Thresholder, ch 178, Visions

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With Grayspear dead, Anaksi wasn’t needed inside the shelf space. She was welcomed aboard the Farfinder, assigned a bunk, and given fresh clothes and a hot shower, something she’d never had before — something that the Farfinder only had in short supply, actually, because there was a large tank of water that they didn’t want to refill from local sources if they could help it.

Perry had given her a half-hearted apology that didn’t mean much to either of them. A part of him still felt like he was in the right, that she should have offered to show him what happened, that it was entirely understandable to ask for. And he wouldn’t even have been that angry with her either way, Grayspear was no angel. Her presence as a prisoner was inconvenient. Still, he’d accused Anaksi, or nearly so, and she’d been innocent, and now there was a tension between them that the apology hadn’t even remotely resolved.

The ability to see the past, or an approximation of it, was working, and it was time to do that, rather than worry about the interpersonal or anything downstream of killing Queenie and stopping her plans.

It was easy enough to find the wayward sniper, as it hadn’t been that much time. Queenie and Perry were the only things above the city of Charlonion through the past few days. The past-viewing interface was worse than it had been before, missing all kinds of features that just weren’t supported by the current configuration of magic, but it would render the past on a screen, and it was just a matter of following Queenie and periodically refreshing the thread to account for divergence.

She did her ridiculous, impossible trick of shooting herself through the sky, and Perry took the time to track her speed. She was slow enough that on open ground, he could outrun her, though he wouldn’t be able to keep up while flying with the sword.

Queenie had made her way out of Charlonion at speed, flying over the prairie and scrubland without stopping. She adjusted her course, following landmarks like you had to do in the Dusklands, a handy river or a piece of rail to orient in the shifting landscape, and eventually, she came to a small town, which she passed straight by.

She landed next to a farmhouse from twenty feet up, thumping hard against the ground and standing up like it was nothing to her, then slipping the enormous sniper rifle into whatever kind of storage system she had.

Perry wasn’t sure what he’d expected from the farmhouse, but there were two women and a man there, all of them young, early twenties or maybe even late teens. This vision of the past didn’t have audio — Mette had promised it would be online soon — so Perry watched their mouths move wordlessly. They were servants or slaves, or just people who Queenie had used her power on and convinced to be by her side. There was a stew on the stove, apparently in anticipation of her, and she was served a bowl of it at the dining table with a side of buttered bread.

When the servants began taking their clothes off, Perry skipped ahead. Something about the setup had made him expect it. Queenie had definitely changed them somehow, stripping away their social inhibitions at the very least, unless they had been sex workers when she’d found them. He supposed that was possible, but decided that he didn’t really care. He doubted that they were anything to her. If they had been, maybe he would have tried to leverage them.

Queenie slept in a large room there, and pulled plenty of things from her inventory, including a thick stack of cash that she tossed to one of the women.

She spent the night, lying in bed with one of the women, and later, with the man. Perry wondered when she’d had time to set this up, but didn’t feel inclined to walk the past-vision backward and find out.

In the morning, she ate a big meal, did a deep cleaning of her sniper rifle that involved taking it entirely apart and putting it back together, and then took off out of the house. She was soon in the air, shooting her way across the scrubland, hurtling above the ground in such a way that she was barely getting her next shot off before she could impact the ground. Perry spent some time marveling at it, trying to see if there was a way to pre-empt it or stop it, but it seemed to him that the only insight was that between shots, she was in a very predictable position.

He’d wondered whether she was going to Charlonion, but instead she headed in the opposite direction. She navigated along a set of train tracks, and when a train came from behind, she diverted toward it and landed deftly on top of it. She sat there for a while, drinking from a canteen, sniper rifle stashed, red scarf flapping behind her in the wind. Wherever the train was going, she seemed at ease, and sat there looking pleased with her life as the train barreled on ahead.

The train eventually came to a massive quarry with a small town next to it, though Queenie had leapt off it a mile before it arrived. Perry watched her as she lay down behind a ridge, aiming her rifle toward the town, but she didn’t make a shot, only looked down the scope. She was scouting, and taking her time about it.

Perry moved the view toward the quarry, keeping it locked in time, watching, up close, what Queenie was looking at.

The quarry was mining out large sheets of rock that was shot through with the same pink as the harmonizer cores.

Perry moved the view across the quarry and to the small town next to it, where there were large production buildings set up. The pieces of rock were being carefully cut with chisels, and most of the rock seemed to be discarded in the course of this, cast aside into an enormous pile. A few of these pieces — those with large enough pink veins — were sent to a different processing area, and these had stone carefully carved away from them, leaving only the pink interiors, which were then even more carefully shaped into spheres with not a single speck of gray rock remaining around them. Many more were discarded in the course of this process.

Then the spheres were taken to another building, where they were measured and polished, then finally put into a large metal framework that was almost twenty feet tall, shaped as an inverted triangle. Perry rolled the view backward and forward in time, watching for a moment when it was full, and saw, slightly out of order, a magical ritual performed by three men in robes who stood around the full frame. At the moment they finished, the full framework of polished pink stones completely disappeared, save for the one at the bottom of the frame. This one glowed brightly, then faintly.

This quarry, and the buildings around it, were the place they made harmonizers.

Perry moved his view back to where Queenie had been, then found her in the past, watching with her scope. It was a well-defended town, and she was taking its measure from a distance. There were, by Perry’s count, half a dozen completed harmonizers locked up in the main administrative building, though it was difficult to tell.

The town was well-guarded. There were Peonies, K-men, and plenty of guns. It was set up for defense, mostly in how the quarry and town had been laid out, though Perry didn’t think that any of it would stop Queenie.

Still, she didn’t start firing, just sat and watched from a distance, even as Perry pushed the vision toward the present.

He was surprised when she left on the train without making a move. This was a scouting mission then, one done with a hundredth the tools that Perry currently possessed. He watched her on the train, sitting on the roof as before, calm expression on her face. She had her scarf wrapped around her, and gently stroked it, then when the train crossed a particular river, she leapt into action and fired her way through the air.

She went back to the same house she’d started from, and there was a conversation that Perry wasn’t privy to, because he didn’t have any access to audio.

“Mette, when are we going to have audio on this?” asked Perry when she came into the room.

Mette stared at him. “How many miracles am I expected to work?”

“We need to find and kill her,” said Perry. “She’s a threat to this world, and to this ship.”

“This is Eggy’s department, not mine, but I think the audio was done through some kind of separate magic,” said Mette. “One that I don’t think we can replicate here.”

“Shit,” said Perry. “She’s sitting there, planning something. She’s taking aim at this specific quarry, trying to get more harmonizer spheres. She’s going to make a bigger, better version of what she had before, and who knows how big the range is going to be.”

“That does sound awful,” said Mette. “Have you tried getting March to lipread?”

Perry pursed his lips. “Marchand, can you do that?”

“Yes, sir,” said Marchand. “May I take control of the viewer? I can be much more accurate if I can find my own angles.”

“Sure,” said Perry.

The image on the screen swung around, going right up next to Queenie’s lips as she spoke, close enough to see her pores.

“This is only an approximation of the past,” said Marchand. “But in composite, I believe it will be clear.”

The viewer was run forward and backward through time, the same moments taken from different angles, and when it was finished, Marchand offered a reconstruction of the audio that played on top of the video — thankfully he didn’t go with the sock puppets again.

“The machine makes things easier,” said Queenie. “All I need to do is drop it somewhere in that town and pop it. Men are a lot less willing to lay down their lives when they have no loyalty.”

“You’re doing it alone?” asked one of the women. She was lying on the couch, topless, skinny enough that most of her rib cage was visible.

“I’ll go recruiting,” said Queenie. “It’s tough to do though.” She reached over and stroked the woman’s leg. “You have to have something to offer.”

“And you’ll bring us with you, when you go?” asked the man.

“Of course,” said Queenie. It was a lie. She didn’t have a way to do that, not like Perry did. “But by the time I’m finished here, you won’t need to go anywhere else.”

There was a part of Perry that wanted to find where Queenie had recruited these libertines from. It would have been possible, with the viewer, to trace backward through time. It didn’t really seem important, but he wanted to know how easy the process had been, what she’d been looking for.

He was, in a way, envious. The libertines were hanging on Queenie’s words, and she was in total control of the situation. She was going to recruit more people to her cause, and she was going to do it without much negotiation, offering rewards that she might never deliver on. Watching her, Perry saw a shade of Jeff, a hedonism that he hadn’t known was there.

It was a hedonism he’d indulged in when he’d first gotten to the Dusklands, fighting and fucking, being the big man, untouchable by the mere mortals, and then it had all gone wrong somehow, even before the Farfinder had shown up. Some of it was Queenie showing up with her cavalry, but mostly it had been Perry himself, miring himself in situations where he was just trying to do the right thing. He’d worked as a lab assistant and gotten the police after him, and it all stemmed from trying to be a basic, decent person.

He could have stayed at the brothel, gotten cheap and easy work as a guard of some kind using his incredible powers, and sat back to relax. It’s what Jeff would have done. Or hell, he could have pursued the path of uplift, that would have been a cinch with March, and would no doubt have naturally led to riches and connections.

Obviously he couldn’t have done any of that, because obviously he had his duties. He had to stop Queenie. If possible, he had to lift the people of the Dusklands up. He had to stop them from enacting more of a genocide than they already had. He had to stop their magical form of indentured servitude. There was an obligation there, and if he ignored it, he’d hate himself for it.

“You have a bead on her?” asked Hella.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “She has a house, which we can hit, or we can wait for her to go after her goal. This doesn’t see closer than twelve hours to the present, but I’m guessing there’s nothing to be done about that.”

“We would need a bridging technology,” said Hella. “And even if we had it, there are accuracy concerns.”

“Both of these are overdetermined,” said Perry. “From my understanding, anyway. This target isn’t random, and this hideout isn’t either.”

“Then we have it in our power to kill her,” said Hella with a nod.

“She’s a fantastic shot,” said Perry. “That’s the thing I’m most worried about. If she sees the ship coming, she’ll have a bullet ready, and she doesn’t often miss a shot. Plus she can see for miles.”

“You sure do meet some interesting people,” said Hella with a sigh. “There’s no chance we can let her be?”

“She needs something called a harmonizer core,” said Perry. “My guess is that she’s going to chain them. I don’t know what that’s going to do, though I’ll have March run through all the conversations in this house to see whether she lays it out. And unfortunately, the woman who had the best information on what would happen is dead.”

“Dead?” asked Hella.

“Grayspear,” said Perry, lips tight. “The woman who was a prisoner.”

“She died in the last few hours?” asked Hella.

“Anaksi killed her,” said Perry. “Self-defense.”

“What?” asked Hella.

Perry threw the memory at her, the violent struggle and quick death that Grayspear had suffered.

“Never do that again without warning,” said Hella, who’d staggered back a half step. She took a deep breath. “Let me see it again?”

Perry showed it again, watching it himself. It was very convincing, in terms of the self-defense story.

“That blackness, that’s what shows up when you’re asleep?” asked Hella.

“Yes,” said Perry. “Unless you’re dreaming. It can show dreams, but they’re pretty obvious, warped and low-fidelity. She wasn’t necessarily sleeping though. It’s possible to stitch two memories together, so there might have been a hidden cut.”

“Cut?” asked Hella.

“A … a thing that’s in movies and TV shows?” asked Perry. “When you switch from one camera to another?”

“Ah,” said Hella. “And to be clear, this is the woman who is now walking freely around this ship? Who you clearly don’t actually trust?”

“I trust her,” said Perry. “Even if she did commit the murder. It would have been very possible for her to shackle Grayspear in such a way that she could escape, to lay her knife somewhere Grayspear could have taken it, to have said some things that indicated violent action was the only escape. Then she’d have to have lain down and pretended to drift off to sleep. But even if that’s what Anaksi did … Grayspear had the knowledge to build a weapon that the Commission would have loved to have. She was working in the interests of genocide.”

“So with her dead, the technology stays in the bottle?” asked Hella.

“Maybe,” replied Perry.

“I’m not sure that I like having a murderer walking free with no investigation,” said Hella. “It would have been good for you to ask me first.”

Perry nodded. “I’ll remember that for next time.”

Hella frowned at him. “Do we have a problem?”

“No,” said Perry.

Hella stared at him. “It feels like we have a problem.”

“We’re aligned,” said Perry. “I just don’t like this world, and I feel like I’m stuck in a moral quandary that I’d prefer not to be in.”

“You think the Commission is evil,” said Hella.

“Yeah,” said Perry. “Maybe about as evil as the authorities from my Earth’s Wild West.” His mind went to lynch mobs, raiders, and slavers. “Maybe less evil, but … that’s still pretty evil. And I’m not going to say that Yuuksen are saints, but they’re going to be wiped out if we start handing the Commission airships, to say nothing of the other stuff.”

“You’ll have to talk with Dirk,” said Hella. “We’ve had a lot of time to think things through, we’d talked about the idea that we might be going up against a society that doesn’t conform to the values of the culture, not that I conform to their values. This was one of the scenarios, though it’s a bit out of bounds. The culture’s plan is to send in people and reform them as much as possible with the diplomatic corps. The cloning machines are back up and running, it’ll just be a matter of keeping their existence a secret from the Commission … though maybe that’s too underhanded to consider.”

“More Dirks coming in here,” said Perry. “Shipments of trade goods from beyond the veil of worlds.”

“I don’t like it either, for what it’s worth, but it does seem like we’re going to have to deal with the Great Arc at some point,” said Hella. “Our ship made it through undetected, but knowing what we know about the place, I’m not sure how undetected we actually were, and if there are dozens of ships making temporary stops in deep space before moving on, it seems like a matter of time before we draw attention from one of the highest spheres, something we really don’t want to have happen.”

“The Great Arc is worse than the Commission,” said Perry. “Far, far worse.”

“I’ll do what I can to ensure we’re not lobbing a hand grenade at the Yuuksen, if that’s what you’re worried about,” said Hella.

“I’m worried about a lot of things,” said Perry. “But yes, thank you.”

“We’re good?” asked Hella.

“We’re good,” said Perry. “And if I manage to kill Queenie, what’s the plan?”

“You go through the portal, because we sure as hell need a way out of here,” said Hella. “And then you have to hope that we can get a redirect going for you, which would happen only after you’d already gone through.”

“I’d be at your mercy?” asked Perry.

“Hell, we tried to send you to Earth instead of here,” said Hella. “So you were at our mercy.”

“And what happened?” asked Perry.

“It just didn’t get done in time,” said Hella. “Now it’s a matter for Mette and Eggy.”

“Seems like maybe you should have brought some backups of them, if the cloning machine is up and running,” said Perry.

“We did think about it,” said Hella. She sighed, then looked at Perry. “I know you have your reservations.”

“If you keep asking whether I’m on board, whether we’re good, whether I have my shit together, we’re not going to be good for much longer,” said Perry. “I’m fine, just stressed out.”

“Queenie won’t be as difficult a match as Fenilor,” said Hella. “She’s a step down.”

“I didn’t actually beat Fenilor, did I?” asked Perry. “He was smashed from the heavens by superior firepower. So that’s less helpful than you think.”

“You let me know if you need anything,” said Hella.

“Sure,” said Perry. “Let’s just get it done, the sooner the better. We camp out in that quarry town and pop her in the head when she comes close, and when that inevitably doesn’t work, we chase her like hell or limp off to lick our wounds.”

“That’s the spirit,” said Hella.

When she left, Perry devoted more time to looking into the past, but it was mostly Marchand doing it, and mostly to get audio reconstructions. With every new sentence, there was a lack of revelations, and mostly it seemed like the group was concerned with the satisfaction of base urges than anything else. Perry rolled the viewer back, then forward, and found that the house belonged to the older of the two women, but it was tedious to find the exact moment that Queenie had come and done the social snipping.

Perry got up and stretched while Marchand continued. The viewer took minimal power, and using it took minimal attention from Marchand, who was still continuing the alterations on the circuitry. There would be more information when he came back, and trying to direct any of it was fruitless.

He found Anaksi sitting in the bridge, which was looking only marginally better than it had before.

“You can’t let the Commission have one of these,” she said.

“I know,” said Perry.

“The trains are bad enough,” said Anaksi. “They would have the high ground, forever. They would track our movements, gun us down. This thing is armored, isn’t it?”

“It is,” said Perry. “I’m not sure how effective that armor is against small arms fire, but probably pretty effective.”

“And if we had these for ourselves …” Anaksi trailed off, looking at the controls.

“You’d have the advantage,” said Perry.

“I’m not sure we would even be ourselves,” said Anaksi. “I’m not sure what the Yuuksen would look like, flying something like this, using these tools.”

“You have rifles,” said Perry.

“And we fought about that,” said Anaksi. She looked at one of the consoles, which was currently dead, awaiting a reboot. “How do your people get food?”

“Uh. We have giant machines that run across manicured fields,” said Perry. “They put the food into storage, which then goes to a factory, and it gets processed into things we pick up from stores. Or, uh, actually a lot of farming is labor intensive, so we use underpaid workers who aren’t under the protection of the law to pick the produce, which then gets taken to the factories and transformed into heavily preserved and flavorless products. And we have to bring in lots of nitrogen and other products to keep the fields running, but I don’t know how those production processes work.”

“We would be leaving our lives behind,” said Anaksi.

“There’s not another path forward,” said Perry. “If you’re going to reject the gifts on offer here —”

“No,” said Anaksi. “We will take every ounce of power we’re offered.”

“Dirk is the guy to talk to,” said Perry. “You’ll want to do your best to convince him that your people are who he wants their culture to side with. I’ll do my part, but I’m worried he’s going to fall under the delusion that he can control the Commission. And hell, maybe he can, maybe I’m underestimating him, or them.”

“I’ll talk to him,” said Anaksi. “Thank you.”

They stood awkwardly for a moment. Perry wondered whether he should offer another apology for accusing her of murder, if he had offered a first one, but she turned away from him, and the moment for that passed.

“You’re leaving after Queenie is dead?” she asked. “To another world?”

“I have to,” said Perry. “Or … I don’t have to, but this is the plan. I don’t think I can go on with hopping between worlds, as much as there’s something that appeals to me. I’m not sure you’d understand, you have this world here, your people. I’ve always felt like a man apart.”

He didn’t like the way that made him sound. It sounded whiny and dramatic, like he was declaring himself a loner that no one else understood. He was painfully aware that back on Earth, he’d have been a dime a dozen, a moderately intelligent, decently educated guy with very little to distinguish him. But maybe all those other people exactly like him had felt the same way, like they were set apart from the world because they were so similar to everyone else.

There were a few ways in which Anaksi was a bad fit as a companion, and one of them was that she had purpose in her life, a concrete identity, even if it was one that was complicated and under threat.

“I might go too,” said Anaksi.

“What?” asked Perry. He looked at her carefully. “You have a mission here. You have people that need you.”

“My husband is dead,” said Anaksi. “The tribe I had married into is likely to dissolve without the men turned back, and Grayspear didn’t know how to undo it. I’m needed here, by the Yuuksen, but …”

“But what?” asked Perry. “You’d abandon them?”

“It’s a long, hard, bloody road,” said Anaksi. Her voice was soft. “There was never an option for me, before. The choices were to live in Charlonion, or a frontier town, as I was raised to do, always a hated outsider, always without a place. Or do what I had done, live among the Yuuksen, a hated outsider there too, my speech not quite right, unfamiliar with their customs, working every day to earn acceptance, to conform, to fit in.”

“It’s not that great, always being on the outside,” said Perry.

“I would have powers, like you?” asked Anaksi.

Perry nodded slowly. “And you’d have people like Queenie.”

“Less powerful,” said Anaksi.

“Yes,” nodded Perry. “Not that she’s such hot shit. I nearly got her already, and she’s not going to be too much more powerful from where she was a few days ago.”

Hella and Dirk came into the bridge then, and Perry stepped to the side.

“I talked to Amanaco,” said Hella. “He’s suggested that if we make for the quarry now, he can commandeer their resources. Ideally we lower the ship and hide it away — there’s a crevice — then set ourselves up so that we can take out Queenie when she gets there.”

“It would be good for our relations with the Commission,” said Dirk. “It would excuse a lot of what you’d done before we got here.”

“You’re allying with them?” asked Anaksi, looking between the three of them.

“We need friendly relations one way or another,” said Dirk. “Obviously we’re not coming in here to support their imperialist efforts. If we can reform them, all your problems go away anyway.”

“Do they?” asked Anaksi. “The rails will be torn down? The outposts and mines and everything else will be torn up?”

“Very likely, yes,” said Dirk. “If they have airships, they won’t need rails. We can introduce the technology to keep people fed without much farmland. They don’t like expanding into the wilderness, do they?”

“Some days it seems like, for all their complaining, they like nothing better,” said Anaksi.

“There’s a win-win situation here,” said Dirk. “And we’re not giving away shit until we get some concessions. I understand you have reservations, but we’re enlightened people a million years ahead of what they have going on here.”

Anaksi frowned at him, but said nothing.

“The Queenie situation is urgent,” said Hella. “We should get moving, we’re taking Amanaco with us.”

“What do we do if she’s already there?” asked Perry.

“We get shot, then we fight,” said Hella. “According to March, I should be resistant to her sniper rifle. It’s enough to knock me around and bruise me up, but if I’m flaring full power, I won’t die.”

“That raises some concerns for the rest of us,” said Dirk.

“You’re flying,” said Hella. “I’ll be on the outside of the ship, to draw fire, and Perry will be in the doorway, ready to drop down.”

“She’s extremely good with that sniper rifle,” said Perry. “Just as a word of warning.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve been shot by a sniper rifle,” said Hella. She grimaced. “Not that I’d look forward to it. If Eggy were here, she would give me an ego check.”

“Did you want to check in on her before we go?” asked Perry. He waved the shelf space open.

“Yes,” said Hella. “Hopefully she’s awake. There’s a chance that we don’t make it through this one.”