Thresholder

The respite on the Natrix was brief, since Perry had a satellite to launch.

The satellite, Horizon 1, was incredibly crude, bashed together from spare parts and with no onboard thrusters. It was powered by some larger solar panels, which would allow it to transmit and receive, and it had a tiny computer onboard, as well as a single camera. It was small, no more than a hundred pounds, which was as much as the sword could move before becoming sluggish — a limit that was apparently magical rather than rooted in physics, much to Marchand’s consternation. March seemed to deal with the idea much better if Perry referred to the sword as ‘the outside acceleration’.

It took a long time for Perry to rise high enough up that the drag from the air wasn’t pressing against the suit, and it wasn’t until that point that the sword was able to push him to the proper speeds for the satellite to maintain an orbit that could last for a few years.

Perry would almost certainly have run out of oxygen, except that he had been working on that, especially during the long walk back from Heimalis City Seven, and had something that he thought would work: he had finally cracked the problem of breathing through the Wolf Vessel.

How the second sphere were supposed to go without breath, as he understood it, was to correct their internal alchemy so they didn’t need air. When they needed energy, they would draw it in from the environment, or have something like a spiritual reactor inside them, sometimes because they ate the right gem or other times because they had careful little feedback loops of energy. By the time a person hit third sphere, they were supposed to be able to radiate some appreciable amount of energy, though they usually just jealousy hoarded what they created.

He was instead going without breath by draining the Wolf Vessel, rejuvenating his blood with the energy the extra vessel stored.

Of course, the Wolf Vessel’s well of power wasn’t infinite, and had already started to get low enough that Marchand was sending warnings about the microfusion reactor having output levels below what could sustain combat functions. There were two small moons around Esperide, but the Natrix was in constant twilight and the moons were small, providing only the tiniest trickle when Perry stood outside facing them.

The plan, then, was that if the moonlight was having problems coming to him, he would come to the moonlight.

For this purpose, Brigitta had built him a new helmet, one that was completely clear, a fishbowl that sat on top of the power armor and would allow the moonlight to touch his skin with almost nothing in the way, not even atmosphere.

He’d have been a lot more confident in the plan if he'd been able to take some measurements first, but Brigitta had built a vacuum chamber and tested the helmet’s design, and it had held. He had a handheld computer strapped to him that would interface with March in lieu of having instructions directly on the HUD, along with the earpiece for audio communication. He also had a backup oxygen tank, in addition to the small one inside the suit, and a parachute, though he hoped that he wouldn’t need it.

This was, in some sense, a test flight that was a proof of concept for something that Brigitta had desperately wanted ever since he revealed he’d been there: a return to the space station.

That was far, far down the line though. Even if Perry could get there by using his roundabout and entirely magical method of converting moonlight to oxygen, there was the issue of radiation. He felt fortunate to have come away from that first dose of radiation with as little damage as he had, all of which had been fixed through the power of the second sphere within a few days. Brigitta didn’t even have a real concrete goal when it came to the space station, given that she had no way to get a crew up there even if the station could be salvaged and the drive fixed so it stopped bathing everything in invisible death. She had talked about a grand plan for landing the station, but it wasn’t clear to Perry how that would work, and Marchand had echoed his doubts.

Still, a single communications satellite in orbit was a good step, and would have an immediate payoff for everyone still on the planet, even if the orbit meant that their conversations would need to be asynchronous most of the time. An email that took a day or so to go from one colony to another was an astounding leap forward, and it would last three years, at least according to Brigitta’s calculations.

Once Perry was out of the atmosphere, he began speeding around the planet, satellite dangling behind him from a wire attached to a harness around the armor. He looked ridiculous, he was pretty sure, a man in a high-tech space suit holding a medieval sword with a bubble of a helmet that looked like it came out of a 60s pulp serial, a hunk of quickly-engineered glass and metal in pursuit.

When the moonlight hit him, he was surprised by its ferocity, though the need to transform was less than it had been in Teaguewater, and he had a handle on it now, more or less. He let the light bathe him, and felt the Wolf Vessel fill, drinking in the energy, multiplying it. Perry had some inkling that it might be possible to induce some kind of feedback loop within him using the Wolf Vessel, but that would be far down the road. The two systems came from different worlds, and he wasn’t sure whether or not the metaphysics interacted because they were, at their root, the same, or whether it was going through the portals that had stitched them together.

He felt whole once the Wolf Vessel was full again, and while his focus had been on ‘making’ air, or at least sustaining his body with energy instead of breath, he was fairly certain that it wouldn’t be that difficult to replicate the same breakthrough with his other biological needs. Food seemed the most difficult, given his monstrous appetite for meat, but it wasn’t out of reach.

He released the satellite when he was told to, having charted the course he was told to chart. The physics of it all was entirely beyond him, but he had looked at the diagram March had plotted while on the ground, and had nodded along to it as though he had some input on the complicated math involved. All he had to do was unhitch, and then watch as his companion for the trip departed.

When he was clear of the satellite, it was time to de-orbit, something that had to be done with exaggerated care given that there was virtually nothing stopping him from burning up in the atmosphere if he got too low. Coming to a stop was easier than speeding up though, and the planet spun less and less below him with every passing minute.

His entire time on Esperide had been spent in or close to the twilight zone of continual sunrise, but there were two twilight zones, just as on Earth, one for sunrise and the other for sunset. Perry watched as the sunset strip passed beneath him. It, too, was green, but the ecology would have to be completely different given the rotation of the planet. There the cold was chasing the heat. If the winds blew the seeds into the colder area of the twilight zone though, they would soon become encased in ice, which meant that it wasn’t a viable method of spreading. The Natrix knew almost nothing about what went on in the sunset zone, and a piece of Perry burned with curiosity to go down there.

He could feel the academic tether tugging at him, gently, reinforcing the curiosity, but it was easy to ignore. Not today, but maybe later.

“Sir,” said Marchand. “During our last pass over the ice, I believe I saw something alarming. As you unfortunately don’t have the HUD available, it will be more difficult to show you, but I’ve put the image on your screen, if you would care to look.”

Perry looked down at the handheld screen Brigitta had provided him. It was a very poor view of something, black with bits of white. It took him a moment to realize that it was a view of something on the dark side of the planet, lighting up the snow and ice, possibly an infrared image or something like it. It was impossible to make out what it was.

“What am I looking at,” said Perry.

“It’s difficult to say, sir,” said Marchand. “On our next pass we’ll be going slower, and I’ll have time to track the anomaly properly using the cameras.” There was a pause. “Do let me know if this is more of that … business.”

“I can’t imagine that it’s magic,” said Perry. “But you think it’s some kind of installation down there? They call it Heimalis City Seven, that implies one through six, right?”

“They only have knowledge of their own city,” said Marchand. “The city has stood for sixty years, sunset to sunrise, and if there is knowledge of other cities, it was scrubbed before I got there, and certainly not general knowledge.”

“But Heimalis City Seven only has three fusion reactors, and there should be five,” said Perry. “So there are potentially two other installations somewhere else, run by those other reactors, right? I mean, they have lots of mines, and lots of insulated tunnels leading to those mines, but there wasn’t a good spot they could build to get everything. Except I guess that doesn’t explain why the city was in the dark.”

“They’re in the dark because the planet is very nearly tidally locked, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry frowned at that. “Now was that —”

“Just a bit of humor, sir, as you appear to appreciate that manner of wordplay,” said Marchand.

“Ah,” said Perry. “We’re still slowing down, I’ll go rigid, you get a better picture of whatever is down there. It’s not far from the city, from those readings.”

“Three hundred miles is not close,” replied Marchand. “Not in the conditions as they are down on the surface.”

“Either way, get ready, do the best you can,” said Perry. “Get the satellite to take a picture too.”

“As you say, sir,” replied Marchand.

The next time they went around the planet, Marchand took more pictures from the suit’s many cameras. They were, to put it bluntly, far too small to actually make out much of note, since there were strict limits to how much a camera could resolve given a lens of a certain size. Naively, it would have been capable of something like a half kilometer per pixel, but one of the things that March was very good at was stitching together disparate images to get higher resolutions and running some advanced processing to clean up atmospheric distortion and make up for everything that couldn’t be seen simply by shining some light on the gigapixel sensors. Marchand had once explained subpixel shifting and super-resolution techniques to Perry, but it was definitely a field better left to the AI.

It was still basically nothing, just a cluster of dots. The size felt off, too small to be a city, a single large dot with six smaller dots around it in a hexagon. They were bathing the snow and ice in light, which wasn’t something that anyone would waste energy on for a city. It took Perry a moment to realize what he might be looking at.

“This is a mech,” he said. “Moving across the snow.”

“I believe it’s premature to say that,” said Marchand.

“Alter the uh, telemetry,” said Perry. “We’re going down.”

“You would die, sir,” said Marchand. “This suit is not rated for those temperatures, and Miss Karlquist’s helmet has not been rated by any authority except her own. She used crude tools and impossibly basic standards.”

“Alright,” said Perry. “Alter the trajectory, bring us to a stop above the anomaly when we’re still out of the atmosphere and won’t freeze to death.”

In fact, the opposite problem was already happening, as the suit had no way to vent this kind of heat. It had been getting warmer during the whole trip, and was now quite toasty. Perry could regulate some of it via the processes of the second sphere, drawing in the heat energy, but his practice with that had gone less well than his practice with not needing breath, and he was fairly sure that he’d need at least another month of dedicated practice to survive a desert. The day-side environment of the planet seemed as though it would kill him dead no matter how far he progressed through the second sphere or what techniques he developed.

“Is this wise, sir?” asked Marchand.

“They don’t have a record of this mech, do they?” asked Perry.

“They do not,” said Marchand.

“I want to see what it is,” said Perry. “Either it’s running off a huge battery, it’s using uranium instead of fusion, or … something.”

“Very well, sir,” said Marchand. “I have updated our routing, please follow it now. I should point out that this course of action will add a considerable amount of time to our total journey, perhaps as much as an entire Earth day.”

“It’s fine,” said Perry.

He was going to run into some problems with hunger, and the pouch of water he had been sipping from would be absolutely bone dry, but he was willing to risk it. Unknown mechs on the dark side of the planet, lights shining as they moved through the snow and ice, that meant something, it had to. The atmosphere was lower on the dark side due to the cold, so they would be able to descend down quite a ways before the chilly air began sapping his heat.

Perry used the sword to decelerate, and by following March’s instructions, he was able to come to a halt just over the ‘anomaly’. He dropped down until March began to complain, then held himself motionless with the sword.

“Pictures please,” said Perry. He couldn’t see the lights down below, not with the naked eye.

When the pictures came in on the handheld, they were fairly clear. The low light sensors, infrared sensors, and AI enhancement all gave way to an image that was much better than before.

“What is it?” asked Perry.

“It appears to be a mech, sir,” said Marchand.

“Alright,” said Perry. “Sure. But talk to me about scale, make up, everything else, what is it like? Where’s it from, where’s it going?”

“Unclear, sir,” said Marchand. “But it does appear to be emitting significant amounts of both light and heat, the former to ensure that the path is clear, the latter in order to keep from freezing. Based upon a very rough estimation of the power output, I believe you are correct in assuming that this has some hitherto unseen power source. It seems to me likely that it’s one of the fabled elder mechs, sir, or perhaps some bastard version of such.”

“And it’s heading to Heimalis City Seven,” said Perry.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry stared down at where the lights would be if his eyes were better. For a moment he thought he saw it. It was very tempting to drop down there, and even more tempting to send them a signal. ‘I see you.’

Perry let out a breath. They had gone down to where there was very thin air, just a brush of scattered atoms against the suit, and he could already feel the baking heat start to relent. Going any further would mean that he’d freeze. And letting them know that he had found them would lose at least a little bit of tactical advantage.

“Alright,” said Perry. “Let’s go home.”

It was a long trip, and there was much to think about on the way back.

~~~~

When Perry returned to the Natrix, it was to a hero’s welcome, the second time in the same week. He was the man who’d launched a satellite, which was now providing a better picture of the planet than they had ever had before. The images were crude by anyone’s standard, nothing like the satellites of his Earth that could take a photo of a person standing at their front door, but it was enough to get a picture of Esperide, its weather systems, and more importantly, allow full and open communication between the many colonies without a need for mountain-mounted antennas or weather balloons, two techniques that had been used in the past.

“It’s a new era,” said Leticia over a large feast in the mess hall. She had already given her speech to those gathered.

By the standards of Seraphinus it was no feast at all, just a few extra dishes they didn’t normally have, the same mix of processed plants and processed bugs with a few flourishes. The one exception was something like a pig, a large species of pseudo-mammal that had been hunted by a mech with a spear gun. Perry was grateful for it, especially since he’d been half-starved by the spaceflight.

“The negotiations are tomorrow,” said Perry. “The satellite will help. It’s proof that you have something good going on here. You’re hoping for peace?”

“Hoping for peace, preparing for war,” said Leticia. “Besides, they might know that the satellite is a cheat.”

“I wouldn’t call it a cheat,” said Perry.

“It’s not something we could accomplish on our own,” said Leticia. “Not without expending resources that we can’t spare.”

“It’s a cheat we could use again,” said Brigitta. She was sitting beside Perry, and had indulged in a bit too much of the absolutely disgusting alcoholic drink that had apparently been brought out in his honor. She had slipped her arm through Perry’s and was leaning against him, with her hand on his thigh. “We should use every cheat he can give us.”

Leticia frowned, but said nothing. There was some tension between the moving city’s three leaders, and from what Brigitta had told him earlier, it was mostly having to do with how much they were planning to embrace the technology that Perry had brought to them. The biggest sticking point was Marchand, who Brigitta thought should be immediately installed on the computers of the elder mechs and given the run of things. Leticia didn’t have the same technical background, but was distrustful.

“Assuming that we can settle things with Heimalis, we have a bright future,” said Mette. “But that’s given that we can settle things with them. The satellite helps. Three years of communication with them, at the very least, isn’t nothing, and if the second satellite goes up and can stay up for longer, all the better.”

“I’ll do what I can,” said Perry.

He had told them about the elder mech on his arrival, but Leticia had thought it would cast a pall over the festivities if it were widely known. They were at their own table, but close enough to the rest of the people that they could easily have been overheard.

In some ways, a battle of mech against mech was the best hope they had as far as a war between sides went. It would mean that when the smoke cleared, they would have a victor, and that victor would subjugate the other side or at least extract the necessary resources, and this would happen without mass civilian deaths. The bad ending would be if Heimalis bombed the Natrix or otherwise went in with guns blazing, hoping to pick through the wreckage for what they needed — which in this case was children.

It was weighing on Perry, and in spite of everything he’d done, it still seemed inevitable. The call was going to be the next day, and he wasn’t invited, which he understood. His role here was that of a soldier, and Leticia would be better at leveraging his capabilities than he was. She wanted peace, or at least the facilities that were producing things the Natrix would need in the long term.

“Come,” said Brigitta once Perry was finished eating. She entwined her fingers with his and stumbled up from her place, giving him a soft kiss on his shoulder and then pulling him along.

“I’ll be back,” Perry said to Leticia and Mette. He caught their disapproving looks, whether that was because of Brigitta’s drunkenness or the relationship the two of them had been developing.

Brigitta led him down the empty hallways, hand in his, pulling him along with some urgency.

“Where are we going?” he asked. “My room?”

“You wish,” she replied. “No, I have a present for you. To the mech bay!”

It was a long walk, and it didn’t seem like Brigitta felt like talking, so Perry simply followed her as she dragged him along. He had never seen her like this, and wondered what had come over her, but the drink seemed like excuse enough. Alcohol was tightly controlled aboard the Natrix. It was hard to tell how drunk she was, but her coordination wasn’t what it had once been.

“Leticia will ask you within the next few days,” said Brigitta when they were halfway there. “If not her, then Mette, but probably both.”

“Ask me what?” asked Perry.

Brigitta gave him a dark look. “You know.”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “A clandestine mission? Because that’s definitely not what I’m suited to.”

“No,” said Brigitta, shaking her head and then seeming like she regretted it. She had her hair in braided pigtails, the work of one of the children, a sign of the celebration. “You know,” she repeated.

“I don’t know,” Perry repeated.

“There was a woman who said that she went to your room before you left, in the middle of the night,” said Brigitta. “She tried the door handle and found it locked. Did you know about that?”

“No?” Perry asked. He was confused. “What was she trying to do?”

“You know,” said Brigitta for the third time.

Perry moved in front of her, stepping fast, and caught her by the wrist. For a moment she looked surprised that he could move so quickly, or that he was stronger than her, and her eyes moved over his body. She leaned against the wall of the corridor, and with her free hand began unbuttoning her pants.

“No,” said Perry, gently grabbing her other wrist and moving her hand away. “No, that’s not what I want.” Though if he was being honest, he wouldn’t have minded.

Brigitta looked at him. Her eyes were like glimmering pools. “It’s what they want.”

“They want —” said Perry, but he stopped himself as he came to the conclusion. “Oh.”

“They told me you were wasted on me,” said Brigitta. Her cheeks were flushed, and he had her pressed against the wall of the corridor, pinning her wrists, though he wasn’t holding her in place, and most of what he was doing was supporting her. “You should do your duty with the women of the Natrix. But I don’t want you to.”

“I don’t want to either,” said Perry. “Jesus Christ, I’m not planning on leaving behind a bunch of children, I’m not going to do that.”

“It’s necessary,” said Brigitta. “You have powers, unimaginable powers, magic, you can go without breathing, and if we could have that in our children —”

“No,” said Perry.

Brigitta looked at him, as though she was going to argue. “Fine, but I’m not who you’re going to have to turn down.”

Perry released her and she started off down the hallway almost at once. He followed after her, taking long steps to catch up with her.

“You’re mad at me because I won’t, and you’d be mad at me if I did,” said Perry.

“Yes,” said Brigitta. She tapped her head. “I’m very smart, I have two minds about many things.”

“Tell the others not to bother, that my room will stay locked at night, that I only need you,” said Perry. “Maybe if I was doing all this when I was seventeen, when it felt like a miracle when a woman decided to touch me, but I’m not seventeen. I have my own agency.”

“I’m too drunk to remember all that,” said Brigitta. “And Leticia wouldn’t listen to me anyway.”

“Where are we going?” asked Perry.

“Mech bay, I told you, got you a present,” said Brigitta.

The city was quiet, and there was only the sound of their footsteps. It was, of course, twilight, but the city ran in cycles, and most people were either at the celebration or asleep, and there was no work being done. It wasn’t night, but it was meant to be like night. There were people who worked ‘off cycle’ manning the defenses and systems and doing the cleaning and prep work for the coming day, but not in this part of the city.

They came out of the hallway and into the mech bay, which was as dark and quiet as the rest of the city had been. If the back door opened up, light would come spilling in, but it gave every impression of being the dead of night.

They walked over to Brigitta’s bay, where her mech was sitting, its guns opened up to receive ammo. Laying on a metal bench was a huge gun, at least fifty pounds, sleek and machined, painted blue.

“Took a bit to match the color,” said Brigitta.

“What is this?” Perry asked.

“Laser gun,” said Brigitta. “There’s a cord, it’ll run off the microfusion core.”

“The core isn’t functional,” said Perry. “So it would be running of the Wolf Vessel.”

“That’s where this comes in,” said Brigitta, picking up a metal part as large as her fist.

“And what’s that?” asked Perry.

“It should make your microfusion core functional again, properly functional,” said Brigitta. She swayed slightly where she stood. “Took me a long time, but it’s not too different from the fusion reactors. We’ve been trying to build a new one for ages. Yours, the original, is smaller, weaker, but more fault tolerant.”

“You can build one of these?” Perry asked.

“No,” said Brigitta. “Or, yes, possibly.” She frowned at it. “We have very, very limited amounts of the base material, corcite.” The second sphere offered no translation of that. “I could make six of these, perhaps, with what we have. Everything in your power armor is beyond me. But with the schematics, with the new understanding, the Horchler process, yes, six.” She held it up for Perry. “Five together should be enough to power one of our mechs. It’s worse than what you had, maybe by an order of magnitude.” In spite of her mild drunkenness, she got through the words without a problem. She set the microreactor down again. “You’re not happy?”

“I’m astounded,” said Perry. “Your ability to rapidly solve problems is its own sort of magic. With the reactor fixed, I won’t have to rely on the moon, and with a gun — I mean, I’ll have to test fire it, see how it handles, but — this is incredible, really.”

“Do you want to finish what I tried to start in the hallway?” asked Brigitta.

“I can’t tell how drunk you are,” said Perry. “And you seem a bit … off-kilter.”

“Up to your room then?” asked Brigitta.

“Brigitta,” started Perry.

She frowned at him. “War might start tomorrow. Don’t you want a last good day?”

“I care about you,” said Perry. “I appreciate the gifts. I don’t think having sex is a great way to ignore the issues you’ve got going on. I mean, if you’re going to ignore the issues anyway, then yeah, that’s probably the best way to do it, but —”

“You’re going to turn down Leticia?” asked Brigitta.

“Yes,” said Perry. “If she comes to me and asks what you say she’ll ask for, yes.”

She was staring at him. She blinked slightly too slowly. “Earlier you said … that you didn’t want to leave behind children.”

“No, I don’t,” said Perry.

“Leave them behind when you go … where?” she asked.

“Somewhere else,” said Perry.

“Why?” asked Brigitta.

Perry frowned at her. He wasn’t sure how to explain it.

“You’re a hero here,” she said. “You can help bring us back to the stars. You have friends, you have me, and if I’m not enough, you can have others, why would you go?” She was giving him a pleading look.

“There’s going to be someone for me to fight,” said Perry. “Someone as strong as me, maybe stronger. Once I beat them, a portal is going to open up, and —”

“I know all that,” said Brigitta. “But why leave? Why go?”

It was tempting to say that he had to, but he didn’t actually believe that. He had, as evidence, a single story told from Xiyan, whose word could not be trusted, and she hadn’t even been entirely sure. Besides that, if you were a thresholder seeking retirement, why not just try? If another thresholder came in to wreck things, you could deal with that as it came, and after you had fended them off, then you could think about moving on.

And there was Richter, of course, and his long-term plan to resurrect her, as little progress had been made on that front. He had felt an iron resolve when he reached Seraphinus, but that resolve had been steadily fading, both with the passing of time and the slow realization of just how daunting the problems were. Resurrection and multiverse travel, those were the two requirements, and he was not closer to either of them than he had been six months ago.

The real answer was that there were more worlds out there. There were more powers, more fights. If he stayed with the Natrix he would be lauded as a hero until the end of his very long second sphere life, but it would be a life that largely consisted of work and obligations, perhaps a family, perhaps not, and it would mellow and fade as time went on. Perhaps he would reach the third sphere, perhaps not, but confined to a single world, he would feel small and insignificant, as though he’d chosen to limit himself.

He didn’t know how to express that, or even where to begin. He wasn’t sure that it was a rational thing to feel.

“When I’m done here, I’ll be needed elsewhere,” said Perry.

This, at least, felt true.

She stared at him and opened her mouth, but before she could speak, an alarm went off, the bugs attacking them yet again, adding more bodies to the piles outside. The guns could be heard down in the mech bay, and the lights dimmed slightly when the lasers fired. They sat there, staring at each other.

“Okay,” said Brigitta once the assault had stopped.

He was certain that hadn’t been what she was going to say before she was interrupted.

“Take your gifts,” said Brigitta. “I need to sleep.” She looked him up and down. “I’m sleeping in your room tonight.”

“Alright,” said Perry.

“You’ll do your best to protect us, if there’s war?” she asked.

“I will,” said Perry, though he wasn’t much in comparison to the mechs, and certainly not an elder mech. He knew they thought highly of him, probably more highly than he deserved.

“That’s all I can ask for then,” she said. She moved away from him, and walked across the bay to the elevator. She gave him a look, a questioning one, and he moved across, slipping in the cage with her before she pressed the button.

They exchanged no more words for the rest of the night.