Thresholder

Perry descended down to the surface of Esperide, where the insects were swarming.

He moved slowly, watching them. They came in different varieties, a result of both different species and complex lifecycles, adults and juveniles mixed together. Almost all of the insects on Esperide were swarm species without any kind of queen or colony structure, perhaps because they were forced to move so often. Most swept across the fields of fast-growing vegetation like locusts or grasshoppers, with only a few sticking in one place for as long as the twilight band would allow. The huge beetles were the toughest to kill, with hard shells, and a single one of them blocking a narrow tunnel would be a problem for him. He could kill it, certainly, but then he would need to smash his way through a corpse.

When Perry was a hundred feet up from the ground, he removed a cuff from his armor and used his sword to cut open his wrist. He swept his arm forward and backward, trying to spread the blood wide, then before he lost too much, he clamped the cuff back in place and focused healing energy on the wound.

“What was that?” asked Jeff from above, the radio up to his mouth.

“Nothing,” said Perry. “A contingency, a technique that I never mastered.”

“From the bug people?” asked Jeff.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Perry. “It probably won’t work.”

At Worm Gate, there were vats of worms that were used to bolster vital energy and to offload damage to the body. At the lowest level of the technique, the worms were fed blood, which provided a tendril of linkage, in a similar way that a spot of blood or a hair could allow a second sphere to find someone miles away. If Perry had known what circumstances he was going to find himself in, he’d have practiced this one more, devoted ten hours a day to it, but most of his training had gone into generalist power. Tracking, too, might have come in handy, but Perry only had the theoretical base necessary for self-training, which didn’t feel too promising. The major issue with the second sphere was that after you were past the initial boost in power, everything was supposed to take on the order of years to master.

Perry touched down on the rock in a place where few of the insects were, placed his hand against the rock, then launched himself up into the air again when the bugs came chittering in with open jaws.

“Chickened out that fast?” asked Jeff, voice right in Perry’s ear.

“No,” said Perry. “I’m making a map.”

The HUD was quickly filled with a blue squiggle, shaded by elevation and then textured by how confident Marchand was in his determination of what actually went where. The cave system was extensive, worryingly so, cracks and crevices that sunk down deep into the ground, growing larger as they went down and hooking into an extensive system of caverns, all of them linked to each other by openings large and small. The whole place was crawling with insects, most of them the large ones that beset the planet, but a few smaller ones that occupied other niches of the twilight ecosystem.

“You can’t find her?” asked Perry.

“Not with such brief contact, sir,” said Marchand. “Most of this is guesswork on my part.”

“And if you compare that map against where Jeff was pointing?” asked Perry.

“What’s up, chickenshit?” asked Jeff, who was still above and looking down at Perry, radio in hand. Perry ignored him.

The HUD updated, drawing a dotted red line through the three-dimensional map that was overlaid on the rocky bug-covered surface. It pierced through two of the caverns, which were separated from each other by several meters of rock.

“Map a path,” said Perry. A green line snaked through the cave system, then a purple line joined it. “What’s the difference between these two?”

“The green line is the path that should take the shortest time,” said Marchand. “The purple line will be safest.”

“Assume she’s in one of the two caverns,” said Perry. “Plot her escape routes, assuming that she starts as soon as we’re down there.” Perry let out a breath. Jeff hovering around up there was putting him on edge, but there was nothing for it, no brilliant plan that came to mind that would change the calculus. Perry could attempt to kill Jeff first, but if Marjut escaped again, Perry didn’t like his chances of being able to find whatever hole she’d dug down into. Worse, killing Jeff might open the portal and either force Perry to leave through it or be stuck on the planet to fight Marjut.

The HUD showed new lines in cyan moving out away from the caverns, a set in dark purple and a set in light purple. There were too many of the lines for Perry’s liking, too many exits from the cave system.

“How confident are we in this?” asked Perry.

“Not very, sir,” replied Marchand. “Sonic mapping is difficult even in the best of circumstances, and works better when the target is isolated from a large main mass. However, I can refine the maps as we go into the cave system.”

Perry frowned. There were other options, but they would all take time, and time wasn’t something that Perry thought was on his side. Marjut was gathering forces, that was clear, and there was a limit on how long she could keep the bugs gathered. The biggest factor in deciding wars was logistics, keeping the army fed through long supply lines or, at worst, eating from the enemy’s fields. Perry didn’t think that it was much different for bugs. She could control the insects, but she would need to keep them fed, and that put a strict limit on how long she could have them massed in one place and not out foraging.

She was going to attack soon or disband the mass of insects she’d collected.

“Put the cave system up as a minimap, continue sonic mapping, place a star on her as soon as you see her, put our own route in orange,” said Perry. He steeled himself. This was something he really didn’t want to do, going into a cave filled with oversized bugs against someone who could set the whole thing on fire.

He dropped down anyway, slicing through the bugs as soon as he landed, then pushed forward into the opening. The lights on the power armor lit up and the lighting correction on the screen made everything pop, but it was still getting to Perry.

He wasn’t claustrophobic, as evidenced by how much time he spent encased in different layers of metal and months inside the Crypt, but there was something about caves that got to him. Maybe it was that he’d read one too many articles about Nutty Putty Cave or Thai soccer teams. Rock was unyielding, the darkness and isolation overwhelming, and if he got stuck, there would be no way to get unstuck, except perhaps by transforming, which seemed like it would only make all his problems worse. He could slip into shelfspace, but that would only give him a breather, and he wasn’t entirely sure that it would allow him to get out if the tunnel was cramped enough.

But Perry had convinced himself that he was a man of action, so without all that much hesitation, he was through the first big chamber, the yawning mouth of the cave, and down the main tunnel. He had gone past the largest of the bugs, squatting at the entrance, slicing through them with his trusty sword, cutting straight through what passed for faces. The sword had trouble with getting through most metals, but chitin provided a resistance similar to chopping wood — it could be gotten through with a single hard swing.

Once he was through the first passageway, the largest of the insects were no longer a problem, because they couldn’t slip through such a small opening. He’d gone for the more narrow of the two routes for that very reason, and moved fast, stepping as though he was sure of where he was going rather than just trying to follow Marchand’s map of the place.

Smaller insects swarmed into a chamber the size of a bathroom. Each of the insects was a hand-span across, huge as far as Earth bugs went but much smaller than the hulks outside. They were on him in an instant, and Perry could feel them buzzing around him, trying to find a place to stick their pincers. They were mostly trying to bite at metal, crude biology no match for precisely fabricated alloys. They were covering microphones and cameras, and Perry’s display was quickly replaced by Marchand’s personal opinion on things, the video feed entirely replaced.

Perry could hear the bugs crawling over him and feel them going for his joints and scratching at the metal. It was unsettling and deeply gross, and he couldn’t help but slap a few off of them. He knew that if his will broke, he’d be double fucked. The only option was to continue on like a deep sea diver, trusting in his metal suit, trying to block out the fear.

His movements were enough to kill some of the bugs. They crunched beneath his feet no matter where he stepped, and there was nowhere he could place a hand that wouldn’t at least feel one of them, if not crush it. He slipped through a narrow passageway and felt them on both sides of his body, skittering between his back and the wall. It didn’t seem to matter to them — or Marjut, who was surely controlling them — that they weren’t doing anything but frying his nerves.

The HUD tracked his path, and a star appeared, showing Marjut’s location. Perry was waiting for the other shoe to drop, the flames and explosions, and it was setting him on edge that they hadn’t made an appearance yet.

The star on the HUD didn’t move at all, and Perry checked in with Marchand twice to make sure there wasn’t some error — that it really was a person there, not some kind of trick. The chamber that Marjut was in was one of the largest aside from the one that Perry had come in through, and she was in the center of it, waiting for him.

He had only a long tube to go down, one that was only just wide enough for him in the armor, brushing the sides of his shoulders. The armor had no give to it, not like a human body, and that made crawling through the cave a much more difficult proposition than he had hoped it would be. He crawled his way forward, feeling the scrape of metal against rock, wishing that he were somewhere else.

Perry was halfway through the tube when the insects started coming. These were the small ones, the size of different coins, and some even smaller, centipedes and flies, some with long stingers and others with barbed legs. They came as a torrent, a flood that pushed down the tube so fast and thick that he had to hold on so as not to be pushed away. He held tight, gritting his teeth, and screamed inside his helmet as they swarmed around him. He had thought that it would pass, like a wave, but these insects were being controlled, and so when they had covered him, they stayed there, crawling all over him, trying to find the gaps in his armor.

He spent a moment shaking and trying to control his breathing, then launched himself forward, scrabbling down the tube, clearing it in short order while killing thousands of insects along the way as he banged against the rocky walls. He was on the very edge of a panic attack, his breathing coming fast and his heart hammering.

He had planned to come out of the tube and assume a fighting stance, sword drawn from the shelfspace, but he was covered with insects, both the living and their corpses, and he couldn’t resist the urge to slap a few places on his body.

“You know, I don’t even really like insects,” said Marjut.

She was standing in the center of the chamber, and there were no bugs within five feet of her. She hadn’t massed her forces here, she had kept them separate from herself. The cameras gradually cleared themselves, and some semblance of normal video returned, though still a composite of reality according to Marchand. Marjut was dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing when she’d left, and these too had been spared the explosion, just like her skin had. Still, she was dirty and bedraggled, unclean from running for miles across the wasteland, hiding with the bugs. She’d been grazed in the arm, and the hem of her dress had been torn away to bind the wound, with the makeshift bandage soaked through with blood.

“You don’t like insects?” asked Perry. His voice came out cool and collected, thanks to the second sphere, though the speakers were slightly muffled. Marchand posted a message to the HUD indicating that they would need to be cleaned to have full volume and clarity again.

“Insects are, in every ecosystem I’ve come across, vital members,” said Marjut. Her face was dirty, but her eyes were clean. She was lit only by the power armor’s lamps, which were diffuse from the gunk that covered them. “But I grew up in poverty, and insects were something I had learned to hate. They stole food from our pantry and bit me in the night, leaving welts and sores for me to find in the morning. It’s a hate that I haven’t fully unlearned. If I had my way, they would be a part of nature that would be seen only in small amounts.”

“I suppose you’re going to argue that I shouldn’t kill you?” asked Perry.

“No, nothing like that,” said Marjut. “I can see through the eyes of the insects. I know that Jeff is waiting for me out there, even if I kill you here. And Jeff can see through the eyes of the insects as well, which would give him a way of tracking me even if he didn’t have his other abilities. He can see this conversation, in fact, hear everything we say.”

“You like your chances against me better than your chances against him?” asked Perry.

“I don’t like my chances at all,” said Marjut. She shrugged, skinny shoulders rising and falling. “I’ve had time to think while you made your approach. I keep coming to the conclusion that this is the end for me. I had thought to send a last large wave of insects against the Natrix, to at least accomplish something, but I’m not sure how much good that might do. There are too many colonies on this planet, too many redundancies, and besides, the Natrix would probably be better handled with a plague, which I don’t have on hand.”

Perry reached to the side and grabbed his sword from shelfspace. It briefly gave more illumination to the scene. “Then what are we doing here?” he asked.

“For my part, I’m hoping that one of the many insects on you finds a chink in your armor,” said Marjut. “I’m also trying to buy another few seconds of life in the hopes that something comes to me, some way out of this trap. For your part … I don’t know what you hope for.”

“I’m going to kill you now,” said Perry. He clenched his fist around his sword. “Either the portal will appear and Jeff will leave, or I’ll get back out of this special hell and fight him.”

“Wait,” said Marjut, holding up a hand.

In spite of himself, Perry waited. So far as he knew, she got nothing from prep time aside from being able to draw the invisible sigils, and she wasn’t doing that. He, on the other hand, was drawing in power from the cave system and feeling the boundaries of the faint connection he had to the insects outside — the ones that were eating up the blood he’d spread around.

“What am I waiting for?” asked Perry.

“He’s talking to me,” said Marjut.

“Who?” asked Perry. He looked up at the ceiling of the cave. “Jeff? How?”

“He can see through the eyes of the insects,” said Marjut. “Same as I can.”

“What does he want?” asked Perry.

Marjut held up a hand, and Perry braced himself for a gout of flames or an explosion that might bring the cavern down around them. She hadn’t had much time to prepare, but he was still worried about what was coming and what the fight might take out of him.

“He wants me to kill you,” said Marjut. She had a far-off look in her eyes. “Which makes me think that I shouldn’t.”

“He wants the portal,” said Perry. “He’s dying. It might be one of the only things that can save him. He’s been pushed to the brink, and —”

“Shh,” said Marjut. She still had that look on her face. After a moment, she cocked her head to the side and looked at Perry. “You know, he would have attacked me by now.”

“I’m not in a rush,” said Perry. “Unless I should be?”

“You’re still hoping for something from me,” said Marjut. “You’re afraid of him. You want some edge against him, some weakness that I know and you do not, even given his state. It’s the only thing you’ve wanted from me, from the moment you freed me.”

“No,” said Perry. “I rescued you because I thought you were innocent, or at least relatively so. An edge against him was — is something that would benefit us both.” He tightened his grip around his sword. “But whatever he could possibly offer you, whatever it is you think that he could be trusted for, I think you don’t have anything on him.”

“Do you know what happened between us in the last world?” asked Marjut. “I killed millions, unleashed a plague that might have doomed their entire society, and he let me. He doesn’t care about anyone but himself. He’ll honor a deal, I think, but he’ll also cheat and steal. He — okay, he’s gone, we can talk freely.”

“Gone?” asked Perry. “What do you mean, gone?”

“The magic I learned is expansive. It covers many things. There are small creatures that live on us, kinds that could be seen only with very fine microscopes,” said Marjut. “He flew away, outside of the range of my ability to sense. There was a cluster floating in the air, now there’s not, and I saw through the eyes of those on the surface.”

“Shit,” said Perry. “Gone where? March, track him.”

“I’ll do my best, sir, but we’re quite far underground,” replied Marchand.

“He’ll come back,” said Marjut. “He asked that I distract you, buy him time, and that if I did, he would spare me. He even offered to finish the job on this world, help me destroy the people here before the portal closes.”

“But you don’t trust him,” said Perry. “Which is why you’re telling me.”

“I’m hedging my bets,” said Marjut. “I don’t want to fight you, because I think I’ll lose. They showed me videos of you fighting, the way you move, the power you have. I tried to kill you as you came through those tunnels, but the insects were only an annoyance to you. I don’t suppose I’m going to do better with the other tools at my disposal.”

“You would have been better off laying low,” said Perry. “If you hadn’t attacked, you could have waited until I had squared things away with Jeff.”

“It’s possible,” said Marjut. “I didn’t know what you knew, or whether you would clean up loose ends, and the fight between the two of you might have gone on for years.”

“Years?” asked Perry.

“It was possible,” said Marjut. “Besides, I wanted to leave this world and find another. I was hoping that you would blame him for the insects and take your fight to the ground.” She shrugged. “I make no apologies for who I am and what I want. You find it abhorrent, I’m sure.”

Perry narrowed his eyes. “What did he go for?”

“A weapon of some kind,” said Marjut. “All worlds have some kind of power to them.”

Perry relaxed slightly. “There’s nothing here. Just insects and the engineers. At least he’s not going for the people.”

Marjut pursed her lips. “You don’t feel what I feel? Empathy for the world? A connection with nature?”

Perry stopped for a moment to consider. He wasn’t considering her question, which so far as he knew was just a lead-in to the ramblings of an eco-terrorist who didn’t even really believe that deeply in her own insanity. Instead, he was considering what Jeff could possibly have left to go get. The weapons that Perry feared were huge ones, the giant guns of the Natrix. There was nothing that Jeff could carry that would pose more of a threat than his dragon form.

Nothing except a nuclear weapon, that is.

Except the Kjärni didn’t just have nuclear weapons lying around. They had materials, refined nuclear products that they kept on hand to make nuclear weapons if they absolutely had to for some reason, but it would take them days to make one, as it had taken days for them to make one for Perry. He had to have known that, which meant that there was only really one place that Jeff could be going, assuming that he’d been telling the truth about going to find a weapon.

Jeff was going to go pick up the second thing that the Kjärni had made for him, and it wasn’t a bomb at all, though Jeff had no way of knowing that. Perry had even told Jeff that it wasn’t a bomb.

“Marchand, can you get in contact with the promena, the one we left near the site of the explosion?” asked Perry.

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “We’re deep enough underground that satellite communication is compromised. I will make some effort.”

“What’s going on?” asked Marjut.

“Jeff is going to grab a weapon I left behind,” said Perry. “Something he’s hoping to use against me. He’s a caveman, he doesn’t understand technology or how it works.”

“You’re content to allow him the time he desires?” asked Marjut.

“I think I know where he’s going,” said Perry. “I should have known that he wouldn’t just stay up there while I made my way through the tunnels and passageways, while we had our fight. We had an agreement, and he’s not technically violating it, which so far as I know is very like him.”

“He hopes to go through the portal that might open up when I die,” said Marjut. “He said as much to me. It might be for the best if we fight now and you leave without letting him get through, at least from your perspective.”

“That would likely doom everyone on this planet to, at best, living under the fist of a gluttonous godking who’s slowly dying of radiation poisoning.” That was assuming that the tooth didn’t cure him. Perry had no idea whether it would work or not.

“If you allow him through the portal, what damage will he do on the other worlds?” asked Marjut.

“Compared to you?” asked Perry. “Probably he’ll end up killing hundreds before someone takes him out. But you’re the worst I’ve seen, the worst I’ve heard of.” The deaths felt more distant though, harder to conceptualize. The world she’d unleashed a plague on was one that Perry had only known secondhand.

“I’m not talking about me,” said Marjut. “I know I’m the weaker of the two of us. I know you’re going to kill me. I did what I could for the worlds, but I was always going to meet my end at the hands of another world hopper. You’re only going to be finishing what Jeff started last world. I’ll fight, but I’m prepared to die.”

Perry frowned. “Then die.”

He moved on her with all the speed and power he possessed, knowing full well that it was likely to literally blow up in his face.

The explosion came from the palm of her left hand, which she had raised and spread wide as he approached. Perry was blasted back and felt the armor cradling his body, and he slammed against the back wall of the cave hard enough that he momentarily saw stars. Marjut threw something at him, tiny pellets that only belatedly resolved into seeds, and with a twirl of her fingers, they exploded into thick vines that wrapped around his arms and legs, growing with every second that passed.

Perry swung the sword around, cutting cleanly through the vines, and with a second twirl, he was free. His head was pounding and he felt like throwing up, but Richter had told him that throwing up with the helmet on was inadvisable, so he clenched his teeth and ran forward instead.

Marjut ducked beneath the swing of his sword, as fast as a second sphere. She aimed a punch straight for his midsection, putting the full power of her body behind it, and broke her fist against the metal.

“Clare!” she screamed, the word probably a curse.

Perry swung again, and she dodged again, slower this time, feet unsteady. His sword passed through her hair, nearly scalping her, and his follow-up came within inches of cutting off a strip of her arm. She had backed up and was scrambling for one of the cavern’s exits, nursing the broken hand. Perry threw his sword at her, and she slipped beneath it, but that threw her balance off, and she landed on her ass. He was to her before she could get back up, fist drawn back for a haymaker.

He was rewarded with a second explosion, this one coming in the form of a kick. It was weaker, and Perry was knocked back only for long enough that Marjut could get to her feet. The passage she was near was narrow, and she took another step backward toward it. If she left through it, he would chase her, but her small size would be a benefit to her, and a flood of insects would slow him.

When she turned to flee, Perry threw his sword, putting his full power into it. She was fast, slipping away with the speed of the wind, but the sword struck her in the arm, going deep. For whatever speed she had, she had no durability, and as Perry called the sword back to him, he saw blood streaming down. He raced after her, but quickly lost sight of her, and was left to depend on Marchand’s understanding of where she was.

Crawling through narrow passages had been difficult before, but racing through them was far harder. She had the advantage, a smaller size, but from all of Marchand’s mapping there was nowhere she could go that would let her lose him just because of the bulk of his armor. Still, she was fast, and had an easier time of it, and he might have lost her if not for the fact that he’d gotten her good with the sword. He saw it in the blood that she was leaving as she raced down the hallway, and once, down a long stretch of open air, he saw the flap of flesh as she ran. It twisted as she moved, disconnected from the bone.

“Take the shot next chance you get,” said Perry as he ran. Marchand should have taken the shot when Perry had first attacked, and the fact that he hadn’t would have to be looked into later.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry was navigating mostly via the ghostly images that Marchand was showing, the contours of the cave as seen through sonic mapping. It was updating in realtime as more data streamed in, various dents in the wall springing in or bubbling out, and Perry hoped that there wasn’t some nasty surprise waiting for him. He didn’t like or trust the caves.

Even without Marchand, it would have been easy enough to follow the trail of blood.

Marjut was slowing down with every step, either from exhaustion or blood loss. She had been shot earlier in the day, and didn’t seem to have a fast way to heal up from that, so even from the start she wasn’t shipshape. Still, Perry was a bit surprised that a single thrown sword would be enough to take her out. Over the time he’d had on Esperide, he’d built up other thresholders in his head, and perhaps had mistakenly come to the conclusion that anyone worth their salt would be incredibly hard to kill.

She doubled back, taking a hole in the floor of a cave, and Perry slipped after her. When he landed on the ground, Marchand fired twice, and it was all over before Perry could figure out where her body was. She should have still had gas in the tank, tricks up her sleeve, but Marchand had very accurately placed two bullets in her torso, which left her coughing up blood on the cool stone. She raised a hand for one last explosion or maybe just a plea for him to stop, and he watched her, waiting to see whether the whole place was going to come crashing down on him.

Instead, she just died, going still and lifeless like a car coming to a gentle stop.

“And I never got to hear your big speech on the evils of man,” said Perry. He stepped forward and nudged the corpse with his foot, just to make sure. “Put another bullet in the brain.”

Marchand complied without hesitation, which caused the body to jump in place. Perry still stared at the corpse for a moment, sword in hand, waiting. He could see up close how much damage he’d done to her arm, how he’d cleaved into her bicep and split the bone. There was a part of him that was worried that she would come back to life. Xiyan’s head had tried to scuttle off somewhere, after all.

“Plot a route out of the caves,” said Perry. “Let me know the moment we can make a connection with the satellites.”

“Was it wise to kill her, sir?” asked Marchand.

“She was a threat to the entire world,” said Perry.

“I suppose, sir,” said Marchand. “However, if I understand your thinking correctly, there is a chance a portal will now open.”

“Yes,” said Perry. He didn’t bother looking around, given how obvious it would be. “And if that happens … I think we have a fight that Jeff can’t just walk away from. If there’s no portal, we fight anyway. And I’m pretty sure I know where he went off to. You tell me the moment he comes back.”

“Very well, sir,” said Marchand.

Something felt wrong though. Perry had a hard time putting his finger on it. He felt good about killing Marjut, and doing it without taking damage in the process, but Jeff was going to be the harder part. No portal had opened down in the depths of the cave, which meant that they would be doing their fight above. Every minute that Jeff deteriorated was a bonus for Perry, though it remained to be seen how the wolf’s tooth would change that.

The insects hadn’t gone docile. They still attacked Perry as he made his way through the cave, but they were small, and they were doing nothing but irritating him and costing themselves their own lives. He had hoped that with Marjut gone they would settle down, or better, start attacking each other for food, but whatever magic she had woven, it had outlasted her death.

He still had the uncomfortable feeling, like he was missing something. He chalked it up to feeling anxious about the coming fight with Jeff.

“I’ve reconnected with the satellites, sir,” said Marchand.

“Where’d he go?” asked Perry.

“He appears to have gone to the promena that we left near the site of the bomb,” said Marchand. “However, contact with the promena was lost following an insect attack mere minutes ago.”

“An insect attack,” said Perry. “Meaning … what, he set them on it?”

“I don’t know, sir,” said Marchand.

“Do we have contact with the core?” asked Perry.

“The core was not built with a controller of any kind,” said Marchand. “The only way to test whether it’s responding to radio signals is to send it a radio signal, which will of course activate it.”

Perry frowned. “Then I guess we need visual contact. Let me know if you come in contact with the nanites.”

“You’ve already given me that directive, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry continued on his way. He was nervous, that was what it was. He had been right that Jeff was going to the promena, and probably right that Jeff was trying to steal the second weapon. But the fate of the entire planet was riding on what would happen in the next few hours, and there were already too many dead, and something was off, something he was missing that he felt should have been obvious.

Perry was almost to the final cavern when Jeff came in over the radio.

“You’re the victor, huh?” he asked. “Survived the flames?”

“No flames,” said Perry. “We didn’t get to that point.” Even just hearing Jeff’s voice, Perry’s heart had grown tight. A hundred dead on the Crypt, and more on the way if Jeff won. Even if this world was left alone, Jeff could slither on to the next, and he’d be up to his same tricks there, which would inevitably leave more dead. At least Marjut seemed to have an ethos.

There was still something bothering Perry, something that was out of place.

“So, you got a portal down there?” asked Jeff. “Doesn’t seem like it.”

Perry didn’t respond. The sense of something missing was getting stronger.

When he flew out of the cave, he saw it immediately. The bugs were missing. The swarm was almost completely gone, but it didn’t take long for Perry to see where it was going — off to the east, where the Natrix lay. Marjut had spent the last of her effort doing this, or perhaps had done it starting from the moment he’d come down into the caves. When she had died, the magic hadn’t unwoven.

That was what Perry had been missing, the thing that had been nagging at him. The connection to a handful of the giant insects was still there, but it was frayed and almost broken with the distance.

“Shit,” said Perry.

“Yup, I have your weapon,” said Jeff.

Perry looked up and saw Jeff floating there, holding a large metal box. He looked worse than he had when Perry had left, if that was possible. The red growth on his stomach, the one from grown-back flesh, was larger than it had been, like an oversized blister that was just begging to be popped.

“Marchand, activate the core,” said Perry.

“Done, sir,” said Marchand.

They were a hundred yards away, maybe a bit more. Jeff thought that it was a bomb, or something like it, because Jeff was from a place where nuclear science was a hundred years off. Why Jeff had gone to get the device was unknown to Perry, but knowing Jeff, it might have just been a desire for some dramatic irony — blowing up the enemy with the same weapon that had been used against him.

It wasn’t a nuclear weapon. Perry had thought that having two of them would be foolish, since if one couldn’t finish the job, a second one wasn’t likely to either. Instead, it was a much more simple device, just two chunks of radioactive material that were held apart from each other by some pistons. When the device activated, they would connect to each other and go supercritical, creating a sustained nuclear reaction that would let off a heavy burst of radiation. This was something from Perry’s Earth, a thing called the Demon Core, responsible for two separate deaths from lethal doses of radiation by early nuclear scientists.

Perry had thought he might be able to bring Jeff close to it. He hadn’t thought that Jeff would literally go there and pick it up.

From the outside, the supercritical event looked like nothing. There was no visible change in the device, no burst of light or arc of electricity, and certainly no explosion. The radiation counter on Perry’s HUD, which had been there since the construction of the bomb, spiked up alarmingly, but that was it.

Jeff dropped the box, and it fell to the ground, shattering beneath them, refined fissile material shattering apart.

“What was that?” asked Jeff. He looked down at the ground. His red eyes had gone wide. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” Perry lied. A lethal dose of radiation, on top of the one you already got.

“It bit me,” said Jeff. “Like a flash of — of what?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “Now are we going to do this or what?” He was drawing power from the planet, from the ground, pouring it into himself. He was going to have to head off the bugs, but he had a bit of time, and there was no way to leave Jeff out there.

“Tell me what it was or I'll kill them all,” said Jeff. His voice had become a wet growl.

“It was a lethal dose of radiation poisoning,” said Perry, not missing a beat. “What did it feel like, a tingle and a flash of heat?”

“What did you do to me?” asked Jeff, looking down at his hands in horror. They had already been blistered, with skin peeling, and didn’t look any different than they had looked just before.

“Not sure what you were hoping to accomplish, bringing that here,” said Perry. He looked down at the broken remains. “It’s dead now though.”

“I’m going to kill you!” screamed Jeff. “I’m going to tear you apart!” He visibly swallowed, throat bobbing, and Perry could only assume that it was the werewolf tooth finally being consumed.

Jeff began to transform, as though ripping apart at the seams, features of a wolf and dragon combined, but still cancerous, red, and peeling. He was a monstrosity, too many things at once, too broken to have been built into something sensible. Everything was in the wrong place, and the red growth that had been on his stomach got even larger than it had been, now almost the size of Perry. The wolf dragon was larger than the dragon had been, with hair coming up between the scales, but it was more damaged too, dying and dangerous.

Perry raised his sword. The bugs were on the march, and he was going to have to make this quick.