Kes was having a good time with what he called the ‘superhero’ masks. There weren’t all that many superheroes from Earth that could map directly onto the powers that the masks could grant, but it seemed to work better than going off the stock masks recommended in books. He wondered whether there might not be some benefit to engineering cultural and social conceptions to favor different sorts of masks, but either the benefits were too vague or too spread out for anyone to have done it. It was also possible that he was simply wrong.
The radio transmitter and receiver were loaded up onto an airship, which left the town soon afterward, intended to be parked in the open waters between island nations. With the equipment that they had in town, it meant that they could once again make contact with the armor, and Perry could assure them all that he was definitely still alive.
Kes hoped that Perry was alive.
Of course, there were also other thoughts. One of them had come about when he was trying to imagine some worst case scenarios. He had imagined Perry coming back, flying in with the sword, energy depleted, bleeding and broken, barely able to make it to Berus. Perry might land and then die, and after that, the only logical thing to do would be for Kes to eat one of his teeth and put on the armor. It’s what Perry would have wanted, in that unlikely hypothetical situation. Kes could carry on the good fight.
When Kes found himself contemplating the practicalities of such a situation, he knew that he was too far gone. It was something he’d had a problem with, ages ago, on Earth. He would find himself going a step too far, imagining conversations in his head that had no chance of actually happening, shadow-boxing with figments instead of the regular drooling morons on the internet. He could sometimes work up a really good line of argument to shoot down something that no one had said.
So he tried to plan, as best he could, for the things he thought were likely to happen, and in the meantime, he stuck by Mette and kept his head down.
Perry had taken pretty much everything, but he’d left behind a collection of nanites. Aside from all the ones that were scattered who-knows-where, the main mass was meant to be used for longer range transmission. It was useless for Kes, given that he wasn’t Maya Singh and didn’t have Marchand to command them. Still, he spent some time with them, hoping that he could come up with something.
Maya had acquired the nanites via some interstellar empire, which was using them as a mobile prison or something like that. She had jailbroken them, which was what made them defensive tools for her, but they were constrained by their original function, which was ‘protect Maya Singh’. Marchand could direct them, but they were independent from him, unequal partners with different goals rather than subservient tools. The primary reason they couldn’t be used as armor for Perry was that they simply refused the request as being too far outside their purview. And if Kes could figure out a way to make them not refuse …
It was hopeless. Perry had attacked the problem from many different angles, and he’d had two years to do it. There was nothing that Kes knew that Perry didn’t. There was no tool in his arsenal that hadn’t existed on Esperide. The tools of this world were magic, not technology, and Marchand, who could actually talk to the nanites, was away. There was nothing that Perry hadn’t tried, and anything that Kes would try would just be desperation.
“Mette, how would you override a complicated security protocol you don’t understand?” asked Kes.
“Er, what?” asked Mette. She gave him a confused look. She’d been in the middle of building more radios, though no one was in her workshop. She wiped her hands on a rag and gave a last look at her work before abandoning it. “What’s this about?”
“Nanites,” said Kes, holding up the small black clump.
“The mysterious nanites,” said Mette. “You know, those might have been nice for you to hand over when we first came to an arrangement on the Natrix.” She took the offered ball from him. “You probably shouldn’t tell me everything about them, given that Perry wouldn’t have.”
“Fuck him,” said Kes. Mette smiled at that.
After he was done telling her what he knew, she squeezed her eyes shut and placed her fingers at her temples. “Alright,” she said, popping up off her stool to pace. “First off, if March tells you that I’m not going to outdo him, that’s … pretty much accurate. You’re asking me to look into how I could break some encryption or authentication scheme whose very nature we’re ignorant of, when I have no computer or artificial intelligence of my own.”
“I’m not picky,” said Kes. “If you can figure it out with Marchand, that would work too. Without reaching second sphere, I don’t have a way to make any more of them anyway, so it’s probably something to augment Perry, not me.”
“There’s just no way,” said Mette. “I mean, yes, you should have brought this to us earlier, much earlier, but from everything you’ve said, I trust Marchand’s analysis. You mostly use them for surveillance or radio signals, not for repair work, because without the authorization, they can’t really do that much. And if Marchand can’t break them wide open, then there’s simply no way that I could do it. At best I could have a conversation with March about it, but … encryption is tough, Perry. There are a lot of ways to make it secure even if all parties fully understand the protocols involved. Which we don’t.”
“So if you had to do it?” asked Kes. “How would you?”
Mette sighed and looked up at the rafters. “It might actually be impossible. I mean, whoever built them, they might have made it literally impossible. If I had tech that advanced, and I was worried about nanite proliferation, I would have made it so they couldn’t replicate, sure, but I would build the directive into the very core. You could do that with the right architecture, I think, make it so there’s nothing you can untangle unless you have the tech advanced enough to just make some nanites on your own.”
“So it’s hopeless,” said Kes.
“I don’t think this is about nanites,” said Mette. “I think this is about you feeling like you need to claw back to being … him, I guess.”
“Sure,” said Kes. “Maybe. But if you had to break the nanites open, you wouldn’t say it’s impossible. Right?”
“No,” said Mette. “I would try to figure out how to get at the code inside the nanites, to lay bare everything that they do. I don’t think there’s a shot of reverse engineering them, though of course I’d want to do that too, but if I could read the code, I could search for vulnerabilities. Of course, I wouldn’t expect any vulnerabilities. I guess I’d hope to find a way to change the protection target, somehow, or at least understand how they’re authenticated, who the ultimate authority is, if anyone. But that might not be possible.”
Kes considered this. “Okay,” he said. “But … how?”
“I don’t know,” said Mette, throwing up her hands. “It’s all unknown. We don’t even have a theoretical way of reading the code.”
“We could look at the nanites themselves?” asked Kes. “I mean, if there’s authorization, it’s physically stored somewhere, right?”
Mette considered this. “Alright, technically if you could pin a nanite in place, and you had a microscope more powerful than anything I’ve ever heard of, capable of reading individual atoms, and you could disentangle absolutely everything that was happening at the microscopic level, then yes, you could read the password from where it was, in some way, physically stored within the nanite. But these are nanites that are storing immense amounts of data, probably with all of it encrypted, so you’d still need Marchand or some better technology to do the parsing for you. And I don’t think that would work either.”
“Step one, get a microscope,” said Kes with a nod.
“If you want to be helpful, or powerful, if that’s your need, focus on the masks,” said Mette.
“Ah,” said Kes. “But where did you think I was going to get a microscope from?”
He walked away happy. Sure, it was going to take an enormous amount of work, and it was possibly unworkable, but it was something that Perry hadn’t thought about. Maybe the masks wouldn’t be able to do it, or Marchand wouldn’t be able to process the data, but he was working the problem. It was a bit of a boost, to be honest, at a time when that was sorely needed.
Maybe with time, he wouldn’t feel like a reduction of the original.
Things were starting to look up.
~~~~
Kes was walking by the warehouse when Nima dropped to the ground from three stories up, landing right in front of him. She was fully armored up. He hadn’t known that she could drop from three stories up and be completely fine. She’d landed with her feet held together, and her legs had bent to an extreme squat, but she’d risen without leaving her mark.
She had a long knife in hand.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“That’s your question?” she asked, nearly a hiss. “Perry, I’ve heard the news from Thirlwell. Why did you do it?”
“Do what?” asked Kes.
She tightened her grip on the knife. “The king is dead. Shot during the course of a meeting with a foreigner.”
“Uh,” said Kes. “How long ago?”
“Only hours past,” said Nima. She was watching his footing, which hadn’t changed. “Do you not think me a threat?”
“Are you threatening me?” asked Kes. He slowly got himself into a fighting stance, hands up. Bringing fists to a knife fight seemed like a pretty bad idea, but he didn’t know how he was going to defuse this, and blocking a knife with his arms seemed like a better idea than getting stabbed in the guts. She thought he was Perry, which meant if she came at him, it would be with as much speed and force as she could bring to bear.
“You said that you would hold,” said Nima. “That you would consider. Why kill him? Why do that, when you said that you were concerned only with the battle between thresholders?”
“Nima,” said Kes. “I don’t know what’s happened. Is there a reason you think it was me, rather than the assassin?”
“You should have killed the witnesses,” said Nima. “You should have told the spymaster to cover for you. As soon as it was done, as soon as the body had slumped against the forest floor, there were people making their way across the ocean to spread the word. Perry, I have seen you in your armor. I know its shape and color. I’ve seen your sword.”
Kes frowned. “I’ve been here all day. Whatever happened, it wasn’t me.”
Nima had not, apparently, been completely cooped up in her room. She’d been listening, and now she knew something before he did. The Last King was dead, and the reports were probably that he’d been shot by a man in bulky blue armor with a glowing sword. Nima was right that there was no one to cover for Perry, because Perry wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. He’d taken the initiative, and not consulted anyone, and then … killed the king, for some reason.
“You’re not even going to draw on me?” asked Nima.
Kes weighed his options for only a moment. He didn’t have the sword, obviously. All that was left was to project strength.
“Nima, you know that I wouldn’t need the sword against you,” said Kes.
She came at him, a ball of fury, knife swinging. He jumped back from it, watching it swish through the air. He’d seen people in movies use a towel to fight against someone with a knife, but they were outdoors, and he didn’t have a towel or anything like it. He also didn’t know how you were supposed to grab someone’s arm with a towel, which might have just been some Hollywood bullshit.
The next time she came swinging in, aiming for his side, he went for the knife. He grabbed her gauntlet, and she cut into his forearm, but he stopped her from slamming the knife straight through his ribs. She was incredibly strong for her size, but he was able to hold her for a moment as blood dripped down from the wound she’d given him. She reached to grab his wrist with her other hand, and he grabbed that too, an awkward crossed grip that left them locked together. He growled at her, then untwisted her arms and spun her around like she was his dance partner. She ended with her back to him.
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It was a bit of a surprise that he could overpower her. He’d thought the armor or some kind of elf strength would have let her make up for the roughly hundred pounds of muscle he had on her. He bent her arms behind her back, forced her to the ground, and sat on her as she squirmed. She struggled and kicked, but he had the better of her, and the knife lay on the ground.
His forearm was dripping blood. The cut was bad, but not quite down to the bone. The pain was blinding, but he was still high on adrenaline, and for now there was the match with her. He had her pinned, but he hadn’t actually beaten her.
Kes looked around, hoping that someone would come running, but it seemed as though everyone that had been out around the town had slipped into hiding inside. There was no sign of Mette, Moss, or Dirk. It seemed likely Dirk had given people orders not to interfere with a fight, which under normal circumstances would be sensible, but Kes needed someone to put a gun against Nima’s head and pull the trigger.
Kes released one of her arms and tried to wrench the other up as high as it would go. He was hoping to break it, but the armor locked in position, keeping him from being able to force it further. With her free hand, she was reaching behind her, and the armor had changed for her, making tiny cats-claws that sank into the meat of his thigh. She was crying out from the pain in her arm, and he was crying out from the pain in his thigh and forearm, and he was certain that she was actually winning in spite of how it must have looked from the outside.
He needed a hammer, but all he had were his hands.
He kept her left arm pinned with one hand, and with the other, grabbed her helmet. It had no convenient handholds, so after some fumbling he ended up going for her neck instead. He was hoping to twist or snap it, but again the armor locked up, preventing him from doing anything of the sort. He tried to smash her head against the ground, but couldn’t do that either.
She lifted her clawed hand and sank it down into his thigh again, stabbing shallowly, but more than deep enough to soak his pants in blood.
Kes got off of her and grabbed her ankle, pulled her along the ground as she scrambled against the dirt. She was a hundred pounds or so, very heavy, but he still had the musculature of the second sphere, and he was able to drag her along. At any moment he was going to get a kick to his face or body with her free leg, so he lifted her up and swung her, not letting go. They made one spin, then two, with her body fully off the ground.
He didn’t have a great plan, but maybe in the back of his mind he’d thought that the rush of blood to her head would knock her out. He released her before he was completely gassed, and while he’d been trying to slam her face into the edge of the building, instead she bounced once on the ground and then knocked her head against the hard wall.
He wheezed, then reached up to his forearm and tried to hold the wound closed. He really wished he could Google how much blood a person could lose and still be fine. He remembered that the answer was surprising, but he couldn’t remember which direction it was surprising in.
Nima wasn’t moving. He was hoping she was dead, but even as the thought crossed his mind, she jerked on the ground, then began moving again. She climbed to her feet, not even remotely steady, then started running away, barely keeping her balance.
“You can’t outrun me!” Kes yelled after her, for some reason. She could definitely outrun him, and he wasn’t even trying to chase her. There were a ton of cuts in his thigh where she’d clawed him, and he wasn’t in any real shape to go after her. He stayed standing though, pretending that he was the great and powerful Perry, who couldn’t be brought low by the likes of Nima.
Mette came out to him with a first aid kit not long after Nima had left.
“You’re injured,” she said. “Sit.”
Kes slumped to the ground. He was feeling woozy. Mette tended to him, and not longer after she’d wrapped up his arm, Moss and Dirk were there.
“Could have gone better,” said Kes.
“I take it she heard the news?” asked Dirk.
“What news?” asked Mette, who was trying to figure out what to do with the claw marks in Kes’ thigh. They had stopped bleeding, but reopened whenever he moved his leg. He’d have to learn how to not move his leg, he guessed, at least for a day or two, which meant he’d be a sitting duck.
“The Last King is dead,” said Dirk. “Shot in the face, apparently. By some jackass in blue armor.”
“Fuck,” said Mette.
Dirk looked at Kes. “He’ll live.”
“Hooray,” said Kes. “Why’d he do it?”
“How the fuck should I know?” asked Dirk. “Shouldn’t you know?”
“Had his reasons, I guess,” said Kes.
“He wasn’t even supposed to be there,” said Dirk. “He was supposed to scope it out, stay back.” He looked over at the buildings. There were people peeking out, faces in windows. He clucked his tongue. “This is unwanted attention. Let’s move you inside.”
They put Kes in the room he shared with Mette, supporting him as they moved him. The bandages that Mette had put on had immediately soaked through, and were painful when removed. After some time had passed, a doctor came by to take a look, and with his medical bag, put in a few stitches and did a more proper job of bandaging Kes up. He recommended bed rest, gave three tablets without saying what they were, and left after Kes had downed them.
“If I die,” said Kes to Mette. “Make sure they do the thing.”
“The thing?” asked Mette.
“The thing we’re not supposed to talk about,” said Kes. “The thing that got me here in the first place.”
“You … would want another?” asked Mette.
Kes nodded. “His decision, if he ever comes back. But yeah, I would prefer to be not dead, and having another isn’t the same as that, but it’s better than there just being none of me out there.”
“Not really my choice,” said Mette. “But I’ll try, if the worst happens.”
Kes laid back and closed his eyes, and eventually, Mette left.
He had actually done pretty fucking well in the fight, in his opinion. She was a thresholder, and he was basically just a human guy, albeit close to peak human from having a body that had been sculpted by two different types of magic. She was a lowly thresholder, that was true, with only one world to her name, but it was still better than anyone had managed to do against him, leaving aside the differences of spheres, that time he got shot with a cannon, and a few others that arguably shouldn’t have counted.
He’d only ‘won’ because she thought he was holding back, or maybe even just clowning on her. He could see that perspective, given everything she knew of his power. If she had leapt to her feet after that hard hit on the head, he was pretty sure she’d have been able to take him out. And if she came back, she’d see him laid up in bed like an invalid, which would probably be the end for him.
He made a mental note to have Mette put a ‘No Visitors’ sign on his door, but fell asleep before she came back.
~~~~
Kes woke up to a dark and quiet room. He had no idea how much time had passed, but the sun was well past setting. His mouth was dry, and Mette was nowhere to be seen.
He almost yelled when he realized there was a dark figure in full armor standing at the foot of his bed. It carried a long spear with a red tuft, and when it slipped its helmet off like it was removing a ski mask, Kes realized that it was Fenilor.
“I’m interested to hear your reasoning,” said Fenilor. His face was pale. He was in the shadows, and given there was no moonlight, it was difficult to make out his expression. His long hair flowed behind him.
“My reasoning?” asked Kes. He was still waking up, and looked around. There was a glass of water on the bedside table, and he went for it almost involuntarily, wincing in pain as he felt the throbbing of his wounds. The bandage on his arm had bled through again, and it had made a wet spot on the bed.
“Why did you act?” asked Fenilor. “Thirlwell wasn’t ready. Berus was only barely ready, the pieces in place but not quite where they should have been, I can see that now. The king is dead, but it appears the monarchy will live on. I’m as much an advocate of striking the head as anyone else, but the time was not right.”
“Circumstances were beyond my control,” said Kes. He had no idea whether that was true. It was better to pretend to be Perry though, because if he wasn’t Perry, then he could be kidnapped and tortured for information, or possibly held as hostage. It’s probably what Perry would have done, if he found a helpless clone of Fenilor or Third Fervor.
“Ah, alas, it is often the case,” said Fenilor. “I’m curious to know how they could get so far beyond your control that you simply had to put a hole in the king.”
“I’m not up for that, at the moment,” said Kes. “Sorry.” He looked around the room. He could call for help, which would do approximately nothing.
“You sustained injuries in the fight,” said Fenilor. “That wasn’t a part of the report I’d heard.”
“Different fight,” said Kes. “Lots of fights today.”
Fenilor shifted, looking Kes over, then began moving his finger in the air. At first Kes thought it looked like spellcasting, but the closer he watched, the more it looked like Fenilor was accessing some kind of invisible user interface. The jabs and swipes of his finger were close to how it looked when someone was using a tablet.
“Sorry if I ruined your plans,” said Kes.
“Mmm,” said Fenilor as he busied himself with whatever invisible thing he was working on. “It was once supposed that a monarchy was like a hydra whose head would grow back when it was cut off. This is, in a sense, true. The king’s daughter will take the throne, becoming queen. It was meant to be her sadistic brother, but he mysteriously died in his sleep some thirty-seven minutes ago. Curious, especially given that he was under armed guard.”
Kes didn’t know what the implication was supposed to be. Was that something Perry had done? Something Fenilor had done? Or the action of some outside party?
“It will take the young queen some time to consolidate power,” said Fenilor. “She’s supposedly soft-hearted and sympathetic to the culture, having been educated by a number of foreign tutors, a few of whom I suspect were placed there by outside agents.”
“You don’t know?” asked Kes.
“No, of course not,” said Fenilor. “I’ve been hands off. If the government needed me to run it, I would never be able to leave this world, which is my intention when all is said and done.”
Fenilor’s finger paused, and he stared at the middle distance, at something only he could see.
“What are you looking at?” asked Kes.
“A power of mine,” said Fenilor. “My second.” He looked down at Kes. “You can’t see it, but there are blue boxes that appear in my vision and tell me things, along with other perks. It’s one of the ways I’ve been able to accrue power over the many years I’ve been here.” He came around to the side of the bed and peered into Kes’ face. It was uncomfortably close. “I don’t think you’re an illusion, but I don’t know for certain what you are. You’re not the real Perry.”
“What makes you say that?” asked Kes.
“I can see things,” said Fenilor with a shrug. “Perry had a high threat rating that night we met here, above this place. He was formidable, at least as far as the blue boxes were concerned. If they’re to be believed, you’re so easy to kill I could do it with an accidental slip of the wrist.” He paused. “Can you relay a message?”
“Yes,” said Kes. He swallowed. This was the part where Fenilor might kill him. It might be that sort of message.
“Tell him that once the last monarchy has crumbled into dirt, I’m leaving this world and continuing my work in another,” said Fenilor. “If I’m right, the world will know peace from our kind once the last thresholder is gone.”
“I can tell him that,” said Kes.
“If the portal opens, I’ll need to see him go through,” said Fenilor. “If he doesn’t go through, we’ll have cause to fight. And if we defeat our counterpart in Thirlwell, or wherever she floats off to, and no portal appears, it does seem as though we might need to fight one another. I think I have a measure of him — of you? If he saw conflict as inevitable, he would draw his sword without hesitation, even if he felt no earnest desire to end me.”
“You could play-fight,” said Kes. “Hurt each other only badly enough that the portal opens, not intending death.”
“I would certainly agree to that,” said Fenilor. “But a man of his power, and an elf of mine, have difficulty holding back. This is true, yes?”
“Yes,” nodded Kes. He drank from the glass of water. He was able to will his hands to stop shaking.
“If he’s an honorable man, we can give it some time, investigate together,” said Fenilor. “I suspect he’s not an honorable man. I can’t say that I know him well, as yet, but perhaps that will change with time. Perhaps my measure of him will be softer.” He nodded and tapped the butt of his spear on the floor once. “Tell him all that. Relay it accurately. We’ll meet again — him and I. I can’t say I understand what you are yet, or whether we’ll cross paths.”
Kes gave a nod and watched as Fenilor left the room. He used no special method of teleportation, had no portal or anything like it, he simply walked out as though he had randomly wandered in.
Kes let out a low breath. He hadn’t been taken hostage, hadn’t been tortured, and was thankful for that. Maybe it would all resolve easily once Third Fervor was dead and buried, and Nima along with her, but Fenilor had stated outright that if the portal wouldn’t open, it was all out war. Maybe Perry would do a better job convincing the elf to do some play fighting, but knowing Perry, he would probably try to make a swift and decisive strike. Maybe the whole thing would spiral out of control, depending on what skills Fenilor had.
A nice final fight in the woods, without the threat of society crashing down around them, would be nice.
It took some time for his heart rate to come back down. After fifteen minutes or so, Mette came in with the doctor to check on Kes, and they changed his bandages again. Mette changed the bloodstained sheets, and when she was finished, she lay down with him, careful not to touch his wounds.
“I’m glad you’re here,” said Kes. He was going to fall asleep soon. He’d been through the wringer after just a short fight with Nima, and the tension of talking to Fenilor was fading.
“That’s ‘cause I’m doin’ stuff for you,” said Mette, who had her eyes closed. She apparently meant to sleep curled up next to him.
“Nah,” said Kes.
“It’s ‘cause I’m sexy,” said Mette.
“Nah,” said Kes. “Though you are.”
“It’s ‘cause I’m a fuck up,” said Mette. She opened one eye, then closed it. “Blew up my life for some magic like a … what did you call ‘em?”
“No idea what you’re talking about,” said Kes.
“A junkie,” said Mette with a nod that pressed against his ribs. “That was it.”
“Well, we’ll figure out why later,” said Kes. “Just wanted you to know that I’m glad for you being here.”
“You almost died today,” said Mette. “Could’ve, if it went different.”
“I’m hoping things settle down,” said Kes. “I’m hoping that Perry comes back and can offer us some protection. I’m hoping that Fenilor leaves us alone and Nima doesn’t try to sneak in and settle the score.”
“Lotta hopes,” sighed Mette. “Get some rest.”
“We might want to move again,” said Kes. “Get on that airship, away from where people can keep finding us.”
“Might,” said Mette. “Sleep now, little doggy.”
“You don’t even know what a doggy is,” said Kes.
“Shhh,” said Mette. “Good doggy.”
If he hadn’t been dealing with blood loss, Kes might have stared up at the ceiling and spent some time thinking about how fucked he seemed to be, but unconsciousness beckoned, and so sleep came easily.
His last thought was that at least now he knew all the pieces and roughly where they were positioned. Nima was to the wind, Third Fervor was going to murder him, Perry was off doing some insane thing in the next kingdom over, and Fenilor was biding his time and waiting to strike a deathblow against the Last Kingdom. At least Kes knew who the players were and where they stood.
Far to the west, unseen by anyone, the SS Farfinder had just arrived.