Thresholder

Perry brought the mech into the bay of the Crypt, having limped it over. It would need repair, and they were the ones to do it, though he had to imagine that it wasn’t going to be remotely relevant in this fight. As he’d made the trip, he’d been working on his own repairs of the power armor, which was largely done through venting copious amounts of energy into the damaged shell. It was astounding how much of a beating he’d taken in a few short minutes, and much of the worst damage had been from Jeff doing nothing more than squeezing Perry around the waist. Whatever combination of powers the enemy thresholder was working with, it had resulted in immense strength and durability.

If the reports from the Natrix had been of an attack, Perry would have abandoned the mech and flown straight up into the air to reach it. Instead, the report was that Jeff had simply shown up with a wave and a smile, glowing golden and floating outside their moving city, asking if they’d had dinner yet.

There was, long ago, a stipulation to all of Perry’s help and information: that they help him in return when the enemy came.

Leticia and Mette were the two remaining heads of the Natrix. They hadn’t had any communication with Perry, except to tell him that the arrival of an enemy thresholder had been detected by their dish in accordance with the approach that Richter had outlined. They had not a single clue what form the enemy thresholder might take or how they would present, and there had been not a word whether the dish’s detection might have been a false alarm.

They would have been well within their rights to simply say that they didn’t know for certain whether this was Perry’s enemy. The way that Perry had laid out the rules, it was entirely possible, absent other information, that Jeff was a companion, a partner sent to team up against some enormously powerful third entity.

On pragmatic grounds, there was an argument that any deal with Perry should be ignored entirely. Perry had given them everything he had to give, and while they owed him, it wouldn’t have been the first time that the leaders of the Natrix had reneged on a deal. That was what had started the entire short-lived war between colonies, though that was more defensible, a result of regime change and sharp ideological differences. Perry had always known that their assurance was shaky, and he would have been put out, but would also have considered it well within their rights. They wanted what was best for their colony, not what was best for him.

From the very moment that Perry had met the other thresholder, he’d had doubts that the Natrix would have his back.

When Jeff had shown up asking for dinner, they had opened fire with everything they had.

After Perry had first come to the planet, he’d been able to dodge Brigitta’s gunfire because her systems weren’t calibrated for fighting against a fast-moving person-sized enemy. All of the algorithms had been hand-built with painstaking care to identify certain features of the bugs, and mowing down humans had been, if not unthinkable, then at least not a consideration for that generation of onboard systems.

Perry had been with the Natrix for two years, and the defensive systems had been one of his major concerns. He’d considered the enemy thresholder an inevitability, and had done everything in his power to ensure that if someone showed up, the city would have a way to handle a wide range of contingencies. The Natrix had been implanted with a second version of Marchand, and both Marchands had significant time and energy put into dealing with cases at the fringe of what might be possible with powers across the many worlds.

Jeff was fast, and he was strong, but he had set himself up poorly. Whatever it was he knew, he didn’t seem to have expected that their very first move would be to shoot him with their biggest guns.

Perry was in space when they transmitted the video. It was terrible quality, low framerate, transmitted over their lousy satellites. There were six frames in question, transmitted from Esper to Marchand, and cleaned up using AI enhancement techniques that Perry did not trust in the slightest given that magic was involved.

One moment Jeff was hovering there, looking quite pleased with himself, smiling like he was fucking Superman come to save the day. The next moment, a single frame, the longest of the guns had fired. The very thick bullet had struck Jeff directly in the chest, his right pectoral. He’d been blown apart, leaving a gaping hole on the right side, ribs spread out like fingers.

He had tumbled, awkwardly, for three frames, pink mist and ropes of red blood, a shocked expression visible for only one of those frames. He was more intact than he should have been following a hit like that. He should have been vaporized, the waves of force ripping his body apart into wet chunks. He was still together.

In the last frame, he was halfway gone, and behind him were what looked like shelves. With the enhancement, that got almost entirely erased, since March seemed incapable of seeing the pixels as anything other than an artifact.

“He’s not dead,” said Perry.

March was silent. They were moving straight up, above the cold and ice, trying to get high enough up to be out of the atmosphere. The insulation had been stripped away from the armor, leaving it sleek and shiny. March was no longer complaining about the damage, because almost all of it was fixed. Perry was pretty sure that he should have set the ribs that had been broken, but he was a short transformation into the mechawolf away from whatever was happening internally getting cured. There was also probably some internal bleeding and clotting, something not right internally, but it wasn’t going to kill him, and venting energy would eventually cure anything minor.

“How do we kill him?” asked Perry.

“I don’t know, sir,” said Marchand. “You don’t normally ask me for that sort of advice.”

“No,” said Perry. “There’s a lot of magic. I don’t suppose you can … run analysis?”

“Of what sort, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Hypotheticals, counterfactuals,” said Perry. “Get a measure of how much force we were applying when I stabbed him through the back, make some guess about the density or the material properties of whatever he has instead of flesh and bone.” Perry was pretty sure that it was flesh and bone, but Marchand worked better in other genres. “Give me some approximation of his speed, my speed, what it’s going to take to put him down. Assume that anything you see is extremely advanced technology, not a glitch.”

“Very well, sir,” said Marchand. “Allow me to run an analysis.”

“Send a message to Mette and Leticia, tell them that he’s not dead and he’s going to come back,” said Perry. “It might take him a minute, it might take him a week, but I imagine he’s going to be pissed off about having been blown up. I’d be in a murderous rage. And tell them thank you.”

“I’ll relay that at once,” said Marchand.

Fifteen minutes later, Perry was talking with Mette. His flight was going to take too much time. He wanted to be there already, but Jeff had the power of mobility, and Perry couldn’t chase him fast enough. If they got into a game of chasing, Jeff would win, assuming that he wasn’t just taking a long time to die in a pocket dimension somewhere. Perry would gladly have taken any portal that appeared in front of him, because it would mean that the Natrix and the Crypt were both safe.

“We can shoot him again,” said Mette. “He came in fast, so fast he didn’t register. It’s going to be hard to hit him if he’s zipping around at top speed. Not impossible, but it would take Esper aiming.” She took a breath. “If he gets inside, which would be trivial for him, we have nothing that can stop him.”

“I know,” said Perry. “I know the defenses backward and forward.”

“We’ll put up what resistance we can, but if it comes down to it …” she trailed off.

“Capitulate,” said Perry. “Bow down to him, give him what he wants. Put him in the penthouse, give him your best food, entertain him, find a woman who can stand him. But he can look into your mind, or something like that, so you have to mean it. Be careful how and where you plot.”

“We could try poison,” said Mette. “It’s what we were going to try with you, if you became a problem.”

“You could try it,” said Perry, electing to ignore her confession. He’d already heard it from Brigitta. “I would prefer that you stay safe. Right now, the best way to do that will be to give him the experiences he’s after. That’s not workable in the long term, I don’t think, and he’s liable to think that you’re valuable to me, and —”

“And it would be better if we hadn’t blown a hole in him,” said Mette. “How screwed are we?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “I don’t think he can punch through metal, not easily, not if it’s thick.” He’d replayed footage of Jeff going after the mech’s leg a few times. It had been a punch at full power, it seemed like, and it had done severe damage, yes, but it hadn’t obliterated it. “I’m more worried that he’s going to be able to see through any plans we couple make.”

“We’ll keep you posted,” said Mette. “When we took the shot, not everyone was inside, we’ll be on lockdown, doors closed.”

“Stay safe,” said Perry. “I’m on my way, it’ll be hours though.”

“Shit, he’s back,” said Mette.

“Mette?” asked Perry. There was silence from the other end. “March, patch in to your counterpart.”

“We have been maintaining a constant link,” said Marchand. “Video is spotty, attempting a reconstruction now.”

The image switched over to what was at least partially Marchand’s own invention, a shot of Jeff walking down the hallway. He looked the same as ever, the gray pants — sweatpants, almost — and the curly hair, but there was a pulsing red pucker of a wound on his right pectoral, the size of a dinner plate, angry and wet. It was what remained of the hit he’d taken, the broken ribs and missing meat all knit back together. There was a mirror of it on his back, since the round had gone through. He had a hitch in his breath, and was walking with a bit of awkwardness, but there was still a smile on his face.

The hallways were deserted. The command center of the ship, at the head, was barricaded. A half dozen men with guns were behind the barricade, and their weapons ranged from sidearms to elephant guns. They didn’t even have a chance to fire, because Jeff swept in like a hurricane, throwing a cannonball down the hallway like he was bowling. The barricade exploded, and then he was in through, glowing gold, wrenching weapons from the hands of those who held them, pushing the huge guns up to fire into the ceiling rather than his face. It was almost artful, and over in seconds. No one had landed a single hit.

Perry was surprised that Jeff didn’t kill those men, only disabled them, snapping or bending their weapons apart.

When Jeff came to the door of the secure room where the leadership of the Natrix was protected, he pounded on it as loud as he could.

“Alright!” he shouted. “You shot me! Fair play! Definitely should have seen that coming, but in my defense, most people aren’t so trigger-happy. So here’s what we’re going to do: I’m going to be your guest here for a week or two. You’re going to supply me with food, drink, and women. Not trembling virgins who are coming to me out of a sense of obligation, I hate that, it’s never fun, get me the ones who are eager for it. I know you have those here.” He waited for a moment. “I’m immune to poison, immune to disease, and I don’t sleep, so don’t try anything. All that shit in the halls? I could survive any of it and all it would do is make me angry. So you have about ten seconds to open this door, or I’m going to start murdering people all over this ship. It starts with those men who are nursing broken bones, but I’ve got zero problems with killing women and children, none whatsoever.”

He didn’t even have to start a countdown: the door opened up shortly after he was done speaking.

On the other side were Leticia, Mette, and most of their staff, two dozen all told, some of them at their seats with interfaces in front of them, but most of them standing given the lack of room. The whole place had been reconfigured to provide a defensive core in the heart of the moving city, something that had been Perry’s suggestion, largely based on the secure doors that airplanes had on the cockpit.

“Greetings,” said Leticia. She had her hands folded, to keep them from shaking. “I would offer our apologies for trying to kill you, but I think you know that would be hollow.”

“Leticia,” he said. He was looking her over, eyes moving from head to toe. “For what it’s worth, this isn’t how I like to do things.” He cracked his neck to the side, taking his time. “I like to party, and it’s hard to party when people think you’re going to kill them. It all goes smoother when I’m a mysterious man from another world, one with incredible powers, great stories, and money to spend. But Perry told you about me, so that’s out the window.” He flexed his muscles. There was blood on his knuckles, not his own. “I’m going up to the penthouse. Send your best food, your best drink, and your best woman.”

“Of course,” said Leticia. “All we want is for the Natrix to get through this.”

“Nah,” said Jeff. “You’re on his side. He’s on his way here, I would guess, if you have some way to call him up. Tell him he’s got to give me two weeks here, or I’m going to focus my efforts on dismantling this place.” He stared at Leticia. “You think that will work, right? That he’ll stay away?”

“I don’t know,” said Leticia. “I would hope so, but Perry’s war across the worlds has always been opaque to us. It might be that he attempts something even with that threat hanging over our heads. Would you give us a moment to call him?”

“I’m not a bad guy,” said Jeff. “Really, I’m not. I would be fine walking away from this place with everything perfectly intact. I haven’t even killed anyone yet.” He gestured at the giant red wound on his chest. “This’ll take a week to fully heal, maybe more, but I got cocky, it’s on me.” He smiled at her. “You make your call, let him know the score, you know where I’ll be.” He turned to go, then looked back over his shoulder at her. “You know, I could have gotten through that door. I didn’t need you to open it. But if I used that much power, I wasn’t sure there’d be anyone alive on the other side when it was down.”

He walked away, whistling to himself. Leticia was grimacing, which might have been an invention of Marchand’s given the lack of camera coverage.

“I’m pretty sure Perry heard all that,” said Mette. “He already said to give the man what he wants.”

“He understood this man,” said Leticia. “It’s the only reason I opened the door.”

“Perry?” asked Mette.

“I’m here,” said Perry. He took a deep breath. “I lost the first match and I’m going to try not to lose the second. I want it far, far away from there though. Having the long guns on my side would be great, but it’s not worth the risk. That said, I don’t know him well enough to know whether he’d kill everyone aboard the Natrix just for kicks once he’s had his fill of … everything.” He frowned. Giving the enemy food, drink, and entertainment was one thing, but giving him women was disgusting.

“If we evacuate part of the ship for your arrival, and you take the fight to him there, would that work?” asked Mette. “The upper part of the Natrix, by the luxury rooms, is largely cosmetic so long as you don’t damage the guns. We could give you an opening, then you take the fight outside.”

“We’ll honor the terms,” said Leticia. “It’s the best chance. Perry, you prepare the grounds for a fight, negotiate with him from a distance.”

“I’m not giving him women,” said Mette.

“What about volunteers?” asked Leticia.

“Who would volunteer?” asked Mette.

“I would,” said Leticia. She had been waiting for the question and ready to pounce on it.

“Ah,” said Mette. She had a pronounced frown, again, possibly Marchand’s invention.

“It’s going to take me time to get there,” said Perry, reconsidering. “You just need to stall.”

“No,” said Leticia. “We keep him calm. We talk to him, see what he reveals. He’ll know that’s what we’re doing, but he seems to like talking.” She was set and firm, voice level and steady. “Perry, figure out how you’re going to end this without any blood spilled but yours and his. Negotiate a time and place, if that will work for him. My duty is to the Natrix and its people, and after all the time you’ve spent with us, I hope you feel the same.”

“I do,” said Perry. “I’ll be nearby. Let me know if you have any clever ideas.”

“Before I speak them, or even think them, I want to know where his information comes from,” said Leticia. “I’ll do what I can.”

Marchand shut down the connection, or at least cut the audio to Perry’s helmet, and Perry continued sailing straight up, following the sword.

“Shit,” said Perry. That seemed like all there was to say.

“Sir, you had inquired as to whether I had any ideas?” asked Marchand.

“Yes, go ahead,” said Perry. “Right now it feels like we’re screwed.”

“We could likely kill him now,” said Marchand. “I have control of the fusion reactors of the Natrix, and it would take relatively little work to —”

“No,” said Perry. “I’m not going to do that.”

“Because of the casualties, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Yes, because of the fucking casualties,” said Perry. “I’m not killing nine thousand people to get him.”

“I had thought not, sir, I only wanted to bring it to your attention and not left unconsidered,” said Marchand.

“Have you finished the analysis?” asked Perry. “What’s it going to take to kill him?”

“It’s unclear at the moment, sir,” said Marchand. “Given the physical properties his flesh or pseudo-flesh has exhibited, the unexplained speed and power, and particularly his ability to reform, regenerate, or repair from the queen-killer round, I believe high-caliber weapons used at close range will be one of the only realistic options. I do believe that you could likely kill him using the sword, as you seem to prefer, but only if you had significant leverage and were able to trap him or catch him unawares.”

“Unlikely, if he’s telling the truth about not sleeping,” said Perry. “You can move some nanites into the room he’s in, get eyes on him, record whatever he has to say?”

“I have already done so, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry let out a breath. He was still stinging from the loss. It wasn’t just that Jeff was strong and fast, though he was, or that he had some unexplained power to look into minds or know things that he shouldn’t. All that would have been bad enough. No, the big problem was that Jeff could fly faster than Perry, which meant that any fight Perry was winning could potentially end with Jeff flying away at a hundred miles an hour, going somewhere to recuperate, which was clearly something that he could do. And if that weren’t thorny enough, he had some kind of extradimensional space, not just somewhere that he could pull weapons from, but a place he could retreat to if need be.

There wasn’t a clear way to win.

Explosives seemed like his best bet, but if Perry tried to pick the time and place, it would be obvious that he was laying a trap even before Jeff used his mysterious power to look into minds or read the past or use some other bullshit. There were all kinds of possibilities, given what Perry knew of the breadth of rules. It could be truth-telling magic or remote brain scanning. He couldn’t even rule out time travel, which really felt like the sort of thing he should be able to rule out.

“We have one single advantage,” said Perry.

“Yes, sir?” asked Marchand.

“He wants to sit back and relax,” said Perry. “He’s giving us time. He doesn’t want to immediately kill anyone, but he does like to fight, so … I don’t know. That’s something. We’ve had two years to prepare, but now we know the enemy.”

“It does seem an advantage, sir, to understand who and what you’re fighting,” said Marchand. Perry couldn’t tell whether he was being diplomatic or not.

“Can you plant the nanites on him?” asked Perry. “Get one of the tiny little spiders to hitch a ride? If we can see where he’s going when he uses the extradimensional space, maybe we can learn how to defeat it.”

“I am unclear on what you mean by extradimensional space, sir,” said Marchand. “It seems quite fanciful to me. But I did manage to place several nanites on him, small enough to be invisible to all but the deepest scrutiny.”

“Did you?” asked Perry. “When?”

“During the fight, when he was gripping us tightly about the waist,” said Marchand. “It seemed prudent, but no particularly good data has come from it, and it won’t be possible to track his location outside the Natrix given the nanites, at that scale, are only capable of weak radio signal.”

“When he disappeared though,” said Perry. “When he was shot. You have data from that time, right?”

“I’m afraid there’s an error, sir,” said Marchand. “As you had previously requested, all errors are silently logged. I can show you the relevant entry, if you would like.”

“Nevermind that,” said Perry. “What did they see?”

“The nanites have difficulty with proper vision as you would understand it,” said Marchand. “As I’ve explained before, lens are —”

“I’m using ‘see’ in a colloquial sense,” replied Perry. He tried to keep from gritting his teeth. “What’s your reconstruction like?”

“Anything that I offered you visually would be woefully misleading,” said Marchand. “However, if I take the data at face value — which I assure you, I do not — it appears that ‘Jeff’ collapsed on a floor, bleeding heavily from his wounds, used his left arm to lever himself across the floor, cried out in pain, pushed himself up onto one of the shelves, and poured some sort of liquid onto himself, which sizzled and foamed. However, none of this matches the data as seen from the cameras of the Natrix, and it’s more likely that he fell into a blind spot. That leaves the question of a temporal discontinuity, and —”

“Back up,” said Perry. “It sizzled and foamed, then what?”

“Unclear,” said Marchand.

“I assume that it was healing of some kind,” said Perry. “Which would be great news, because it means that he can’t just heal back from something like that naturally.”

“Sir, there is no liquid that could heal a wound of that size and severity,” said Marchand.

“And temporal discontinuity,” said Perry. “Talk to me about that.”

“He hit the ground shortly after he was shot,” said Marchand. “But this doesn’t line up with the only places he could possibly have landed.”

“But the timelines match up, right?” asked Perry. “The data from the nanites covers the same timeframe as your data from the Natrix?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

“So it’s a spatial discontinuity,” said Perry. “Not a temporal one.”

“I suppose that might be correct sir, but I fail to see how one can have a spatial discontinuity,” said Marchand.

“Nevermind, don’t worry about it,” said Perry. “So he nearly died, warped himself into some kind of personal subspace, healed himself with a flask of mystery liquid, then … what?”

“He laughed, sir,” said Marchand.

“Laughed?” asked Perry. “Like … hee hee ha ha?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “I believe he found the whole situation quite droll once he was past the point of almost dying. It’s difficult to say, sir. So far as I can tell, he spent the remainder of his time moving or touching various things, though the recuperation took quite a bit, and he was moving oddly until just before he reappeared and made his way through the Natrix.”

“Do you know if it was the same position?” asked Perry. “From the exterior cameras, did he reappear at the same location, up in the air?”

“I’m looking through the records now, sir,” said Marchand. “It does appear that there was a flash of light at that same location just prior to ‘Jeff’ landing upon the Natrix. The exterior cameras are not as numerous as we might like them to be.” He showed a single frame, which was just a smear of light on the same part of the Natrix. The enhancements corrected it to mere glare.

“So if he disappears, he reappears in the same place,” said Perry. “That’s good.”

“Is it, sir?” asked Marchand.

“It puts a barrier on the power,” said Perry. “It means that if he tried that shit again, if he turtles up, we can camp him, put a bomb in place that’s triggered by him coming out.”

“Does that not leave the question of how to get him badly injured in the first place?” asked Marchand.

“It does,” said Perry.

They had finally reached space, or at least the region where the air was thin enough not to create drag. It was just a matter of finding a heading and hitting the gas, then slowing down and dropping down into the atmosphere. Dropping down was far, far faster, and he could be at the Natrix in not very much time at all.

But Perry’s read on Jeff was that if Jeff wanted to kill everyone aboard the moving city, he’d have already begun that work. Showing up would mean a series of threats and a tense negotiation between the two of them. There was no point in doing that, not when they could communicate with each other from a distance.

There was a clock, but so far as Perry had a read on Jeff, the clock was currently in Perry’s favor. It was a bad clock, an erratic one, and doomsday was approaching, but if Jeff was the type of guy to laugh about nearly getting killed, then maybe he was also the type of guy who would brag about his accomplishments, his powers, and the secret to defeating him. He seemed like a talker. He had given Perry a shit-eating grin when he revealed that he knew Perry’s name. Other things would slip out, deliberately or otherwise.

That was what Perry was hoping, anyway.

The clock was going to hit midnight once Jeff got bored of the Natrix. In the meantime, Perry was better off waiting. His eyes went over the horizon as he let himself fly through the vacuum. Waiting was the wrong word for it. Perry wouldn’t be waiting, he would be plotting and planning.

He had until the adversary grew bored to close the power gap between the two of them.