Thresholder

“Which do you want first, the good news or the bad news?” asked Jeff. His breathing was raspy and wet, worse than the last time they’d spoken.

“The good news,” said Perry.

“The bad news is that I’m at the Crypt, though you probably already guessed that with your technology and stuff,” said Jeff. “The other bad news is, I decimated them. I was looking through your past a few days ago, your deep past, on Earth, and you got into this argument about the meaning of the word during trivia night. You looked so smug, telling this woman who clearly didn’t give a shit that actually what decimate meant was to kill one in every ten, something that some other nation did to keep people in line. So I came to the Crypt, and I thought, hey that sounds like a plan. I decimated them. Maybe my technique was a little sloppy, maybe it wasn’t exactly one in ten. But I thought you would appreciate the terminology. It was once very important to you, the kind of thing you harped on to make yourself feel impressive.”

“Bastard,” said Perry. It came out at almost a whisper. A long list of names went through his head, people that had been aboard, friends and colleagues, doctors and engineers. The loss settled like a weight on his shoulders, even as uncertain as it was. A single name rose to the top of the list, naturally — Brigitta.

“Well, see, I thought we had a deal,” said Jeff. “You’d send me over a tooth, we’d have an honorable duel, and that would be that, yeah? But you were a bastard first, so I figure this is payback. It’s about nine tenths less payback than I could have done.”

“Is Brigitta … did you … ?” Perry couldn’t get the words out.

“She’s fine,” said Jeff. “See, you’re jumping the gun, I’m still on bad news. Her being fine, that’s good news. The bad news is, I don’t trust you, and I don’t think there’s any pile of bodies I could threaten you with that you’d take seriously. What I want is for you to just fucking kill yourself, but I think even if you saw me in a video holding Brigitta’s neck in my hand, you would just protest and say that you would do whatever it took, and then the thing is, you wouldn’t actually do it. See, because you’re a bastard.” He coughed once, thick and wet. “So, are you going to kill yourself?”

“You know I’m not,” said Perry. “And I know you’re not serious about your promises, because even if I promised you the world, you might still kill them all for fun.”

“Well, sure,” said Jeff. “I’m a little pissed off now, and every injury I take gets healed back wrong. I’m worse for the wear, I don’t mind you knowing that, it’s going to be obvious enough when you see me. You hit me back there, not when we were fighting, but when you blasted past me. I guess I’m getting ahead of myself. We were still on bad news.”

“Name your terms,” said Perry. “I’ll hand over the tooth.” He wasn’t even sure that it would work to heal Jeff, even if it might provide a power up. There was no way to secure the hostages though, no way to do a handoff that didn’t risk escalating into a conflict that might kill everyone aboard the Crypt. There were children there. Perry wondered whether they had been spared, but he didn’t want to ask that question. He knew a few of those children — there had been boys who had volunteered to come aboard the Crypt because that’s where he was going.

“So, the other bad news,” said Jeff, ignoring him. “It’s bad news you already know. Marjut summoned the bugs up, attacked the Natrix, then escaped. I know that much from the radio, and I can’t imagine that’s your sort of trap, but I suppose you never know.”

“Get to the good news,” said Perry. He was feeling hollow. He had gone to the Natrix because it needed defending, and without him to chase off Marjut, he was certain they’d have been overrun. He should have known that Jeff would pick a different target. There was more advantage to be had in the bitter cold.

“Oh, so much good news, at least for you,” said Jeff. “See, I know Marjut. I beat her once. And the thing is, I don’t think you can beat her, not on this planet, not when she’s got a swarm of fast-growing bugs and all the time in the world to mount the mother of all attacks. Unless she’s dead.” There was a brief pause. “Is she dead? I guess it’s possible you killed her and kept it off the radio.”

“She’s still out there,” said Perry. His mind kept going to the Crypt. It was too far away, in the cold night. Even if he left right at that very moment, the fastest way to get there was to go up out of the atmosphere, which took too much time. Jeff could kill everyone aboard before Perry could do a damned thing.

“Good, good,” said Jeff. “Because I think we both know that me fucking off into space to wait for you to die from old age was weak. I mean, you wouldn’t believe it, and I wouldn’t really want to do it. Here though, there’s some real pressure. You’ve got a war on two fronts, right? And I’ve gotta tell you, with Marjut licking her wounds, I feel like it’s going to be really hard to find her, especially if she had a chance to prepare. She tried to get me by luring me into a trap, she’s that kind of person. You might get along, if she wasn’t a psycho bitch. Now, here’s what I’ve got for you — I’ll help you find her.”

“And why would you do that?” asked Perry.

“The portal,” said Jeff. “You said it yourself, I don’t know for sure that one doesn’t open up when she dies here. I beat her, and I smuggled her here, but she is a thresholder. Maybe the spell — or whatever it is — can be tricked that way. So you give me the tooth, I point her out, you go kill her, and if there’s a portal, then hey, that’s two problems solved at once, right?”

Perry tried to consider that, but the only thing on his mind were the dead. He wanted to kill Jeff, to rip his cancerous body apart. Perry’s teeth were set against each other, not quite grinding. All he would need to do was say that he would agree, pretend to hand the tooth over, then attack. Jeff was faster, could run away, but he was growing weaker with every passing hour, and all it would take was a single blow, enough to knock his head off.

“Alright,” said Jeff. “So here’s your dilemma, as I see it. You want me gone from this planet, preferably dead. You want Marjut gone and dead. You want yourself gone, through the portal and off to greener pastures, especially since everyone knows this is mostly your fault. You try to double cross me, I fly away and spend the rest of my life killing your friends, hit and run tactics, like eh, that one war I saw you watching. You’re not strong enough to take me out with a single hit, I’ve felt your hits. That sword of yours is mighty sharp, and I’m not doing so hot, but I don’t think you’d gamble on that. Without me, no way are you finding Marjut, which means you’d be double fucked. Maybe we’d have to have it out after everyone else on the planet is dead. And if you did kill me, you’d be left with the same problem, Marjut, queen of the bugs, and no way to find her, plus the portal would open, and you would either have to leave this planet behind for her to do whatever she likes with it, or you’d be stuck here, with no way to ever leave, fighting a protracted war with that psychopath.”

“You want to team up,” said Perry. His voice was flat.

“Yeah, you got it,” said Jeff. “And if the portal doesn’t show up, then we have to fight, but I’m not doing either of those things without that tooth. You need me. And if you don’t agree, I’m gonna kill everyone here. You know, I didn’t touch the children, just the adults, when I did the decimation. But if you try to fuck me on this, or you say no, I’m going to murder all of them. It’s going to take time, but I’ll put that time in, if you make me. You should have sent over the tooth when we were in space, you really should have, but this is your second chance.”

Perry’s eyes were unfocused. He was trying to regulate his breathing and control the beating of his heart, to think, but it was painfully difficult when all he really wanted to do was fight. He was feeling impotent, incapable of doing the one thing that he was actually good at. There was too much running and not enough fighting. Jeff was too fast, and Marjut had gone to ground. He would need to kill them both to keep the Natrix safe, and Jeff was right: this did seem like the only way forward.

“Fine,” said Perry. “Leave there. Make your way to the Natrix. If you come within range, the guns will open fire on you. What’s the range of your ability to sense her?”

“Ha!” said Jeff, but the laugh dug up something in his lungs, and there was a wet cough that followed and lasted for a few seconds. It sounded as though something had slipped through his mouth, and there was the sound of spitting afterward. “So you’re in, easy as that? You know, I was halfway through the decimation when I had this idea, and I thought maybe you’d refuse to work with me, but I should have known you’d accept. The only question is whether you’re going to try to stab me in the back.”

“I know when my back is to the wall,” said Perry. “Go north of the Natrix. That’s where I’ll be. If you can sense me, you can find me, right? I’ll be twenty miles away.”

“My range is huge,” said Jeff. “I’ll find you, then we’ll go find Marjut together. That only happens if you hand over the tooth though, in person. You need me more than I need you, remember.”

Perry wasn’t sure that was true. Jeff wasn’t doing well, and Perry expected that he’d look even worse than he’d looked in space the next time they met. What mattered now was getting Jeff away from everyone else, and if it took a ‘team up’ to do that, that’s what Perry would do.

“I remember,” said Perry through gritted teeth. “Go, now, we need to move fast.”

“I’ve got contingencies like you wouldn’t believe,” said Jeff. “Remember that.”

The line cut out, and Perry took a deep, steadying breath. He was second sphere, and he was sure he looked impassive from the outside, cool as a cucumber, but inside he was roiling with anger.

“Do you have contact with the Crypt?” asked Perry. “The main computers?”

“Yes, sir,” replied Marchand. “There are a number of queued messages waiting for you, which I’ve taken the liberty of reading. Most relate to the attack on the Crypt, which lasted for some twenty minutes as Jeff broke through the insulation and the hull. It appears that he was telling the truth about the so-called decimation, at least based on the casualty reports that have been entered into the mech’s system and what I can confirm with a quick headcount and bodycount. I can confirm that Miss Karlquist is alive and well as of five minutes ago. ‘Jeff’ is in the command room at the moment, and the mech is in poor condition given the hole he ripped in the side, but I believe as soon as he leaves the repair teams will be able to fix the damage he’s done.”

“No, they won’t,” said Perry. “Because the damage he’s done is a hundred fucking people, dead. That’s the hope for the future, the chance of this last pocket of people being something other than the sputtering out of an accident that happened three hundred years ago. Those people aren’t coming back to life, March!”

“My apologies, sir,” said Marchand. “I of course did not mean to imply that the heinous acts he committed were in any way repairable.”

Perry screwed his eyes shut. “Give the brief version of the plan to Mette. Give her an update on the Crypt.” He took a long breath in through his nose and wished that quelling his emotions were easier. It had been a long time since he’d suffered a loss, and now they seemed to be coming thick and fast.

A minute later, supplies gathered, Perry was flying through the air, following the sword as he headed north.

The plan, such as it was, sucked. Depending on Jeff for anything was a fool’s game, but Jeff had a point. With Marjut unleashed and gone to ground, Perry had very little way to find and stop her. Maybe the engineers could build some kind of machine that would use sonar to pinpoint her location or something — Perry thought this because of a scene in the first Jurassic Park movie, and had not done any research into viability whatsoever — but if Marjut’s goal was simply to wipe humanity from the planet, she’d have an easy time doing that given how large the insects got and how ill-prepared the Natrix and the Kjärni were for a massed attack. The Heimalis faction, by comparison, was nearly untouchable, but that was cold comfort.

Perry found a tall hill to float above. There were no insects below, only vegetation, but even this far out it was trampled by the hordes of insects that had come through on the way to assault the Natrix. Perry was going to have to get his insectile soul-pulling technique a lot better in a hurry, even if it was only going to be useful on this one planet. Maybe if he could denude whole acres of land, that would be enough to drive Marjut out, but that was an advanced technique, and probably only available to a third sphere who’d devoted years to achieving it. The best he could do was kill with a touch, which might still be good enough.

It took Jeff a half hour to show up, and even more time to approach. For as much as Perry knew, Jeff might have seen him from fifty miles out, or maybe a hundred. Perry wasn’t aware of his presence until he was a mile away, descending down through the clouds, in human form again.

Jeff was looking rough. The tumors had grown, including a large one that at first looked like an off-center beer belly. It was red and angry, flesh having grown large through whatever healing Jeff was using, his DNA corrupted and betraying him. His eyes were still red, though darker than before, and he was still bald. The only thing he’d done to improve his appearance was putting on pants, and that just made him look awkward. If Perry wasn’t imagining things, he’d lost some muscle mass too, but that was by far the least important thing, given how many red welts there were all over his body. He was missing skin in places, including a thin strip along his chin.

For someone who cared a lot about looking awesome, it was probably especially bad to catch himself in the mirror and see that.

“I fucking hate you,” said Jeff as he drew closer. They were both floating high above the ground, though Jeff had his golden aura around him. Maybe Perry was imagining it, but it seemed to be a different shade, a bit darker than before, like piss when he hadn’t drunk enough water.

“Here’s the tooth,” said Perry, holding it up.

“No,” said Jeff. “No, you take that from your mouth where I can see it. I want to watch you wrench it out, to make sure it’s a good one.”

“You can look into my past and see me take it out,” said Perry. “You can see that it’s a tooth.” He held the tooth up, showing it. It was a back molar, taken from his mouth before he’d gone up to the space station. That molar had returned when he’d transformed, no longer a hole in his mouth that his tongue seemed drawn to. “You can see that it’s this tooth.”

“Nah,” said Jeff. “You know how the power works, you know how to get around it. You pull a tooth, you have someone come by to swap it later, and it’s poison or some shit, more of whatever was in that bomb, or maybe just a fake tooth, I don’t know, a tooth that someone donated to you that won’t do shit for me.”

“That’s a clever idea,” said Perry. “But I didn’t think of it. You know that every minute we waste here, Marjut has a chance to gather more power, to get further away, harder to find?”

“And I don’t give a shit about that,” said Jeff. “I said I’d help you.” He blinked at Perry. “You’re upset I killed some people, huh?”

Perry threw the tooth at Jeff, hurling it, and Jeff caught it without missing a beat.

“It didn’t even feel good,” said Jeff. “I mean, a bit, a trickle, but punching a normal human, for me, is like putting my fist through some wet toilet paper. There’s not much satisfaction to it, except that they stop screaming.” He held the tooth up and inspected it. “How do I know it’s still good?”

“You don’t,” said Perry. “I wasn’t ever given any instructions on how it works, what the bounds are, and I never tested it.”

“You know, I talked to Brigitta about it,” said Jeff, still holding the tooth up to look over its contours. “You never told them about the teeth, not all through two years. You never told them about the nanites either. I asked her, ‘how did he explain the black stuff’ and she said that there were certain things the two of you never talked about.”

“Eat the tooth, let’s go,” said Perry.

“I saw the night of the transformation,” said Jeff. “I saw what it did for you. I’d be useless, and worse, defenseless. You need me, but maybe the temptation to kill me would be too much.”

“Eat the tooth, don’t eat the tooth, whatever,” said Perry. “Let’s go. If you eat it, you should have enough time to find her. We’ll scout from the air.”

“I’ll find her first,” said Jeff. He popped the tooth into his mouth, then held it between his front teeth, showing it to Perry. “For safekeeping.”

“Here’s a radio,” said Perry, pulling one from his bag. He tossed it across the gap between them, and Jeff caught it, looking it over with some suspicion. “You go faster, so we need to keep in touch.”

“You know I could just fly off, right?” asked Jeff. “Leave you here, stranded?”

“You make it a point not to lie,” said Perry, though the exact thought had been going through his head since he’d decided on this course of action. “You’re twisted, but part of the way you’re twisted is that you like for there to be rules.”

“I’m twisted?” asked Jeff with a raspy laugh. “You used a bomb that destroyed everything in a few miles, that poisoned me to my core, and twice now you’ve violated what I’d tried to make a clean match. You know that, don’t you? I killed a hundred people just a few hours ago, but that was a penalty, and less of a penalty than I could have given you.” He still had the tooth in his mouth, and his speech was slightly off because of it. “And you know what? I still think we’re the same, down at our core. It’s fun to fight, to be the best, to lord your strength over others. I’ve got less of a twist than you do.”

“Whatever,” said Perry. “Let’s get this done.”

Jeff grinned. There was blood on his teeth. “Even if you lose, it’s fun. I want to see how you tackle Marjut, how you overcome her strengths. So tell me, which way did you see her go?”

“That way,” said Perry, pointing to the northwest.

Jeff took off, radio in hand, moving as fast as he could just to show off. Perry watched him go.

“And he was never seen nor heard from again,” said Perry, under his breath.

“Did you want me to transmit that, sir?” asked Marchand.

“No,” said Perry. “Give me a minimap, show me where he’s going, track him with the radio, send out the nanites. Try to get them under his skin, if you can do that.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “The nanites are, in fact, pushing themselves into empty follicles as we speak, though he’s already passed the range where I can communicate with them.”

“Every time he looks at us, he can see the past,” said Perry. “We need to be careful. Give away less when you speak.” They were talking in a foreign language, Japanese, as a precaution, but Perry wasn’t sure how useful that would be.

He flew through the air, following the line that Marchand had drawn, like he was blithely following a car’s GPS system, or tracking down a quest objective in a video game. He was in atmosphere, limited to only thirty miles an hour, and Jeff was so far away he might as well have been on a different planet. Perry rose into the sky a bit, where the air was thinner and drag was less of an issue, and that gave him a bit more speed to work with, but it still took some time to get over to the general region where Jeff was.

“She won’t have gone too far,” said Jeff. “The range she’s got on the bugs is maybe five miles, not all that much, so my guess is she’ll gather them up, then make another run at the ship, unless she wants to try something tricky. You’d think she’d feel some kind of hesitation about running thousands of creatures straight into the guns, but if you want to understand Marjut, really understand her, it’s not all about that.” There was a brief pause. “She’s just crazy.”

“I need to know her abilities,” said Perry.

“Yeah?” asked Jeff. “The thing is, I want to see this match up, and it doesn’t matter to me who wins.”

“You want me to kill her,” said Perry. “I want to kill her. Maybe we get a portal out of it, and you can just leave. So if you tell me, then I can just get it done. You’re dying, and I don’t think the tooth is going to do it for you, which means the portal is your only shot. So just fucking tell me what you know.”

The radio was silent for a long moment. Either Jeff was thinking, or he was letting Perry stew.

“She’s got markers she can make,” said Jeff. “Invisible to us, just a symbol, applied any number of times. She can layer them, to make explosions, pretty small booms by your standards. She’ll try to roast you, to explode you, to lead you into a trap and then cook you alive. It’s limited though, since it needs prep time, and once she’s shot her shot, you don’t need to worry about it. She likes to put them on her feet, lots of them, to make these big dramatic leaps. She’ll have a few of those stored up.”

“She’s immune to fire?” asked Perry.

“Nah,” said Jeff. “Worse. She’s immune to heat. She could probably walk on the hot side of this planet with no trouble, aside from maybe dying of dehydration.”

“Which means … immune to lasers?” asked Perry.

“I don’t know what the hell a laser is,” said Jeff. “She’s a sigilist, locked into flame. Is a laser like a flame?”

“I guess,” said Perry. A small part of him wanted to know if Jeff didn’t know how a laser worked or whether he was only ignorant of the concept, but what Perry wanted most was to keep their interactions as brief as possible. Marchand had a list of the dead, if Perry ever needed any sort of reminder of what kind of person Jeff was. “What else?”

“She’s got control of vines, though she needs some actual plants, which I guess she’ll have in abundance. She can make them grow fast, move them around like whips, pin you down — though I was strong enough to rip any of that apart. You probably are too. And there’s the bugs, which you know about.”

“She was running like a cheetah,” said Perry. “What’s that from?”

“Eh, some kind of magic,” said Jeff. “I was hoping that I’d have some time to look through her past while I got my bearings in this world, so I could learn it for myself, but then you showed up pretty much right off the bat.”

“Generic magic?” asked Perry. “That doesn’t help me much.”

“It was like yours, martial arts, moving like the wind, or with the wind,” said Jeff. “More fast than strong, I’d say, and not even that fast. We could both outrun her. I think I found her, incidentally.”

“On my way,” said Perry.

Five minutes later, they were together, floating above a massive horde of insects, so many that it was difficult to see the ground. They were crawling over each other, a giant nest of them, and Perry’s stomach did an involuntary flip. Some of the bugs could fly, but their trips into the air were brief.

“Well, go get her,” said Jeff, radio hanging limply at his side, the strap around his wrist just barely holding onto it.

“Where is she?” asked Perry.

“There,” said Jeff, pointing down at the ground. It took Marchand drawing an exact line for Perry to see where he was pointing. It was a hill or a mound, a place where the bugs were especially thick. There was no sign of Marjut, but there was an entrance to a natural cave there, which was at least partly obscured by the insects that were chittering and moving around it.

“And how am I supposed to get her?” asked Perry. “Especially if she’s laced the place with invisible sigils that can blast through my armor?”

“I dunno,” said Jeff. “Just go in and swing your sword around.”

“A confined place is terrible for swinging a sword around,” said Perry.

“Well, better figure it out,” said Jeff. “I fulfilled my end of the bargain, now it’s up to you to fulfill yours.”

“I gave you the tooth,” said Perry.

“No, the deal is that you kill her and we see whether a portal opens,” said Jeff. “So go in there and give her a poke.” He had his hands folded across his chest.

“You’re not going to help?” asked Perry.

“No, I’m going to kill you if a portal doesn’t open,” said Jeff. “Or at least fight until I’m badly beaten and can slink off through a portal.” His arms were still folded. “I’m swallowing the tooth soon, to give me the edge, just in case that works.” He still had it in his mouth, which was obvious from the way he was talking, like having a conversation with someone who was nursing some chewing tobacco.

“I don’t know if this is workable,” said Perry, staring down at the insects below.

“Just pull out another bomb and we can get to a safe distance,” said Jeff.

“I don’t have another bomb,” said Perry.

“Well I don’t believe that,” said Jeff. “Trying to track what you have and what you don’t, that’s been tough, but I’m pretty sure you have something else up your sleeve, some horrible trick that you’re just waiting to spring on me.”

“No,” said Perry. “It was a different contingency. Useless now.” Perry wished he’d asked for a second bomb, but he’d had no way of knowing that the outcome of the first bomb exploding was going to be that he’d have a place to store a nuclear weapon. “When I go down there, when she sees me, do you think she’s going to bolt or fight?”

“She’ll bolt,” said Jeff. “She bolted from you once, right? She’ll do it again. But you’re faster than her on the ground, aren’t you?”

“There are a million bugs down there,” said Perry. “I’ve seen the damage they can do. Even with the armor, they’re a threat. And in a cave? I can’t blast through rock. If she’s got explosions, she can bring the whole thing down on my head.”

“You know, I knew you were a coward,” said Jeff. “The poison bomb taught me that. But I didn’t think you’d risk the lives of everyone you care about for this. I should have brought some skulls from the Crypt, just to drive the point home.” He smiled at Perry. “There’s nothing that you can do to stop me, if I decide I’m going to kill everyone. It’ll take time, it’ll be painful, but I’ll murder everyone on the Crypt, and you’ll show up hours late. So be a man, go down there, fight through the insects, kill her, and hope that the portal opens up so you don’t have to face me.”

Perry took a steadying breath. It was so, so tempting to try for a kill shot now, to summon all his energy and just go after Jeff with a maximum strength punch to the heart. But if that failed, Perry was certain that Jeff would go off to fulfill his stated goal of killing everyone that had helped Perry, and Perry knew there wasn’t much to stop Jeff from doing that, not with the speed difference in atmosphere. That was the entire reason to agree to something like this, the whole point of giving over the tooth. Perry only had one hope, and it was that Jeff would stay a man of his word — and follow the incentives that very much seemed to warrant a fight between the two of them to open the portal.

Sometimes being a thresholder meant running straight into the face of certain doom, being a brave boy and steeling yourself for the worst.

“I’m going down,” said Perry. “I’ll radio when the portal opens up.” When, not if, because he needed Jeff to think that it was certain, something not to be missed.

He descended down to the open mouth of the cave, ready to face the horde of bugs and the certain rain of explosions.