Thresholder

The micro-fusion-fission bombs had wiped out half of the incoming insect swarm, and that was the only thing that gave them any chance. Perry stayed in his wolf form, moving between them, targeting the largest of them, sinking his claws in and ripping out their lifeforce to get the power necessary to keep up with the exertion and recover from the heavy blows they occasionally landed. He was faster than anything on the field, but there were so many of them that he was clipped from time to time, and once, trampled.

The bugs had apparently been given a directive, one that they would march to their deaths to obey, and that was to swarm the Natrix and, presumably, kill everyone aboard it. It took an hour before one of them reached the hull of the Natrix, and fifteen minutes after that, that was where the killing fields had moved. The largest of the guns on the Natrix were on top, to give them the best range, and that left inferior defensive measures. Perry was the strongest of them, ripping through what he could, but it wasn’t a battle that suited him well, not like the fights against the orcs of Seraphinus.

The Natrix had gone up on its legs, making as much of a gap between the ground and the belly of the city as possible, leaving the mechs below to do what they could. Portholes that Perry hadn’t even known existed were opened so that people could point long guns down at the base of the ground, most of those weapons repurposed from the storeroom that supplied the mechs, and a few that were freshly manufactured within the last cycle.

In the end, the battle lasted three hours, killing twenty-six, most of them mech pilots, some of them children.

There were many ways in which it wasn’t like fighting the orcs, but the biggest was that there was no flow and rhythm to the battle, only a series of calamities and responses. Normally, a battle had a ‘turn’ to it, the breaking of morale on one side or another, some tactic that had been set up earlier and held in reserve to be released later. This had none of that. The Natrix used the strongest weapons it possessed as early as it could, and the insects kept attacking until there were simply none left. At the end, it was a slow trickle of weakened insects, those who hadn’t been able to move as fast when given the call. They were going against whatever the Natrix had left, which was mostly Perry.

Perry made the painful transition back, feeling hollow and empty, then immediately started running to where the portal had been.

“Wait!” called Mette into his ear. “I’m coming with you!”

Perry paused for only a half step, then kept up his running at the same speed he’d been going. “I’m not coming back for you,” said Perry. “Find a working mech and come meet me. It’s been three hours, it might not even be there anymore.”

“Fuck,” said Mette. “I’m coming, I’ll be there, don’t leave without me!” There were other voices following that, some kind of argument, but nothing that Perry could make out before she stopped transmitting.

Perry had been in battle for nearly three hours, more if he tacked on fighting Marjut and Jeff, and he was feeling it. His mind was mush, but at least he hadn’t had a deluge of the disturbing images of battle. He hadn’t seen most of the dead, not the humans anyway, and the one image he knew would stay with him, that of a boy’s body being pulled from a ripped open cockpit, he was already working hard on shoving deep down inside of him. It would go to a place where he wouldn’t have to think about it, with all the others.

When Perry arrived, the portal was still standing, and beside it, the cancerous body of the dragon was still unmoving. He had been worried about that, but his senses as a robowolf were very sharp, and he had smelled death in the air, then confirmed with a sonic scan that the vital processes had stopped.

It wasn’t clear how long the portals stayed open. Maya had said that her first one stayed open for a few hours, long enough that she could gather a few things. Jeff had said that it would last for an entire day, if not longer. And there was a story from Xiyan which implied that if Perry didn’t take the portal, he would end up getting a visit from another thresholder anyway. That would likely be a calamity though, and was best to avoid.

The point was, the portal might potentially close at any moment, stranding him there, which he desperately wanted to avoid.

He turned to the dragon, pulled his sword from the shelf space, and began hacking at it. The first cut went deep, opening up the flesh like a balloon full of butter. Organs and muscles splashed down onto the ground, and Perry grimaced. Most of the dragon’s durability must have been magic, and unlike the directive to the bugs, that was a magic that didn’t seem to last beyond death.

It took only a few minutes to get to the heart, but once it was free, Perry still turned back to the portal to see whether it had disappeared. It was still there, open and waiting, just as it had been from the moment that Jeff had been dispatched.

Perry held up the heart, looking it over. It was diseased, and without Marchand’s mapping of the internals, he might not have known that it was a heart at all. It promised power, but having seen what the dragon had turned into, its transformational death, he had no particular desire to eat it. Killing himself for the potential for a better transformation, some kind of enormous metal wolfdragon, seemed like a step too far.

Still, he had taken it from the body for a reason, and he turned it over slowly, contemplating what it would be like to eat the thing and have it inside his chest. Maybe the second sphere could fix it, or maybe he would simply die from cancer.

He set it on the ground, gently, away from him but undamaged, so he could eat it later if he decided that it was worth the risk.

“On my way,” said Mette in his ear. She was slightly out of breath. “Brigitta will be calling you soon.”

“Why?” asked Perry, eyes going back to the portal. It was still standing there, waiting for him. Maybe it would wait for as long as a full day, if it had to. Maybe even longer.

“Perry,” said Brigitta, her voice transmitted from very far away, a different channel. “I’ve been told that you have a portal, that you’re leaving soon. I need something from you first.”

“Time is short,” said Perry. “I don’t know how short, but —”

“I need you to take me up to the space station,” said Brigitta.

Perry was silent for a long moment. “That would take a lot of time. To go to the Crypt, fetch you and put you in the storage, fly to the space station, then fly back — and it would be a death sentence, the place is bathed in radiation.”

“I gave Marchand orders,” said Brigitta. “He made scans for me while you were up there. I can turn the reactor off, then work in the dark. I’ve had partial schematics for two years. I can get it done.”

“There’s not enough time,” said Perry. “I’m sorry.”

“If I can get up there, I can bring it down to the ground,” said Brigitta. “It was never meant to do that, not when injured, but it should be possible if I get everything fixed. Before you had that ring, there was no way to get this done, but now that you have it, now that you can carry me there, we can accomplish the work of generations.”

“No,” said Perry. He kept his voice firm. He didn’t like doing that. It made him feel like he was talking to a misbehaving dog, rather than his long-term girlfriend. “Even if you shut the reactor off, you’d be consigning yourself to a slow death up there, too much is broken, we don’t even know if the life support systems could handle having people up there, and the radiation levels are too high.”

“That’s for me to figure out,” said Brigitta. “Perry, you have to do this.”

Perry’s lips went thin. “You’re seeing something here, a shortcut, I get that, but —”

“The Crypt is injured,” said Brigitta. “The Natrix is crippled. We’ve had too many people die, Perry, too many roles that will have to be filled, we’re going to be in recovery for decades, and the reactors need repairs and replacements that we just can’t do. We’re dying a death of a thousand cuts, we’re being run down, and all of this, these people from another world, they haven’t helped us. We need this, Perry. We need to bring the space station down and cannibalize it, use the technology on it, the repair systems alone might be enough to save us.”

It was a complicated and nuanced sort of discussion, the sort that Perry would have leapt at if he was a passive commentator and they were having an anonymous back and forth on reddit. Instead, he was feeling antsy, and the responses he was coming up with felt like they were crudely emotional. She was asking him to prioritize her future over his own, and there were all kinds of unknowns in her plan.

He could step through the portal right now and there was nothing that she could do about it.

“Please,” she said. “Please, I know you want to go, but there’s time, there’s still time, you know there is.”

Perry was silent. He was trying to weigh the evidence against the hammering of his heart. There was another world out there, waiting for him, just a few steps away, a new place with new people. He hadn’t really enjoyed the two years of waiting, wondering whether someone would show up or if the whole thing was over. If the portal closed, he’d be in the same position but worse. This world wasn’t meant for him, he had no power here, no real ability to make changes or exercise his wishes. Maybe he could have tried harder to push them, should have, but consigning himself to living here felt like too much to bear.

The only reason he was even considering it was because helping her was something he felt that a good person would do.

“Sir, I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up a route,” said Marchand. “The optimal window requires leaving for the Crypt in the next twenty minutes.”

“This is the future of my people,” said Brigitta. “People you’ve been with for two years, people you know, people who have died. Perry.”

It was at that moment that a mech came running over to Perry’s position. It wasn’t one of the combat mechs, nor the worker mechs, but a new kind that was lanky and bipedal, stripped down to almost nothing, used mostly for long-range transportation with minimal goods. It ran like an ostrich, antenna wobbly with its movement, and came up next to Perry with a skidding of its feet along the ground.

“Okay,” said Mette as the legs folded up and lowered the cockpit. “I’m here.”

“No one else?” asked Perry.

She gave him a somewhat pained look. “No,” she said. “There’s … some disagreement over whether to come with you. People want to stay, to salvage what they can, to move forward, here, on our home planet.”

Perry wanted to ask about her children, and the question died in his mouth. She was looking slightly manic, and definitely with an edge of fear. He had thought there would be thirty people, maybe as many as a hundred, and there was only Mette. She stepped from the cockpit as soon as she was able and walked to the portal, fixing her eyes on it and not daring to blink.

“Put me in the ring, so we’ll stay together,” said Mette.

They had communal child-rearing on the Natrix, which went along with the custom for children not to have only one father, even if their biological father was obvious in some cases. Mette’s children would, in some sense, be fine, but it couldn’t help but strike Perry as incredibly selfish for her to leave. What did he want though? For her to take small children with her? For her not to come? He could stop her, easily.

“There’s something that I have to do first,” said Perry.

Mette spun toward him. “Do?” she asked.

“I need to go take Brigitta to the space station,” said Perry. “She’s going to try to … I don’t know. Bring it down, I guess, safely land it on the planet, use the thrusters and Esper to do a needlepoint landing so the reactor — which is currently spewing radiation — can be cannibalized, or … I don’t know.”

“We should leave now, sir, if we’re going to,” said Marchand.

“You can’t be serious,” said Mette. “She can’t be serious. I’ve seen the schematics, watched the video, she’s giving herself a death sentence.”

“She’s the engineer,” said Perry. “We aren’t.”

Mette balled her hands into fists. “What am I supposed to do then? Just go through? Wait for you? How much warning will I have?”

“Wait here,” said Perry. “I’ll be back. It should stay open.” He didn’t believe it, and his lack of confidence shone through in his voice.

“What’s the outer limit of how long it’ll stay?” asked Mette. “What’s the point where I … where I go without you?”

“One day,” said Perry. “More or less.” That was from Jeff though, unreliable, and there was no way to test it without risking that the portal would vanish. And of course, it could be that the portals stayed open for a variable time, or a time that depended on some element Perry knew nothing about, and if he stayed there for any longer thinking about it, he was going to abandon Brigitta.

It wasn’t what a good person would do.

He lifted off with the sword without another word to Mette, following the line that Marchand was drawing on the screen, a line which had been slowly moving as he sat there.

There was, unfortunately, a lot of time to think while he was flying. It took time to get up out of the atmosphere and into a region where he could go faster, then took more time to drop down to where the Crypt was.

Perry thought about what his life would be like if he was stuck on Esperide. He thought about what new worlds might be waiting for him on the other side, and what opponents he might face there. He’d gotten stronger on Esperide, though if there was some ultimate power here, a low-hanging fruit, he had no idea what it was, and hadn’t gotten it. He wouldn’t be taking a giant mech with him, and even the smallest of them couldn’t possibly fit within the opening that the ring could make. He only had the ring because he had stolen it, and that didn’t seem like it fit the pattern either. Maybe there wasn’t always a power.

He came to a realization, two years too late, that the laser rifle that Brigitta had made for him was a way of attempting to quell his desire to leave.

Because of the satellites, he had plenty of time to talk with whoever was on the network, but he did relatively little of that. Brigitta was trying to get everything as ready as she could, hastily assembling a plan for the space station now that she could actually go there. Mette was fretting, and had apparently burned some bridges — or had bridges that were in the process of burning. She would tell him if the portal closed, at least.

It was the call with Leticia that took most of his attention, if not his time.

“The second reactor was pushed beyond its limits,” she said. “It knocked years off its expected lifespan.”

“Aren’t they all far past their operational expectancies?” asked Perry.

“Yes,” said Leticia. “So you understand the concern. I do think Brigitta has the wrong motivations for this, but she might be right that this is the last chance we have to do something with what you’ve brought here.”

“That’s why I’m going to get her,” said Perry.

“If she dies, it will be a blow to life on this planet. She’s skilled beyond reason,” said Leticia. “Do whatever you can to see her home safely.”

“I’m only dropping her off,” said Perry. “Even that’s pushing it, given the travel times.”

“And Mette,” said Leticia. “She was a leader of this place, and will no longer be, leaving me as one of the only shepherds of the new ways. But I don’t want her going with you.”

Perry hurtled through the thin atmosphere, along the trajectory that Marchand had chosen. He couldn’t feel anything from the outside, and his body was, as usual, pretty rigid so he wouldn’t be gently flapping around as he drifted after the sword.

“It’s her choice to make,” said Perry.

“No,” said Leticia. “It’s yours, if you’re going to allow her to come with you. If she had to go through on her own, into the unknown, with no ally to speak of, I don’t think she would do it. Tell her that if she wants to leave us, it won’t be with your safety net in place.”

“There’s no safety with me,” said Perry.

“I know that,” said Leticia. “Perry, she’s talking about leaving, about abandoning her children, leaving the work behind, letting whatever happens to us happen. She’s being as selfish as you are.”

“It’s not selfishness,” said Perry. “I need to move on, there’s nothing more for me here.”

“Jeff told me everything,” said Leticia. “He answered all my questions about you. He told me about the nanites, about the werewolf teeth, about you and your need to hold things over us.”

Perry felt his guts grow cold. That conversation hadn’t been one that Marchand had shown him, and it was very possible that Leticia had made sure it happened somewhere that wasn’t recorded. “The nanites wouldn’t have changed anything,” said Perry. “And the teeth … they’re a curse.”

“You should have told us,” said Leticia. “We could have decided for ourselves what was a curse, what wouldn’t have changed anything.”

“I was holding some of it back as a tool in the arsenal,” said Perry. “I couldn’t know what would be coming through that portal, whether it might be someone who could turn you against me.”

“This isn’t about trust,” said Leticia. “It’s about you wanting to feel special.”

Perry grit his teeth. He didn’t want to have this conversation. Really, the only thing stopping him from putting her on mute was that it had always felt like defeat to block someone in the middle of a conversation. What you wanted to do, if you blocked someone, was to do it after getting the final word, and in this case, he knew that it wouldn’t feel good in the same way.

Perry had asked Marchand about the nanites. He had inquired as to whether the nanites could be used to solve any of the outstanding engineering problems aboard the Natrix, or whether they could jailbreak it further. Marchand had been deeply skeptical that it would be more than marginal use, even with Perry working hard to make more of the stuff: the coded in directive was still to protect Maya Singh, and everything that they were doing for Perry was premised on getting around that somehow. Without Maya available, they were crude instruments that needed digital coaxing into doing most of what they could still do.

The teeth were, perhaps, different. Being a werewolf came with a drawback, which was transforming into a beast, but it also came with plenty of benefits. With the small moons and the perpetual twilight, maybe they would have found it easier to control. Perry had killed while a wolf, and having done it, he thought it would have been very hard to learn to control it without having that lack of control at least once. Being second sphere had also helped — helped significantly, because it allowed for him to manage his energy levels and internal alchemy. He had given it some thought, and hadn’t wanted to inflict lycanthropy on the people of the Natrix. It was a poison pill that Leticia would surely have swallowed. Mette too, for that matter, though possibly not Brigitta.

Perry ran through the arguments, and they felt weak. In his own opinion, one of his best qualities as a former ‘man who argues online’ was that he was able to see things from other perspectives, analyze all the angles of attack before they actually came, do the research and perspective shifting to know when he was on thin ice.

“You wanted me to give everything over,” said Perry. “You wanted me to give up every advantage, every asset, so you could have it all. And when the time came, what did you provide in return? The single biggest thing, the nuke, that didn’t come from you at all, I got that by being big and scary. All the work I did to make peace, everything I did to protect you, and nothing but a full commitment to your people and your cause would have been enough. So no, I don’t regret not sharing every little secret with you. I don’t regret leaving either. End communication.”

Then he put her on mute, but it hadn’t felt like a slam dunk. It had felt needlessly self-righteous, but what else was his option? Admit that she was right, grovel like a dog, care about what she and the others thought of him?

Whatever. He was leaving anyway. None of this mattered, and the odds that there would be anyone to look into his past ever again seemed low.

Hours passed as Perry flew. Descending through the atmosphere was done by falling, not flying, and he only needed to slow himself enough that he wouldn’t burn up. He’d never had to visit the day side of the planet, and now he never would, which he considered to be no big loss. There had been planning that had gone into keeping him as safe as possible in the heat, along with a fair amount of testing, but it had all been for naught, and had never worked properly anyway.

Perry flared power so the cold wouldn’t affect him and went through the dark, guided by the lights of the oversized vehicle. His eyes went to the repaired hole in the side of it, now thankfully sealed, and he slipped in through the back door, where he found Brigitta bundled up and waiting. She wasn’t alone.

“We go, now!” she called. She turned to Perry. “These are my people, a dozen of them, the best that were old enough. They’re coming with.”

Perry wanted to argue, but there was a countdown timer in his field of view, helpfully pasted there by March. They needed to be up in the air as soon as possible to get the best possible angle of approach on the space station, the one that would take the least amount of time.

Perry opened the overlap of dimensions, and people began filing through, moving fast, some of them carrying packs and equipment that had been taken from the Crypt. Brigitta wasn’t doing this alone, and she was betting a fair amount of their resources and personnel on it. Everyone who was coming with them was over the age of twenty, and two of them were elders.

“We’re not going to be able to talk once I lock you in,” said Perry. “Then when we’re up, there won’t be time to talk either. So if there’s something you need to say —”

“No,” said Brigitta. “I know that this is you. I accepted it long ago.” She went up on her tiptoes and kissed him, lips pressing against the hard exterior of the helmet rather than his mouth. Then she slipped into the shelf space with the others, immediately directing them, before Perry made his way out of the Crypt and back up into space, this time with the station as his target.

“How do you like their odds?” asked Perry after a few minutes of silence.

“It’s a daring plan, sir,” said Marchand. “There are certain imponderables that they’ll need to contend with once they’re there, the largest of which is how they plan to shut the reactor off and bring a halt to the radiation. However, there is a risk that neutron activation is the source of enough radiation to be of some concern, a topic which I have discussed with Miss Karlquist at great length.”

“She’s had this plan for a while,” said Perry.

“In fact, she had proposed to me that you would be the one to carry it out, under my direction, though of course there are several significant reasons that doing so would have been very dangerous and far less likely to succeed,” said Marchand. “I repeatedly advised against that version of the plan, which I felt was unacceptably likely to send us slamming into the ground at a high velocity — or more likely, send the space station itself into the ground with us descending slowly after it.”

Perry frowned. There were times he felt like he had given Marchand too long of a leash.

“There’s a chance she’s killing herself,” said Perry. “A chance that she’s going to send the best hope of escaping this planet hurtling toward the ground.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “However, she does know the risks, and has been set on this for quite some time. I believe she might have been trying to work out how best to approach the issue with you, but of course that’s pure speculation on my part. I could dip into the private logs from Esper, if you would like, sir.”

“No,” said Perry. “Let them keep their secrets. I owe her at least that.”

“Very well, sir, shall I delete the logs once we’ve left this world?” asked Marchand.

“Not unless there’s a need for space,” said Perry. “We’ll have Mette with us. Just in case, we might want to know more about … I don’t know. There might be cause, anyway.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “And we’re quite certain about having a companion join us?”

“It’s not certain,” said Perry. “I think maybe she doesn’t quite understand what it will be like, to leave her home, to be in unfamiliar places, to depend on me for her protection.”

There was more silence in the void as they flew, leaving the planet behind. The countdown timer was still ticking down, but they would make it back to the planet with time to spare. Perry tried not to look at the timer too much, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to tell Marchand to remove it. It was also a timer that had been set to the maximum length of time that Perry had a report of a portal being open, minus a few hours for the sake of safety and imprecision.

There was no way to make the sword go faster, and no way to shrink the distance. It was mathematics, that was all, and Perry had to trust in Marchand.

Eventually, Perry was beyond the reach of the satellites, and couldn’t have talked to anyone if he wanted to. He had only his own thoughts, or conversation with Marchand, which was often like an amplification of his own thoughts. He tried to meditate, which did nothing good for him, and eventually settled into a low-power slow-breathing mode that helped to make the time pass. He was feeling claustrophobic, possibly because of the horrors of the cave. The armor was feeling tight around him, like he was trapped in a metal box, and the very first thing he would do once he was secure in a new world was take it off.

That was assuming the portal stayed open for him.

The space station looked like it was in worse condition than when he’d left it, but that was almost certainly just Perry’s imagination. They had barely touched it during the fight, enough to dent one of the large panels but almost certainly not enough to create any long-term structural damage. The space station had been orbiting the planet for hundreds of years, its automated systems keeping it there, the fusion reactor trucking along with only the replacements and maintenance that happened on their own without human intervention. It was a testament to overengineering and technological sophistication that it hadn’t gone cold and dead in all that time.

Perry went in the way he’d come out, through the bay doors. The radiation counter appeared on his screen, warning him of the total exposure he was getting. Death was coming if he stayed here, and it might prove unavoidable for Brigitta and the others.

She came out of the room with the shelves as though she’d been waiting there for the entire duration of the long flight through space. The others followed behind her, the engineers that the Crypt could spare, going on a mission that could very easily kill them all. If Perry had known that this was the plan, he’d have flown to the space station earlier for reconnaissance, even if it meant being bathed in more radiation. Radiation was supposed to be additive, every dose you got adding onto your lifetime total and raising your risks even if you had a long break between.

Perry had gotten a radiation bath when he’d first come to the world, and had a big fight with Jeff in the dust of a mushroom cloud, and in general, hadn’t been as safe as he might have hoped. He didn’t know whether he’d recovered from the radiation poisoning just by having enough time or because the second sphere had helped him, and he was taking more radiation now. He was feeling ill already, but that might have just been the hypochondria that happens when you’re watching the rems roll in.

“Wait,” said Perry as Brigitta turned to leave.

She paused and looked at him, a complex web of emotions on her face. Mostly it was a grim determination to get things done, but there was sadness underneath that. She didn’t have time for parting words or long goodbyes.

He stepped forward and wrapped her in a hug. It wasn’t just sentimentality, he was pouring energy out from his skin, draining his vessels, trying to heal her up and get her to the peak of health, the better to survive what came next. It lasted only a few seconds, and she was stiff against his armor for most of it. Then he released her, and she went on his way. As soon as she and her people had cleared the bay, he went back out through the doors and accelerated away from the space station, leaving them to their fate. He would be gone before he knew whether it worked or not. They’d brought radio equipment with them, maybe stuff that would be good enough to get a signal to the satellites.

He couldn’t help but think, as he left, that a better person might have stayed to do what he could.

There was silence again as he went back to the planet, tracing the line that Marchand had laid for him. It had felt good to kill Marjut and murder Jeff, and now he was feeling out of sorts. He recorded a message for Brigitta, even though there was a good chance she wouldn’t get it — and might not live through the rest of the day. He watched the lights on the space station for as long as it was in visual range with Marchand’s extreme zoom, hoping that they would wink out, indicating that the reactor had been turned off and the team had started on whatever their plan was to get the space station down to the surface. The space station had thrusters, and had possibly even been designed to come in for a landing when it was first made, but it was also an ancient thing that had suffered a severe hit and had gone without human intervention for literal centuries.

Eventually, he was far enough away that he couldn’t see the space station anymore.

“I have a stored message from Mette, sir,” said Marchand.

“Play it,” said Perry.

“The portal is closing,” said Mette. “I’ve measured it, it’s slow, but it is closing. You’ve got, uh, two hours, I think, before it’s too small for you to get through. I’ll wait as long as I can.” Her voice was tight and she was speaking fast. Perry had gotten to know Mette fairly well, and she was hard to rattle, but she was rattled — which made sense, given she was on the verge of throwing herself through a portal to a world that might be anything.

“Tell her I’m on my way,” said Perry. “When was the message sent?”

“One hour ago, sir,” said Marchand. “I’ve taken the liberty of updating the clock.”

The time allowance had shrunk. They had less than an hour left, and it was going to be a squeeze.

“Update the course,” said Perry. “Steeper descent through the atmosphere, less protection from the heat, I’ll keep us from burning up.”

“With magic, sir?” asked Marchand.

“Yes,” said Perry. “Just do it, give me a new heading, we’re going in at as steep an angle as we can, minimize time in the air.”

“I apologize, sir, but I need a second confirmation,” said Marchand.

“Just do it,” said Perry. “I’m aware of the risks.”

The line changed only slightly, and Perry began making preparations. He wore nanite long johns beneath the armor, an extra layer of protection that worked less well for him than it had worked for Maya when she was in combat mode. For the descent, he had Marchand push the nanites out to coat him on the outside, then began forming them into a shell with insulating layers. As that was being done, he began channeling his energy, pouring it into the assembly, trying his best to make channels that energy could flow through. It was among the contingencies he’d tried to have available for going into the baking four hundred degree heat of the day side if it ever came to that, a way to take the heat and turn it into fuel, or at least bank it somewhere that wouldn’t result in him being cooked alive.

It was the sort of thing he’d ideally have wanted to be rock solid before using it in a life or death situation. It wasn’t as though he’d be able to bail out of the fall if he found himself cooking.

They hit the atmosphere at speed, the nanites forming a thin shell with a pointed tip to minimize drag. Perry did his best to hold everything together as he heated up, tracking everything from inside the shell, relying on Marchand’s senses and the energy flow of the second sphere. The heat was wicked away by the metaphysical channels he’d dug into it, but not fast enough to keep the shell from heating. Marchand reported on the death of the nanites, which happened as they grew too hot and began to fail. An altitude tracker was ticking down very fast, and at a certain point, a large warning popped up across the whole of Perry’s vision, telling him to apply force with the sword if there was to be any chance of preventing a substantial impact with the ground.

Perry had the sword pull him up, away from the planet, slowing him down, reducing their velocity and drag in equal measures. He could feel himself sweating from the heat, hotter than a sauna, and he could feel his attention begin to wander too. The shell was starting to lose its integrity, and parts of the armor were starting to fail too. He was venting energy back into the armor to repair it, taking the heat on the outside and transmuting it into the fuel for repairing the damage of the heat.

The altitude tracker hit zero and Perry smashed into the ground, feeling every bit of strain in his legs but somehow not breaking them. He took off his helmet as the remains of the shell migrated back into the armor, breathing hard and feeling cool air on his face.

“Come on, let’s go,” said Mette. She was standing next to the portal, which they’d somehow landed within a dozen feet of. “Open the thing.”

Perry used the ring to overlap the dimensions, and Mette ran inside without another word to him. He had half expected other people to have joined her, but it was just Mette. The Natrix was still sitting in the distance with workers swarming it, looking like insects at that distance. At least with the massacre that had happened, they wouldn’t be threatened by another attack for quite some time.

Perry turned to the portal, then looked to the sky.

“No word from the space station?” he asked.

“None, sir,” said Marchand.

“The message for Brigitta, that’s sent, it’s on the servers somewhere?” asked Perry.

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry was, for whatever reason, stalling. “Send another message to Leticia,” he said. “Tell her to come to these coordinates for some supplies. They’ll need Esper for manipulating the nanites, and … give them a full outline on everything we know about werewolves, every transcript and video of transformation, all the parameters.”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry reached into his mouth and pulled out a tooth. They regrew with a transformation, but it hurt like hell, and was only possible using all his strength. He did it two more times, leaving a long gap on the right side of his mouth and the taste of blood on his tongue. When that was finished, he had Marchand take half the nanites out and place them in a heap of black, where he set the teeth.

He wasn’t sure that was the right call. Maybe it was guilt that made him do it, not guilt about the Natrix or the things he’d kept from them, but guilt about Brigitta.

With that done, Perry let out a breath and slipped through the portal, which was just barely wide enough for him.