Thresholder

The goal was to hold things together. That was the only goal, at least for the next few years. They had lost people and damaged equipment, and the cycle of harvests had been disrupted, costing them material supplies. With no option to farm among the corpses of thousands of insects, they would need to move, and that would mean living off what they had in their stores for much longer than preferable.

They were one more disaster away from annihilation. That was what Leticia chose to keep in her mind, rather than the names of the dead and the memories of their lives. A hurried mass funeral was arranged, then the Natrix was on the move again.

They had a tough journey ahead of them, one caused, in part, by geography: Esperide had an ocean. It was small, by the standards of both their original planet and the maps that Perry had shown them of Earth, but it wasn’t something the Natrix was capable of crossing. Instead, they were going to have to go around — along with most of the wildlife. When the waves of insects hit the shores of the melted ocean, they would be diverted north or south to find passage, and that would cause a time of conflict across most of the planet.

The Natrix had been through it before, and unlike the insects, they knew that it was coming well in advance. Now though, they were limping along, facing the danger with far less strength than they might have hoped for.

Mette was gone. It was a blow to Leticia, not just because of Mette’s job aboard the ship, but because it undermined Leticia’s authority as the ship’s leader. It didn’t help that Mette was Leticia’s closest friend, which made the loss personal.

Esperide didn’t have a long history. The history of their ancestors, of those people they had been before the calamity aboard the spaceship, had not been well-preserved. What the three young women and their supporters had done was virtually unprecedented, and they had nothing to base their plans on, only the certainty that they were right. Brigitta and Mette would both have been sold into virtual slavery among the Heimalis if something hadn’t been done, and that was at the core of why Leticia had pushed so hard for so long.

Ruling was the more difficult part. The old people had their rooms stripped from them and were effectively sidelined by the generation of children they had created, with the rule of the young by the old ended, but once that was finished, there was still a city to keep in order and all sorts of problems to fix. It was Leticia who was tasked with managing the people, their wants and whims, brokering agreements with the inevitable factions, making sure that everything was equitable, and more difficult, that everyone was happy about it.

Leticia had never depended fully on Mette and Brigitta, but she was less comfortable with their replacements, both of them young men who were a few years her junior. They were good, sturdy workers, part of the new breed, teenagers when the soft coup had happened and fully onboard with the ideas and ideals that Leticia, Brigitta, and Mette had brought with them, and yet … there was a distance between them. It might have been because she was a woman and they were not, she was a mother and they were at the usual reserve from their own children, if they had sired children. Most of it was probably just age and the fact that she had the weight of all her past decisions hanging over her.

Her life became lonely. It had been trending that way since before the big battle, but it was far worse afterward. The reorganization had left her feeling like a cog in the machine, and not a wholly necessary one. She found herself spending more time with the children than the adults, both her own and the others that were a part of the new generation. There was a sweetness to the toddlers in particular that lifted a heavy heart.

For all that the Natrix had suffered, the Crypt that was slowly traveling through the cold dark had suffered more. A tenth of their number had been brutally killed, almost all of them adults, which included a large number of vital positions — doctors and engineers in particular. Then Brigitta had left with almost a dozen others for her insane quest to take the space station down from space, leaving the Crypt to limp along. There were times when the Crypt had to make calls to the Natrix to help guide them through some problem or another, usually technical ones that went beyond their ability to solve.

Perry had been gone for a month when Brigitta established radio contact. They had shut down the space station early on, early enough that they weren’t going to die immediately, but not so soon that most of them wouldn’t die an early death from cancer. They were making headway on the project, according to Brigitta, cutting away parts of the space station that wouldn’t survive re-entry and using the precious few micro-fusion generators to power up vital systems. The atmosphere was only barely breathable, leaving them with persistent headaches, and the food production facilities had needed to be completely rebooted, putting them on the brink of starvation, but Brigitta was optimistic.

From Leticia’s perspective, both her sisters had succumbed to Perry in their own ways. Brigitta had fallen in love and taken on one of the sins that infested Perry — the need to be unique, to be special, to be a savior. That was always when Perry had shined brightest, which was all the more clear now that she knew how much he’d kept from them. Even his insistence on not having children was suspect to her. There was no need for Brigitta to go up to the space station and risk her life. With the new technology they had, they could have done it more safely and with better planning in a generation. The data and engineering that Perry had brought with him would allow them to move by leaps and bounds, especially once they were stabilized, and once Brigitta was with the Heimalis, sharing research and development. But no, Brigitta had seen her chance, and had gone for it headfirst, exactly in the way that her almost-husband would have done it.

Mette was infected with Perry’s other sin, the sin of wanderlust. Maybe that had always been there. They had often talked about the work of generations, getting off the planet, rebuilding all the technology their people had once had. Leticia’s focus had always been on the present though, the things that they could do within their lifetimes to advance that work, and it was obvious in retrospect that Mette was far more emotionally attached to the future and what it might hold. Once Perry had come, she’d taken to ‘magic’ like a fiend, and talked often about the other worlds and what it meant for their lives and ambitions.

Leticia and Mette had ended things with the worst fight that they had ever had, and now she was as good as dead.

Perry had remarked, more than once, that the three of them represented the past, present, and future. That seemed prophetic now, with Brigitta having gone to the space station and Leticia alone on the Natrix. It was only Mette who was the odd one out, having gone not to the future, but to a parody of it, other worlds that were mostly not planets but something else.

Leticia focused on the present rather than the past. She kept her nose to the grindstone and tried her best to build up good relationships with those who had filled the positions of her friends. The Natrix skirted its way around the great ocean, legs sometimes lapped by its waters.

“We’re bringing it down,” said Brigitta after two months had passed.

“In one piece?” asked Leticia.

“That’s the plan,” said Brigitta. “I think it’s doable. I’ve been conversing with Esper on it.”

“More than you’ve been talking with me,” said Leticia.

“You’re not going to be any help,” said Brigitta. “You were never as deft with the engineering as I am, and I’m in contact with Engineering there, taking as much as they can spare.”

“You’re well?” asked Leticia.

“We’re recording vitals,” said Brigitta. “They’re sent to Esper every cycle. I’m the only one without any symptoms. I’m fine, Lettie. It’s the landing I’m worried about. I can go into the technicals if you want me to, but —”

“How have you gotten worse?” asked Leticia with a small laugh.

“I’m focused,” said Brigitta. “Sorry if I’m — it’s the headspace I need to be in here. I’m the only one without symptoms, the only one Lettie. I just wanted you to know that I’m bringing it down, wanted you to hear it from me.”

“Thank you,” said Leticia. “It’s good to hear your voice, and I hope it’s good for you to hear mine. With Mette gone … I hope we can reunite someday, in person.”

“Someday,” said Brigitta. “If it goes well, if we can make the landing like in the simulations.”

The space station was, unfortunately, aiming for the dusk side of the planet rather than the dawn side. There were a few reasons for that, but they didn’t think that they would be able to easily move it without significant work that couldn’t be done in advance, and it was far better for it to be trapped in the cold than trapped in the heat. Eventually, in sixty years time, it would be in the dawn twilight band, if they couldn’t get it up and running before them. Landing in dusk would also mean that they could get more assistance from Heimalis, though there were still personnel issues there.

Leticia predicted failure. She was a pessimist at heart, a worrier, and while that normally helped her to plan for the unexpected, here it wasn’t terribly productive. Some of the people in engineering had wanted to requisition the small theater as a place to watch the landing of the space station as seen from every angle they would have access to, including a mech from Heimalis that would be sent out there to watch from a safe distance. Leticia had waffled on it, but decided against it. There was too high a chance that something would go wrong. Gathering people together to watch death and destruction seemed like a risk not worth taking.

But of course it was difficult to temper excitement, and Leticia hadn’t instituted a lockdown on comms, mostly on the grounds that it might cause some resentment against her. There were going to be hundreds of people watching on their own, some of them in small groups, or listening to one of the ‘pirate’ radio ‘stations’. That was better though, easier to have everyone process their collective grief if the worst happened — not just grief for Brigitta and those she’d brought up with her, but for the loss of everything the space station promised them.

Leticia watched from her office. She had two speeches prepared, because she didn’t trust herself to speak extemporaneously. She had blocked out the entire day, because she knew that she wouldn't be able to think about anything else. Her hands tapped at her desk, as though on a phantom keyboard, busying themselves as her eyes went between the monitors and her ears listened to the blathering of one of the young people who’d taken it upon herself to play announcer.

“The space station was designed to land on the surface of the planet,” said Sanna. It was probably the third time she’d said it, just to fill the time, and for people that were just tuning in. “We think now, from what we have from the computers up there, that the space station was always intended to make a permanent home of some kind here, though there’s no evidence that they had a way to march around the planet, and we don’t think that they would have wanted to stay in one place. One interesting theory is that the space station was only one of many, but we don’t actually know!” She was fifteen and chirpy. Leticia had been like that once, though it had been mixed with an earnest desire for change. Sanna just seemed to like talking.

“I’m getting word that they’re going to be turning on the reactor soon, which is the dangerous part, since they’ve only been able to partially shield themselves,” said Sanna. She was behind the times: Leticia had gotten the message that the reactor had started up again five minutes prior.

They’d initially had hopes to fully repair the reactor, to do what their ancestors had failed to do, but too much had been sheared off. The material to make a proper shield was simply missing, and was one of the biggest casualties of whatever had struck the ship, aside from the main control center that had housed most of the most important pieces of the station.

The reactor was necessary to move the ship, which meant that this wasn’t the first time they’d had to use it. They had appropriated shielding for themselves, going so far as to partially flood a portion of the ship to place some water between them, but that was a half measure. Everyone had symptoms of one kind or another, rashes and bloody noses. Everyone, save for Brigitta, but knowing her, that might have just been her putting a brave face on things, staying conscious of morale.

Sanna blathered on. Leticia watched the numbers on her screens. It was all coming to them with a significant delay from the other side of the planet, relayed through the network of satellites. At a certain point, the landing would be in the past and everyone on the Natrix would be watching it unfold, fate already written.

It was almost startling when the video from the mech showed a point of light. That was the space station, thrusters firing, both the ones fed by the reactor and those fed from fuel tanks. Most of the fuel had gone rotten in the time it had been sitting there, but some had remained, and they’d done what they could to make it usable.

Brigitta had compared it to the power of a fart.

From where the mech was standing, the light looked small, but it was the brightest thing in the sky aside from the sun on the horizon. It was impossible to tell how fast it was actually approaching, but Leticia knew from the planning and reports that it was going to be coming in fast, using air friction to brake as much as possible. Whoever had been in charge of piloting the mech, they were good at making sure the camera was in the right spot, and their vantage point over the region was also good. The plants didn’t thrive as well on the dusk side, but the wide open area was green, the better to allow just the smallest bit of extra cushioning.

Sanna was chattering excitedly while this was going on, and Leticia had to imagine that a majority of those aboard the Natrix had stopped what they were doing to watch or listen. She would have to make a speech soon, perhaps very soon, though it was a question of when. If the station crashed, it seemed better to wait, to give the news some time to ripple through the Natrix and for people to come to terms with it. If it somehow landed safely, then she thought it was better to give it some time, just to make sure it didn’t seem like she was taking credit for something she’d had no part in. It was also better not to let people know that the speeches had been written already. They liked for their leaders to speak from the heart.

The station grew larger in a hurry as it approached the landing site. It was on target, at least, that was something. As it got close enough to make out the shape of it, the engines flared brighter, killing the last of their speed.

Leticia was not an engineer herself, having only middling ability at programming and a basic understanding of the disparate fields. She understood engineers though, and in particular, understood Brigitta. Anything an engineer made wouldn’t work perfectly the first time, nor the second, not unless it was a tweak to a mature system, and sometimes not even then. Engineers tended to go past the schedule they’d given themselves with alarming frequency, and often a project which was scheduled for a week would take two.

What Brigitta wanted to do with the space station, bringing it down to the surface of the planet, could not possibly be tested. It couldn’t be done in incremental steps that moved them further toward the end goal. Given how bad the fuel was, there wasn’t even a chance to fully test the engines that they would be relying on. There were all sorts of concepts that Leticia had picked up over the years, things like integration hell, and they all pointed toward a fiery death. The only reason to think otherwise was that Brigitta thought it was going to work.

The plants rippled from the force of the engines, and the space station hovered for just a moment before landing gently on the ground, not a strut out of place.

It was a landing that had been accomplished as though it had been done a thousand times. It looked routine, casual, the kind of thing that someone was ticking off on a list of things to get done before they could move on to something more interesting.

Leticia held her breath until there was no more movement, then let out a little cheer in her office. The entire Natrix was surely vibrating with energy, other people cheering and shouting with joy at the tremendous accomplishment. Leticia sank into her chair, then looked at the metrics on display. The space station had held together shockingly well, with only a few things broken inside it. The crew, such as it was, had all survived with minimal injuries.

They had done it.

Leticia waited fifteen minutes, then gave her speech. She let the emotion bleed through into what she said, though the words seemed to her too constrained for what they signified, and a few of the things she said didn’t seem as apt as they had when she’d written them. In particular, she had an intuitive sense that the phrase ‘the work of generations’, which had been drilled into her head since she was small, no longer applied.

With the space station brought to the ground, its reactor intact, its stores of knowledge fully opened to them, its robots and systems available to them, it would no longer be the work of generations, but of this generation. It was no longer a far-off future, but perhaps mere decades of work.

~~~~

“I’m sorry that it will belong to the Heimalis, for now,” said Brigitta. It had taken time for them to get a chance to talk. “This was the only sensible way though.”

“It’ll be sixty years before we get there,” said Leticia. “Most of our lives until we see each other again, in person.”

“If you follow the twilight, yes,” said Brigitta. “But we might be ready before then. You read the proposal?”

“I did,” said Leticia. “If I were the one in charge of it, I would say that there are too many unknowns, too many ways that it could go wrong, and without knowing what happened to the home planet, we might spend enormous resources just to find … I don’t know.”

“You think they might all be dead,” said Brigitta.

“It was always a possibility,” said Leticia. “Three hundred years have passed and no one has come to check up on what happened to the space station. And something hit it, we still don’t know what.”

“We would do it small, if we could,” said Brigitta. “But the FTL drive can’t be done small, can’t be done with anything less than the full force of our people and all the power we can muster.”

“It was a miracle that you landed safely,” said Leticia. “I don’t want you to push it. Building an entirely new piece of technology, even if it’s from designs recovered from their computers, that’s a tall ask.”

“We could make it home in ten years,” said Brigitta. “We could bring our people back to the bosom of civilization. We wouldn’t have to go back into orbit, we could leave from the surface of the planet itself. They could do that, it’s in the emails. The only reason they didn’t was the destruction that it left in their wake.”

“There will be time to talk about it later,” said Leticia. “You think we should abandon the Natrix, is that it?”

“Or keep a skeletal crew,” said Brigitta. “We could take a thousand, say, people trained up for a return home, starting now. It’s the sort of thing that Mette would have been good at.”

Leticia was silent, because it was true.

“Anyway,” said Brigitta. “It seems like I might be the only one to make it. The other women are getting sicker by the day. I think there’s a good chance that some will pull through, but I’m the only one unaffected.”

“How?” asked Leticia.

“Perry,” said Brigitta. “One final gift. Two, actually.”

“Two?” asked Leticia.

“I’m pregnant,” said Brigitta. She let out a shaky breath that the microphone picked up. “It’s selfish, but if I had known, I would never have come up here. We don’t have a doctor, and with the radiation … there’s a good chance that it won’t become anything. Perry healed me, I think. He could do it to his armor, repair it with a thought, erase the nicks and stains. Oil and dirt would evaporate off his fingers. He never showered unless it was to keep me company, but he was always clean. So maybe it was that.”

“He didn’t want to leave children behind,” said Leticia.

“No, he didn’t,” said Brigitta. “But I had hoped he was special, different, that it would happen somehow. And it might be that the child is what’s been protecting me, if it’s special like he was.” There was something in her voice, a tremor of uncertainty. She had certainly thought of all the issues that Leticia felt compelled to mention, the possibility of miscarriage, stillbirth, or something worse. The baby had gotten a dose of radiation, probably very early on in the womb.

Leticia tried to be gracious. “I hope it works out for you. Keep in touch with me. Try to make time in between your workload. Let us know if we should send people to you. I’m sure that if I put out a sign up sheet today, there would be a hundred names on it by the start of the next cycle.”

“I’ll be in touch,” said Brigitta. “Both for the technicals, and for everything else.”

When the call had ended, Leticia got up from her desk and paced back and forth in her office. She had bit her tongue about the potential baby, but it was an issue that had been on her mind for other reasons. She had the three teeth that Perry had left them, along with the mass of nanites, and the final piece, which he hadn’t even said anything about, the diseased heart that had been laying on the ground next to the enormous corpse that Jeff had left behind.

Leticia had put the heart in a jar filled with water, intending it as a reminder to herself of what she could endure if she had to. There was perhaps an argument that someone should try to eat it, to see whether they could gain the powers of a dragon, but the thing was sickly looking, and there was no one that Leticia would trust to have that kind of power. Perhaps Perry had been wise enough to know, in those final moments, that power wasn’t something to be taken lightly, that it came with costs and risks. Or maybe Perry was just worried about getting sick.

The heart hadn’t broken apart in the water, as Leticia had feared it might. It was still alive, somehow, animated by its own magic. Every three days, there was a single heartbeat, a wub-lub that was barely audible in the water. The first time she’d heard it, she had thought it was paranoia or her imagination, but after the second time, she set up a camera to watch it carefully. She had a private fear that Jeff would somehow return, regenerate from this smallest piece, but it seemed more likely that it was just latent power. The beating was regular, like clockwork.

Leticia got the teeth from the small box they’d been stored in. She didn’t know whether they would still work, having been out of Perry’s mouth for so long. She had been given no instructions on how they were to be used, only that they needed to be eaten. There were three, but as soon as someone had eaten one, at least to her understanding, they would be able to extract their own teeth and allow others to turn.

The whole community could become werewolves. There was no way that Leticia would embark on that without studying the costs and risks, but that would require volunteers, and giving them that personal power would maneuver them into importance, which might not be for the best.

She had been putting off talking with anyone else about it, but she was far from a dictator, and the longer this went on as a bit of a secret, the worse it would make her look. Still, the potential impacts might be far-reaching, and they were worth thinking about before she did anything too hasty.

She worried that giving the teeth out might make someone like Perry, or worse, like Jeff. Both had been rather mundane men before going through the portals. It was only the accrual of power and stripping of limitations that had changed them, or awakened something in them. She couldn’t even say that Perry was a villain, only that there were bad sides to him. Maybe she would phrase it as risks and costs that hadn’t been apparent at the start. His legacy on Esperide would be complicated, but the younger generation had taken him for a hero, and she wasn’t sure that she could say that he wasn’t, even if he had absconded first with Brigitta and then with Mette.

Reminiscence done, Leticia returned to her computer and went through her mail. The Natrix’s path around the ocean needed to be charted, the farms tended to, the manufacturing taken care of, and life on the planet needed to carry on, whatever might come.

She did wonder, briefly, where Perry and Mette might have ended up.