Thresholder

Perry listened to it all while floating high in the air above. There was nothing about the magic tablets. Fenilor was a talker, but he hadn’t talked about the right things. If there was another session, if the tales continued, maybe there would be more.

“Did we learn anything from that?” asked Perry.

“He is supremely arrogant, sir,” said Marchand.

“He’s admitted to all his mistakes,” said Perry. “There’s arrogance, sure, but he’s very clear about the mistakes he’s made.”

“If you will permit some speculation, sir, I believe the arrogance shines through in how he speaks of these mistakes,” said Marchand. “He claims that he is better now: wiser, stronger, less prone to error. There is a certain way of speaking about the mistakes of the past that indicates arrogance in the present. He has divorced himself from his errors, and speaks of them as though they happened to another person.”

“Sure,” said Perry. “I guess.” He bit the inside of his cheek. “And he wants to push forward with his experimentation, but to other worlds, with this one being considered a success.” He paused. “How accurate is that?”

“Is what, sir?” asked Marchand. “The success of his project?”

“Yes,” said Perry. “Because if they have developed something that actually works … I don’t know. Exporting it wouldn’t be the worst thing, I guess. And if we do what Hella wants, then developing an alliance of worlds would mean giving these people a place of prominence. They would want to spread their culture to every nation they could touch, and that’s going to be a lot of nations.”

“By what metric would you define success, sir?” asked Marchand.

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “GDP per capita?”

“I am unfamiliar with the metric, sir,” said Marchand.

“What, really?” asked Perry. “Surely there’s some sort of Earth 2 equivalent? Gross domestic product per capita?”

“If my interpretation is correct, the equivalent would be TSOS,” said Marchand. “That would be the Total Sectoral Output Score, derived from tabulating economic activity across all economic sectors. But I wouldn’t have the data necessary to guess at any individual symboulion’s TSOS, nor do they have proper nations, nor does the concept of TSOS map cleanly to a library economy.”

“Right, GDP wouldn’t either,” said Perry. “And they wouldn’t have HDI or any other kind of index. Or do they? Is there some sense by which we can tell whether a group of people are doing well or not?”

“As a rule, the symboulions eschew numbers,” said Marchand. “I believe they find them depersonalizing. If a symboulion is large enough to need detailed tracking by numbers, it’s likely too large.”

“Well that’s dumb,” said Perry. “Even a mid-sized company has to have a lot of numbers to track everything. The domes must need some method of knowing whether they’re making shirts or food.”

“They do, sir,” said Marchand. “Though I should mention that the domes themselves don’t manufacture clothing, but rather, the textiles that are used in —”

“Yes, yes,” said Perry. “I have done my best to understand things. But the lack of numbers means we’re just … going with our gut?”

“It would perhaps be possible to get firm numbers from every golden dome,” said Marchand. “That would be quite an undertaking, and I would imagine that they do not all use the same systems of accounting for production.”

“It’s irrelevant,” said Perry. “I just want to know whether it works, whether we can say that he succeeded or not, or if there are hidden downsides or problems lurking in the background.”

“The downsides are not hidden, sir,” said Marchand. “There are limits on what any one person can achieve, the Command Authorities are divorced from the concerns of the symboulions, useful technologies are being killed in the crib, and the intense localization means that even communal projects are limited in their grandeur. You are aware that Miss Richter considered television and movies to be the greatest human accomplishment?”

“I … think I heard her say that once,” said Perry. “I assumed it was hyperbole.”

“I do not believe so, sir,” said Marchand. “Power armor and artificial intelligence were one thing, but she believed that movies were an art form that had no comparison to anything else. Such an art form could not exist in this culture, not only because the technology would be stopped, but because they would not allow an enormous budget to go to something which was destined for wide release.”

“I guess,” said Perry. “Still, giving up movies is … I mean, they could have low budget movies, things that were shot by amateurs, if they relaxed their technology restrictions. And the restrictions aren’t permanent, they’re really just there as guardrails. If you’d come from the Earth I came from, you might wish that people had thought about and studied things before just releasing them into the world.”

“We had leaded gasoline too, sir,” said Marchand.

“Not even what I was thinking about,” said Perry. “I was thinking … social media, I guess. Three-year-olds given tablets. Crazy AI on the horizon that was going to get legislated twenty years too late, if it ever was.”

“I suppose it is my bias showing, sir, but I disagree with the sentiment,” said Marchand.

“It’s neither here nor there,” said Perry. “We need a plan to defeat Fenilor, if he’s not going to listen to us about the danger of going through a portal. And that means that we need to snatch up Nima, but do it without killing her, because Fenilor could just step out at basically any time he chooses if all he needs is to kill her.”

“I’ve charted a course, sir,” said Marchand.

“You know, you don’t have to call me sir,” said Perry. “If you’re a thinking machine, if I’m treating you on the same level as a person, if we’re taking this partner thing seriously … it’s not necessary.”

“I’ll take it under advisement, sir,” said Marchand. “If I may be honest with you, I have often used the honorific in a sarcastic manner.”

“Yeah, I picked up on that,” said Perry. “You do you, I guess.”

“Very well, sir,” replied Marchand.

~~~~

Perry hovered over the twin islands of Berus and Thirlwell, high enough that he could see both of them.

As usual, the Farfinder was taking its sweet time. He imagined that the reason was most likely prognostics, as it tended to be, but he really would have liked to confer with them. They had learned that Fenilor would show up to that tavern for story time, and he thought that would be an excellent time to drop a huge rock on him or fire a massive laser from space down on him. Their lack of weaponry was troubling, but he understood it: they skittered through the holes between universes, hid away from the powers that be, and made contact only when they could be sure that they weren’t going to get swatted. Bristling with weapons would have only invited conflict.

After half an hour, Perry stepped into the shelf to check on Mette. She was sweaty and flushed, but also awake, which was a good change.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Mette. “Water?”

Perry went to their supply of jugs and poured her a glass. He wished that they had filtration, and made a reminder to ask the Farfinder if they could supply him next time he was aboard the ship. They had already given him a lot, far more than he had thought they would. Mette was tapping away at a laptop computer that had a facsimile of the interface she’d used aboard the Natrix. As soon as Perry had shown up, Marchand had begun augmenting it, because Marchand had connectivity and far more processing power.

Perry set the glass on the table beside her and removed his helmet.

“Nothing?” asked Mette after she finished drinking down half the glass. Her eyes were still on the screen and her fingers were still hammering at the keys.

“Nope,” said Perry. “We have time, for now. But if Fenilor thinks that he’s outmatched, he might just leave this world to its own devices. Which would almost certainly kill us, if Eggy’s math is right.” He paused. “Is it right?”

“It’s difficult to say,” said Mette. “My brain isn’t working at capacity, and mathematics was never a strong suit. I’m working with March here, but … I don’t know.”

“This is kind of ‘fate of the world’ stuff here,” said Perry.

“I am aware,” said Mette. “It would be great if we didn’t have to fight that guy again.”

“We?” asked Perry. “Sorry, but no way am I letting you near him.”

“Give me a few days to recover,” said Mette. “You’re going to need as much help as you can get. If you’d had me and Kes and the Farfinder we’d have had him down in that mine. Hella is strong.”

“You almost died,” said Perry. “I don’t want your blood on my hands.”

“You’ll have my blood on hand next time,” said Mette. “So you can bring me back, or a version of me, and I won’t just be … nothing.”

“Why do you have a death wish?” asked Perry.

“Because I want my life to mean something,” said Mette. “If I left the Natrix behind to go learn magic from the world and then sit out every fight because I’m a clay doll, what was even the point?”

Perry let out a breath. “Alright. I can understand that. Just … try not to die.”

“I’ve got a great track record of not dying, thanks,” said Mette. She had been watching him, but turned back to her laptop. “I’m unfortunately irrelevant to the conflict.”

“I don’t think you being relevant would be better, honestly,” said Perry. “If you went down in the mine and a portal opened up, that might have been the endgame. He might have tried to go through, and I don’t know that I would be able to stop him.”

“And you want to capture Nima, so that Fenilor can’t kill her and slip away?” asked Mette.

“Even if the math isn’t solid, we need to treat it as though it is,” said Perry. “If there’s a ten percent chance that this world gets nuked, that’s too much of a risk.”

“And we … don’t want to use nuclear weapons?” asked Mette. “Because I might be able to make one.”

“Metaphorically nuked,” said Perry. “Though yes, I would love another nuclear weapon, if you can do that without giving yourself radiation poisoning. It seems like a power that Fenilor knows not.”

“A what?” asked Mette. She was half-focused on her screen again. It was a world that she was well-acquainted with, though he knew it would only be a matter of time before she asked for more monitors and a desk instead of a bed.

“Nevermind,” said Perry. “Cultural reference, I guess. And it’s very possible that Fenilor does know about bombs, if he’s been interviewing and interrogating a few dozen thresholders, even if they’re just baby thresholders.”

“If he’d interrogated me, he’d have learned it,” said Mette while typing. There had been a two-second lag in her response.

“I’m going out to check on the islands,” said Perry. “I might fly down and talk to Dirk, if I can catch him.” He looked down at the power armor. “I would really love to be able to keep this on though. I don’t think Fenilor can track me, but if Third Fervor is within range, she can probably sense the portal opening, and that would be trouble for both of us.”

“How close are you to being an open secret?” asked Mette.

“That’s for me to ask Dirk about,” said Perry. He rubbed his face. “Flying with the sword is one thing, it can be explained as an unknown Implement, but the armor is something else.” He frowned. “I guess I’ll keep it on, but I don’t want to wait for nightfall. I’m not cut out to be a superhero.”

“A what?” asked Mette. “The mask thing that Kes was doing?”

“It — yeah,” said Perry. “It’s one thing to be a superhero when people know that’s what you are, but it’s another to just be some totally new thing. And I know Dirk would rather we keep things quiet, though there have been enough deaths and evacuations and everything else that word must be getting out.”

“Well, I’ll be here,” said Mette. “Trying to crack the math with Marchand’s help, to make sure that it’s reporting something fundamental. March seems to think that a single person doing math on their own is never worth paying much attention to, but I’m not sure why.”

“March?” asked Perry.

“It is a good heuristic, sir,” said March. “Though Eggy did have the mathematical solutions checked over by locals in a few cases, and much of it was built off the understandings of Hella’s homeworld.”

“It’s a good heuristic if you’re in a huge society,” said Perry. “Not in this case.” He turned to Mette. “If you have hundreds of millions of people, then the crazies vastly outnumber the professionals, and math, unlike engineering, is a field that you don’t need actual results in to, say, write a paper or something.”

“I’m still not really clear on ‘write a paper’,” said Mette. She had a faint grin, just the smallest quirk of her lips. “Or ‘academics’ really. Lots of strange things in your culture. And you said to me that this was how it was done at colleges, but then I came here, and it’s really not.”

“Next world,” said Perry. “You’ll see. Or … we actually might make it back to one of the Earths at some point.” Her eyes flickered from her laptop screen up to him, then back when she saw his neutral expression. “Work on the math. I’ll be back.”

~~~~

The nanite listeners had weak range, but they had quite a bit of longevity, so when Perry descended toward Calamus, the network came to life. Weeks of recordings were dutifully encrypted and broadcast to Marchand, who dined on them with all the careful dignity of the consummate snoop.

Perry didn’t care about most of it. He cared about Berus only in the abstract, and given that he’d spent most of his time there as a bodyguard, he had no strong feelings on the civilians. The public executions had certainly left their impression, but he wasn’t going to hold that against them as a whole. He was certain that he’d find things if he went digging into the transcripts that Marchand was preparing, but he thought that the vast bulk of it would be idle conversations and strictly procedural symboulion meetings. A slender fraction would be interesting or juicy in some way, but he had no real instinct for prying into the business of strangers. Marchand would flag anything that he really needed to hear about, which mostly meant things that directly touched one of the thresholders.

“It appears there are still counter-revolutionaries in the city, sir,” said Marchand after some time to process. “I have taken the liberty of flagging several cells. I don’t believe it would take long to investigate them.”

“Uh,” said Perry. “Any of them connected to Third Fervor?”

“It does not appear so, sir,” said Marchand. “I should think that she has been keeping her new queen company since our last parting. There have been mentions of her, but no one has attested her aid and I do not have her rather distinctive voice recorded.”

“Then we can pass the information on, but it’s not relevant,” said Perry. “You’ve found Dirk? Or one of him?”

“Just the one sir, yes,” said Marchand. “I’ve marked him on the HUD, though he’s in the middle of a meeting at the moment. Would you like to listen in?”

“No,” said Perry, feeling no small amount of alarm. It felt like a betrayal of some kind. Dirk didn’t know about the listeners, and definitely didn’t know about the Farfinder. He would have to, eventually, if the long-term plans of the Farfinder were going to come to fruition. Dirk’s love of secrets and spycraft meant that he was perhaps not the best person to be tasked with getting things going, but Dirk also seemed like he had a lot of leeway from the various Command Authorities, and possibly held some seats on them. “We wait for him. Any idea when or where he’ll be alone?”

“He has a room in the building,” said Marchand. “I believe it was the same room he was staying in before. We can enter from the balcony.”

“Good,” said Perry.

So Perry spent the next two hours waiting in Dirk’s room, first finding a place to sit, then trying to judge the sightlines and awkwardly shuffling over to a different chair. It would be better to rearrange things to make an imposing presence if he moved the furniture around, but he worried that Dirk would notice, and that the furniture that had been moved would say something about him. He didn’t want to scare Dirk, but there was something about lying in wait in a darkened hotel room that appealed to him. He tried not to think about what to say, it wasn’t like that, but the meeting was taking longer to get out than Perry had hoped, and the time was taking a while to pass.

There was plenty of warning when Dirk came. He pushed into the room muttering to himself with papers in his hands, and threw them down onto an end table before starting to shrug out of his shirt.

“Long time no see,” said Perry, then immediately cursed himself, because he was fairly sure that was local to Earth. It had slipped out freely, with automatic translation, but he had no idea what cultural context had snuck into whatever Dirk heard from him.

“Fuck!” Dirk shouted, staggering backward and instantly finding something to use as a weapon, which happened to be a decorative vase.

“Is this room secure?” asked Perry. He had his helmet off, which should have made him less threatening, but Dirk wasn’t treating him like less of a threat.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” asked Dirk, not dropping the vase.

“Needed to make contact,” said Perry. “Here, catch.” He tossed a cell phone grabbed from the Farfinder over to Dirk, who caught it and eyed it suspiciously. He gently set the vase down. “That will let me contact you. When it vibrates, slide your finger along the green symbol and it’ll open a channel to communicate. You place the bottom to your mouth and the top to your ear.”

The cell phone started ringing, and Dirk nearly dropped it, then lifted it to his face. When it kept ringing, he brought it backward, slid his finger along the answer button, then put it back in place.

“Testing,” intoned Marchand’s voice.

“Hello?” asked Dirk.

“I do believe that’s sufficient,” said Marchand.

“What … is this?” asked Dirk when the call hung up.

“Technology,” said Perry. “Your people will be able to build one someday, if you spend a lot of time and effort on it. It’s downstream of computers. We don’t have the infrastructure for me to call you from anywhere in the world, but anywhere in the city, that we could probably manage.” The cell phone had a thick layer of nanites packed into it, and the whole thing was a mishmash of different technological levels that was thankfully working together without any active intervention by Perry, who had only a vague knowledge of how an Earth-modern cell phone functioned.

“This is what you came to bring me?” asked Dirk. “I can think of a dozen better ways for you to have done that.”

“We’re making moves,” said Perry. “I wanted to check in. I know about your boy in Thirlwell.”

“You’re going to have to be more specific,” said Dirk.

“Your clone,” said Perry.

“Again, you’re going to have to be more specific,” said Dirk.

“Your clone who is also the spymaster,” said Perry with a sigh. Dirk gave nothing away. “You know that they have Nima, right? And she’s seen your face, which means she can blow your cover wide open.”

“It’s a risk that my other is handling as best he can, I’m sure,” said Dirk. “He knows that Nima has seen me. The scheme wasn’t exactly decided on with thresholders in mind. Hell, I wouldn’t have come here if I had realized how much danger I’d be putting my other in. He’s running the tendrils of the counter-revolution in Thirlwell under his name, feeding information back to me, but we were hoping that the two of us would never cross paths — that our agents would never see us. That was part of why I was set up in the sticks with you and Moss.” He was getting calmer by the minute, which wasn’t exactly what Perry wanted.

“Do you have a line on Nima?” asked Perry.

“Meaning what?” asked Dirk. “You’re the one with a map of Thirlwell. You’re the one who slipped a clone in and then magicked him back out. I could probably tell you where she is, but are you proposing a prison break for someone who tried to kill you? A prison break in a foreign country where you previously engaged in a different prison break?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much the gist of it,” said Perry. “Though that other prison break was my clone.”

“You’re responsible for the things your clones do,” said Dirk, rubbing his temples. “You understand that, right? And you pulled him out, I know you must have.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Perry. “Anyway, I’m going to go do that tonight. I’m pretty sure that Third Fervor needs to sleep, and I’m hoping that I can get some sense of when that is. All I’ll need to do is snatch up Nima and put her in a jail cell, which is basically where she is already. It’s a change in ownership.”

“I strongly advise against it,” said Dirk. “Fuck, you’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you?”

“Fate of the world might be at stake,” said Perry. “If you have any tools you’ve been holding back on, now might be the time to hand them over to me.”

“You already have a very expensive cloning machine that I know you’re not going to give back. Better you have it than to have it in enemy hands, but,” he sighed, deflating. “You know, I like to have plans, and it seems that you like to beat those plans to death.”

“Sorry,” said Perry, but it was clear from his voice that he wasn’t sorry at all.

“There’s one thing,” said Dirk. “It’ll take some time to get to you, but it’s obvious enough that it keeps needing to get squashed down — masks.”

“Masks?” asked Perry. “I’ve made masks, they don’t work well with the helmet, and they take too much time and effort to get good. If I had a year in this world, then maybe, but time isn’t on my side.” It might be, actually, if he could depend upon his enemies to sit still, but it seemed like all of them but Nima were waiting to pull various triggers. In theory, Third Fervor was trying to ensure the success of the Last Queen while Fenilor was waiting for Thirlwell to ripen into readiness to be taken over by the culture, but in practice it was much more questionable.

“There’s a technique for universal masks,” said Dirk. “They’re weaker, but it doesn’t matter who made it, because it can be used by anyone.”

“Shit,” said Perry. “And you can get me one of those?”

Dirk nodded slowly. “Not as good as making it yourself. And we didn’t bring any along on the ship, but you can move through the air at speed, faster than an airship, right?”

“Not actually,” said Perry. “I’m slower than an airship that’s going fast. What I have to do instead is go straight up until the air gets thin enough that there’s no drag, and then I can go faster than the speed of sound.”

Dirk let out a breath. “Well, right, I can see where that would be much different.”

“It takes time to go around the planet like that,” said Perry. “Give me an address and I can get there, if there’s firepower in it for me.” That word, ‘firepower’, translated awkwardly.

“You can drop down anywhere on the planet?” asked Dirk. “And that’s a power that we’ll have too someday?”

“Might be,” said Perry. “Or you might just never push technology far enough to see it. I can see how it would rankle. Everything being local is important, that’s the culture, but when you’re not more than two hours away from anywhere, local gets pretty blurred.”

“Tourists and immigrants are already a problem,” said Dirk with a distant voice. He returned his attention to Perry. “Tetrankersh, Old Road Way, 342. You’ll find a familiar face there. Tell him you have my authorization, which might not be enough for you, but you’ll get a mask for you and yours. Don’t trade them where the enemy can see, they’ll just think that it’s something you made. But I assume you’ll get a long speech about it from him.”

“Another Dirk?” asked Perry.

“No,” said Dirk. “Another Moss.”

“Oh,” said Perry. “Shit. I guess … I knew logically that he didn’t die for good.”

“There’s another in the city already,” said Dirk. “We made him before we took the machine apart. I’m telling you now because I think you already know.” He was watching Perry’s face as he said it. “Or maybe not.”

“Seems like a security risk,” said Perry. “There were plenty of people who saw Moss die, and he’s a dwarf, distinctive in these parts.”

“He’s a necessary guy,” said Dirk. “We want the domes to go up as fast as possible. The sooner we have these people converted over to the proper way of doing things, the more attention we can focus on rowdy neighbors.”

“Mmm,” said Perry. “Then I’m taking off.” He finally stood from his chair, and felt how much he towered over Dirk. “Probably after Nima first. Be warned, I guess, that it might get hairy.”

“Not much I can do about it,” said Dirk. “Try not to get me or my clones killed, if you can help it, but I worry that even saying that to you makes it more likely.”

“I’ll be fine,” said Perry. “I’ll be in and out.”

~~~~

Perry had wanted to wait until the Farfinder checked in again, but time passed, and they didn’t show up. He wanted to go get the masks that Dirk had promised, but that would take time, and Perry wanted to close off the chance that Fenilor would snatch her first. It was what Perry would do, if he was in the same position, going up against someone he wasn’t sure he could beat. He checked in on Mette for a third time, to find her asleep with her laptop open. He closed it and made sure that the jury-rigged power supply was still functional. It was running off something that looked like a car battery, but would apparently last for a full year, and could be recharged off of Marchand’s reactor. The Farfinder had accumulated a lot of things on their jaunts across the multiverse, and hadn’t been shy about giving him some utility. There were five more cell phones like the one he’d given Dirk, and two more laptops. All of it had been given without conditions.

Perry found himself floating in the air in the middle of the night, which was becoming a running theme for this world. He had the spot where Nima was being held identified thanks to the listeners that were scattered around Thirlwell. He was high enough up that the ground was very far below him, far enough that he hoped to be beyond the range of spotters.

The nanites had recorded plenty of conversations here, too, and enough of the bigger clusters had floated into the throne room as well as the royal bedroom that Perry had a handle on Third Fervor’s schedule and the new queen’s demands. It seemed that they were sharing a bed together, which definitely raised Perry’s eyebrow, but it was also chaste, which seemed like a weird half-measure.

Perry waited until Third Fervor had been asleep for half an hour, then descended down, dropping like a stone. He would be visible to spotters, if they had motion-tracking masks, but he was hoping the coverage was bad. There didn’t seem to be more than a small team surrounding the upscale jail for diplomats that Nima was being held in, and he could get out quickly, he was pretty sure. The biggest thing was accomplishing it all fast, then getting out before getting in yet another scrap with Third Fervor.

Perry didn’t use the sword to slow himself until he was just above the roof, but landed gently, whisper-quiet.

He placed his hand on the roof, and Marchand did a scan of the interior, locating Nima sleeping on a bed with her amulet around her neck. There were other people in the building with her, but he was pretty sure that they were guards. Two of them were awake, sitting at a table together but not talking.

“The windows are barred, sir,” said Marchand. “They would be trivial to go through, but might alert our quarry.”

“Still no word from the Farfinder?” asked Perry. “No email, no message telling us that this is a terrible idea?”

“No, sir,” said Marchand.

“Which means that it’s a good idea,” said Perry. “I mean, we’re going to have to strand her somewhere, and it would be best if we could put her in the brig on their ship.”

“There has been no word, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry considered this. He knew their capabilities pretty well. They would have run prognostics to get a guess at how the future was going to go, and had probably foreseen this, since it wasn’t a high-variance event. They were also probably monitoring him in real time, which meant that they would have direct eyes on Third Fervor.

In a sense, he was depending on them to stop him if he tried to do something that was completely ill-advised, though he was pretty sure that their primary method of movement — opening doors — had a strong chance of triggering Third Fervor’s sense of space. Still, they could send him a ‘please don’t’ email.

“We’re going in,” said Perry. “You think I can smash through the window?”

“I think you would have more luck smashing through the roof, sir,” said Marchand. “It appears the designers did not account for overwhelming force being applied from above. This will, however, alert the guards and wake Nima.”

“Then we get her out of here,” said Perry. “Kicking and screaming, if need be.”

“Very well, sir,” said Marchand. “I’ve marked the point of entry, and I suggest a straight-legged dropped that should smash through, if performed from a height of one hundred feet. Your final speed will be fifty-five miles an hour. I should warn that it will be quite loud.”

“That’s not going to cause problems for the suit?” asked Perry.

“No, sir,” said Marchand. The HUD flashed an arrow that pointed up, and when Perry looked, there was a ghostly image showing him where to drop from.

“How much does she weigh?” asked Perry.

“I do not know, sir,” said Marchand. “She seems quite slender, but we have limited data to work with. I would guess one hundred and ten pounds.”

“The sword gets sluggish at over a hundred pounds,” said Perry with a frown. “Not much room for error.”

“No, sir,” said Marchand. “Are you rethinking this plan?”

“Yes, obviously,” said Perry. “Add on her armor, that’s … how much? One thirty?”

“Based on the testing done before the satellite launch, that should result in a slowdown of approximately forty percent,” said Marchand. “Though it has been to my consternation that our graphing never looked proper.”

Reluctantly, he rose to the spot. This prison break had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was seeming like less and less of a good idea, particularly because the sword only went about thirty miles an hour. It was like using a moped for a getaway vehicle.

“Don’t shoot her,” said Perry once he was in position. “This is a capture mission. We shoot her, there’s a chance that a portal opens up right next to Fenilor, and I think he would take it in spite of our warnings. We’re going to wrap our arms around her and lock her in place, make sure that she can’t get out, then fly away, ideally with her mouth gagged somehow.”

“I am ready, sir,” said Marchand.

Perry dropped, legs held together like he was doing a jackknife dive. He tensed his whole body, though he could feel that the armor was also tensed, servos and hydraulics locked into place to minimize the impact. There was just enough time to regret the plan while he fell. He got through the first step of mentally comparing it to a car accident, except the armor didn’t have crumple zones.

He crashed down through the roof, breaking through wood and tile, shattering the floor when he landed and then stopping there, having taken most of the impact in his legs. He rose as the alerts splashed across his HUD, a headache blossoming in the back of his skull, but the power of the second sphere had held him together, and any damage to the armor would be temporary. He was surprisingly no worse for the impact, which he’d been second-guessing for the duration of the fall.

Nima was already getting out of bed, with her armor spreading over her.

Perry rushed her, leaving his sword aside, tackling her back down onto the bed and wrapping her in a tight hug that squeezed the air from her lungs. He was on top of her, helmet pushed against her face, and he would need her the other way, so he could crush her arms against her chest and get her immobile.

It would have been simple to kill her, even with the armor around her. He could have exerted the strength necessary to crush her, to bend the metal and squish the flesh beneath, to crack bones open and let the marrow empty out.

She scratched at his chest with metal claws as he flipped her over, sending up a screech of metal on metal. She had gouged surprisingly deep, the magic of her armor better than the superscience alloy, but then she was facing away from him, and he was overpowering her. He gripped one of her wrists and forced it to her chest as she tried to kick at him, then grabbed the other wrist and brought it down too. He was crushing her, and could hear her shallow breaths as she wriggled and struggled beneath him. When her other wrist was pinned in front of her, and a single arm of Perry’s to keep them both in place, he finally stood up, the ruined bed beneath them.

He called his sword to him and tested it. She was heavier than he had expected, but not enough that the sword was sluggish — she was a slender elf, after all, and it wasn’t a deceptive sort of slenderness.

He started rising through the air just as the guards burst into the room with their swords drawn. The shoulder gun rose and Perry shouted “No!” before it could fire. He was up and out of the room, scraping back through a hole that was too small for the two of them, then out into the night sky, rising more slowly than he would have liked. He was going straight up, aiming for the stars.

Nima howled and kicked, but Perry had his back bent so she had trouble hitting him. She got in a good one every now and then, with little teeth protruding from her armor, but once they were a half mile in the air, she stopped and quieted down, probably because Perry had angled himself so that she and the sword were beneath him. The threat of being dropped was probably very clear in her mind.

“Status on Third Fervor?” asked Perry.

“Still asleep, as far as I can tell, sir,” said Marchand.

“Good,” said Perry. “They’ll report to her soon though.”

“I don’t see how, sir,” said Marchand. “They have no telephones, no workable radio, and no semaphore system in place. We will be over the ocean shortly, beyond her ability to find us.”

Perry mulled that over. His heart was racing, and he stilled it, redirecting the energy that was pulsing through his body, stilling everything and relaxing his muscles, save for his iron grip on Nima. Unless there was a dramatic change, it seemed like he was going to get away with it. Third Fervor could teleport, but she would need to be able to spot him, and so far as Perry knew, she couldn’t.

“Why are you doing this?” asked Nima. Her voice was soft and on the edge of tears. Maybe she was crying beneath her fanciful helmet.

“I’m taking you out of the game,” said Perry. “You tried to kill me.”

She choked out a sob. “I don’t want to fight.”

“Tough shit,” said Perry. “I’m not going to kill you, just put you somewhere that Third Fervor doesn’t have you, where you’ll be safe from Fenilor.”

“Who the hell is Fenilor?” asked Nima, giving a token struggle that didn’t come close to risking her getting dropped.

“He’s the king killer,” said Perry. He turned their angle, so they were going back toward Berus, which would quickly take them over the water. He thought she might struggle more then, because it would change from a certain death to an uncertain one. When he looked down, he felt some vertigo, which was unusual for him. They were high enough up that it was almost certainly fatal.

“You’re the king killer,” said Nima.

“Just one of them,” said Perry. “It was a misunderstanding.”

“Where are you taking me?” asked Nima.

“Somewhere safe,” said Perry. “Somewhere that Fenilor can’t find you. You’ve been sitting tight, it’s going to be more of that.”

They flew for another mile, three minutes, with no commentary from Nima.

“I could have killed you,” she said. “Without the armor, you were vulnerable. I didn’t understand it until after I was long gone.”

He was surprised by the bitterness in her voice. She was talking about Kes, not about Perry, but she had no way of knowing that.

“You were always going to lose,” said Perry. “Fenilor is your enemy, not me, and if you ever got within a mile of him, and he wanted to kill you, you would be dead. I’m not sure I can beat him.”

Red alarms went off on the HUD, flashing and pointing arrows, showing picture-in-picture of the big important thing that was apparently happening. Perry had thought it would be Third Fervor opening portals to come at him, some kind of insane aerial combat with Nima figuratively strapped to his chest, but when he looked at the image, it was something far, far worse: Fenilor was there, inexplicably, floating in the air with his spear out and his armor encasing him.

“Peregrin,” he said as Perry turned to face him. “I believe there’s been some misunderstanding, because that’s my prey you’ve captured.”