Ymir, page 10
His brother slides through one decade, the start of another, then disappears. Yorick blinks, retraces. Thello’s last entry into the local net was six years ago, aged twenty-seven. He spent his last dregs of credit on surface supplies, thermal gear. He was last seen by a surveillance drone, crisp footage of him striding through the skid terminal.
Yorick watches it on loop for a minute, trying to imagine his brother abandoning the Cut for the ice. Their mother took them to the surface only once. It was to visit their grandmother, who still lived in one of the crumbling surface colonies. Back then the first uptube was still a skeletal frame swarming with buildbots, so they took a conveyor to the surface, slow and creaky.
He remembers the creeping cold, worse the higher they rose. Their mother had wrapped them in so much spiderwool they could barely bend their arms, but by the time they reached the surface terminal, Thello was blue-lipped, Yorick numb-toed. From there they trekked south to the colony, a collection of bubblefabs and ice-houses, most of them in disrepair.
Only a few old men were outside, and Yorick recalls their mournful black stares, the same stare their grandmother gave when she finally saw them. She had stopped speaking by then. She rubbed her hands together over and over, like a goretoon glitching, and forgot to turn the heating pipe on. Their mother sent them outside to throw snow at each other, and when she joined them a while later she was red-faced and trembling.
Yorick searches for Petra Zabka next. He finds a wide scatter of individuals tied to the name, most of them clanners registering for work contracts in the mines. He sifts through pale faces, searching for his younger brother turned old. A pattern establishes itself: Thello has been transient for years, wandering from one mine to another, always volunteering for deep work, dangerous work.
For a moment Yorick hears a musician’s soft voice in the dark: You want to die.
But Thello is not like him, and he wasn’t wandering. Yorick traces the geometry of his brother’s brief contracts, the later ones usually twinned to those of a giant named Fen. Their ill-fated stay in the Polar Seven is double the duration of any other. Maybe they just got tired of the cold. Yorick suspects otherwise.
Fen knows what’s going on, and the deep mine is as good a place as any for private conversation. Heart thumping, Yorick finds the overseer’s company tag and taps out a simple message in company script, nothing to raise the suspicion of an avatar or algorithm: I need a spotter in the mine tomorrow. Meet me in the skid terminal at 1500.
He wasn’t anticipating a swift reply, but it arrives instantaneously: Send a work contract for standard emergency pay.
Yorick does. Then he plunges deep into the company system and uses the hounds to scrub the worker profiles and surveillance footage where Thello appears as Petra Zabka, replacing his brother’s face with a sallow conglomerate of a dozen different clanners. The trespass makes his stomach clench. Gausta would not forgive him this.
But Gausta has kept him in the dark and used him like bait ever since he arrived to Ymir. She doesn’t deserve his trust anymore, and Yorick can’t risk her interfering with the chance, the fragile chance, that when he finds Thello they’ll embrace, and all the bad years will peel away like dead skin, and they’ll be brothers again.
CHAPTER 26
Southern Urbanite Memory has seen changes in his absence. When he gets out of the car he notices passersby giving the hotel steps a wider berth than necessary. The hotel’s one security guard has fissioned into two, both of them brandishing chitinous black guns along with their stunsticks. The hotel’s switched-off sign has a ragged hole burned through it.
The little red girl is selling her filter masks on the other side of the street. When she spots him she makes a gesture with two specific fingers, Cut shorthand for fuck your dead.
He returns it, then climbs up the steps. The guards at the top scan his neck without looking him in the eye. They don’t ask to see inside the bag the clinic loaded with phedrine for him. He walks into the lobby, which is as empty as ever—at this point he suspects he might be the only guest. The host droid comes trotting up.
“Welcome back, Mister Bellica. I have some news I think you’ll be happy to hear.”
“Lifts?” he asks, using a fresh copy of the mandible Wickam’s sister smashed to bits. The medroid helped him attach it before he left, maneuvering around the few regrowth tags still sticking out of his cheek.
“I’m afraid the lifts are currently undergoing maintenance.”
“What’s the news, then?”
“It’s news I think you’ll be happy to hear. Several packages arrived for you while you were away.”
“Yeah.” He pauses. “What happened to the sign outside?”
The host droid does its jittering dance. “We are glad to have you staying with us again, Mister Bellica,” it chirps. “I would be happy to accompany you up the stairs to your room, which is a double-luxury suite on our seventh floor.”
“What happened to the sign outside?” Yorick repeats. He eyes the recessed doorway in the red coral wall, the one that leads to the bar.
“I’m afraid it was accidentally damaged by an improvised explosive,” the host droid says. “Our security detail has since been doubled in order to prevent further accidents. Southern Urbanite Memory prioritizes the safety of our guests.”
He heads past the droid and down the short twist of stairs. The bar is dark when he enters, lights dusked low. The rusty mining equipment casts jagged shadows in the corners. The table where Nocti usually sits is empty. Behind the bartop, Linka’s pneumatic arms are a strange sculpture, frozen mid-motion.
Yorick feels trepidation moving ice up and down his spine. “Linka?” he calls. “You there?”
The arms don’t so much as twitch. He walks to the bar, eyes on the black biotank installed behind it. The stool screeches against the floor when he takes a seat. The sign is still scrolling along the bartop: HUMAN OPERATOR, HUMAN OPERATOR, HUMAN OPERATOR.
“I’m always fucking here.”
Her electronic voice undoes one of the knots in his chest. “Where’s Nocti?” he asks.
“Yeah, it’s probably better if I don’t tell you that,” Linka says. “He has to stay low for a few days. Think you know why.”
Yorick suspects, but he shakes his head. “He didn’t come to the foundry. He wasn’t there when I got in the shit.”
“You used his name to get inside, and someone saw him with you at the wake.” Linka’s voice is fainter than usual. “You let us think you were just some offworlder. If he knew you were a blood traitor, he never would have taken you.”
“Yeah.” Yorick looks at the holomural, the halo, the gas mask. “It felt good to have a friend for a little while.” He doesn’t know if her sensors are watching, but he twists a knuckle against his temple. “Dumbsick.”
“Don’t.” One of Linka’s manipulators snaps shut, echoing in the empty bar. “You knew it would fuck him over if someone found out, and you did it anyway, and now he’s fucked over. You got your little paid stay in meat repair. He got his place gutted, his whole stash stolen. If he’d been there, they were going to play his leg.”
Yorick’s imagination flashes Nocti babbling, begging, as the miners tear open his body glove and dig their thumbs under his kneecap. He sees the instrument unfold, blossoming out of Nocti’s flesh, sees the pit owner raise her wrench, drag it along the strings—
The anger has to go somewhere, but Fen is a hard target, and Yorick is a company man.
“Still eating their own,” he says, biting out the words. “Fucking Ymir.”
Linka’s arms jerk.
“Fucking Ymir?” she echoes. “Those dimskulls after Nocti, if they were here right now I would drown each and every one of them in the brew barrel. But in a month they’ll be in here yocking and drinking, and Nocti will be right here laughing along with them.”
“That makes it even worse,” Yorick says, and thinks of long-gone Tuq abandoning him in the autohauler lot with a wink and a smile.
“You want to know who eats who?” There’s a choppy staticky sound, and he knows the synthesizer is trying to approximate either laughing or the other one. “Did Nocti smoke enough to tell you how I ended up in a company prison?”
“A strike.”
“The Polar Three strike, yeah.” Linka’s voice grows louder. “Eight years back. We striked, and I got arrested when the company came to break it. Other people got killed. They put me in a box, and when the box got full they put me in a smaller box, and when that got full they carved me up.”
“No pain,” Yorick grates, heart thudding hard. “It’s a temporary measure, and there’s no pain—”
“I got to watch. The teledoc sawed me off at the second vertebra, and I got to watch my body get fed to the bioprinter. Raw mass for food or for organs or whatever the fuck the company needed more than I needed to have my own fucking body.”
Yorick has a splintered memory of the teledoc saw, buzzing over him like a wasp, cutting away his mangled jaw. He tries to imagine it cutting away everything below.
“And now that I’m released, the company sponsors me. They pay for the biotank. Pay for the fluids. I exist because the company lets me exist.”
“I can help get you a transplant.” Yorick swallows. “Get you rebodied. I can do that.”
“Right. And then everything will be fucking beautiful again.” The choppy sound comes again. “Nocti’s already writing the song in his head. The ballad. But nothing’s the same after the company touches it. If I rebody I won’t even be the same person.” Linka’s synthesized words tumble over each other in a rush. “Different nerve mass. New gut flora. Some stranger’s muscle memory. I’d rather be half of me than turn into somebody else, and Nocti can’t fucking understand that, and neither can you, company man, so you can keep your transplant and you can fuck off.”
The arms behind the bar spasm, lashing in all directions. He jumps back. His stomach is sick and hot. His pulse is pounding in his ears.
“I didn’t put you in the box,” he says. “I didn’t make you strike, or make Nocti come to the wake with me. You picked your own fuckups. We all picked our own.”
She doesn’t reply. Her arms go still again, branches of a petrified tree.
CHAPTER 27
None of the nozzles work without Linka’s say, so he leaves the bar, brushing past the host droid in the lobby one more time on his way to the stairwell. The bartender and the musician are not important, not compared to Thello. His brother is alive and close by—the thought is still dizzying. Hiding somewhere in the Cut, or out on the ice. Waiting for a reunion.
Yorick makes his tally in the Ledger of Universal Suffering: up seven flights, down the crunchy mosscarpet hall, all the way to room 702. The clinic did its work well. He can move with only a slight ache in his repaired ribs, the smallest twinge in his calf. It feels like the last of the sleepsickness is gone. It feels like he’s young, healthy, cells on their way up instead of down. More likely the clinic pumped him with slow-release endorphins as a goodbye gift.
Other gifts are waiting inside the room. The first crate is chest-high, dull red, heavy enough to indent the floor. He wonders who brought it up the stairwell and hopes, vaguely, that they did it with a hover. The other two crates are smaller, black, printed with the company pictogram on each face. He goes to the red one first.
It tastes his genes, folds open, and reveals the nerve suit: a living mass of intercalated conduits and sensor cilia, bone-colored, molded to his exact proportions. He misses it when he goes too long between jobs. He dreads it, too.
Yorick strips off his clothes—the clinic printed him trousers and a hooded shirt, not flimsy spiderwool—and folds them. The closet smartglass shows the cuts on his face are already fading white scars. The bruises mapped across his whole body have receded to a few dark spots, mostly around his reknit ribs.
The cut on his calf has disappeared entirely. It won’t join the old marks, the permanent marks, from jigs he fought before he had access to regrowth tags and stemtech. Maybe that means he’ll forget Wickam entirely. That would be good. Maybe there are other people he’s already forgotten.
Yorick takes the nerve suit out of the crate. Xenotech sensitivity is a condition found in disparate populations across all colonized worlds, always in the second generation. Babies born near Ymir’s ansible, or under Tyr’s crumbling skyways, or in the cloud lattice of Hod—anywhere human detritivores feed off the Oldies’ infrastructure—develop a novel sensory pathway.
The company’s nerve suit sharpens it to a razor. He steps into it now, letting it close around him. Internal calipers pierce his skin in a dozen places, chining him with minuscule filaments. He turns the suit on and the world turns inside out.
All his other senses recede. He plunges into a seething darkness that somehow plugs his ears and olfactories, too. He feels a wasp in his skull, a sickly sweet static lurking somewhere behind his eyeballs. Every hair on his body strains upright, or maybe strains toward the source, the black hole tugging him into its gravity well.
Even from inside this hotel room in the middle of the Cut, so far from the ice, the ansible is overpowering. He’ll have to adjust the suit’s filters when he gets to the mine, or the grendel’s whispers will be lost in bad noise. For now, he lingers just long enough to load the hounds, transferring them from their firewall pen, then switches the suit off and puts his clothes back on overtop.
He goes to the weapon crates next, unpacking all the vicious tools the company has created or modified for grendel hunting: a carbine loaded with radioactive rounds, a sleek white howler they always give him even though sonic weapons only ever work once, a rack of tiny flicker bombs. Below those, for intimate range, they’ve printed him a needlegun.
He slips the spiny shape from the cradle, turns it over in his hands. The familiar weight makes him shiver. The grip licks his thumb and recognizes him. It’s not a standard arm for grendel hunting, but it used to be his preferred weapon. Gausta must have specified its inclusion.
Same goes for the graft-knife, a fleshy prehensile whip tipped by a butcher blade. It’s the sort of tool fat-hunters use for flensing, once they get to the delicate parts, or often for brawling. Fine for flesh, but it would never make it through grendel hide, and if he gets close enough to try it he’s already dead. Gausta always did have a tenebrous sense of humor.
Yorick thinks of his impending conversation with Fen, the two of them alone in the dark of the mine, and attaches it anyway.
CHAPTER 28
The Polar Seven’s temporary overseer is waiting outside the skid terminal when he arrives, her plus two unexpected companions. The company combat drones hover over her sinewy shoulders, planar, vaguely corvid. They bristle with autocannon. Judging by the restrained fury in Fen’s stance, they’ve been shadowing her all day.
When one of them grows Gausta’s face, Yorick feels no modicum of surprise. “Hello, Oxo,” she says. “It seems you’ve made an excellent recovery.”
“Seems so,” Yorick says. “Yeah.”
“We’re fortunate that Fen here was on hand to intervene,” Gausta says. “Though I’m afraid she’s received a flurry of death threats since. Providing her some additional protection was the least I could do.” She gives a beatific smile. “And perhaps they’ll be useful in flushing out the grendel.”
Yorick eyes the drones, digests the lie. “I don’t want them in the tunnels,” he says. “The grendel starts mimicking their feeds, I’ll be chasing shadows all over.”
He waits for Gausta, or more likely her avatar, to verify the fact that Yorick has always hunted without drone support, that feed interference is a known hazard. He made the information a little easier to find last night.
“That’s a pity,” she finally says. “I’d hoped to watch you work. See the bloom of those seeds I helped plant so long ago. You always had such a talent for finding and brutalizing.”
“I’d like to find and brutalize this grendel and then get the fuck off Ymir,” Yorick says, keeping his face blank. “You ready, Fen?”
The giant nods, stiff; Gausta recedes with a permissive smile. The drones don’t follow them inside the skid terminal. They drift higher instead, circling the uptube like buzzards.
Fen has already prepped the skid. Yorick straps down his weapons and gets to his chair just before the uptube pipes them up through the sky and the sudden acceleration makes his gut into a trapdoor. There’s a pressure change as the skid pierces the blister roof; one of his ears pops. Then the skid is moving horizontally again, plowing across the ice field toward the Polar Seven. Fen peers into the dark, hands welded to the throttle.
Yorick’s questions are already clawing up his throat. He swallows them back down, like swallowing bile, because Gausta abandoned the drones too easily. Her avatar is probably lurking in the skid’s circuitry, listening for suspicious language, or maybe she put a cutworm-sized surveillance droid somewhere on Fen’s body.
He’s surprised when the red speaks first.
“How many grendels have you killed, company man?” She asks it with her gaze still fixed to the smartglass window, to the endless snowscape turned sickly green by the skid’s running lights.
“Eleven,” Yorick says, recalling all of them.
“Eleven of eleven.”
Yorick shakes his head. “Three I never found. Sometimes they just disappear.”
Fen’s brow furrows, but she says nothing else. They pass the first pylon, and its yellow glow filters through the skid’s fuselage. The Polar Seven entrance appears up ahead. He knows why miners call it the Maw, but this time he really sees it. The broken ice ringed around the downtube becomes jagged teeth. The hole itself becomes a gullet.
Yorick hears Linka’s voice in his ear: You want to know who eats who? He thinks of his mother and brother, bent and battered by their years in the mines.
