In the end, the Mettes did have to admit that the Eggys were right, and that differentiation was the way to go. There had been too many moments of confusion, even after they all started wearing color-coded outfits, and if they hadn’t picked names for themselves, it seemed inevitable that they would be referred to as colors instead. There was a part of Mette, the engineer part, that liked the idea of simply having a color for a name, but it was a relatively small part.

  Mette Prime became simply Prime, since that's what people were calling her anyway. She put streaks of purple into her hair, which was cut and styled at what the people of Markat called a “salon”. She still thought of herself as Mette though, and she was sure the other Mettes felt the same way.

  One crisis was over, and another had begun. Perry was in what they were calling portal stasis, but that meant they had time — time to figure out how to use the wiggler to direct him, time to figure out where to direct him, time to map out the multiverse as best they could with all their new tools. The decision had been made not to push themselves too much, because after the Farfinder went after Perry, there were sure to be other crises.

  Mette had been indulging in the culture. She was destined for the Farfinder, and it was looking like she would be the only Mette to go there. She still had her project management duties, but that was something that wasn’t entirely necessary now that there weren’t so many people working on so many different things.

  Because the people of Markat seemed to be destined for trading partners with the Natrix, Prime was looking at them with a keen eye. She was thinking about what the Natrix had to trade, what the Natrix would want, and what the future of her people would be like.

  In one sense, Mette’s entire reason for going into the shelf with Perry was to help her people.

  In another sense, it had simply been that traveling the world was too enticing. There were distant lands, unique people, magics to learn, and new technologies.

  But with the very first world she went to, she had found the solution to the work of generations. The ships they would build here would eventually carry the entirety of the Natrix and all other colonies on Esperide to the promised land of plenty. There wouldn’t be any more trouble with bugs, or mechanical issues, or burning heat, or freezing cold. They could simply uproot their entire society and place it here, in this relative paradise, where they had the luxury of pissing away manpower.

  She had even started drafting up plans for how the Natrix, as a whole, could be converted to use a punch drive, but the sticking point was that the punch drive was imprecise in where it put the Farfinder, mostly because it went through blind every time and only ended up in the relative vicinity of where a portal had been. If they established the Loop, it would be the first time the Farfinder was punching through to a known world.

  Mette wasn’t even sure that the Natrix would go for it, not if there was an outside entity that could bail them out of a jam, not if they had access to the expertise of Earth 2. It was the driving mission of their people to escape from that cursed planet, and yet she didn’t know whether they would want to live under the thumb of this strange culture. There was a possibility that they would rebel, and a greater possibility that they would work to carve out some kind of exception for themselves. What diplomacy would look like was anyone’s guess, but the Natrix would certainly attempt to hold its own.

  The people of Markat had clothes and food in excess, and they had plenty of books. Prime went to their libraries and tried on different dresses, and she went to their kitchens and sampled their foods. There was abundance everywhere, so long as you didn’t care about microchips, or didn’t want video calls. It was fine so long as you enjoyed technological progress being stifled. They didn’t have anime.

  The Natrix’s chief advantage was its people, its engineers and scientists, and also its mechs, though without an enemy to fight, in a place where roads could be built, maybe those would prove useless. And would any of that be allowed here? They needed mechanics to run their domes, but they had mechanics. They needed people who would put in the work, and Prime trusted everyone aboard the Natrix to do that, but she didn’t think that the culture would want to pay for labor.

  Was interuniversal trade “the culture”? It was hard to say.

  Still, first contact was coming, at least if they could figure out how to aim a latent portal, which was proving to be more of a challenge than anticipated — and it had been anticipated to be an enormous challenge.

  “We’re all counting our chickens before they’re hatched,” Hella said one evening.

  “What’s a chicken?” asked Mette.

  “A bird,” Hella clarified. “A farm bird. You raise them from eggs, it’s — we’re making plans whose intermediate steps have many many kinks to work out.”

  Mette Prime and Hella were friends, much more than Hella was a friend with any of the other Mettes. This was largely due to both being in command positions, but it was also because Hella had sat with Mette during three full moons — they could get one any time they wished by flying the Farfinder out into space. Mette was locked inside a prison bubble for it: it was a necessary step for learning to control the wolf. This had been good bonding time.

  “We’ll get it figured out,” said Mette. “We have significant backing from the scientists here, whatever the GCA is getting up to. It’s just a matter of aiming at where Perry came from.”

  “I’m worried about the Great Arc,” said Hella. “I was worried about the Great Arc when we were on the Great Arc, but I’m more worried about it now that it’s being positioned as a thoroughfare. There are very powerful, very dangerous people there, to say nothing of the higher entities.”

  “You scraped by,” said Mette.

  “We were running dark,” said Hella. “The magics we were using weren’t native to that world, so it’s understandable that we slipped by — up until Maya Singh arrived, their world hadn’t even been compatible with what our engines or scrying devices use. I don’t know if that’s going to continue to be the case.”

  “Hrm,” said Mette. “Every other world is probably fine though, right?” asked Mette.

  “The Perry half, maybe,” said Hella. “The Maya half, less so.”

  The idea of the Loop was simply that punches were a graph of some kind, a series of one-way connections between universes, and if they could manipulate the Grand Spell into sending someone to a universe that was already a part of the extant graph, they could use the punch drive a set number of times to traverse the circle, ending up back where they started, enabling diplomacy and trade between any world in the circle.

  Perry had been to Earth 2, then Seraphinus, then Teaguewater, then the Great Arc, then Esperide, and finally Markat. Of those, the Great Arc was the only one that was any significant problem, except that Earth 2 wouldn’t have magic. Perry had always assumed that the plan for the Loop was to focus on Earth 2, and that assumption had gone unchallenged, mostly because the idea of the Loop was what was important, not the specific implementation. Everyone had been focusing on Fenilor anyway.

  But once Perry was gone, Hella had sat down for a moment and turned her eyes to the world that Perry called Earth 1 instead. There was one major thing that Earth 1 had going for it: Maya Singh was from there.

  If they could correctly target Earth 1, that would mean that the Loop would become a Split Loop, with one path heading down Perry’s side, and the other path heading down Maya’s side until they rejoined at the Great Arc. Maya’s side was longer, and less well-known, though the Farfinder had traversed at least some of it, and Maya had told Perry stories about the unknown worlds. The world with gods was worrying, and they would be out-teched by the civilization that was perched at the heat death of the universe, but the other worlds were less concerning.

  They didn’t have a map of the multiverse, but Earth 1 seemed like it was obviously their best option.

  And getting there depended on whether the Mettes and Eggys and scientists from the culture could get something — multiple things — working, which Mette was not sure was ever going to actually happen.

  “There’s a second option,” said Henrietta over breakfast one morning. “Maybe Perry’s stasis finishes and we just don’t get him aimed, which is extremely possible, and he just ends up hitting a world that makes him a part of the loop anyway?”

  “The odds of that are extremely low,” said Mette. “Assuming the numbers we have are right, and there are 1.6 million universes in the multiverse.”

  “Yeah, but there are lots of options,” said Henrietta. “The Farfinder has been to a ton of different worlds, and it has more of them cataloged. All Perry would need to do is land on one of those and we could establish the Grand Loop. We could even end up on Hella’s world, just by accident, that’s where the Farfinder is from.”

  “It would be impossible to navigate,” said Mette.

  “Nah,” said Henrietta. “Because we would know the whole sequence. We would have the luxury of preparing, rather than just stumbling into the middle of an ongoing party.”

  “It’s still extremely unlikely,” said Mette. “Being generous, it’s something like one in five thousand.”

  “Right, but it’s compounding,” said Henrietta. “We get a new chance with every new world. The chance gets better every time. Plus we get information about the new thresholder, and the worlds they’ve been to.”

  Mette considered this. “I still think the math doesn’t add up. And until we clear a corridor for shipping, every jump we make is a danger.”

  Henrietta shrugged. “Even if we can’t control where Perry goes, eventually we’ll get lucky.”

  Mette didn’t find that satisfying.

  Perry had been gone for two weeks when his spike disappeared. There was nothing special about it disappearing, it was just like the others, but it was on the fast side.

  The punch drive wasn’t ready, and neither were the new crew. They had not managed to alter his trajectory through the multiverse, though the more they had worked on that, the more they’d realized how big a problem it was, particularly without a map of the multiverse. They would be able to do more mapping in the next world, but that didn’t help in the near term.

  “So he’s on his own,” said Mette. “That’s not great.”

  “He’s survived on his own before,” said Hella.

  “Any battle between thresholders is a coin flip,” said Mette. This was literally true, so far as they could tell. There wasn’t a statistically significant way to slice the data such that they could make good predictions about who would win, Fenilor aside. Also, a coin was a round, flat token used for trade.

  “Then we get everything working as quickly as we can, and we follow after him,” said Hella. “What does our timeline look like?”

  The engineers all looked at each other. The timeline had been one month, back when they had first started working on it, and was now stretching to two months, but timelines had a habit of getting longer, not shorter.

  “That bad?” asked Hella.

  “Six weeks,” said Mette. She was the de facto leader of the Mettes, and she spoke for them. She probably would until the day she left. It was the only time she felt like Prime. “But it might slip.”

  “He could find, fight, and kill the enemy thresholder in that time,” said Hella. “He could be two worlds away from us by the time we reach him.”

  “It’s unavoidable,” said Mette. “There are specialized parts in the drive, materials we’re still working on getting the lanterns to make, some that the lanterns can’t make. We have all kinds of issues. The Farfinder itself is ready to travel, and we’ve been working on rewriting some of the code, making systems more redundant, but …”

  Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

  Hella held up a hand. She stopped and thought for a moment. “I want to crunch on this. We’re going full throttle. The exception is those who are going on the Farfinder, I want you fresh and ready. Everyone else, this is the last crisis we’re facing. If more manpower helps, we add in more manpower.”

  Mette nodded. That meant that she’d be doing even less than she’d thought she’d be doing, because she was going to be on the crew.

  “Do you have a manifest?” asked Mette after the room had cleared and Hella was alone.

  “You, me, Eggy 6, and Dirk,” said Hella. “That’s four. We can potentially go with one more, but keeping the crew small makes it easier to manage. We’re all basically human, so I wouldn’t mind having a doctor, but I don’t know that we can recruit one from among these people, and they have their own interests.”

  “I need more werewolf training before we leave,” said Mette. “From what Perry has said, I’ll never be able to resist the full moon entirely, but I’ll be able to stop myself from killing while in wolf form, at least if I’m well-fed. And it’s possible I’ll be able to transform without one.”

  “Doable,” said Hella. She rubbed her face. “I hadn’t expected, when I left my homeworld, that this is what I would be doing.”

  “I hadn’t either,” said Mette. She looked the other woman over. Hella was older, but not by that much. She was a ‘superhero’, or had been one. “Do you miss it? Your home?”

  “I hardly remember it,” said Hella. “It seems so long ago. But yes, I miss it. I was selected for the Farfinder mission because I didn’t have many attachments, but it’s lonely out here. I’ve lost so many people along the way …” She was silent. Her face was blankly neutral. “Even if we have the Loop, it won’t be the end for me. I won’t be any closer to home, to my people. That’s the goal, for me.”

  “Mmm,” said Mette. “Me too. Mine seems closer at hand, but if we solve the problems in our way … I don’t know, both are close, I guess.”

  Hella nodded. “I don’t know if I can go back. I don’t know what living in an apartment in the city would be like after so long moving from place to place.”

  “I don’t know what living in an apartment in the city would be like at all, if I’m honest,” said Mette. “The closest I’ve come is living in communal housing in this world. The place that’s closest to home is … well, the airship, or this ship, though they’re both far too small.”

  Hella placed a hand on Mette’s shoulder. “I’m glad we have you. You’re the best thresholder I’ve ever met.” The hand withdrew.

  “I won’t be one for long,” said Mette. “In theory, at least.”

  “And if the move doesn’t work to cure you?” asked Hella. “If you’re still registered, if you still have to fight?”

  “Then I’ll fight,” said Mette. She closed her eyes and let out a breath. “I’d go off on my own, I think, to spare these worlds the trouble.”

  “Noble,” said Hella.

  “Feh,” said Mette. “Logical.”

  “And you’re still planning to fight Nima before we leave?” asked Hella. “Open us another portal, gather more data, give her an out?”

  “I am,” said Mette. “I have to say I’m not looking forward to it though.”

  ~~~~

  They chose a sporting arena for their match. Bloodsports were not the culture, though they had been a part of the predecessor cultures, and all the major venues were still standing, used for more athletic and less deadly sports. The plan hadn’t been for them to have an audience, but there was quite a bit of interest, and someone, somewhere had decided without much consultation that people would be allowed to file in and see what was going on. They could have avoided the attention by having the fight elsewhere, but Dirk was of the opinion that it would raise their profile and help earn the respect of the GCA and the symboulions.

  Mette was in armor, a simple breastplate, with a helmet that covered everything but her face. For a weapon she had a staff, which was the same thing that Nima had. There were bladed weapons on standby, though Mette was hoping they wouldn’t have to use them.

  There was one other thing that Mette carried with her: a small lantern. She was hoping not to have to use it, but if it came down to it, she would.

  This has all been negotiated ahead of time. They wanted the fight to be, in some way, “fair”.

  There wasn’t any real indication that this would work. The portals seemed relatively straight-forward when it was just two people fighting against each other, but as soon as more than one person was involved it seemed much more complicated to work out what was supposed to happen, let alone what would happen.

  Nima was armored up. The armor that flowed from her pendant was form-fitting and concealed almost all of her body. Mette was going to need to use the lantern, she could feel that just looking at her opponent.

  “You know, we don’t have to do this,” said Nima. “I’d like to be on my way, but I can go with the Farfinder.”

  She said it with the implication that all the fuss was over, that she wasn’t dangerous. She was less of a prisoner these days, mostly because it was clear she had very little power, but she still had a room on the Farfinder, and there were places she was barred from.

  “We want to resolve anything that can be resolved,” said Mette. “We also want to do science.”

  “Do you honestly think you’re going to win?” asked Nima, tilting her head to the side. “I’m not going to try to kill you, but I will crush you.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said Mette. She rolled her shoulders. “I’ve been training.” She was also a werewolf, which counted for something. Her body was more stocky than it had been, and she had more muscle.

  “What do you think I’ve been doing while I was cooped up?” asked Nima.

  “I suppose training your ass off,” said Mette. She tapped the staff on the ground. “With a staff?”

  “With a staff,” said Nima with a nod. “It’s what I’ve had access to.”

  “Well that’s not confidence inspiring,” said Mette.

  “We can start whenever you’d like to,” said Nima. “I’d prefer to be fair about it.”

  “Now is good,” said Mette.

  Nima pounced, like she’d been waiting for the moment. She ran forward, holding the staff tucked under one arm, then when she came within striking distance, flipped it forward and spun it two-handed. Mette brought her own staff up to block, but was slightly too slow, and got whapped in the head. She fell to the ground, feeling dazed, and was slow to get to her feet.

  “Ow!” she said. Nima was standing in a defensive stance, staring at her. “That hurt!”

  “We’re fighting,” said Nima. “I could have kept hitting you.”

  “Well, why didn’t you?” asked Mette.

  “I don’t know, I wanted to make sure that you were okay,” said Nima.

  Mette rubbed her head through her helmet for a bit, then laughed. “You’re really not cut out for this, are you?”

  “You haven’t wronged me,” said Nima.

  The crowd was noisy. This wasn’t really the fight they had come to see, though it was impossible to know what they’d been told about what was going to happen. They had heard the wild tales of a mech wolf and a giantess. Mette and Nima were not living up to that.

  “We’re supposed to be fighting,” said Mette. She rubbed her helmet again, which was really very ineffective. “You’re going to have to actually come at me. One of us is going to have to be pretty injured for the portal to open, if this is ever going to accomplish anything.”

  “Then I’m going to beat you,” said Nima. “And I’m going to mean it, and I’m not going to stop because you’re hurt.”

  “Yeah?” asked Mette. “You’re not skilled at hurting people.”

  “And you are?” asked Nima.

  Mette went in for the kill, swinging her staff around, and Nima brought a matching staff up to block it. Nima proved herself to be far better with a staff than Mette was, and knocked the staff to the side, then stepped forward and gave Mette a kick in the crotch with an armored boot.

  “Ow, oh fuck!” cried Mette.

  She backed away, holding her staff up defensively, and Nima didn’t give her any quarter this time. Mette got hit on the arm, where she had no armor, and it was surely going to leave a bruise, but she brought her staff up to block the second hit. She was losing already, badly, and the pain was making her not want to go through with any of it. Still, pain was temporary, and any physical injuries could be fixed by becoming a wolf.

  The battering continued, and Mette was putting up weak defenses. Kes had won against Nima, she couldn’t be that difficult to take, but Kes was also much bigger and stronger than Mette, as he’d proven to her a few times. She should have practiced with the staff more, she could see that now.

  Nima jabbed the staff in Mette’s face, and Mette simply couldn’t react in time. It hit her on the cheekbone just below her left eye, and it felt like something broke as she stumbled backward. She was blind in one eye, or nearly so, because her vision didn’t return as she tried to blink it away. The pain was intense, and she was barely able to keep her feet, but Nima kept attacking anyway, hitting Mette in her unarmored parts. A hit to the leg nearly took her down, and she looked over to the lantern she’d brought with her, which was five feet away.

  Nima spun her staff around in a sweeping motion, knocking the lantern far away, and probably ruining it in the process.

  The lantern was the last round in the chamber, the last hope. Mette had spent a full day getting it to output moonlight, which had been no small feat, and it was the only way that she’d be able to turn into a wolf given that they were fighting in full sunlight.

  Mette got to her feet and held her staff in front of her. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She was supposed to whip the lantern out at the last possible moment and transform into a wolf, then Nima would surely have some trick left in her bag, and they would fight until one of them couldn’t get up. That was how thresholder fights were supposed to go. It wasn’t supposed to be one-sided.

  “I’d give you a break, if that were the game,” said Nima. “There’s no honor in a fight between thresholders.”

  Mette’s crotch was aching. Looking back, she should have worn some kind of cup, but the people of Markat weren’t big on armor, and the Farfinder didn’t have any that were ready-made. Her head also hurt, and her ears were ringing.

  There was only one option, which was to turn into a wolf without the lantern, without moonlight. She could feel it inside of her. The hits she’d taken were awakening the anger. All she needed to do was concentrate, or not concentrate, to let it flow from her. Perry thought that was doable, in the hour of need. He posited a defense mechanism, though he didn’t have any proof of it, and Kes had never been able to call it forth.

  Nima went back on the attack; the respite had been brief. Mette blocked the attacks as best she could, getting more sloppy as they went on. She was running low on energy, and smarting from the hits.

  Nima brought her staff down, aiming for Mette’s knee. Mette blocked, but the staff was inside her leg, and Nima used her whole weight to bring it to the side. Mette was hooked, lost her balance, and fell to the ground, and Nima wasted no time in jabbing her with the end of the staff, hitting her in the unarmored area. It was impossible to defend against, and Nima dropped down on top of her, putting her full weight on Mette.

  Mette dropped her staff and grabbed at Nima’s, stopping it, but only after she’d been hit in the face twice. She was seeing stars and bleeding, and it didn’t seem like the wolf was any closer to coming out.

  Nima let go of the staff, cocked back a fist, and Mette had just enough time to see spikes grow from the end of it before she was punched in the neck.

  Blood flowed freely from Mette’s neck. She reached up to stop the bleeding and felt the spurts of blood. She was in shock, unable to think, but the thought we weren’t supposed to kill each other came to the forefront of her mind, as though it had been brewing back there.

  Nima rose off her and Mette kicked backward, sliding along the ground, trying to put distance between them.

  “No portal,” said Nima. Her voice was tight. Blood dripped from her spiked fist, whose spikes slowly retracted.

  “Guuuh,” said Mette. She was fading. Consciousness wouldn’t last, and her fingers were doing a bad job of keeping her blood in. The wolf felt weaker, not stronger, as much as she tried to call it out.

  “Sorry,” said Nima. “I am.”

  That was, somehow, Mette’s breaking point. She was sorry? That fucking bitch.

  The wolf came out slowly. The straps of the armor had been configured so the two halves of the breastplate came apart cleanly, the straps undoing themselves, but she had to hook her bloody fingers beneath the edge of the helmet to rip it off. It was a grotesque thing to transform in the sunlight, and her clothes fell from her as her body changed, cloth falling to the ground in pieces. Hair sprouted from everywhere, growing long and thick, and her teeth reshaped themselves into fangs as her face extended into a snout. Her mind was the last thing to change, and then she was on the attack.

  Her teeth clamped down on Nima’s leg and lifted her bodily in the air. The metal had a particular taste to it, a sweetness to the metal, and it held against the teeth, so the wolf shook it back and forth, trying to kill the prey that way. In the course of this, the leg slipped from her mouth, and the prey landed on its back, motionless for a moment before it got to its feet. The wolf went forward to bite down on its head, and found that it had developed sharp spikes from every surface, but the wolf bit down anyway, trying to use the power of its jaws to crush. The prey cried out and began punching with spiked fists, but the wounds were shallow.

  The wolf’s attempt at cracking the metal shell over the skull were futile. It was getting stronger as time went on, and the wolf could feel itself starting to fade in the sunlight. More shaking, an attempt to snap the neck, did nothing — the armor went rigid, with more metal around the neck.

  The wolf spat the piece of metal out and growled at it. It placed a paw on the chest, then extended its claws and tried to rip through the armor that way, but it was scraping more than gouging, and the sunlight was starting to make the wolf feel sleepy. The armor held, and the wolf changed back.

  Mette found herself on all fours, completely naked. Her wounds were healed, but she was exhausted.

  Nima staggered to her feet and grabbed one of the staffs from the ground. She approached Mette, limping.

  “Now hold on,” said Mette.

  Nima smashed her across the face, and Mette blacked out.

  When she came to, it was as though no time had passed, but Nima was gone and there was a portal standing in her place. Someone had placed a blanket over her, and Kes was standing beside her. Not long had passed.

  “Did I lose?” asked Mette. Her head was killing her. She didn’t even try to get to her feet.

  “Yeah,” said Kes. “You lost, she’s gone.”

  “More data, I guess,” said Mette. She winced. There were people milling about. The cloning machine wasn’t public information, which meant the other Mettes were staying away for the time being, the better not to give it away. “I would like a hot bath.”

  “We’re going to hope you’re not concussed,” said Kes. “Though maybe any lasting damage will be resolved at the next full moon.”

  “How’d I do?” asked Mette.

  “Well, you lost,” said Kes. “That’s the main thing you’re not supposed to do, as a thresholder.”

  “Feh,” said Mette. “I almost had her.”

  “You could have snapped her neck, yeah,” said Kes. “Her armor saved her.” He looked away from her and toward the portal.

  “You’re not going through, right?” asked Mette.

  “Nah,” said Kes. “Not for me.” He looked down at her. “You?”

  Mette laughed in his face.