Ymir, page 1
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2022 by Rich Larson
Excerpt from The Body Scout copyright © 2021 by Lincoln Michel
Cover design by Lauren Panepinto
Cover illustration by Arcangel
Cover copyright © 2022 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Author photograph by Micaela Cockburn
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Larson, Rich, 1992– author.
Title: Ymir / Rich Larson.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Orbit, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021060514 | ISBN 9780316416580 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9780316416573 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316416566 (library ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Science fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PR9199.4.L375 Y58 2022 | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20220118
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021060514
ISBNs: 9780316416580 (trade paperback), 9780316416573 (ebook)
E3-20220602-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 00
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter -7
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter ~(#&—
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter **#>`
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter -6
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter -5
Chapter 24
Chapter :#%>>
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter -4
Chapter 31
Chapter -3
Chapter 32
Chapter -2
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter -1
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter <<`#&
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter -5 (V2)
Chapter 66
Chapter -4 (V2)
Chapter -3 (V2)
Chapter -2 (V2)
Chapter 67
Chapter -1 (V2)
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter ++*~
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Acknowledgments
Discover More
Extras Meet the Author
A Preview of The Body Scout
Also by Rich Larson
Praise for Annex
For Megan & Peter
Kalena
Wesley
& Miles
Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.
Tap here to learn more.
CHAPTER 00
An enormous rust-brown bowlship, pitted and scarred from its journey, descends through Ymir’s dark howling sky. Drones stream upward from the ice field to meet it, swarming like insects, tasting its hull with electromagnetic mouths and asking after its cargo. The bowlship reports nickel alloy, raw hydrogen, an inconsequential amount of human freight.
When it sinks into the frost-coated docking cradle, the heat of its stabilizers turns ice to vapor. A thunderhead of steam slams out in all directions. The bowlship groans and shudders and finally comes to rest. It opens itself to the tunnels below, where automated laborers and exoskelled dockhands await to begin unloading.
Past the alloy stores, past the hydrogen tanks, in the darkest gut of the ship: the torpor pool. Bodies churn in a slow current around the reactor, tangling and untangling, a drifting mass of frosty flesh. They are skeletal, emaciated from the long haul, and their skins are coated a slick milky white by the stasis fluid. They are clinically dead, but not legally corpses.
At the far end of the pool, a door folds open. Two dockhands step through in a gush of steam. One is carrying a long hooked pole on her shoulder. A tiny drone is clinging to the end.
“Rerouted the whole ship for one fucking body,” she says. “Must be a company man.”
“We giving him a private thaw, then?”
“Sending him straight north. They’ll thaw him on the way.”
The drone darts ahead of them, fairylike on gossamer rotors. Its scarlet laser plays over the drifting bodies. The dockhands wait while a spiny walkway assembles itself, sprouting from the reddish-brown wall to extend across the torpor pool. They trudge forward, footsteps echoing in the cathedralic space.
The drone slides under the surface of the pool with a muted gurgle. The dockhands follow its red light, and the one with the pole slings it off her shoulder. She eases it into the stasis fluid, poking between bodies until the magnetic hook finds a particular harness.
Together, the dockhands dredge their catch up out of the pool. The walkway grows a socket to hold the base of the pole. It slides inside with a rasp and click, and the man is hoisted into the air like a puppet, dripping fluid. The dockhands peer at him.
He’s small, pallid-skinned and dark-haired. He has no lower jaw: between the blue curve of his upper lip and the rippled flesh of his throat there is nothing but medical membrane.
“Ugly fucker,” the first dockhand says. She points to a geometric spiral on his neck, the biotech tattoo the drone scanned to identify him. “Company man, though. I was right.”
“Looks a bit like you.” The other dockhand blinks. “Sending him north, you said? Maybe he a cold-blood, then. A cold-blood company man.”
“No such thing.”
But when they load the body into a drifting sarcophagus for transport, she sees shins and feet cratered with scars. Her black eyes widen, then narrow, and then she spits. It trickles down the side of the man’s frozen face.
“What’s that about, then?”
She stares down at the body. “No such thing as a cold-blood company man,” she says. “Only traitors.”
“So I was right.” He smirks. “Them cold-blood geneprints are real distinct. Sealie, yeah?”
“Half, maybe. Half-blood.” She hinges the sarcophagus shut. “Company’s mad to send him north. He’ll be leaving in a spraybag.”
They guide the body across the dark walkway, over the torpor pool, following the dancing drone.
CHAPTER 01
Yorick wakes up dead, which is never comfortable. His chest is a clamp, lungs frozen, no heartbeat. His limbs are phantom. The hindbrain panic swallows him whole. He knows nothing except that he is alone and terrified and in the dark; every sensory-starved nerve in his body is screaming it, and then—
A jolt of electricity digs its teeth in, and his heart stutters back into motion. He owns his chest muscles again, so he sucks down a breath, ballooning all the crumpled alveoli in his lungs. The first one always feels like sucking back broken glass. A rehearsed thought comes to him: Nothing is wrong. You’re coming out of torpor. Nothing is wrong. You’re coming out of torpor.
He gasps. Bucks. Waits for the firestorm in his nervous system to subside, for the world to stop lurching from side to side. He works on proprioception, finding his body in space. His arms and legs are spread-eagled, punctured in a dozen places by tubes that are pumping him full of newly brewed blood. A diagnostic droid is scuttling up and down his torso.
His prosthetic mandible is missing. Cold dry air rasps in his wound.
“Welcome back from the River Styx, Yorick.”
Yorick’s eyes are crusted over. He works his lids until he manages to free one from the gound. First he sees only a dark gray haze. Next he sees an orange blur, flickering through his field of vision too quickly to track. He knows from experience that this is the orange suit of a thaw technician.
“It’s been a long time since we spoke last,” the voice says. “Nearly two decades here. Half that for you, I believe, with all the time spent in torpor. I can see you’ve done good work in that span. Eight successful hunts. Do they ever permit you to keep trophies from them?”
Yorick knows the voice. His gut coils tight.
“I still think you did your very best work right here with me, of course,” the voice continues. “Back in those early days of Subjugation.”
The tattoo on his neck prickles. He knows the voice, but it was one he never thought he would hear again, and if he’s hearing it again it means—
“I’m afraid this thaw’s not taking place on Munin. You were rerouted in transit to solve a more pressing problem here on Ymir.”
No.
No, no, fucking no.
“That seems to have spiked your adrenals, Yorick. Thrilled to be home, I expect.”
Memories crash in. Phosphorescent flares lighting up the ice field, the skull-pulping sound of smart mines going off. An anonymous body shredded to pieces, steaming, another barely intact, wriggling through the snow and slicking blood behind. And the owner of the voice is there, too, one bony hand on his shoulder, saying civilization costs.
“I’m an administrator here now,” Gausta says, voice sintered with faint surprise, as if she’s still marveling at the fact. “Living just to the east of your old haunts, overseeing security for all of Ymir’s northern-hemisphere extraction and refinery sites. Which brings us to why you’re here.”
Yorick wants to rage, to beg, to say that he will go anywhere, absolutely anywhere. Just not Ymir, the slushball of piss on the edge of the colony maps, the birthplace he swore to never set foot on again. But he can’t speak without his mandible. He only manages an animal groan that startles the thaw technician.
“Eight days ago a xenotech incident suspended all labor in the Polar Seven Mine,” Gausta continues. “There were grendels here after all, and we finally dug far enough to wake one up.”
Yorick isn’t afraid of the grendel. He’s killed the grendel a dozen times on a dozen worlds; it’s the job the company trained him for. He’s afraid of everything else.
“It butchered a few miners and then disappeared, as a grendel is wont to do,” Gausta says. “But the attack has reinvigorated anti-company sentiment here in the north. There are rumors of a strike. Fainter rumors of insurrection. We tread on thin ice.”
Yorick finally pries his other eye open. The orange blob of the technician sharpens. Above it, he sees the hazy outline of a holo projected on a low plaster ceiling. He can’t make out Dam Gausta’s features, but he recognizes the predatory angles of her body. He remembers her in a chamsuit, her long limbs dissolving into the ashy snow behind her, her hooded head turning dark as the starless sky. Before that, in a bright yellow coat.
“The algorithm balked when I chose you for this job, Yorick,” Gausta says. “You were only the third-nearest option, and the differential in transit cost was significant.”
Yorick forces the memories down and works on focusing his eyes. Gausta’s face comes clear, the wolfish gaze and jutting bones and swirled vitiligo skin. She’s aged less than he has in twice the years, as perfect and awful as ever, the gengineered telomeres of a company higher-up at work. Her eyes are unchanged, the same silvery pits.
“But machine minds are so limited when it comes to sociohistorical context.” Gausta gives her scalpel smile. “You understand this place, Yorick. Every day the mine remains shut and the grendel roams free, not only does the company bleed profit, but the locals’ discontent festers. Stability degrades.”
But it will never be stable up here; Yorick wants to scream it at her. The first colonists to come to Ymir were exiles and radicals. The generations born after were shaped by the cold and the dark into paranoid tribalists. He left because he didn’t want to die, and now the company has returned him with a tattoo on his neck, a target on his back.
Gausta reads his ruined face, or more likely his jolting heartbeat. “It’s been twenty years here,” she says. “And you’ve undergone quite a spectacular rendering of flesh. Nobody will recognize you, Yorick. So long as you do your work quickly, and tread lightly on the ice.”
CHAPTER 02
Gausta leaves, but her avatar lingers to give Yorick logistics:
He will have one day to recover from torpor before he conducts his initial investigation of the site, accompanied by the Polar Seven’s interim overseer. His pseudonym will be Oxo Bellica, to avoid Yorick Metu’s lingering notoriety. His hunting equipment was not transferred, but will be reprinted pending ansible clearance. His clothing and mandible are nearly finished. He is three hours out from Reconciliation.
That last part jags him, but explains why the world has not stopped lurching from side to side. They loaded him straight from his bowlship onto the only passenger skid that heads north. Nobody in the north would ever call it Reconciliation, of course. It’s the Cut to them, was the Cut before the company ever arrived.
Unless things have changed in the past twenty years—Yorick considers that faint possibility as the thaw technician retracts the tubes, freeing him from his plastic web. They’re gentle with the flap of scar tissue and reconstructed flesh where his jaw should be.
“I can give you one more wake-up shot,” they say, muffled by their mask. “Nod if you want it.”
Yorick has been working mostly on clenching and unclenching his toes, wriggling his fingers, but he manages to bob his head up and down. Microneedles prick his neck, and a half second later he feels a chemical cloudburst, stimulants flooding his whole body. It rubs his nerves raw and makes him momentarily want to vomit.
The bed folds, easing him upright, and the diagnostic droid crawls off him.
“You ready to try walking?” the technician asks.
Yorick nods.
The technician nods at a chugging printer at the end of the compartment. “We’ll go to that printer. Get you your clothes and your prosthesis.”
Yorick grunts. He draws a deep breath, rubs the knotted muscles in his thighs. He holds the thaw technician’s shoulder as he takes his first shaky step, timing it to the sway of the skid. He takes a second. A third. On the fourth his knees buckle, his head rushes, and he nearly takes the technician to the floor with him.
“Today’s not going to be pleasant for you,” they mutter. “Thawing you this fast, yanking you straight off the freighter without calibrating your chemicals.”
Yorick shrugs his bony shoulders, gives the technician his own hideous version of a smile. He was not expecting a pleasant day anyway.
They stand him in front of the printer nozzle, just long enough for a patchy gray undersuit of spiderwool, then help him into his high-collared coat. The color is wrong, black instead of canary yellow, but it fits the same on every world. The boots are heated this time. He puts them on while he watches the printer work. It disgorges his rucksack next, a fabric shell that scuttles along on four stubby pneumatic limbs.
“Your prosthesis should be inside,” the technician says. “Do you want my help with it?”
Yorick shakes his head, because attaching the mandible is something he does himself, alone.
“Okay.” The technician scratches under their mask. “I’m getting off at Sants. I recommend you stay in here and rest. You’re going to be sleepsick for a while. Fatigue, nausea, some body dissociation. Probably hit the peak in four or five hours.” Their eyes flick to the tattoo on Yorick’s neck, then away. “But you can do whatever you like. Your vitals cleared threshold.”
