Ymir, page 13
“I learned about you when I was imp,” she says. “When I was small. Yorick the Butcher. Yorick-Who-Cooked-the-Cradle. We made a little rag doll of you and tore it all to pieces.”
She jerks the graft-knife free from his forearm, trailing its wet neurocable. Her knee leaves. His lungs uncollapse. The jig lasted a moment, only a moment, but Thello watched it from his orthochair without so much as a flicker. Thello, who used to get sick at the sight of blood. The grendel hasn’t moved a micrometer, maybe too busy composing its fucked-up dreams.
“Anything deep, Fen?” Thello asks.
Fen touches a finger to her scored back. “No. Nicks.”
Yorick hauls himself slowly into a sitting position. He can already feel the bruise blooming on his sternum. “I’m not useful to you,” he chokes, still shaking angry, craving hurt. “I can’t get you the fucking ansible. Don’t have clearance. Gausta’s the one who brought the hounds through.”
“We don’t need clearance,” Thello says, trading a glance with Fen. “But we need you to keep Dam Gausta looking in the wrong places.”
“She already knows something’s wrong,” Yorick says dully. “Especially now me and Fen dropped off her signal map.”
“So convince her. I know you can be convincing.” Thello pulls something from under the orthochair, a smooth gray pellet suspended in insulatory gel. “Everything you did back then, you did for yourself,” he says, digging the device free. “You’ll do this for yourself, too. Fen and the grendel, they’ve been recoding some old company tech. You remember gutjacks?”
Yorick watches the pellet unfold on Thello’s lined palm, prickly origami.
“Early days, before they had the indenturement implants worked out, they used these to keep miners from deserting,” Thello says. “You were never in the mines. You might not be familiar.”
Yorick is familiar. They fed them to prisoners in transit, too.
“It attaches to the stomach wall,” his brother says. “If it doesn’t get the right chiral molecule every three days, it wakes up, and the detonation rips you apart from the inside out. If we send it a particular signal, it wakes up, and the detonation rips you apart from the inside out.”
Love is so close to hate. Yorick feels an old fury in every cell of his body, the kind he used to feel in the pit, the kind he used to feel when their mother was the grendel. He looks at it again, lurking in the corner. An open strip of vermeil flesh in its hide is extruding something, tiny lumps poking and bursting through. Off-white, conical.
Teeth.
“In three days, all this will be finished,” Thello says. “You’ll get the chiral molecule. The gutjack will turn into harmless proteins. You’ll be free to go back to drinking and drugging yourself to death.” He raises the gutjack. “Until then, you do what we tell you.”
Yorick knows he is never getting the chiral molecule, not if Fen coded the gutjack, not if Thello still hates him the way he hated him when the needlegun went off. He is the ghost here, not Thello. He is the flickering holo at a wake. As far as his brother is concerned, he died the day he left Ymir.
But he is outnumbered and unarmed, and in a way he is getting what he deserves, so when Thello’s fingers wrench his mouth open he doesn’t lunge or bite. When Thello drops the pellet onto his tongue he doesn’t spit it out. It tastes like ash and numbs his throat on the way down, becomes a faint worming pressure in his belly.
Fen stays long enough to run a scanner over it, making sure it roots properly, then she goes to the other tent to muck out her membrane and patch her cuts. Thello doesn’t even look at him. He watches the grendel instead, still seething in its corner.
“You trust it?” Yorick asks.
“I know them better than I know you, Yorick.”
“Those four miners it shredded. You know them well?”
“I knew them. Yeah.”
“But you sacrificed them. You traded them.”
Thello’s face contorts. “No,” he says. “It was a reflex.” He stares at the silent grendel, but Yorick thinks he is picturing the sundered bodies. “They still have—subroutines. Things they can’t always override.”
“Oh,” Yorick says. “Just like our ma, then.” Thello flushes at last, a telltale darkening of his cheeks, and Yorick feels a muted pleasure. He points to the fissures in the grendel’s black xenocarbon where raw-looking tendons peek through. “Those red fibers are human,” he says. “The grendel took bits of your miners and played with them. Spliced them into its hide.”
He is seeding doubts, planting pupae that can hatch in the night. He’s finding nerves.
“Recycled them,” Thello says woodenly. “The company does it to the living.”
He peels open the bubblefab and Yorick follows him into the cave, leaving the grendel to its machine thoughts. The dampers have had time to take effect. He can observe the architecture with only a faint unease. Either the xenotech has its own sort of cooling system or there’s a shaft somewhere, a chimney leading all the way up to Ymir’s icy surface.
“We’ll take you to the main shaft to make the call,” Thello says. “You’ll tell Dam Gausta the grendel ambushed you, cut up Fen. You chased it down an auxiliary tunnel and got lost. You need more time here in the Maw.” He unfolds the antisensory hood and hands it over, locking eyes. “If you stray, if you try to warn her, we blow the gutjack early.”
The thing pulses in Yorick’s stomach.
“Get her attention off Fen, if you can. There’s more work to do in the Cut.” Thello pauses, his not-quite-sealie eyes narrowing. “You went to the old apartment the other night. Why did you do that?”
“I thought you were dead,” Yorick says. “I wish I was right.”
He pulls the hood over his head. The dark static is comforting.
CHAPTER -1
The Cut is silent when Yorick steps out of the terminal, leaving the last row of heatlamps behind. Cold air slices at the bends of his knees. It’s like walking into an unloaded simstage: the streets are indistinct, cloaked in vapor, and nobody’s in them. A pulsing red curfew notice scrolls through the blank gray sky. Harsh company script, no attempt at colonist characters.
This will be his last day under the suffocating artificial sky, breathing foul soup for air. Tomorrow the bowlship launches. He walks the familiar route to the apartment block in spiderwool instead of combat gear, a scarf wrapped carefully around his tattooed neck, needlegun hidden in his coat. He passes a cleaner bot scrubbing graffiti, the anti-company tag smeared half away. He doesn’t look closely, in case it’s the one that mourns Laska’s Cradle.
He turns the corner and sees his brother waiting on the apartment’s cement stoop. Yorick’s heart turns to helium. Thello is safe, whole, healthy-looking. Nervous, maybe, for the company drone drifting nearby to make sure the curfew is respected. It swoops over at Yorick’s approach; he pulls his scarf down on automatic and lets it scan his neck.
“Hey,” he says, while the laser light traces his tattoo.
Thello watches with worried eyes, and doesn’t reply until the drone has retreated. “Where were you, Yorick?”
Yorick doesn’t flinch. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry you had to take her to the recycler yourself.”
Thello blinks. “You didn’t miss anything,” he says. “There was no dirge. No wake. Company won’t allow them yet.” His voice fissures. “Where were you, I said.”
“They had to keep us in Shipfall until things died down here,” Yorick says, keeping his pulse slow. “I told you. But it’s over now. Nearly over. The algorithm is drafting an armistice.”
Thello gives a raw, cracked laugh. He rubs furiously at his eyes, and Yorick sees they’re red from a vapor pipe or from crying. He looks up. “Where were you really?”
Yorick’s helium heart plunges. He doesn’t answer.
“I know you been out on the ice. Someone saw you.” Thello wraps his arms around his bony knees. “You didn’t see them. You were busy.”
Yorick imagines a hundred things he might have been doing while a spy or sympathizer watched from hiding: repairing sensors, setting smart mines, loading prisoners. Bad things, but not unforgivable things. Not out on the ice.
“She recognized you from how you were cleaning the blood off your boots,” Thello says shakily. “You do it the same way you clean your jig shoes. She showed me the clip off her goggles.”
Fresh sweat is trickling down Yorick’s rib cage, soaking into the spiderwool. His stomach churns, but he tells himself this is for the best, this flaying, this exposure, because it hides the darker deed. Now he needs to explain to Thello, about how Subjugation is a natural process, like entropy or erosion, and in the end Ymir will be better off, and even if it’s not, it won’t matter because tomorrow they’ll be climbing out of the gravity well, sailing into the stars—
But his throat is screwed shut.
“Maybe they forced you. I thought that. I hoped that.” Thello puts his finger to his head. “The wardrugs, or neurocables, or… I don’t know. But it wasn’t like that, was it?” Another raw laugh, closer to a sob. “You just saw who was winning.”
“We don’t owe anyone here anything,” Yorick says hoarsely. “I did it so we could leave. So nobody will ever call you a half-blood again.” He falters, blind and desperate. “You remember that night in the fountain?”
Thello’s face is disbelieving, disgusted. “I don’t care what a few dimskulls call me,” he says. “Not everyone is like that. And even if they were, every single one of them, they wouldn’t deserve the company.” His mouth twists. “But this is some sort of revenge for you. Revenge on our own home. Our own people.”
Yorick stares. Their mother has infected Thello, used her deathbed to slip through his defenses. Maybe she told him she always loved them, told him all her anger was the fault of the company man, told him they belonged to Ymir no matter who told them otherwise. Or maybe it was someone like Tuq, who could act like a friend until the knife went in.
He remembers all the times he protected Thello from their mother, from the other children, from his own weakness. He did his work too well. Now his brother thinks if he keeps pretending, keeps playing at being a cold-blood here under the artificial sky, they’ll love him someday.
“It’s over now,” Yorick says, forcing the words through a bone-dry mouth. “No more people have to die. The armistice is coming.”
Thello has tears tracking down his cheeks.
“Come on,” Yorick says. “Everything’s over. She’s over. Ymir’s over.”
Thello isn’t moving. Yorick will have to do it by force, drag Thello onto the bowlship, hold him while the technicians prep him and plunge him into the torpor pool. One long frozen sleep, and they’ll wake up far from Ymir. He has years to make things right, to bring his brother around to understanding, once they get away from this poisonous fucking place.
Thello reads the shift in his body language, and as Yorick steps forward his brother levers upright, knees bent, hands loose. The company drone spins, interest piqued. But this is not going to be a jig. There’s no time for it, and Yorick doesn’t want to hurt him. Instead he slides the needlegun from his deepest coat pocket.
“Yeah,” Thello says, flushed red, trembling angry. “You better. You better fucking shoot me, Yorick. I know it was you who boiled Laska’s Cradle.”
The world inverts.
“What did you say?” Yorick asks, in a hollowed-out voice that can’t possibly be his.
“I called you that night.” Thello smiles a horrible smile. “To tell you our ma was dead. You cried for her. You said you would miss her. So I knew it was the avatar again.”
Yorick’s heart pounds. “That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Tell me where you were, then.” Thello’s eyes are cold, cold. “Now.”
Yorick knows it’s too late. Knows he should leave. But he’s rooted to the spot by all the months of exhausting microsurgeries and sims, all the weeks hunting on the ice, all the hibernating bodies swirling deep in Laska’s Cradle. All for nothing. His hand moves without him, drifting upward, tugging the needlegun with it. His whole body is burning, trembling.
“They’ll never love you,” Yorick tells his brother.
The company drone snaps its cam shut.
Thello’s eyes winch wide. Then he dives for the needlegun, teeth bared, face contorted. They slam into the concrete; the flickering sky pinwheels overhead and—
CHAPTER 35
He blew half my fucking head off.”
Yorick has been turning the memory over and over, slicing his fingers on it. After so many years locked away, it’s still pristine, razor-sharp. It feels more real than what happened in the cave, his younger brother turned old, the grendel squatting silently behind him, the mad plan to loose it into the ansible. But he knows that was real, too, because of the gutjack pulsing in his stomach.
“Most of the time, I tell people a grendel did it,” he says, staring through the skid window at impenetrable rock. “Sometimes, other stories. Ordnance accident on Hod. Trying to kiss a wood thresher on Tyr. I do that one when I’m drinking.”
Fen led him through the mine for another small eternity, until his muscles ached from the constant microadjustments, the uncertainty of moving into a void. Now the hood is off and they are back in the skid, sitting at the bottom of the downtube.
“But it happened here on Ymir,” Yorick continues, running a finger along the hairline hinge of his mandible. “He ever tell you about it?”
Fen isn’t talkative, maybe resentful of the gelfleshed gouges in her leg and back—more proof that what happened in the cave wasn’t some torpor-induced hallucination. She keeps her attention on the skid interface, adjusting the signal.
“They scraped it all off the stoop,” he says. “Teeth and bone splinters and a chunk of my tongue. None of it was viable, of course. When I woke up in the clinic, when I saw myself in the smartglass for the first time, I thought I was having a nightmare. Thought I was a nightmare.”
Fen’s eyes finally flicker over. “Was there pain?”
Yorick shakes his head. “They shut half my nerves down and drugged me to shit,” he says. “The pain was later, when they put the conduits in for the mandible. It was a lot of pain, if that comforts you. Or arouses you. I was never sure how different those are.”
Fen seems to consider it for a moment, then returns her gaze to her work.
“Him mauling my face, that was the first time he ever got his hands dirty,” Yorick says. “Has he done it since? Or is that what you’re for? He’s hiding in the mine while you go back to the Cut and take the shrapnel. From the other miners, from Gausta. You know she’s going to throw you in an interrogation pod as soon as she gets the chance.”
“I’m not scared of the pod,” Fen says flatly. “I done it before.”
“You’ll do it again,” Yorick says. “For Thello, and his dreams. His fucking dreams.”
“Our dreams. Ymir free and the company dust.” Fen’s face is full of scorn. “You think this is some dirge about you and Thello, some fated thing. It’s not.”
“What is it, then?” Yorick asks.
Her nostrils flare. “It’s about Ymir and every world like it. So if I have to go back to the interrogation pod, so be it. If I have to work with the monster who killed Nam and Cayetano and Brills and Mala, and the monster who cooked the Cradle, I’ll do that, too.”
Yorick feels a savage delight and an ache in his chest at the same time. “Greater good,” he says. “The tired old calculus. The company told me the same thing when they sent me to Laska’s Cradle. We’re all running the same numbers.” He stares into Fen’s glacial blue eyes. “But the company is a big beast. You’re going to have to sacrifice a lot more than seventy-eight people to bring it down. By the time it’s over, you and Thello, you’ll make me look like a fucking monk.”
Fen shakes her head. “Not if the grendel can do what Thello says.”
“Fuck Thello,” Yorick says, tipping his own head back against the window. “The company was going to arrest him for it, you know? Debody him, probably. I got him clemency instead. I had to beg, but I did it. I looked out for little brother one last time.”
Fen ignores him.
“I heard you two are like kin,” Yorick says. “You better hope his aim is still shit.”
Fen puffs air and her massive shoulders twitch, maybe an aborted laugh. When she turns around, there’s no levity. “I’m starting the call,” she says, holding out his dead carbine, the one they’ll use as a prop. “Are you ready?”
Yorick nods. He puts one hand to his abdomen. The pulse of the gutjack is more in his head than his pylorus, but it’s there, waiting, lurking. In a way, it’s his friend. The chiral molecule is never coming, and he’s nowhere near the company clinic that would be able to dissolve the gutjack without setting it off. That gives him only three days to live.
It focuses things. He is drifting into a black hole, and before the end he’s going to pull everything he can in with him: Fen and her venom, the grendel that’s been fucking with his dreams, all of Ymir if he can manage it. But Thello especially. Thello who blew his face apart, who rejected all his love and even his forgiveness.
Thello, who still thinks he can play games with monsters.
CHAPTER 36
Yorick tells lies while Fen oversees from off-screen, miming violence with her eyes. Either Gausta or the algorithm must detect something beyond hunter’s adrenaline in his elevated heart rate, in the traitorous dilation of his pupils, because she asks him, pointedly, if he is well.
“There is no one for whom it is well,” Yorick says, taking out his carbine. “Especially those who nearly got eviscerated by a grendel an hour ago.”
Gausta’s face swells onto the skid’s smartglass window. “I’ve had no signal from you or from Fen for the past three,” she says. “Explain.”
“This grendel has a new trick,” Yorick says. “It can talk.”
