ruben. His eyes were on Perry, dark and worried.

“I really, really hope not,” said Perry.