Thresholder

Space was a terrible place to be, which meant that it was a terrible place to have a fight.

Perry couldn’t survive in space for very long without the suit. Cold and heat were both issues that needed to be dealt with in separate ways, and during multiple satellite launches, he had tried to get in as much practice as possible, including on the ground. He could deal with punctures, mostly by venting energy to the affected area and ‘healing’ the armor, and mostly be fine inside. The second sphere's ability to have clothing stay perfect had been a godsend, something that he didn’t think he could now live without, and his ability to wield it had gotten much better, the energy he was spending being more correctly targeted.

Still, space was brutal, his only form of movement was the sword, the ring would only help him to hide away, not to actually win. He had done progressive tests to see whether it could survive being opened in the vacuum of space, and it seemed as though the interior was separate, a divided reality that didn’t allow airflow.

There was little doubt that space favored Jeff. There was one exception to that, which was the presence of the moon, and for that reason, Perry had waited as long as he could to go up, allowing the larger of Esperide’s two small moons to get in a slightly better position. Being able to draw on moonlight wouldn’t make up for the lack of energy now that he was up off the planet’s surface, but Perry had drunk his fill of the planet’s energy, as much as he possibly could, letting it flow into his vessels and be stored there.

He found himself wishing that he’d had another year on the planet to train.

He was fifty miles out from the space station when Jeff came on over the radio, after being prompted by a ping from Marchand.

“You know, I wasn’t sure you’d come,” said Jeff. He was just a voice in the black. “It was a test, a way of seeing whether or not you’re really the person I thought you were. It turns out you are.”

“What kind of person is that?” asked Perry. He was scanning the black space, looking for something that blotted out a star or two, but there was nothing.

“The kind that sees the threat of being forced to stay on a world as one of the worst fates possible,” said Jeff. “I wanted to see whether you’d come, knowing that I was going to just let you die down there. You could have made a life, you know?”

“No,” said Perry. “There was too much uncertainty, like whether or not I should believe you, which I shouldn’t. You even said you might get bored and come back.”

“Yeah,” said Jeff. “But that’s not why you came. You like moving between worlds. It feels good.” There was something off about his voice, his breathing. “The fighting too, you love it.”

“I do,” said Perry. He could see the space station, but only because it was massive, and it was just a small speck. Following Marchand’s instructions, he’d matched velocity with it, but he was still a long way away. The sword moved slowly, and was only fast when it had a chance to build on its own speed. It wasn’t going to be useless, not in the least, but it wasn’t going to allow fast strikes. “I can admit that. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why I’m not quite satisfied with this place as my home. I was here two years, you saw that. I had thought maybe the time of portals was over. I grappled with the question.” He didn’t need to justify himself, not to Jeff, but he’d been dreading having a similar conversation to this with Brigitta.

“We come from similar worlds,” said Jeff. “My world had legates, people of enormous power you couldn’t possibly stand against, unassailable titans whose shadow I could only ever hope to live in. For you, it was the same, but the titans were just normal people.”

“I don’t really think our worlds were anything alike,” said Perry. “In ours, there was hope.”

“Perry, I’ve sat in on the conversations you had before you stepped through the portal,” said Jeff. “I watched the things you typed on your screen. Why lie? You hated Earth. You spent half of every day arguing with people. It’s not like I could see your thoughts, but you weren’t shy about spewing out everything in your head. Perry, I could watch your face, I could see the way you reacted to it all. Why lie to me?”

“I’m not lying,” said Perry. He grit his teeth. “There was hope.”

“Well, if there was, you weren’t feeling it,” said Jeff. “Come on, I can see every moment, watch you, figure you out. I have you pegged. And I’m telling you, I felt the same way. We’re the same. You’re just a pussy bitch version of me.”

“I’m going to end you,” said Perry. Nevermind that he couldn’t see him.

“You said you were going to spare me, let me limp through the portal,” said Jeff with a laugh that came through the radio oddly. “But I know you don’t have that in your soul. Hey, I’ve never been the sort to spare anyone when they’re well and truly beaten. It seems like a good way to make a nemesis, if you ask me. I always worry that some unfinished business from another world is going to follow me through a portal, but that’s just because I have a good appreciation of the dramatic.”

Perry stayed silent, thin-lipped and angry. Did Jeff know? It wasn’t clear just from that.

“You know, I watched you wilt over those two years you spent here,” said Jeff. “You had this great big battle, a glorious battle, tensions coming to a head, you pulled out the stops, people thought you were a god … and then nothing. You were venerated, appreciated, but what did you have? Marchand was doing most of the work. Each satellite launch was less impressive than the one that came before it, with shorter speeches and more anemic feasts until it was just a little cheer for you at mess time. You brought books for these people, and they used those books, but it was so distant, so unconnected.” There was an unfriendly smile in his voice. “And you had to pretend that you were happy. You know, when I see into the past, I can see everything, even when you’re sleeping. So I could see Brigitta staring at you while you slept, wondering whether there was something that she could do, some way that she could make you stay, or make you happy.”

“Fuck off,” said Perry.

“Would you like me to engage autoresponse, sir?” asked Marchand.

“No,” said Perry. “It’s too important, I’ll listen to his shit.”

“Same with that girlfriend you had on Earth,” said Jeff. “It was a few months before you left, I was trying to search for all the times you banged someone, but with her — didn’t get her name — there was that same look on her face, this painfully sad little look like, ‘can I do something for this guy?’”

“Her name was Rachel,” said Perry. He hadn’t thought of her in months. They had dated for maybe a year, and it had started to feel like they would or should get married, which was when he’d broken it off.

“Well, what Rachel didn’t know is that the only thing that would make you happy is to have some importance, some agency. What you needed was to become this fabulous monster traveling from world to world, cleaving through orcs and crushing the skulls of vampires. And if she had known that was what it would take to make you whole, she probably would have despised you.”

“I found happiness here,” said Perry. “I can find happiness in most places, I don’t need to go between the worlds.”

“Nah,” said Jeff. “You wouldn’t need this specifically. There are lots of places where you might find satisfaction, places where you could feel special and powerful, like you were cock of the walk instead of a limp-wristed academic. You could have been happy as a professional athlete, except you never had the body for it, and didn’t have the drive necessary to be great at anything.”

“From everything you said, you were exactly the same,” said Perry. “Only worse, because you didn’t care about a goddamned thing.”

“I cared about myself,” said Jeff. “At least I was honest about it. I gambled and whored and stole what I could, hoisted myself up while knowing that the top was out of reach, but at least I didn’t pretend that I was content, not like you did — like you do. Ah, I see you now, let me figure out what you’ve been up to. Get the tooth ready, but don’t toss it my way until I tell you to. We wouldn’t want to lose it in the vastness of space, would we?”

Perry stayed on course, altering the trajectory and acceleration as Marchand was telling him to. The sword was pulling them backward, slowing them down. While they were within visual range of the space station, it was far away, and the radiation readings were within levels that were only alarming on the scale of years. It could probably be counteracted by second sphere fitness and healing, or possibly the regeneration that came with mechawolf form.

“All this talking to scrub through,” said Jeff. “And your own particular countermeasures, which makes it all annoying. But I’m looking at you now, and — oh shit, you have the ring. Well, I’ll be wanting that back. Oh, and you found the woman I was keeping in there.”

“I did,” said Perry. He wondered whether Jeff would reveal anything.

“And let her out, I see,” said Jeff with a laugh. Again, the laugh wasn’t translating quite right, an artifact of the fact that Jeff’s microphone was pressed against his throat, no air actually involved, whatever was happening with his vocal cords being picked up and then run through Marchand’s processes to become a voice again. It was extremely impressive that Marchand was able to do it at all, given that the movements of the lips and tongue wouldn’t be changing much of the internal acoustics.

“I know she’s Marjut,” said Perry. “I’m going to go deal with her after I deal with you.”

“Are you now?” asked Jeff. “Interesting, interesting. I guess there’s something to be learned about the portals here. What did she tell you she was?”

“She said she was a ballerina who came up to your hotel room and got kidnapped,” said Perry.

“Hah!” said Jeff. “She must have read about that in the papers. Minus the kidnapping, that was her own invention. I think she might have been a ballerina though, in a past life. She told me that same story. Of course, it’s been a long time since then. You can tell by looking at her feet. The gross feet are the worst part of sleeping with a ballerina. Consider that a warning, friend to friend.”

“Are we doing this or not?” asked Perry. “I have the tooth ready for you, it’s in a container.”

“I’m still looking,” said Jeff. “I’ll need that ring back too, just so you know.”

“Or what?” asked Perry.

“Or I fly away,” said Jeff. “And curse you to live on that underwhelming planet for the rest of your life.” There was something sneering in the way he said it.

“You understand that I’m probably going to live three hundred years, right?” asked Perry.

“Yeah, and I know you don’t want to spend it here,” said Jeff. “Maybe you can go down and kill Marjut. I don’t really know if that’ll open a portal for you or not. I guess if you leave, I have to go down and start killing so you don’t leave without me. Huh, that would be interesting.”

“You think I want to go, but you also think I care about these people,” said Perry. “If I’m as much of a rat bastard as you think, surely I’d be fine leaving these people to die.”

“No, don’t try to pull that. You’re not going to run, and you can’t provoke a fight by pretending you would. I don’t believe it,” said Jeff. “You’ve deluded yourself into thinking that you’re a good person, and hell, maybe you are by some standards. You want to save the girls, get hailed as a hero, pat yourself on the back for even the slightest bit of decency. There was something you hated when you came here, but I don’t quite know what it was yet. Doesn’t seem like it bothers you now. I think you’d mold yourself to any people you found yourself with, given enough time. Me, I do the same, but not on the inside. Tell me, what was it that you found so off-putting? Something to do with the little girl, Liv.”

It was the child labor, that was what he found off-putting. As soon as Jeff brought it up, Perry remembered. He didn’t even really think about the fact that there were children working on the Natrix anymore. Some of them were in dangerous jobs, others simply deprived of a childhood and forced to take on roles that strained their small bodies. There was nothing like the factory cruelty that marked the early 20th century, but it was still something he’d balked at and slowly, silently accepted as time went on.

“New deal,” said Perry. “You want my tooth, you can take it from my cold dead body. Same goes for the ring.”

“Aw, have I pissed you off?” asked Jeff. “Shame. But I’m a man of my word, so I’m going to go fuck off into space for the next hundred years and outlive you. Not how I’d have preferred it to go, but I’m already feeling better, and if I don’t get the full heal, I’ll survive.”

“Bullshit,” said Perry. “Let me see you.”

“You can’t already?” asked Jeff. He laughed again, a coldly mechanical laugh. “I can see you, armored up, shining to perfection, holding that sword like you’ve got a bead on my heart. Send the tooth now, in its little package, and the ring too, since you have it.”

“Do you know what happens if I go down there and kill Marjut?” asked Perry. “Do you know that a portal doesn’t open? Because if it does, then I leave and strand you here.”

“Ha!” said Jeff. “I must say I find that compelling … but I don’t think that you do. Think about what me being stranded here means. You wouldn’t leave this world at my mercy, not with your almost-wife here, not with the friends you claim to care about. I’d rip them apart out of spite, then make them serve me in a much less gentle way than I’ve made them serve me so far.”

“I’ve spotted him, sir,” said Marchand. The HUD magnified a portion of the view, leaving the rest of space as just a border. The image was quickly cleaned up by Marchand, showing Jeff floating with a golden glow around him, lighting him.

He was grotesque. His hair hadn’t grown back out, and his scalp was black and red. His eyes were a solid gray, no pupil to be seen. His muscular body was still as large as ever, but it was warped and changed, huge growths and tumors visible beneath his skin, not that the skin itself was in good condition. Parts of it had rubbed off and not been regenerated, and looked shiny and red under the glow that Jeff was giving off. Radiation had interacted poorly with whatever healing powers Jeff had available to him, and his face was sunken, sagging like he’d aged a few decades since they’d last met. His smile was still there though, a grin visible beneath the drooping face.

“Ah, you see me,” said Jeff. “Admiring your handiwork?”

“You were supposed to die,” said Perry. “I didn’t intend … this. You can tell I’m looking at you?”

“Oh yeah,” said Jeff. “I’m a hard man to sneak up on. So you’re going for the whole ‘over my dead body’ thing, huh? Won’t even send over the goodies you brought for me? Forcing me to make a stand? Is that how we’re doing this?” Perry could see now the awkward way that the microphone was pressed against his throat. The audio quality had taken a dramatic jump when Jeff had come into view, and it took Perry a bit to realize why: Marchand was reading his lips.

“I guess I’m calling your bluff, yeah,” said Perry. “You want the tooth, you want the ring, you can come get them from me. No tricks.”

“It wasn’t a bluff,” said Jeff. “I thought for sure the ring was gone forever, or that it would get shat out into some septic tank. It took a lot of painful work to get it wrapped around my knuckle like that. It was well-hidden. I guess you’re the first to know, since I usually don’t tell that part of the story, not unless I’m about to kill someone. Changing your opinion on what’s to be done based on learning something new? That’s just sensible, that doesn’t mean what I said was a bluff.” It seemed to annoy him.

“You’re faster than me in space,” said Perry. “You have the maneuverability. Come at me, bro.”

“One more thing,” said Jeff. “Marjut? She’s crazier than a madhouse rat. If you do kill me, if the portal opens, you’re abandoning that planet to her, and she’s going to wipe them out. I don’t know if she can remake the plague she made last world, but she’ll figure something out. I haven’t had the time to look through everything she might have told you, haven’t sniffed out all the ways you have of talking without talking, but if you’re trusting her a single inch —”

“I’m not,” said Perry.

“She’s tougher than she looks,” said Jeff. “That’s all I’m saying. If you wanted, I’d make a deal with you. You give me that tooth, we go fight her together. I barely made it out of my last fight with her, and that was with me having peeped at what she was planning.”

“Do you hear that?” asked Perry.

“What?” asked Jeff.

“That’s your desperation talking,” said Perry. “I see you covered in tumors, skin sloughed off, and maybe you’re right that you feel better than you did yesterday. But I know that radiation is supposed to be a slow death of illness, and I think you’ve heard enough from me to know that I’m not bullshitting you.”

“You don’t know me,” said Jeff. “I’ve got power. I can survive things you can’t even dream of.”

“Try me,” said Perry.

Jeff laughed and tossed the radio to the side, then immediately transformed into a dragon and came at Perry.

Perry held his sword in front of him, waiting for the charge, and he kept waiting for what felt like a very long time, because the distance between them was so great. Unmagnified, the acceleration seemed small, right up until the point when the dragon finally arrived, mouth open only just wide enough to grab some small part, small snapping motions that must have been meant to keep Perry from slipping down the throat like last time.

Perry was barreled into, the teeth clinking against metal and not finding purchase, pushed backward by the dragon’s horrifying face and snapped at again. He tumbled through space, righted only by the movement of the sword, and held himself in place, ready to angle in for another attack. He needed the maneuverability that the human form brought him, but his best option for the fight was to bring his sword up and deliver a blow at Jeff as he made the approach. Deprived of his cache, Jeff should only have close range weapons, which was the only reason that Perry had any chance. Still, it was reactive, which Perry didn’t like.

The dragon swam through space, a sinuous motion that shouldn’t have done jack squat given the total vacuum. It came at Perry a second time, and he positioned himself to have the sword out in front. The sword had cut the dragon before, it was just a matter of making a single decisive strike against it, something that it couldn’t just fly away from. The scales no longer covered everything, a translation of the wounds that Jeff’s human body had suffered.

When the dragon came in, moving swiftly, Perry was ready for it. He couldn’t move very fast, so he did the next best thing and threw the sword directly at the dragon’s face, calling it back to him as soon as it had landed a hit. He was again smashed by the snout, and felt teeth graze his leg, which came with a warning from Marchand and a sharp pain, but he was soon tumbling through space again, sword back in his hand.

It was hard to tell whether the dragon was dumber than Jeff was, or whether Jeff was just out of options. They were both adapting to the conditions of the fight, but the options were so limited that it was only a matter of time and who could land what blows. Perry was worried about losing his sword somehow — throwing it felt stupid as soon as he’d done it the first time and found himself totally without control of his position — and about being coiled and crushed, and about those teeth coming down on him. He had the ring, and could open up the space, which offered both a retreat and a handful of tools, but this was a dragon, and the way he’d won last time wasn’t going to work a second time, not when Jeff wasn’t opening his mouth all the way. If they’d been on the ground, Perry might have been able to push off and use the weight of his body to smash teeth, getting into the vulnerable interior, but in space it seemed like it was a losing proposition.

The third time Jeff came in, his technique was better. Perry stabbed into his snout, and the sword found its way through the hard scales to pierce the flesh of the face, but didn’t seem to hit anything vital. He had tried to maneuver himself away from the snapping jaws, but a shock of pain from his left foot was proof that he wasn’t fast enough. The dragon nosed him away and he lost his grip, a second attempt at stabbing only gouging a scale before Perry was spinning through space again.

Perry howled inside his helmet, feeling his own hot breath, momentarily deafening himself. When he looked down, a status report was already scrolling by, the word ‘tourniquet’ the only one that grabbed his attention. The pain was shooting up his leg, blotting out all other sensations, and it was only by clamping down on the meridian that he was able to think straight and reduce it to a dull roar. Most of his left foot was gone, only the heel left, torn metal and globules of blood the only evidence that it had been there.

“Fucker,” howled Perry. The foot would come back when he transformed, but once he was the wolf, he wouldn’t be able to maneuver as well, the sword held in his mouth rather than his hand, and he wouldn’t be able to bite, only use his claws.

The dragon came back around, and this time Perry pushed with his well of energy, generating impulse. It took more than it should have, a technique that he’d not found much use for. It was almost always better to channel energy into a limb, funneling power, but in a pinch, it allowed for some movement in the air. He narrowly avoided the jaws, and this time went under the head and grabbed onto one of the small, stunted arms of the dragon, whose claws flailed wildly trying to dislodge him.

“Full scan,” said Perry while he stabbed at the belly. His sword had difficulty finding purchase, and the dragon was so long that a single injury in this one spot couldn’t possibly matter that much. Still, he kept plunging it at the skin of the belly, his grip on the leg the only thing that was giving him any leverage.

The dragon surged through the void, and though the stars seemed to stand still, Perry could feel the enormous acceleration that was being applied to him. His grip was crushingly tight, and after a moment, there was no more tug, even as the dragon’s movements stayed exaggerated and difficult to deal with. Perry aimed the sword at the joint of the leg and leveraged his entire body into a strike, pulling himself at the dragon, locking the sword arm in place. The sword went in, slicing cleanly into something vital, and the leg went limp as the sword opened the wound wide. The dragon shook him off, and he went spiraling through space, righting himself in just a moment, ready for the follow up.

The HUD flashed up an image and a distance in meters, and Perry saw the picture-in-picture of the space station, which was rapidly approaching. He tried to angle away from it with the sword after reorienting himself, but it was clear that Jeff had been employing actual strategy, and that collision was going to be impossible to avoid.

Perry slammed into the side of the space station, feet first, denting the metal wall and sending up a flare of pain and alarms from the armor. He braced himself against the metal of the station, flicked his eyes to the radiation tracker — which was yellow, still within the limits he’d set — and then set his sights on the dragon, which was coming toward him.

He was pretty sure his leg was broken, but in space, he wasn’t really using his legs, and the sharp pain when he moved it was dulled by clamping down on another of his meridians. His eyes tracked the dragon as he tried to heal himself, flaring out energy. A single bite in the wrong place would be enough to end him.

“Show me where the heart is,” said Perry.

“The scan was messy, sir,” Marchand replied, but a marker showed up on the HUD, displaying a tiny red dot on top of the white dragon. “From what I could see, the enemy appears to be blind.”

“Blind?” asked Perry.

“Visual and sonic inspection reveals — incoming,” said Marchand.

If the dragon was blind, that hadn’t stopped it from finding Perry. It slammed him against the dented wall of the space station, then whipped its tail at him, knocking his head against an exterior window, shattering it into a spiderweb but not releasing any air from inside the station. Perry pushed himself off and away from the station with his good leg to avoid a bite. He’d thought having a purchase on something would help him, but he hadn’t realized how much the void of space was giving him protection.

Once he was floating off, trying to keep up the healing on his bruised and broken body, along with the damage to the armor, he tried to focus his mind. That was the benefit of being in human form, wasn’t it?

The dragon was blind, and judging by his eyes, Jeff was too, but that wasn’t stopping him. What had Jeff said? That he could sense people? If the blindness had happened because of the bomb, or the partial blindness, or whatever it was, then maybe he’d been blind during the fight too. His eyes had been a deep red, and it hadn’t been clear whether they were actually tracking him. But Jeff had said that he could ‘sense people’, so … maybe the answer was to not be people.

“I’m going to try to get us some space,” said Perry. “If I disconnect the arm and the chestplate, can you run the laser gun? Aim it and stuff?”

“That will expose you to the vacuum, sir,” said Marchand.

“Use the nanites, bridge the gap,” said Perry. “I have enough for a skintight suit.”

The dragon took a long time to circle around, the motion elongated. Perry was cursing his low maneuverability, but he thought he probably had a higher top speed if it came to that, given the differences in their magic. Space played havoc with intuitive understandings of velocity, and he thought that the sword had a better interpretation than either of Jeff’s two powers. The point of the long circle was fairly clear: the dragon was lining up to push Perry straight at the reactor. That the dragon could see the reactor and the space station meant that the blindness was only partial, or that other senses were picking up the slack.

Perry held his sword out in front of him, and when the dragon charged in with reckless abandon, Perry swung himself around the blade and used what was left of his eaten foot, the heel, to push himself off and away.

He worked quickly, with Marchand’s help, detaching the front plate of the armor and slipping his arm out of the left ‘sleeve’. It was attached to the center piece with a wire, and with a wave of his hand, Perry reached into the shelf and pulled out the huge laser gun that Brigitta had built for him. He attached that too, using a long cable, and then tossed the three-piece assembly out to drift through space just in time for him to nearly get his arm bitten off by the dragon’s sharp teeth.

Wearing only the nanites on his chest and arm was unnerving. They didn’t conform to his skin like they had to Maya’s, and wouldn’t react to protect him. Deep within their programming was a directive to protect Maya Singh, and two years worth of Marchand alternately attempting to cajole and hack them hadn’t done anything to change that. It wouldn’t go diamond hard in an instant, and wouldn’t fight back in the same way that hers had, which meant that it would be little better than motorcycle leathers for him.

The jaws snapped, and Perry felt his fingers, unencumbered by armor, touch one of the huge teeth that was snapping at him. He looked down at the mouth, illuminated by the golden glow, and saw the half a foot still floating around in the mouth among perfect spheres of blood and spit.

When the laser began firing, the dragon howled, wordless with the lack of air. It swam away, leaving Perry to drift near the space station once more. The radiation alert went to orange, too much time having passed with him too close and with no shielding between him and the source. Perry watched the dragon twist and squirm around, circling back but clearly in pain.

As Perry expected, Jeff seemed to have no idea where the laser was coming from. If it weren’t flagged on the HUD, Perry wasn’t sure he would know there even was a laser. It was a tightly focused beam, and there wasn’t anything in the air, no straight red beam of light caused by scattering photons. There was only a hole burning into the dragon, highlighted with a flashing circle. It was targeted straight at the heart. When the dragon moved, the arm of the power armor would move the laser gun, keeping a bead on it, fed targeting information by Marchand.

Perry flew at the dragon, casting both fears and pains to the side. If he could, he would have pinned it in place, but that was an impossibility in space. The best he could do was to harry it, keep it from running as much as he could.

He went for the face, the most dangerous part of the whole creature, and got slapped to the side with a twist of the head. Perry slashed with his sword, scoring another hit on his second approach, then got brushed aside as the snake dashed forward, away from the station.

Perry stared after it for only a moment as he got his bearings, then swore. It was heading toward the planet.

“Fucker,” Perry spat. He was winning, and now Jeff was running. He wasn’t sure why he’d expected anything different. “Keep him in sight, don’t let him lose us,” said Perry. He flew to the chest piece and the laser, then took off, following the sword.

He was slower from the start, but the sword let him pile up the speed over time. All he knew was that if he lost Jeff, the next time he found him would be when the enemy thresholder attacked one of the human settlements.

This needed to end, and it needed to end now.