Thresholder

“Fire!” shouted Perry. “Hit the sensors!”

Marchand responded by immediately shooting the mech’s single long gun directly at the distant elder, which scored a direct hit, threading a needle between metal plates and shattering a lens that could barely be seen on the video.

As soon as the gun had fired, Perry was on the move, lunging to the left and picking up speed. The only thing on his side was that the elder mech had not originally been programmed for war, and its firing solutions would be worse than his own. He focused on speed, straining the metal of the legs with every footfall, and changing directions as quickly as he could at regular intervals.

At the same time, he had the blade up, ready to block incoming fire from the main gun. His HUD traced a red line projecting the path of the bullet, and he was keyed into the controls, following it perfectly even through the layers of mechanisms that sat between his fingertips and the motion of the blade.

When the main gun fired again, he felt the hit, and knew immediately that he hadn’t saved himself, not completely.

“Status,” said Perry, gritting his teeth as the mech thundered forward.

“Incomplete deflection, left arm partially disabled,” said March in a curt voice.

Perry had no choice but to race forward. His own main gun fired again, and again scored a direct hit to the little triangle of sensor equipment on the top of the elder mech’s head.

Almost immediately, the red line tracking the main gun veered to the side. He wasn’t sure whether it was blind or simply recalibrating, but it gave him the time to close the distance, and he moved the mech at a dead sprint, metal groaning.

Unfortunately, the elder mech didn’t just have the large main gun, it had a smaller weapon in either hand. One was a laser, hooked into the incredibly powerful fusion reactor, and that was going to be a problem once he was within range. The other was more like a pistol, and would only be a problem because then Perry would be trying to block attacks from three different directions at once.

A third shot from his own main gun deflected off the triangular sensor by what must have been a matter of inches, maybe because he was running. If the elder mech was poorly built, then there was no redundancy, and taking that tiny section out would permanently blind the entire giant mech, but he was pretty sure that no sane engineer would build their craft in that way.

It was possible that the correct strategy would be to stand two miles away and duel like gentlemen. He had no faith in his ability to parry every shot though, and had already lost function in the left arm.

No, the trick would be to close the distance, use his superior speed to evade or block the attacks, and do the thing that you weren’t supposed to do in a mech, which was close-up combat. The gun on the elder mech’s back, which was now having a hard time tracking him, would have an even harder time once he was close to it and the turning radius needed to be wider.

He had never pushed the mech so far before, and was worried that the custom alloys in the knees wouldn’t be able to take it, but as the seconds passed, he grew more confident that he was going to make it.

There was less distance between the two now, and the ballistic pistol aimed right at him, showing little of the erratic aim that the main gun was having.

Perry had a decision to make, two red lines to track, the path of the main gun or the path of the smaller one. The main one seemed erratic, but the smaller one was pointed straight at him, so he put his sword in position to block what he expected to be a volley as he continued forward. It came quickly enough, but the caliber was much smaller, and even the ones that the sword didn’t block plinked off the armor. It would only take a solid hit to the wrong spot to destroy something, but the inner cockpit was protected by solid plating from their strongest alloy. Unlike the elder mech, his mech had been built for combat.

The distance closed fast, the zig-zag run of Perry’s mech frantic. The fourth and fifth shots from his main gun broke more of the sensor equipment, though he wasn’t sure how much more damage there was to do there. The shots came when he pivoted from one direction to the next, at the moment when the mech was almost still, the thrum of gun loud even through the layers of metal and padding.

When the elder mech’s laser gun lit up, Perry was barely worried. The lasers were good against the bugs, because the chitin wasn’t nearly as heat-resistant as metal and the internal pieces of the bugs even less so. Against metal, and at distance, the lasers would only cause significant damage if they could stay directly focused in one place, and he was moving enough that he didn’t think that was going to happen.

Instead, the laser went directly for the exterior cameras.

“Launch the drone!” Perry shouted as one of the cameras went down. The mech had been built with redundancy, but if that had been a precision attack, and they could identify the cameras, that was going to be very, very bad.

Launching the drone was a huge risk, but it would give him eyes, and Marchand would command it to zip around and be difficult to hit.

The elder mech’s main gun fired, and Perry’s sword was nowhere near close enough to deflect it. He felt the jolt and his mech stumbled for half a second before launching into a stride that righted it.

“Catastrophic hit to the main gun,” said Marchand in his cool and collected combat voice. “Releasing now.”

The mech immediately gained speed as its primary weapon was dropped into the short green grass it was trampling over. The left arm was still gripping the sword, same as the right, but it was moving freely, and if he gave the command, it would fall limply to his side. That left only the right arm, with only the sword, as his weapon.

For anything else, he would need to get close enough to touch.

“Prepare to slap her,” said Perry as the laser tried to find an angle on the other cameras. The bullets from the pistol were mostly stopped by the sword, but the inaccuracy of the weapon was working in their favor.

The black patch of nanites on the right hand was only a square foot across, a small portion of what Perry had been able to replicate using the second sphere. It had been meant as an emergency measure, a way for him to use them while still in the suit, placed against a security system or something similar, but he was going to use it here, now, to end the elder mech. As soon as the nanites were against the metal skin of the elder mech, they could move and flow between the cracks and cause all kinds of havoc, disabling everything.

It was his only realistic shot at winning now.

After a full mile of running, the final approach felt like it took no time at all. His mech was faster with the gun being dropped, the pivots easier, and even with half his attention focused on putting up his sword-shield, he was able to make the strides from one place to another with ease, aided by March.

Then he was in contact range with the elder mech. He hadn’t realized just how big it was until he was up close: it was at least fifty feet tall, almost twice the height of his own mech. Up close, the big gun didn’t have any way to point directly down, and as Perry darted past the elder mech, it was a simple matter of slapping the closest leg and then digging one of the mech’s feet down into the ground to turn all the way around. As soon as it was done, he grabbed the sword from his ‘dead’ hand and brought it up again.

“Send the nanites,” said Perry. “Disable everything.”

The elder mech spun around, rotating about the slender waist. It was an elegant creation, but up close the patchwork was even more obvious, places where a smooth curve had something welded onto it. This mech had fought against the bugs in the moments since first coming to this planet, had been run as a machine of war for perhaps a century, and it showed.

The laser flashed over what must have been the last of the mech’s exterior cameras, and the image on the HUD flickered for a moment before going into ultra-low resolution polygon mode, which Marchand only did when he was trying to create an on-the-fly reconstruction of the visual information from other sensors, including the overhead camera. It was no problem for Marchand, since he didn’t see in the same way, but Perry found it jarring, especially since the framerate was lower and his eyes were so much better than they’d been in Teaguewater.

Half blind and with only the sword as a weapon, it had become a game of stalling, waiting for the nanites to worm their way into the main trunk of the machine. Perry circled the mech, trying to stay out of the way of the weaponry. He didn’t fear the laser, and only somewhat feared the ‘pistol’, and the giant gun that was mounted on the shoulder couldn’t swivel down to aim at him.

The woman inside noticed all this and reacted by kicking him.

The mechs were not at all designed for melee combat, neither of them. At best, they were designed to survive an impact or two, but they were products of careful engineering and designed for locomotion over uneven terrain much more than they were designed for smashing into each other.

The effect was very much like a car crash for both of them, except she had only gambled a leg, and while it was damaged, she was left standing.

Perry’s cockpit had buckled and warped, but at least held. One of the legs had twisted and was ruined, and the mech had fallen to the sword arm, likely ruining that too. Even with the alloys they used, the mechs were just too heavy, and as Perry tried to right his mech, he saw from the picture-in-picture drone feed that the elder mech was sitting on him.

“It’s going to be expensive to repair that,” said the woman’s voice in his ear. The period of combat had only lasted perhaps a minute, if that, with most of that time spent with Perry running through the alien meadow to come meet her. In that time, Perry had virtually forgotten that they had a line of communication.

“March, how are we doing on wrecking her shit?” asked Perry.

“It will take more time, sir,” said Marchand.

“Unfortunately,” said the woman’s voice. Natalka. Perry heard her breath over the radio, an exhale of satisfaction. “Unfortunately, I’m going to have to kill you.”

Perry’s eyes were on the picture-in-picture, the drone’s eye view. He watched as the two pistols were clipped in place on the chest. He just needed to wait, that was all, Marchand would come through, the nanites would find a gap and worm their way in, then it would just be a matter of blowing out something important or reprogramming the whole thing. March had always come through in the past, he was dependable, reliable.

The elder mech’s grippers weren’t quite hands, but they were smooth and nimble. They reached up and began taking the large rifle down. The whole thing might have weighed half as much as Perry’s entire mech. When he realized that she was bringing it down to point between her mech’s legs, directly aimed at his mech’s cockpit, he started to panic.

“March,” he said. “Exit strategy.”

“Blowing the cockpit hatch,” replied Marchand.

There was a brief explosion, not the sound of an enormous gun firing an enormous bullet straight into the mech, and the cockpit itself shifted in place, moving down like it was supposed to, then getting stuck. Perry pushed with his arms, as hard as the considerable power of the suit allowed, and heard the metal twist and tear as whatever deformation was keeping him in place gave way. He slipped out of the mech a half second before the gun went off, its power strong enough he could feel the shockwave.

Perry was breathing hard. Normally he was cool under pressure, but that had nearly been the end for him. He had only barely improved matters for himself, as he was just in the power armor, staring down a mech the size of a building.

A contrarian by nature, Perry had always kind of hated the story of David and Goliath. A matchup between an experienced person wielding a ranged weapon against someone who was slow, lumbering, and armored in everywhere except the face seemed like it definitely favored the little guy. What moron would agree to single combat with those as the terms? Sure, it was a story about the plucky underdog and the incompetence of evil, and maybe about the will of god, but every time he heard someone use the phrase ‘like David and Goliath’ he wondered what point they were driving at. Usually it was just ‘big guy against little guy’, which was disappointing and didn’t give him a chance to talk about how obviously every single factor of the fight favored David from the very start.

Perry had one advantage, one, and that was the nanobots worming their way into her mech. He was getting less confident in the waiting game though, and he had been seconds away from death. If the mech had fallen in such a way to block the cockpit from opening, that would have been it for him.

Still, he stood there with his sword, the giant mech looming over him.

“March, send a message as soon as we’re spotted,” said Perry. “Tell her, ‘I guess we’re doing this the hard way.’”

“Acknowledged,” said Marchand.

It took less time than Perry would have thought. There were active sensors somewhere on the mech that were giving input, even if the main ‘head’ had been severely damaged.

When she spotted him, he flew straight up, out of the way of the giant gun she was still holding, and heard his own voice going out over the radio. Marchand had taken some liberties with it, modulating it somehow, making him sound strong and confident, like he was utterly convinced of his own victory and the loss of his mech was a mere inconvenience. Or maybe, because of the second sphere, that was actually how he sounded.

She tried to aim the gun at him, but she was holding it with both hands, and whatever firing algorithm it had been using before, manually aiming was just never going to work. Still, she fired, and the noise would have deafened him if he hadn’t been wearing the power armor. The shockwave was strong enough to be visible where the plants were flattened down, and the bullet smashed into the earth, kicking up a plume of dirt.

Perry flew up into the air, following the sword, and landed on top of the mech. It was absolutely not the sort of situation that a mech was designed to deal with, especially not an elder mech, and when she tried to shake him off, he simply rose up with the sword and landed back on her again.

“March, I need her disabled, now,” said Perry.

“Disabling abdominal rotors,” said Marchand.

The mech came to a stop, standing stock still, but with the arms still moving. It was like what would happen if the spine of a human were cut, all motor function below the waist completely stopped, which meant no more bucking or spinning.

“Gotcha,” said Perry.

Unfortunately, whatever March was doing inside of the mech wasn’t enough to stop the upper body, and a hand came up to try swatting him away. Perry leapt up, pushing hard off the top of the mech. He was hoping that it would fall without the use of its legs, but it was stable, and the hand came within a foot of him, too close for comfort.

“What have you done?” came the woman’s voice.

“Disabled you,” Perry replied. “It’s only a matter of time before you’re sitting inside a statue. I’m hoping that this helps with the negotiations, now that we’ll have an extra fusion reactor.”

There was a growl from the other end of the radio, and the hand went down to the pistol. Perry thought that was frankly insane, since to shoot at him she’d need to shoot at herself. That was exactly what she did though, spraying bullets that he was only just able to dodge out of the way of. Marchand put the red line of fire up on the HUD, but it was too erratic, his own motion and her motion making it impossible to track. That also made it nearly impossible for her to actually land a shot, but he thought the caliber was high enough that it would be a serious injury if she did. All he needed to do was be a gnat and pray that nothing lined up right for her.

Perry didn’t realize it was a distraction until it was too late.

The other hand, the one that still had the long gun, swung up with all the speed and power it could muster. If Perry’s eyes had been on the picture-in-picture, or if Marchand had been in control of the sword, probably could have moved out of the way. Hell, if he’d gotten lucky, or reacted even faster, he might have been spared the worst of it.

Instead, he was hit with all the force of a truck, launched sideways, warnings popping up as Marchand registered damage to multiple systems. Perry had lost his grip on the sword, and summoned it back to his hand, but he suffered a second injury as he landed on the ground, his head slamming against the inside of the helmet, dazing him. His teeth had clacked together, hard, and he lost a small amount of time, enough that he was stunned when he woke up.

“March,” he said, tasting blood in his mouth. “Now!”

There was no response. The mech lowered the pistol, aiming squarely at him, and the sword was nowhere to be seen. He tried to scramble away, and the pistol began firing, striking him with every shot, hitting him in the torso, the legs, and once, in the head. The armor held, but every one of them felt like a body blow from a second sphere master, pain coursing through his body, metal denting, joints ripping in his arm when it was knocked backward.

The woman in the elder mech tossed the pistol to the side, then used both hands to heft the long gun that she’d used as a club. Perry was having trouble moving, either because of his battered body or malfunctions within the armor. Energy was flowing out from him, but he wasn’t fast enough to heal back from the damage that had been done, and he was bleeding internally.

As the long gun was leveled at him, the shot lined up, he played his last remaining card.

With the Wolf Vessel filled, the change was easy.

In his last battle in the Great Arc, Perry had mangled himself to prevent the wolf form from destroying Marchand from the inside. The vessels and meridians were still not back to normal, and likely never would be, but the biggest change was the relocation of the Wolf Vessel to within Marchand. Perry’s ‘vital energy’ was suffusing the power armor, and not just with electricity, but with code as well, seeping into Marchand’s functioning, repairing damage, an extension of himself. It was faster than it had been, he was pretty sure about that, and the damage from the pistol was at a high enough caliber that he’d have expected it to penetrate, not just gouge. And when he’d transformed in Heimalis City Seven, it had been slow and stunted. It had felt like something was missing, some piece of him.

None of this passed into his head as a conscious thought, not in the moment. It was only a last ditch effort.

The transformation was a fusion, flesh and metal coming together, so rapid that there wasn’t time to be horrified. The alloy became a second skin, wrapping his flesh tight, and his bones firmed up to become hard as steel. The most shocking transformation was his head, which merged straight into the helmet, HUD disappearing and replaced by raw sensation. Marchand was gone, or merged, heightening every instinct and sensation. It wasn’t that Perry could see the red line that predicated where the bullets would travel, it was that he could feel the probability, all the math and calculation that had been too complex for March to feed him through the HUD, all the microadjustments that had been done automatically now part of the way he himself moved.

He was on all fours and out of the way of the shot without even a question about whether it would hit him. As the dirt sprayed into the air, he was dashing forward, homing in on the enemy.

As the wolf, he was an animal built for killing, rending claws and razor teeth. Marchand, as much as he played the role of sardonic butler, was a machine that had been built for killing, trained and armed, diligently designed to disassemble enemies.

Now, together, they were something different and altogether more dangerous.

He leapt through the air, landing squarely on the elder mech’s chest. His teeth sunk into the metal, jaws more powerful than they had ever been before, fangs reinforced, stronger than the alloy that made up the armor even. He wrenched at the central plate, pulling hard, and with a rip and tear of plastic, wires, and hardened struts, it all came loose, exposing the woman in the cockpit.

She was a wild animal, cornered and afraid, hands off the controls, fumbling at the straps that held her in, seeking to get away, anywhere that wasn’t there with him and the ripped out hole of her armor.

It took everything in Perry not to rend her apart.

“Yiiiieeld,” he spoke, his first word as a wolf, difficult with his mouth and tongue, the sharp teeth in the way of it all.

Her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak. Her hands shook, trembling next to a buckle that refused to cooperate with her clumsy effort. Her mind, by all appearances, had gone blank before the nightmare of flesh and metal.

“Yield!” he shouted, a snarl and a howl more than a word.

She went limp inside the cockpit, head lolling back, face pallid.

Perry reached in with a foreclaw and sliced through the straps that held her. When that was done, he poked his head in and gripped her arm in his teeth, careful not to bite down too hard. She was wearing a thick jacket, which helped, and he tugged her from the elder mech, bringing her down to the ground without too much damage. She woke from the shock and started screaming at the sight of him, but when she tried to run, he bounded forward to block her escape.

The elder mech was sitting empty, looming over them both, and his own mech was ruined. They were at least fifty miles from the Natrix.

Transforming back was slow and surprisingly painful. There was a moment where Perry thought that it might fail, that his face would be stuck to the inside of the helmet and ripped away from his skull, or that he’d have rubber stuck to his legs, but after a long moment it was over.

Perry took off his helmet and stared at the woman.

“Natalka,” he said.

She could only stare at him. He’d put holes in her jacket with his fangs.

“Natalka,” he said. “That’s your name, right?”

She nodded at him.

“We have a long walk back,” said Perry. “I’m going to radio, and they’re going to come pick us up, do you understand?”

She nodded again. Her eyes were going over his armor. It had been completely repaired when it had transformed back. In fact, Perry could feel that it hadn’t just been repaired to what it had been before he’d taken a half dozen high-caliber shots, it was better. There was no drain on the Wolf Vessel anymore, and instead, a connection of energies. He would have to check when he had time, but he suspected that the microfusion reactor had been completely repaired, the component that Brigitta had put in either upgraded or wholly replaced.

“You’re a hostage now,” said Perry. “The elder mech is ours for the time being, but I’m sure Leticia will give it back to you if you don’t try to fuck with us.” He lowered his sword and pointed it at her. “I’m going to get you on the radio, and you’re going to tell them all that. I don’t know if you have a prominent voice there, but I’m hoping that you do, okay?”

She nodded again. She hadn’t said a word.

“Right,” said Perry. “I’m going to give you a few minutes to calm down. Then we’re going to wait here. You’re going to tell me everything you know about who’s really in charge of Heimalis City Seven, and then we’re going to sit down for talks. Do you understand?”

She nodded quickly, as if afraid he was going to slit her throat.

Perry walked over to the side and radioed the Natrix. They didn’t even seem surprised that he had managed to best the elder mech in single combat, and Brigitta informed him that they would send a promena out to get him with all due haste, including an armed escort.

When he was finished, he walked back over to the woman, who was sitting there in her torn coat, right where he’d left her.

“Alright,” he said. “You’re good? You’re all cooled down, ready to talk?”

“I am,” she said, letting out a breath.

“Who are you?” he asked. “Where are you from?”

“I’m Natalka,” she replied. “I’m from Heimalis City One.”

“And you’re one of the brains behind this idiotic posturing?” asked Perry.

She swallowed. “My father is.”

“And where is he?” asked Perry.

“Heimalis City One,” she replied.

Perry tightened his grip on his sword. “And where is that?”

“Far to the west,” she said. “It’s small, a hundred people, no more, and moves like the Natrix, though not as often.”

“And you’ve been fooling the people of City Seven, like Jorn, into thinking that a computer runs everything?” asked Perry.

“No,” she said. “Jorn knew. Many of them knew.” She put her head into her hands. “I’ve lost the elder mech. They’re going to flay me.”

“Literally?” asked Perry. “Because we can offer amnesty.”

“Not literally, no,” she said with a sniff. She looked up at him. “What are you?”

“Just a peace-loving guy who wants to not kill people,” said Perry. He leaned toward her. “You understand that if I had thought there was no chance at peace, I would have ended you, right? You acknowledge that there’s nothing that could possibly have stopped me?” This was not, in any real sense, true, and he was well aware of that, but he was playing the diplomacy game, and part of that wasn’t admitting how close she’d come to getting the better of him.

“I do,” she said in a soft voice. “And with the elder mech gone, you’ll bend us over your knee.”

“No,” said Perry. “That’s not how we’re doing things.”

She gave him a dark look. It was hard to judge her age, but he guessed she was only in her twenties, maybe even the same age as him. “It’s how Leticia will do things.”

“I have sway with Leticia,” said Perry. “The talks can’t continue until I come back with you. Everyone wants peace, at least in theory. Leticia hates that you’ve been stealing their children — her childhood friends, some of them — but she’s pragmatic. With the communications satellite I launched, you can be two communities under the same umbrella. We can bring everyone in.”

“There’s too much bad blood,” she said. “They hate us.”

“We’ll see,” said Perry.

He watched her closely, worried that she would make a run for it, and let her rest and recover while they waited. It was a cool and pleasant day, and they were far enough to the west that there was no real risk of the bugs. His mech was completely destroyed, and he thought there would be little to be salvaged from it, but the elder mech only had the front panel ripped off and some damage to the leg, as confirmed by Marchand.

When the promena came, it was with six mechs, Ruben’s among them. He hopped out when he pulled up to a stop, and looked first at the dormant elder mech, then at the ruined mech that had once been Perry’s.

“I don’t know how you do the things you do,” said Ruben.

“It’s magic,” said Perry.

Ruben’s eyes kept going to the elder mech. “It’s going to be a lot of work to drag that home. I’m not sure how we’re going to manage.”

“Oh,” said Perry. He stretched out. “Well you don’t need to worry about that, I was going to handle it myself.”

He stretched a hand out toward the elder mech, and after a moment of groaning metal and whirring servos, it began to walk on its own.

Ruben stared mutely at it, then looked at Perry. “Well now you’re just showing off.”

They marched back toward the Natrix, and Perry was satisfied that peace was on the horizon.

There was only a question of when and where the other thresholder was going to show up.