Thresholder

They walked back through the snow, worried about a volley of missiles to their back. Perry had Marchand drive backward, so the gun and most of the sensors were in the direction of Heimalis City Seven. If a plane appeared over the horizon, he was going to have to shoot it down.

“I should have stayed,” said Perry when they were five miles away.

“Could you have held them off?” asked Ruben.

“Even if I were in the armor, I’d be one slip up away from being killed,” said Perry. “A whole colony against me, time for them to try lots of things … a foot-thick wall of iron is enough to stop me.”

“Is that all?” asked Ruben. He chuckled over the radio, then coughed before unpressing the mic switch. It took a moment for him to come back. “Just a foot of iron, that’s all it takes. Good to know.”

“No way I could have gotten out of that airlock without March,” said Perry. “If they had heavy doors between the sectors, cut off from the rest of the place, if they had a month to prepare for that meeting instead of hours, they could have just locked the whole thing down and I’d have had to learn to survive without food in a hurry.”

“A skill we should all simply train hard enough to learn,” said Largen.

Perry laughed. “Even if I could, that wouldn’t really help me. Even if I learned to go without food, water, sleep, air —”

“Is that possible for you?!” asked Ruben over the phone.

“Yeah,” said Perry. There was a bit of silence on the other end. “Even if I could do all that, I would still be trapped, was my point. Once I was, they would figure out a way to kill me, whether that was with more bullets than I could deal with, explosives, letting in the cold, something.”

“That cold would kill you then?” asked Ruben.

“Why, trying to hedge your bets?” asked Perry.

“Just seems like you’ve always got one more trick up your sleeve,” said Ruben. “After seeing you in action, coming naked down the hall with sword in hand, busting through a wall, all of it, I’m your loyal lapdog until the end of time.” The term, ‘lapdog’, was translated from some local animal. Perry would have to look it up later, because they didn’t have pets.

“I appreciate that,” said Perry. “There’s a good chance that you’re going to have to follow me into war.” He let out a sigh. They just had to go for the gas, didn’t they? “I’m going to take some time to speak with Marchand, keep on high alert, I’m shooting down anything that comes after us and we’re double-timing it until we’re beyond the range that a mech could catch up.”

“Whatever you ask,” said Ruben. He coughed again, gravely and deep, the side effects of the knockout gas still in his system. “Speak with your man.”

Perry took his helmet off and took a deep breath of the stale air. He was frankly a little surprised that they hadn’t come after him, even with the display he’d put on for them, the threats, his burying of the dagger, and the total shutdown of the computer system that ran their colony. They seemed like the sort to go for it anyway, tripling down on their aggression.

“Alright my man, what have we got?” asked Perry.

“The nanites have been scattered throughout every area of the colony you visited, sir,” said Marchand. “Mobility is low, but before the airlock finished cycling, I was able to infest nineteen separate terminals. I would feel more confident in my long-term ability to control the colony if we had a direct radio link, and unfortunately, I was unable to install much in the way of long-term programming of their systems. I would have liked to insert a copy of myself in order to ensure their compliance.”

“You would need my express permission to do that, right?” asked Perry.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

“Good,” said Perry. “I trust you, but putting them under your thumb without their consent would be a step too far.” He frowned. He wasn’t sure that was true. The guns pointed backward during the walk through the snow were a sign of how little he was trusting the peace process.

“Very good, sir,” said Marchand. “The next item of note would be the information that I was able to secure from the colony. I’m afraid that most of it is public, as I wasn’t able to subvert their security before wide-scale shutdowns occured, largely due to interference from their artificial intelligence.”

“Alright, go ahead,” said Perry.

“You had said, during the meeting, that you would inquire into the source of their fertility problems,” said Marchand. “Unfortunately, sir, while I have a great deal of data from their production processes, logistics, and agriculture, it’s unclear to me whether there’s an environmental contaminant, as you suggested. I was able to take much of their research into the matter, which I believe has advanced them quite far in this specific field. My analysis will take some time.”

“Anything you can find there would be good,” said Perry.

“Perhaps more interesting to you given the current predicament are the efforts they’ve gone to, sir,” said Marchand. “They did everything in their power to keep knowledge of their problems from the Natrix, a policy of secrecy meant to give them leverage and power. But they preferred the young for a reason, and used many of them for testing.”

“Testing,” said Perry after a long mulling pause, lips suddenly thin.

“I can hear you, sir,” said Marchand.

“What?” asked Perry.

“I can confirm that I hear your voice, sir,” said Marchand.

“No,” said Perry, closing his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Sorry, I really need to check here, did you actually think that I was testing our audio systems in the middle of a conversation?”

There was a long delay before Marchand replied again. “I see, sir. My assumption was in error.”

Perry started laughing. “Alright, it’s fine, you know what, I had almost been missing this.”

“You would like more errors, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Not really, no,” said Perry. “That was just … a good one, I guess.” His smile slowly faded. “You were saying that they were doing testing on children.”

“Yes, sir,” replied Marchand. “On my Earth, these tests would be considered grossly unethical. The participants — victims — were isolated, with many tests done to determine which variables might be affecting fertility.”

“Testing how,” Perry said. He was just about ready to turn the mech around and kill every adult inside the colony, except that many of those adults would be children who had gone through that.

“Typically groups of children would be isolated from their peers,” said March. “They would be put into specially-built dormitories of four or six, half male and half female, and given work and instruction on that work without contact with others, and in theory, without the environmental contaminant that they were attempting to isolate. Most of them had completed an apprenticeship on the Natrix.”

Perry frowned. “And they were encouraged to … mate?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “Though I should note that teenagers rarely require much encouragement.”

“So we’re talking … sixteen? Eighteen? Not … young?” That came as an immense relief. When he heard ‘we’ve taken young people and run fertility tests on them’ he was picturing something much worse.

“It is believed aboard both the Natrix and in Heimalis City Seven that a woman should not bear children until she is at least eighteen years of age in order to reduce risks, particularly preeclampsia and preterm birth,” said March. “This experimentation without consent, and in many cases with vocal non-consent, would likely cause an outrage aboard the Natrix, sir. The size of these isolation chambers was not particularly large, and they would be there for years.”

“Yeah,” said Perry. He was still feeling some relief at the description of these experiments. It was bad, but it wasn’t that bad, not as bad as his mind had initially gone to. He really didn’t think that Brigitta would feel the same. “So we can’t hand all this over without worsening relations.”

“There are many details which I believe would offend those on the Natrix,” said Marchand. “The extensive war preparations would be of particular concern, especially as they date to before the change in power aboard the Natrix.”

“Before?” asked Perry. “They were always planning to attack?”

“The referent of ‘they’ is a bit nebulous, sir,” said Marchand. “The central AI running their systems is far below me in terms of its ability to change and adapt, but it is possible that those with direct access to its functions saw themselves as tenders rather than the power behind the throne.”

“Why would the AI want to attack?” asked Perry.

“It’s unclear, sir,” said Marchand. “As I was unable to obtain a copy of the AI in full, it’s difficult to speculate. From what information I do have, it saw people as a vital resource, and perhaps orchestrated this on its own in pursuit of a vital goal. It was capable of doing that when the colony had a need for various materials. This is purely speculation on my part.”

“But it’s dumb,” said Perry.

“I said only that it was below me, sir,” said Marchand.

“You as you are now, or you as you were when we were in Teaguewater?” asked Perry.

“I don’t know what you mean, sir,” said Marchand.

“Nevermind,” said Perry. March had gotten smarter, or at least different. Either it was energy from the second sphere feeding into the code somehow, a bit of Perry’s own intelligence infesting the machine, or it was the continual changes and improvements that Marchand was making to his own superstructure or weighted graph. “Continue with the report please, aside from the population woes, what have they got?”

“Sir, as you know, these colonies are built around the so-called ‘elder’ mechs,” said Marchand. “From the report that we were given and the comprehensive history that I assembled from their notes to confirm, there were five mechs that moved to the cold side of the planet. Three of the fusion cores are within Heimalis City Seven.”

“Meaning … two crapped out, or splintered off?” he asked.

“It’s unclear, sir,” said Marchand. “The fact that there are three fusion cores in Heimalis City Seven suggests that this is their major, or perhaps only settlement. All three reactors have been prepped for movement in anticipation of a long drive across the wastes, and they do appear to have very impressive stockpiles of materials. What they lack is the manpower and expertise.”

“You think if this was resolved now, their plan of going across the snow is workable?” asked Perry.

“It’s very difficult for me to say, sir,” said Marchand. “I know you will now ask me to give my best estimation, so I will pre-empt that and say that in my best estimation, yes, with the help from the Natrix and full cooperation, they would be able to make it across.”

“Good to know,” said Perry, letting out a breath. “That means that it’s just a matter of getting them not to kill each other. Though …”

“Did you have a thought, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Yes, a tiny little thought rolling around in my brain,” said Perry. “Which is that you’re telling me that Heimalis City Seven has all the stuff necessary to make their own Natrix. Or that they have enough, say, microchips to keep the Natrix fed for many decades. Which gives the Natrix incentives to try to take some of that.”

“I do see your point, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry mulled that over, then put the helmet on and started some intensive study of these people and their culture. He could feel the academic tether growing stronger. Where there had been a trickle from talking to Marchand, it was more of a steady flow when he did his own reading and drew his own conclusions.

They had solved all of the most obvious problems ages ago. They had what they needed to run the reactors indefinitely, and the materials necessary to filter water. Power from the reactors fed the grow lamps which grew a variety of carefully cultivated plants to provide a varied diet, along with all their textiles and that hard plastic they seemed to use everywhere. The colony wasn’t fully self-sufficient, but it had a deep mine that dropped down from the center, and had been built in a place with generous mineral deposits.

There were also satellite sites, some many miles away, and while overland travel was very difficult with the extremely low temperatures, the solution that Heimalis had settled on was to instead tunnel toward what they needed. It seemed to Perry like an immense amount of engineering, and it was, but that was their bread and butter. The longest of the tunnels led to a site sixty-four miles away, and Perry had to imagine that if it had been done on his Earth, it would have cost billions of dollars.

There was an entire warren beneath Heimalis City Seven. Any war with them would have to take that into account, but even with the depth and distance they had managed to achieve, they would still bake in the sun once it was daytime. They had drawn up plans to ride out the heat, but hadn’t found them workable, not with the insulators they had available to them. If that had been the direction they wanted to go with, they would have had to commit very early on.

A few hours later, Perry was rubbing his eyes. Aside from the brief excitement inside the colony, he’d been staring at screens for a very long time, trapped inside the power armor, which was trapped inside the mech.

He focused on his meditation, the vessels and meridians, trying again to push the more stubborn ones back into place. He felt better inside the armor, with the meridians not straining at the distance of the Wolf Vessel, but if possible, he would like to be able to take it out and put it back in. He had absolutely no training in that, and didn’t even know if it was possible — clearly he was entangled with Marchand now. That the wolf was weaker was a problem, but not a major one. The Wolf Vessel was less full than it had been though, with the weak moons not providing much power. He had plans to fix that, but they would have to wait.

“No sign of the enemy thresholder in the files?” asked Perry.

“The prophesied enemy?” asked Marchand.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Come on, don’t tell me you don’t believe that there’s going to be someone.”

“Perhaps, sir,” replied Marchand. “Mister Walsh and Miss Singh do provide precedent. But no, I have not found any mention of mysterious strangers. Everyone in Heimalis City Seven was either born there or came from the Natrix.”

Perry frowned. “Which means they’re with the nuclear branch — the, uh, Kjärni. Or alternately, that they haven’t arrived yet. Which would mean that I need to figure out the power thing.”

Every world so far had some kind of power, some addition to the arsenal. On Earth 2 it had been Marchand and the power suit, in Seraphinus it had been the sword, Teaguewater had given him the werewolf power, and the Great Arc had given him second sphere. He had heard about more than twenty worlds, maybe as many as forty if he included all the ones that were hearsay. It seemed like there was always a power, even if it wasn’t one that stuck around.

None of the things that Esperide had to offer him seemed like they would qualify. The mechs wouldn’t fit through the portal, the FTL drive was a gigascale project, the fusion reactors were far larger than the one in the power armor, and the whole thing was making Perry feel like he had missed something.

If he had got here first, he was worried that he was squandering the opportunity.

The best he could do was to work on what he could, keep his head down, and hope that it was enough.

It took them three days of walking to get back to the Natrix, moving a bit faster than they had before, mostly because they didn’t need to worry so much about draining the batteries. The snows at the fringe had melted in that time, making the landmarks feel unfamiliar. There was no sign of any planes, which Perry was thankful for. They were in communication with the Natrix, though after the initial debrief, there wasn’t all that much to say. Marchand transmitted an enormous amount of data, including the full details of their combat capabilities and preparations.

If it came to war, the Natrix was likely to crush Heimalis City Seven. The only way that wouldn’t happen is with a first strike, but an attack would have to cripple the Natrix, not destroy it, since what Heimalis wanted was manpower.

When they came into the valley where the Natrix was parked, it was transformed. The farms covered the entire valley floor, and there were more machines that must have unfolded from inside storage bays which were chugging along, fed by power from thick cables that led into the walking city. Parts of the hillside were being used to dry things in thick tarps, preparing crops for storage. There were still many months left before they would need to move again, but already they were working on refilling the granaries and storerooms.

Perry made note of the pile of bug corpses near the valley’s eastern mouth. Some of the smaller mechs were over there, along with some people, taking apart corpses and getting them ready for processing. The shells would be processed, the meat eaten, and some would simply be thrown away because there was no use for it. It was gruesome, even from a distance.

They were almost to the mech bay when the city’s speakers began blaring about an incoming attack.

Perry got into position, facing east. The Natrix had impeccable defenses, including the lasers that would draw on the fusion reactors and cost almost nothing to fire, but he was very conscious that the defenses weren’t perfect. Next to the pile of bug corpses, the mechs were loading up with people, who clung to rungs on the exterior. They were close to where the attack would come from. Once the people were hanging on, the mechs began moving, bringing everyone to safety.

“Be ready to fire,” said Perry. “Aim for the big ones, your goal is to hit the biggest ones in the weakest spots from the furthest away.”

“Yes sir, firing now,” said Marchand.

It wasn’t until Marchand adjusted the HUD that Perry could even see where the shots were going. The long rifle was raised at a thirty-degree angle and firing at targets that were detected only by the equipment that the Natrix had set up on the high hills around their valley. Perry could see the enemy only indistinctly with the imaging available, but the highlighting showed a red outline around each of the bugs, and they were marked with a big red X when killed.

“Sending up the drone, if that’s alright with you sir,” said Marchand.

“Go for it,” said Perry. He barely felt the movement of the mech as the drone was flung into the air.

The image immediately made an improvement in quality as the drone zipped forward, not just from the drone’s images, but from March’s processing of those images into a coherent picture of the incoming swarm.

The bugs came in several different sizes, all variants of the same species with their own role in its lifecycle, though this wave had none of the largest. The small ones were the size of a person, maybe a bit bigger, eight feet tall at the most, while the mid-sized ones were as big as a school bus. Those were dangerous, requiring a precision hit or massive firepower.

Perry watched as one of them had an explosion of green snot from its eyes and stopped moving, a direct hit from the rifle from more than a mile away. But it was only a direct hit that would kill one of them, and Perry could see the scars on some of the others, a furrow along the amber shell from where a high-caliber bullet had ricocheted.

With the drone up, Marchand’s accuracy had increased, and Perry could track every shot. They were taken against targets that were so far away he could count a full second between when the bullet left the rifle and when it hit its mark.

After at least twenty shots, all of them direct killing hits, the rifle stopped, and Perry frowned at the screen.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“I have received instruction from the Natrix to stop firing,” said Marchand. “All of the larger enemies have been dealt with, and only the smaller ones remain. I was not given the reasoning, but I imagine that smaller caliber weapons will be used for the rest of them.”

There were many more of the small ones, almost ten times as many, two hundred in total, and Perry watched the drone’s feed as they moved across the ground and funneled toward the Natrix. Aside from when he was in quarantine, there had been no attacks, and this was his first time seeing one up close, unfiltered — or at least as unfiltered as it could be through the power armor and the mech.

The swarm moved as one, with no stragglers, which he found odd. There was no evidence of a hivemind, but he knew that they didn’t need a hivemind, in the same way that a flock of birds didn’t. It felt like overwhelming numbers, but it was something the Natrix could handle, and had handled for its entire existence.

It wasn’t until the swarm started funneling through the mouth of the valley that the Natrix came to life. The lasers fired up, rapidly switching targets, melting holes through chitin and flash boiling the delicate internal membranes. For every one that was killed, the others would swarm ahead, and as they started to get closer to the farms, the Natrix’s guns started firing again, visible mostly through the tracer rounds.

At a certain point, it seemed as though they were going to be overrun, but before Perry could tell Marchand to open fire again, he realized that the swarm was thinning out. The last of the bugs was killed unceremoniously, and there was a sudden silence as the hammering of gunshots from above no longer battered the mech.

“Come, let’s get out of the mechs,” said Ruben. “I’m in need of a long shower.”

They were greeted with some muted applause once they brought the mechs in, and Perry was happy to slip out of the mech, though he was still in his power armor. He had his helmet off and held in his hand, and his sword held in the other.

He’d been looking forward to seeing Brigitta, but she barely said hello to him when she came up. She was more interested in the mech and how it had fared.

“I saw the shooting,” she said. “The distance is remarkable. It’s down to the firing solutions, but we’re close to taking those, and once we do, we should be able to match the same feats.” She touched the mech’s leg and looked closely at it. “The insulation helped? You weren’t at risk of freezing?”

“No,” said Perry. “Not to my knowledge, anyway.”

“Hmm,” said Brigitta. “Marchand?”

“No,” said Marchand’s voice from the suit. “The mech performed admirably, Miss Karlquist. I do have some notes for improvement based on its performance in the field.”

“Send them to me,” said Brigitta. “I’ll look over them later.”

“Everything okay?” asked Perry as he watched her inspect some of the lines and look at the interior of the cockpit.

“That was the second large bug attack in twenty-four hours,” said Brigitta. “Each one of them uses up resources and puts stress on the system.” She looked over at Perry and raised an eyebrow. “You are remarkably put together for a man who spent the last seven days in a mech.”

“I got out and about,” said Perry. “I’m still going to take a shower though.”

She moved closer to him and sniffed near his neck. “You smell like a cool, fresh breeze.” She looked up at him. “I’ve been feeling stress, the weight of my burdens. Do you mind if I join your shower?”

“Not at all,” said Perry.

They rode the elevator up to the penthouse apartment, and because he was still in the armor, helmet in hand, he resisted the urge to spend that time kissing her.

“Are they usually this bad?” he asked.

“The bugs?” asked Brigitta. She looked out at the mech bay as they rose until they had gone up into the shaft, which showed no view of anything. “No. They’re attacking early, more aggressively, and in greater numbers. I’ve talked to Mette about it. We might have settled in a bad spot. Or it might be seasonal.” She looked over at him.

“An aberration in their lifecycles?” asked Perry.

“Something like that,” she shrugged. “Growth and death aren’t constant, sometimes the plants do better, which means the insects do better. I think we must be at a dangerous time, thick plants from fertile soil letting the grubs grow their population, then a lean time following which drives them to swarm.”

Perry nodded. Or this presages something worse. He was going to have to keep his eye to the east, on the insects, and to the west, on the frozen colonies. It was possible that the enemy would come with the bugs instead of any human faction. He didn’t know what that would look like, but he knew it would be trouble. And even if it weren’t something like that, the insects were something to worry about, more pressure, possibly a need to move again.

“I’m hoping to forget all this for the next half hour,” said Brigitta. She looked at him. “I’m hoping to be made senseless.”

Perry smiled at that. He itched to get out of the armor. “I think I can arrange that.”

If she still had misgivings about their arrangement, they weren’t showing on her face, and unexpectedly, Perry realized that the Natrix had started to feel like home.