Ymir, page 11
The skid descends.
CHAPTER 29
Yorick skips the glue bath this time—he doesn’t want the membrane touching his nerve suit—but he spreads a coolant paste on his face and hands while Fen finds herself a pair of goggles and the stored pheromone that turns off the biolamps. They retrace the steps they took three days ago, down Track Five, and diffuse the chemical as they go.
The nerve suit does its best work in darkness. As the luminous orange scales fade to black, the tunnel becomes chthonic. He feels like a shade, drifting through the mine with his feet barely touching the ground. Fen could be a grotesque. He keeps remembering another colonist ballad he wanted Nocti to play for him, the one about the dead man who tries to escape the underworld.
He knows he’s not here for the grendel. The deeper they go in the mine, the tighter the knots in Yorick’s organs. His sleepsick paranoia is crawling back. Maybe the moment he keeps turning over in his mind, Fen saying Thello’s call, company man, was only a pain hallucination, bruised neurons. Maybe she only said it to lure him here.
Fen’s face, gleaming under membrane, gives nothing away as they approach the kill site. Yorick can still remember the placement of the holos, the four dead miners. He remembers how Gausta’s micvoice wavered and chopped. If she has a droid on Fen, they must be testing its transmission range by now. Yorick’s heart begins to hammer.
The hammering intensifies when Fen wordlessly leaves the track, veering down an ancillary tunnel. Yorick checks the metal plate welded to the rock. The number is 517, and underneath it a yellow hazard holo warns about gas leaks. He feels for the coil of the graft-knife against his forearm, then follows the giant inside.
The tunnel is cramped: half a meter of clearance on either side, less overhead. With Fen in front of him, he has no hope of seeing where it leads. They move along a gradual curve, heading north, away from the bulk of the mine’s excavations. It feels vaguely familiar. Dreamlike.
He switches on the nerve suit, because the grendel won’t respect their desire for private conversation if it comes across them in the dark. The ansible flares in his head like a star going nova. He tamps it down, pares it away. He listens for the grendel, splitting his attention in two: half for an ancient warmachine springing from the blackness, half for Fen whirling with a weapon drawn.
Fen stops walking. Yorick tenses, dials down the nerve suit. He readies himself as the red wriggles sideways into a crevice, aided by the slippery membrane. But Fen doesn’t emerge with a pirate-printed blockgun or illegal hunting rifle. Instead, her hand dwarfs a jammer, not so different from the one Yorick recalls tossing into traffic a few days ago.
It whines to life, buzzing between them in the dark. None of the tension seeps out of Fen’s hunched shoulders. “If it was to me,” she says, “I’d have killed you down here the first day. Whether Dam Gausta was watching or not.”
Yorick goes cold. He considers hitting first, letting the graft-knife fly. He can carve through the membrane into Fen’s bulging jugular before she strangles him.
“Thello keeps telling me monsters can be useful,” Fen says, with a storm building in her voice. “We’ll see. We’ll see about it. And the instant you’re not useful, company man, you’re dead.”
Yorick’s mouth is dry. His mandible clicks when he speaks. “So where is he? The Cut? The ice?”
“He’s here,” Fen says. “He never left.”
Yorick recalls what Fen told him about membranes dissolving after eight hours, about dehydration and heat exhaustion. There’s no way Thello has survived down here nearly two weeks. There’s no way Fen could have brought supplies to the shut-down mine without attracting Gausta’s notice. The impossibility jags.
His nerve suit starts to whisper.
Yorick unslings his carbine. The ansible is still looming, a singularity leagues away, but the nerve suit has fished out something else, distinct and moving. He amps the sensitivity and feels the grendel’s approach, feels its body displacing air.
“The grendel’s in the tunnel,” Yorick says. “Sixty meters behind you, closing quick.”
Fen eyes the nerve suit. She doesn’t run, just drops to a squat, leaning her head back against the tunnel wall. Waiting. “Put that down,” she says. “You’re locked anyway.”
Yorick checks the carbine, then the needlegun, then the howler. The gene-coded triggers on all his weapons have been rusted over with malicious code. The hounds should have been awake by now, sniffing out the grendel’s familiar electric signature, but he can’t reach them. He looks at the makeshift mechanism clutched in Fen’s hand.
Not a jammer, or at least not only a jammer. Gausta’s words dart through his mind: not so brutish as she looks.
The nerve suit’s whisper becomes a soft scream. If he is going to die to a grendel, of course it will be here, in Ymir’s belly. Not scaling a beautiful limestone cliff on Baldr, or adrift in the shifting metallic cloudscape of Hod. It will be here, in the sweating black. Just like any indentured miner.
“Put it down,” Fen repeats, placid now beneath her goggles. Resigned to be torn apart, or maybe it’s something else.
Yorick peers through the sights of his locked carbine, but readies himself to use the graft-knife. He’ll have to lop Fen off at the wrist, smash the not-jammer against rock so his carbine can recognize his sweat-slick hands, so the hounds can hurtle across the gap at their prey.
Then Thello comes strolling out of the dark.
Patchwork surface gear, dark goggles, but Yorick will always recognize his way of moving. He is skinnier than he was in the holo; his unzipped thermal vest shows a concave chest and jutting ribs. His face is bloated, overgrown with bristly beard. His eyes are made into black holes by the goggles.
And strolling behind him, mimicking his motions, a hulking shadow composed of rust-red flesh and gleaming black xenocarbon.
Yorick hears an echo of Fen’s voice in his head: Monsters can be useful. Thello comes to a halt, staring. The grendel does the same, slipping from its bipedal contortionist act into a shifting mass of insectile limbs and razor-tipped tendrils.
Yorick’s subconscious has spun this scene for him a hundred different ways in a hundred different dreams, but never like this. Thello peels off his goggles with a sweat-suction pop. His eyes are weary, bloodshot, cratered by deep wrinkles. But they’re Thello’s eyes, and they root Yorick to the spot.
A red filament slithers from the grendel’s body into his brother’s waiting hand. Yorick watches, uncomprehending, as Thello feeds it into the swollen corner of one glassy eye. A ripple goes across his sweat-studded face. His eyelid flutters.
“Yeah,” he says, in a voice that has somehow barely changed at all. “This is him. The one they sent to catch you.”
The filament retracts, and Thello’s eyes refocus.
“I didn’t know how it would feel,” he says. “Seeing you like this. After so long.” He gives a tight shrug, and says nothing else.
CHAPTER 30
They give him an antisensory hood, the kind technomonks use for meditation and other people use for sex games. Yorick doesn’t like either of those things. Fen makes no move to force it over his head, though, and the grendel stays crouched behind Thello, sprouting and resorbing sensory stalks but otherwise calm in a way Yorick has never seen before.
“I can’t stay out here long,” Thello says, twitching how he twitched a lifetime ago, impatient for the toy printer to turn their dirty plastic scrap into fresh figurines. “We have to go somewhere else to talk.”
Yorick still has his nerve suit, and he still has the graft-knife coiled warm against his forearm, so he pulls the antisensory hood on. His eyes fill with purple-gray static. He can’t hear anything, not even his own breathing. He thinks of Linka the bartender drifting in her biotank. Somebody clasps his hand and leads him off into nowhere.
It all feels unreal: this reunion in the Maw, his younger brother turned old, the pale-eyed clanner and the docile grendel. Most of his mind is floating, shock-tossed. A small corner of it is plunged into ancient memory: a child’s voice babbling in the dark, nonsense syllables drifting up to the concrete ceiling, on and on until he has to put his arm against Thello’s mouth, so their mother won’t do worse.
Talking to the grendel, Thello muttered the next morning.
You don’t talk to grendels, Yorick said. You hunt them. That’s the game.
There have been several attempts to communicate with grendels and no recorded successes. The machines self-immolate if captured, and in the field their only reaction to drones, droids, or humans is extreme hostility. But somehow Thello has found an exploit, a buried vulnerability in the grendel’s machine mind that no hound has ever scented.
Thello always was good at finding hidden things.
CHAPTER -4
Yorick wanders through a polyp-walled barracks, holding a basic black tablet aloft, trying to find the best pocket of connectivity. The company’s new net is still crawling its way across the world, and the Cut is far away. Finally Thello flickers onto the screen.
“Hey, company man,” he says. Lately Yorick can’t tell what his brother means by calling him that. Thello’s face isn’t as transparent as it used to be. “When are you coming back?”
Training and mods happen in the south, in the capital, where the company has already wrapped itself into every function of colony government. Shipfall is different in many ways. For Yorick’s whole life he’s met echoes of the same person over and over, either a dark-haired sealie with spindly limbs or a red with thick muscle and fiery orange hair.
In Shipfall there are hundreds of different geneprints, brought to Ymir on company business, and nobody knows the word half-blood. He has been in the capital eight months, eight months of microsurgeries and running sims with the other recruits. The tattoo will be coming soon.
“Soon,” he says. “How is she?”
Thello glances over his shoulder. “Old,” he says. “Old all at once.” He hesitates. “She took her clothes off yesterday. She stood around looking at something that wasn’t there. Kept saying she was going up to the ice fields.”
Part of Yorick thinks: good. Their mother deserves her confusion, her weakness, after all the bruises and handprints she put on them, all the poisonous words she poured in their ears. Part of Yorick wants to weep. All of Yorick knows that once their mother is gone, there will be nothing tying him and Thello to Ymir anymore.
“It’ll be different when you come back,” Thello says. “Things are changing. Things are bad.”
“With her?”
“No.” Thello’s eyes wander left. “With everything. They’re trying to break the strike. More bowlships keep coming in, offworld workers from the mines on Baldr. The contracts keep mutating. People are fucking angry. Something’s going to happen.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Yorick says, even as his chest constricts. “We won’t be here when it happens. We’ll be gone.”
Thello looks right at him now, but almost like he’s a stranger.
“You remember that night in the fountain?” Yorick says, trying to find a crack in his blank face.
“Yeah,” Thello says. “The fountain. Someone dumped a skimmer carcass in it last week. Turned the water all pink and bloody.” A pained smile twists his mouth. “People are saying it should be a company man next time. Mostly they’re joking.”
The silence again, seething. Yorick is relieved when the connection cuts out. He hesitates, hesitates, then finally speaks another call onto the screen. The company man in her bright yellow coat appears, or maybe just her avatar does. Yorick can never tell.
“What’s happening in the Cut?” he asks her.
“A vestigial but inevitable reflex,” Gausta says. “Rebellion. It’s always part of the process.”
Yorick’s stomach churns. “What will you do?”
“We’re evaluating our options,” she says. “We want to avoid an extended conflict. We have no wish to waste company resources and northerners’ lives.” She gives him a penetrating look. “It’s the same old calculus. Kill a few, save noncount.”
Yorick knows she was listening to the call with Thello, but it hardly matters. All he can think about is a crowd of drunken miners catching sight of Thello’s half-blood face in the shadows of some bar, thinking he’s an offworlder, dragging him outside. They put their jig shoes on and stomp and slice until he’s a heap of mangled meat.
“You understand what it’s like here,” Gausta says. “You understand there’s no other way.” Her fingers run along the shape of her tattoo. “But you can help make it quick. Almost painless. Compared to grendels, it’ll be easy.”
Yorick knows it won’t be.
CHAPTER 31
They walk the underworld for what feels like an eternity. Every so often an anonymous hand pushes softly on Yorick’s head; he ducks to fit under a dipped ceiling or support beam. Even rendered deaf and blind, he can tell they’re moving north, in a tunnel too cramped and jagged to have been hewn by automated diggers. The air is stifling.
Before the antisensory hood went on, Yorick caught a whiff of Thello’s sweat. He holds the familiar scent in his mind, and it acts like an accelerant, making the memories come faster, cleaner. He is being carried along invisible rails. Internal, external.
There’s no point in struggling.
CHAPTER -3
The training sims are cut short, and Dam Gausta sends him back north with a handful of other recruits. But not to the Cut: to the ice instead, to the company camps ringed around the ansible like black fungi. The soldiers there are offworlders, unaccustomed to the cold and dark, but they do their work calmly and with a strange tenderness.
It extends to Yorick and the other recruits, too, once they take their first pheromone bath. The company soldiers don’t seem to resent being taught to navigate the snowscape by foreigners half their age. There is no suspicion, no reflexive hostility. No anger.
Not even when the northerners strike first, as Gausta predicted they would. A group of disenfranchised miners and territorial clanners blow a hole in an orbiting bowlship using a munition assembled from company components. The satellite view circulates through camp: a hundred corpses leaking out into space in a frozen nebula of stasis fluid.
Yorick and the other recruits can meet each other’s eyes more easily after that, knowing they are saving Ymir from its own barbarism. They start taking the same wardrugs that bond the company soldiers together and sometimes make them laugh uncontrollably, an atavistic pack behavior. They start the slow and bloody process of Subjugation.
In the Cut, the insurrection is dissected by algorithm, all the bonds of social molecule between sympathizer and radical laid bare in a matter of days. Minor offenders are sent to the mines with indenturement implants. Major offenders, or those projected to be, are imprisoned. But the actual malefactors, the ones who blew the bowlship, are already out on the ice.
Those are Yorick’s work. Hunting for rebels with springy red hair, like the woman who used to watch him and Thello when their mother was long away, or rebels with dark sealie eyes, like the sad old men in his grandmother’s village. The clanners’ brutality makes it easier. When they catch one of the other northerner recruits on a patrol, they open her veins with a hundred cuts and bleed her out into the snow.
The only lull in the violence is brought by blizzards. Storm season blinds the company’s sensors and grounds their flyers. It forces the insurrectionists deep into their makeshift burrows. The Cut is no longer an option, but the extremist clanners never needed it. They use repurposed hibernation equipment, crude torpor pools, to hide from Ymir’s anger. They have for generations.
Yorick tells Thello lies. He says he is in Shipfall still, hunting simulated grendels. He says the violence will end soon, as if he knows. When Dam Gausta visits the camp for a personnel inspection, yellow coat swapped for a chamsuit, she pulls him aside and offers to generate him an avatar to make the lying easier.
A week later, she appears in his goggles. “Hello, Yorick,” she says. “I hope you’re well.”
“There is no one for whom it is well,” Yorick says, because that is their shared joke, sliced from some ancient ballad. He doesn’t think the other recruits know this joke or take these calls in the night, but maybe they do. Maybe they all have small bargains of their own.
“Thello’s still safe,” Gausta says. “I have a drone watching when he leaves the apartment, but it’s rare these days.”
Yorick knows why, thinks of their mother’s slow descent, feels a gut-churning guilt. He reaches on instinct for the injector beside his bed.
“You’ve been doing hard things up there, Yorick,” Gausta says. “Hard, necessary things. I’ve been watching.” She looks at him, and for a moment her silver eyes are soft and sad. “The algorithm has found a way to end the surface conflict. You are the only one who can do this job, Yorick. I wouldn’t ask you to do it otherwise.”
CHAPTER 32
Yorick’s nerve suit is whispering again. Not from the grendel he feels loping along behind him, and not from the ansible, still a distant event horizon. The whisper grows as the passage shrinks. Eventually disembodied hands stop him, pluck at his knees, and he realizes he’s meant to crawl. He feels a stream of cool air up ahead, paradoxical. It turns his spouting sweat into gelid slime.
He crawls, eyes and ears straining pointlessly inside the hood. The tunnel has inclined a half-dozen times, small shifts upward, but nowhere near enough to spit them out at the surface. This pocket of cold, this building murmur of xenotech, is something else.
A hand grips his ankle; he stops moving. Another hand peels the antisensory hood away. His eyes see only spots, but a rush of sound thunders through his skull. His own labored breathing, his thudding heart, the scrape and scritch of his eyelids. The others are even louder: Thello’s clothes rustle and shout against themselves; Fen’s lungs are bellows.
CHAPTER 29
Yorick skips the glue bath this time—he doesn’t want the membrane touching his nerve suit—but he spreads a coolant paste on his face and hands while Fen finds herself a pair of goggles and the stored pheromone that turns off the biolamps. They retrace the steps they took three days ago, down Track Five, and diffuse the chemical as they go.
The nerve suit does its best work in darkness. As the luminous orange scales fade to black, the tunnel becomes chthonic. He feels like a shade, drifting through the mine with his feet barely touching the ground. Fen could be a grotesque. He keeps remembering another colonist ballad he wanted Nocti to play for him, the one about the dead man who tries to escape the underworld.
He knows he’s not here for the grendel. The deeper they go in the mine, the tighter the knots in Yorick’s organs. His sleepsick paranoia is crawling back. Maybe the moment he keeps turning over in his mind, Fen saying Thello’s call, company man, was only a pain hallucination, bruised neurons. Maybe she only said it to lure him here.
Fen’s face, gleaming under membrane, gives nothing away as they approach the kill site. Yorick can still remember the placement of the holos, the four dead miners. He remembers how Gausta’s micvoice wavered and chopped. If she has a droid on Fen, they must be testing its transmission range by now. Yorick’s heart begins to hammer.
The hammering intensifies when Fen wordlessly leaves the track, veering down an ancillary tunnel. Yorick checks the metal plate welded to the rock. The number is 517, and underneath it a yellow hazard holo warns about gas leaks. He feels for the coil of the graft-knife against his forearm, then follows the giant inside.
The tunnel is cramped: half a meter of clearance on either side, less overhead. With Fen in front of him, he has no hope of seeing where it leads. They move along a gradual curve, heading north, away from the bulk of the mine’s excavations. It feels vaguely familiar. Dreamlike.
He switches on the nerve suit, because the grendel won’t respect their desire for private conversation if it comes across them in the dark. The ansible flares in his head like a star going nova. He tamps it down, pares it away. He listens for the grendel, splitting his attention in two: half for an ancient warmachine springing from the blackness, half for Fen whirling with a weapon drawn.
Fen stops walking. Yorick tenses, dials down the nerve suit. He readies himself as the red wriggles sideways into a crevice, aided by the slippery membrane. But Fen doesn’t emerge with a pirate-printed blockgun or illegal hunting rifle. Instead, her hand dwarfs a jammer, not so different from the one Yorick recalls tossing into traffic a few days ago.
It whines to life, buzzing between them in the dark. None of the tension seeps out of Fen’s hunched shoulders. “If it was to me,” she says, “I’d have killed you down here the first day. Whether Dam Gausta was watching or not.”
Yorick goes cold. He considers hitting first, letting the graft-knife fly. He can carve through the membrane into Fen’s bulging jugular before she strangles him.
“Thello keeps telling me monsters can be useful,” Fen says, with a storm building in her voice. “We’ll see. We’ll see about it. And the instant you’re not useful, company man, you’re dead.”
Yorick’s mouth is dry. His mandible clicks when he speaks. “So where is he? The Cut? The ice?”
“He’s here,” Fen says. “He never left.”
Yorick recalls what Fen told him about membranes dissolving after eight hours, about dehydration and heat exhaustion. There’s no way Thello has survived down here nearly two weeks. There’s no way Fen could have brought supplies to the shut-down mine without attracting Gausta’s notice. The impossibility jags.
His nerve suit starts to whisper.
Yorick unslings his carbine. The ansible is still looming, a singularity leagues away, but the nerve suit has fished out something else, distinct and moving. He amps the sensitivity and feels the grendel’s approach, feels its body displacing air.
“The grendel’s in the tunnel,” Yorick says. “Sixty meters behind you, closing quick.”
Fen eyes the nerve suit. She doesn’t run, just drops to a squat, leaning her head back against the tunnel wall. Waiting. “Put that down,” she says. “You’re locked anyway.”
Yorick checks the carbine, then the needlegun, then the howler. The gene-coded triggers on all his weapons have been rusted over with malicious code. The hounds should have been awake by now, sniffing out the grendel’s familiar electric signature, but he can’t reach them. He looks at the makeshift mechanism clutched in Fen’s hand.
Not a jammer, or at least not only a jammer. Gausta’s words dart through his mind: not so brutish as she looks.
The nerve suit’s whisper becomes a soft scream. If he is going to die to a grendel, of course it will be here, in Ymir’s belly. Not scaling a beautiful limestone cliff on Baldr, or adrift in the shifting metallic cloudscape of Hod. It will be here, in the sweating black. Just like any indentured miner.
“Put it down,” Fen repeats, placid now beneath her goggles. Resigned to be torn apart, or maybe it’s something else.
Yorick peers through the sights of his locked carbine, but readies himself to use the graft-knife. He’ll have to lop Fen off at the wrist, smash the not-jammer against rock so his carbine can recognize his sweat-slick hands, so the hounds can hurtle across the gap at their prey.
Then Thello comes strolling out of the dark.
Patchwork surface gear, dark goggles, but Yorick will always recognize his way of moving. He is skinnier than he was in the holo; his unzipped thermal vest shows a concave chest and jutting ribs. His face is bloated, overgrown with bristly beard. His eyes are made into black holes by the goggles.
And strolling behind him, mimicking his motions, a hulking shadow composed of rust-red flesh and gleaming black xenocarbon.
Yorick hears an echo of Fen’s voice in his head: Monsters can be useful. Thello comes to a halt, staring. The grendel does the same, slipping from its bipedal contortionist act into a shifting mass of insectile limbs and razor-tipped tendrils.
Yorick’s subconscious has spun this scene for him a hundred different ways in a hundred different dreams, but never like this. Thello peels off his goggles with a sweat-suction pop. His eyes are weary, bloodshot, cratered by deep wrinkles. But they’re Thello’s eyes, and they root Yorick to the spot.
A red filament slithers from the grendel’s body into his brother’s waiting hand. Yorick watches, uncomprehending, as Thello feeds it into the swollen corner of one glassy eye. A ripple goes across his sweat-studded face. His eyelid flutters.
“Yeah,” he says, in a voice that has somehow barely changed at all. “This is him. The one they sent to catch you.”
The filament retracts, and Thello’s eyes refocus.
“I didn’t know how it would feel,” he says. “Seeing you like this. After so long.” He gives a tight shrug, and says nothing else.
CHAPTER 30
They give him an antisensory hood, the kind technomonks use for meditation and other people use for sex games. Yorick doesn’t like either of those things. Fen makes no move to force it over his head, though, and the grendel stays crouched behind Thello, sprouting and resorbing sensory stalks but otherwise calm in a way Yorick has never seen before.
“I can’t stay out here long,” Thello says, twitching how he twitched a lifetime ago, impatient for the toy printer to turn their dirty plastic scrap into fresh figurines. “We have to go somewhere else to talk.”
Yorick still has his nerve suit, and he still has the graft-knife coiled warm against his forearm, so he pulls the antisensory hood on. His eyes fill with purple-gray static. He can’t hear anything, not even his own breathing. He thinks of Linka the bartender drifting in her biotank. Somebody clasps his hand and leads him off into nowhere.
It all feels unreal: this reunion in the Maw, his younger brother turned old, the pale-eyed clanner and the docile grendel. Most of his mind is floating, shock-tossed. A small corner of it is plunged into ancient memory: a child’s voice babbling in the dark, nonsense syllables drifting up to the concrete ceiling, on and on until he has to put his arm against Thello’s mouth, so their mother won’t do worse.
Talking to the grendel, Thello muttered the next morning.
You don’t talk to grendels, Yorick said. You hunt them. That’s the game.
There have been several attempts to communicate with grendels and no recorded successes. The machines self-immolate if captured, and in the field their only reaction to drones, droids, or humans is extreme hostility. But somehow Thello has found an exploit, a buried vulnerability in the grendel’s machine mind that no hound has ever scented.
Thello always was good at finding hidden things.
CHAPTER -4
Yorick wanders through a polyp-walled barracks, holding a basic black tablet aloft, trying to find the best pocket of connectivity. The company’s new net is still crawling its way across the world, and the Cut is far away. Finally Thello flickers onto the screen.
“Hey, company man,” he says. Lately Yorick can’t tell what his brother means by calling him that. Thello’s face isn’t as transparent as it used to be. “When are you coming back?”
Training and mods happen in the south, in the capital, where the company has already wrapped itself into every function of colony government. Shipfall is different in many ways. For Yorick’s whole life he’s met echoes of the same person over and over, either a dark-haired sealie with spindly limbs or a red with thick muscle and fiery orange hair.
In Shipfall there are hundreds of different geneprints, brought to Ymir on company business, and nobody knows the word half-blood. He has been in the capital eight months, eight months of microsurgeries and running sims with the other recruits. The tattoo will be coming soon.
“Soon,” he says. “How is she?”
Thello glances over his shoulder. “Old,” he says. “Old all at once.” He hesitates. “She took her clothes off yesterday. She stood around looking at something that wasn’t there. Kept saying she was going up to the ice fields.”
Part of Yorick thinks: good. Their mother deserves her confusion, her weakness, after all the bruises and handprints she put on them, all the poisonous words she poured in their ears. Part of Yorick wants to weep. All of Yorick knows that once their mother is gone, there will be nothing tying him and Thello to Ymir anymore.
“It’ll be different when you come back,” Thello says. “Things are changing. Things are bad.”
“With her?”
“No.” Thello’s eyes wander left. “With everything. They’re trying to break the strike. More bowlships keep coming in, offworld workers from the mines on Baldr. The contracts keep mutating. People are fucking angry. Something’s going to happen.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Yorick says, even as his chest constricts. “We won’t be here when it happens. We’ll be gone.”
Thello looks right at him now, but almost like he’s a stranger.
“You remember that night in the fountain?” Yorick says, trying to find a crack in his blank face.
“Yeah,” Thello says. “The fountain. Someone dumped a skimmer carcass in it last week. Turned the water all pink and bloody.” A pained smile twists his mouth. “People are saying it should be a company man next time. Mostly they’re joking.”
The silence again, seething. Yorick is relieved when the connection cuts out. He hesitates, hesitates, then finally speaks another call onto the screen. The company man in her bright yellow coat appears, or maybe just her avatar does. Yorick can never tell.
“What’s happening in the Cut?” he asks her.
“A vestigial but inevitable reflex,” Gausta says. “Rebellion. It’s always part of the process.”
Yorick’s stomach churns. “What will you do?”
“We’re evaluating our options,” she says. “We want to avoid an extended conflict. We have no wish to waste company resources and northerners’ lives.” She gives him a penetrating look. “It’s the same old calculus. Kill a few, save noncount.”
Yorick knows she was listening to the call with Thello, but it hardly matters. All he can think about is a crowd of drunken miners catching sight of Thello’s half-blood face in the shadows of some bar, thinking he’s an offworlder, dragging him outside. They put their jig shoes on and stomp and slice until he’s a heap of mangled meat.
“You understand what it’s like here,” Gausta says. “You understand there’s no other way.” Her fingers run along the shape of her tattoo. “But you can help make it quick. Almost painless. Compared to grendels, it’ll be easy.”
Yorick knows it won’t be.
CHAPTER 31
They walk the underworld for what feels like an eternity. Every so often an anonymous hand pushes softly on Yorick’s head; he ducks to fit under a dipped ceiling or support beam. Even rendered deaf and blind, he can tell they’re moving north, in a tunnel too cramped and jagged to have been hewn by automated diggers. The air is stifling.
Before the antisensory hood went on, Yorick caught a whiff of Thello’s sweat. He holds the familiar scent in his mind, and it acts like an accelerant, making the memories come faster, cleaner. He is being carried along invisible rails. Internal, external.
There’s no point in struggling.
CHAPTER -3
The training sims are cut short, and Dam Gausta sends him back north with a handful of other recruits. But not to the Cut: to the ice instead, to the company camps ringed around the ansible like black fungi. The soldiers there are offworlders, unaccustomed to the cold and dark, but they do their work calmly and with a strange tenderness.
It extends to Yorick and the other recruits, too, once they take their first pheromone bath. The company soldiers don’t seem to resent being taught to navigate the snowscape by foreigners half their age. There is no suspicion, no reflexive hostility. No anger.
Not even when the northerners strike first, as Gausta predicted they would. A group of disenfranchised miners and territorial clanners blow a hole in an orbiting bowlship using a munition assembled from company components. The satellite view circulates through camp: a hundred corpses leaking out into space in a frozen nebula of stasis fluid.
Yorick and the other recruits can meet each other’s eyes more easily after that, knowing they are saving Ymir from its own barbarism. They start taking the same wardrugs that bond the company soldiers together and sometimes make them laugh uncontrollably, an atavistic pack behavior. They start the slow and bloody process of Subjugation.
In the Cut, the insurrection is dissected by algorithm, all the bonds of social molecule between sympathizer and radical laid bare in a matter of days. Minor offenders are sent to the mines with indenturement implants. Major offenders, or those projected to be, are imprisoned. But the actual malefactors, the ones who blew the bowlship, are already out on the ice.
Those are Yorick’s work. Hunting for rebels with springy red hair, like the woman who used to watch him and Thello when their mother was long away, or rebels with dark sealie eyes, like the sad old men in his grandmother’s village. The clanners’ brutality makes it easier. When they catch one of the other northerner recruits on a patrol, they open her veins with a hundred cuts and bleed her out into the snow.
The only lull in the violence is brought by blizzards. Storm season blinds the company’s sensors and grounds their flyers. It forces the insurrectionists deep into their makeshift burrows. The Cut is no longer an option, but the extremist clanners never needed it. They use repurposed hibernation equipment, crude torpor pools, to hide from Ymir’s anger. They have for generations.
Yorick tells Thello lies. He says he is in Shipfall still, hunting simulated grendels. He says the violence will end soon, as if he knows. When Dam Gausta visits the camp for a personnel inspection, yellow coat swapped for a chamsuit, she pulls him aside and offers to generate him an avatar to make the lying easier.
A week later, she appears in his goggles. “Hello, Yorick,” she says. “I hope you’re well.”
“There is no one for whom it is well,” Yorick says, because that is their shared joke, sliced from some ancient ballad. He doesn’t think the other recruits know this joke or take these calls in the night, but maybe they do. Maybe they all have small bargains of their own.
“Thello’s still safe,” Gausta says. “I have a drone watching when he leaves the apartment, but it’s rare these days.”
Yorick knows why, thinks of their mother’s slow descent, feels a gut-churning guilt. He reaches on instinct for the injector beside his bed.
“You’ve been doing hard things up there, Yorick,” Gausta says. “Hard, necessary things. I’ve been watching.” She looks at him, and for a moment her silver eyes are soft and sad. “The algorithm has found a way to end the surface conflict. You are the only one who can do this job, Yorick. I wouldn’t ask you to do it otherwise.”
CHAPTER 32
Yorick’s nerve suit is whispering again. Not from the grendel he feels loping along behind him, and not from the ansible, still a distant event horizon. The whisper grows as the passage shrinks. Eventually disembodied hands stop him, pluck at his knees, and he realizes he’s meant to crawl. He feels a stream of cool air up ahead, paradoxical. It turns his spouting sweat into gelid slime.
He crawls, eyes and ears straining pointlessly inside the hood. The tunnel has inclined a half-dozen times, small shifts upward, but nowhere near enough to spit them out at the surface. This pocket of cold, this building murmur of xenotech, is something else.
A hand grips his ankle; he stops moving. Another hand peels the antisensory hood away. His eyes see only spots, but a rush of sound thunders through his skull. His own labored breathing, his thudding heart, the scrape and scritch of his eyelids. The others are even louder: Thello’s clothes rustle and shout against themselves; Fen’s lungs are bellows.
