Ymir, page 14
Her brow rises slightly. “Is this humor, Oxo?”
“No.” He tugs a gossamer cable from the skid interface, pries open the port in the carbine’s grip, and links them. “There might be traces, still. It blocked our signal anywhere below the main shaft. Locked my weapons when we got close. Locked the hounds. I’ve never seen a grendel do that.”
Gausta’s eyes narrow as she takes in the scan. Yorick observes it on the smartglass, rotating the spiky black aberrations in the needlegun’s gene memory. Compared to the grendel’s other behaviors, compared to it wriggling its tendrils into Thello’s skull, this is nothing. But it should be enough to give Gausta pause.
“Clever of it,” she says. “How close did you get?”
Fen shifts in his peripheral.
“Close enough your overseer took a few wounds,” he says. “Mostly incidental. The grendel was coming for me, licked her on the way past.”
“Yet here you are alive.”
“Got the howler on manual just in time. I didn’t do much damage, but the grendel spooked and ran. Fen got us back to the main shaft.”
Gausta says nothing, but he can see her weighing the story. “And where is she now?”
“Patching up,” Yorick says. “There’s an aid station here.”
“And the grendel?”
“Gone deep again. Nerve suit’s getting nothing.” Yorick lets some real anger show, lets it tighten the parts of his face that can still tighten. “I’m switching everything over to manual. Taking the genelocks off. Then I’m going after it again.”
“A strange one, this grendel.” Gausta’s silver eyes are unreadable. “I suppose it follows. Most of Ymir’s natives are a bit mad.”
For a moment he’s tempted to tell her just how mad. But then Fen will blow the gutjack, and Yorick will never get the chance to take his brother’s delusions apart and grind them to dust in front of him. He needs to make his three days count.
“I’m staying here until I find it,” Yorick says. “Might take the night cycle. Might take another day. I’ll call when it’s dead.”
“You don’t wish to rest and re-equip in a less subterranean environ?” Gausta asks.
“I’ve got what I need,” Yorick says. “But I’m sending Fen back to Reconciliation. She’s a hazard here. Breathes too loud.”
Gausta runs her tongue along her blocky white teeth. “If this grendel is so unusual, and is able to interfere with company signals, perhaps you could do with more experienced reinforcement.”
“I can find it,” Yorick says, bristling. “Give me a day and a bit of fucking faith.”
Gausta’s eyes narrow. He wonders if he’s played it wrong.
“I’ve never doubted your capacities, Yorick,” she says. “Update me in six hours.”
Fen nods in his peripheral. Acceptable terms.
“Best send your overseer to the clinic when she arrives,” Yorick adds. “Grendel wounds are unpredictable. Xenocarbon does odd things to flesh.”
Gausta gives an uninterested nod and ends the call. Yorick watches the realization move across Fen’s broad-boned face, watches it transmute to rage. She opens her mouth to speak. He interrupts her, just in case the gutjack has a verbal trigger.
“She would have noticed,” he says. “Gausta’s the one who equipped me the blade. She knows the difference between grendel serrations and graft-knife.” He gives the giant a bland smile. “This is a chance to seal cracks in our story. Head off her doubts.”
They are alone here in the dark skid, and Yorick is anticipating more violence, almost praying for it. He’s lost his way to Thello’s triggers, but Fen’s are obvious, poison-bright. She observes him for a moment. She must observe people in the pit the same way, a predatory mix of anger and calculation. But this time the violence comes soft.
“No wonder he always hated you,” she says.
Yorick keeps his face hard. “Thello will say the same thing. The wounds need to be consistent with the story. He probably knew it already. Probably hoped I would tell you and save him the ugly conversation.” He mimes a grendel’s clenching claw. “Good thing you’re so willing, Fen. To make sacrifices.”
The slap rattles Yorick’s skull, ripples the gelflesh that conceals his mandible. He blinks away the oil spills and sees Fen staring down at him, expressionless, seeing past him somehow. He knows she is picturing it: even if the grendel keeps its reflexes in check, even if Thello stays tethered to the beast by tendril, it won’t be like a teledoc doing it. It won’t be clean.
Yorick only feels guilty until he remembers Canna, the nineteen-year-old recruit who clanners like Fen cut open and bled out on the ice. Compared to that, this is nothing.
“Ymir thanks you,” he says, and his mandible buzzes against the distorted gelflesh, so he peels the gelflesh away, exposing the pitch-black polymer underneath. His reflection in the dead smartglass makes him look like a grotesque, an avenging tormentor from some colonist ballad. Yorick the Butcher. Yorick-Who-Cooked-the-Cradle.
There might be more names to come.
CHAPTER 37
They don’t let him watch, but he never wanted to. The sounds are bad enough. He can hear through the glistening wet wall of the bubblefab as the grendel retraces Fen’s wounds with one of its flickering serrations, dragging open the small incisions that were only just beginning to knit shut under gelflesh. Meat sounds only; Fen makes no noise. Her big lungs must be held tight.
Yorick sits and waits until another of Thello’s clanners, anonymous behind scarf and surface goggles, comes to get him. In the next bubblefab over, the orthochair has reconfigured itself so Fen’s weight is supported even as her back and left leg are exposed. It trembles slightly under her bulk. Thello sits beside her, jaw clenched.
“You’re right,” he says, looking up. “The company would have noticed.” His eyes catch for a moment on Yorick’s exposed mandible. “Verify the wounds.”
Yorick verifies the grendel first. It’s back to its customary corner, maybe watching, maybe oblivious to everything outside its own machinery. If there is fresh blood on one of its limbs, it doesn’t show in the dim light. Not everyone has acclimatized to Thello’s new friend; Yorick can smell sour fear on the clanner behind him. Maybe they played some version of the grendel game when they were young, chased some snarling sibling through the snow.
Yorick goes to the orthochair. Fen’s blue eyes track him as he comes closer, but their fury is dimmed—Thello must have given her pain-eaters. He wonders, briefly, if he might be able to filch some. He’s already missing his phedrine; the damper drugs dance all around that neurochemical itch without actually scratching it.
He gets as close as he dares. He peers at the reopened gash on Fen’s leg, then the ones scoring her back and shoulders. Still shallow, but the edges are jagged now, and the grendel left tiny flakes of xenocarbon behind.
“They’ll pass, yeah.”
“Good,” Thello says. “Your turn now.”
He jerks his head, and the grendel crawls forward, somehow pushing its top half through its bottom to form a single oversized pseudopod. For a moment, Yorick thinks that Thello, soft-stomached Thello, wants to balance the Ledger of Universal Suffering by having the grendel slice him up. But it’s not a serrated limb that emerges from the machine’s boiling mass.
“They’re curious about you,” Thello says heavily. “They want to talk.”
Yorick stares at the rust-red filament snaking toward him. “Get that thing away from me.”
“They won’t damage anything.” Thello’s attention is split between the grendel and Fen, who is moving sluggishly in the orthochair. “They just sponge your patterns. Ask you—questions.”
“Your own private interrogator,” Yorick says, and it puts an image in his head, a motley communion of miners and clanners tipping back their heads for the grendel’s tendril.
“Doesn’t work that way,” Thello says. “It might not work at all. You never had the dreams when we were children.”
An even darker thought wings across Yorick’s mind: Maybe Thello is not to blame. Maybe his brother is only a puppet, and the grendel is manipulating him to its own ends. But fine-tuning a human brain is on another magnitude of difficulty from manipulating company code, and it wasn’t the grendel that pulled the needlegun trigger twenty years ago.
The machine creeps closer. The clanner behind him seizes his shoulders, holding him in place. Yorick feels a kick of panic, less for the possibility of it going wrong, of the grendel lobotomizing him, and more for the possibility of it going right. He doesn’t want anybody joining him in his head, dissecting his thoughts, observing his secrets. Half the time he can barely stand to be in there by himself.
He twists away from the bobbing filament, and the grendel stops short. It waits. Part of its body rotates toward his brother, who is sealing Fen’s remodeled wounds with gelflesh again.
“Go ahead,” Thello says, distracted, impatient.
Yorick keeps his head craned to the side. The grendel squats there, its hide slowly roiling. Then the filament retracts, and it ambles back to the corner of the bubblefab. He feels his tremor of relief mirrored in the clanner behind him.
Thello’s eyes flick briefly between him and the grendel. He shrugs his bony shoulders. “Alright,” he says. “Take him back to his tent.”
Yorick’s captor wheels him around, shuffling him toward the bubblefab entrance. The grendel makes no protest. Thello doesn’t even watch him leave. His brother’s only concern is Fen, coming stiffly now off the orthochair. She finally breathes, a long slow grimace. Thello reaches an unnecessary hand to steady her. The tenderness on his face makes Yorick hurt.
He looks away, and somehow locks stares with the grendel, eyeless but alert. It raises one spiny limb, maybe a goodbye wave. Then the clanner is pushing him out the suppurating door, back into the cave. The architecture swells behind his eyes.
“I need more neuroleptics,” he says. “More dampers. I got high sensitivity.”
“You got habits,” the clanner says, a non-sounding voice, thick northerner accent. “Seen the sucker mark on your neck. Ugly as the tattoo.”
Yorick’s fingers trace the place where he usually jabs himself. “That’s for anti-immunos,” he says. “I need those, too, or this mandible’s going to fall off and I’ll have to eat through my ass.”
The clanner snorts. When they open the neighboring bubblefab, the one where he’s being kept, they hover. “People been say you’re the Butcher, but I don’t believe such. He would be old by now. And he’d be bigger, too, I think.”
“There’s no specific geneprint for it,” Yorick says. “Can you get me my drugs?”
The clanner nudges him inside and seals the door.
CHAPTER 38
Yorick has to find other ways to entertain himself. He tries to count, from blurred voices and shadows, how many heads Thello has recruited to the cause. Most of them seem to be clanners, probably Fen’s kin. There must be more malefactors in the Cut, who secured the damper drugs and smuggled them into the mine.
Gausta was right: insurrection has been stirring. This is not a bitter miner building a biobomb, or a clanner shooting down a glitchy company drone that wandered too far across the ice. This has gravity. The wonder is that it’s gone this long undetected. Even if the cold-bloods have kept their mouths shut and their ranks tight, the company algorithm should have sniffed out an operation of this size by pattern-matching alone.
But maybe the algorithm needs the insurrection to fester, to gain some critical cancerous mass, before it debrides it entirely. Subjugation is a long and complex process. Or maybe it’s the grendel’s work. Maybe it’s been whispering to the company algorithm the same way it whispered to Thello, sending it electric dreams.
Yorick walks from the center of the bubblefab to the wall and back, three strides each way. He drinks from the half-empty water sac. He does a few of the breathing exercises a puffy white medroid in the company clinic once taught him.
Trying to escape is useless; Thello will be only too happy to blow the gutjack and fill the gaps in his plan some other way. Trying to remove the gutjack is useless, too. He remembers a determined prisoner who drank three cups of smuggled vatbrew and slit herself open, yanked it out. He remembers it took six or seven geophages to clean out her cell. Gutjacks are designed to stay put. They trigger the instant they leave their warm acid bath.
Yorick sits down, wishing he had something to drink or smoke or snort. That makes him think of Linka in her empty bar and Nocti lying low somewhere in the Cut. Maybe he’s strumming his leg and composing a sad ballad about it.
“There’s another old dirge I wanted you to play,” Yorick says to the absent Nocti. “You might know it. You might not. It’s about a rich man who dies. I don’t remember how. Probably he’s caught in a blizzard and the cold stalks him in endless circles and finally reaches into his chest with its icy jaws and eats his dark warm heart. That’s how people always die in these things.”
Yorick can hear the dirge in his mother’s tired voice. He can picture her in the orthochair, staring up at the ceiling, eyes half shut, reciting the story while he and Thello sit listening at her feet. One of those counterfeit glimmers, one of those gossamer bubbles of happiness that burst the next time they were too loud or hungry or looked too much like the company man.
“So his shade goes to the underworld,” Yorick continues. “I think the underworld must look something like this. There’s a couple grotesques who show up to torment him, pull his toenails out and all that—I guess shades still have toenails. But he’s a rich man, so he buys them off. Hires them, actually. He promises them fuel and blubber and his own jig shoes. Says they can wear one each. In exchange, they have to help him escape.”
Yorick lies down on the slick floor of the bubblefab, lacing his hands behind his head. This part of the dirge needs a slow ascent. He imagines Nocti sawing away, the music blossoming bittersweet in the dark, sadness stitched with a whispered hope.
“He wants to go back to his family,” Yorick says. “He misses them. But shades can’t leave the underworld, because they don’t have bodies. So the grotesques have to build him a body. They don’t know much about that, but they do their best. I always liked this part when I was a little imp. Them building it.
“They go to the forest and break branches, because they think the petrified trees are bones, the same as we have in our skeletons. They go to the craters and scrape lichen off the rocks, because they think it’s hair. They kill a frostskimmer out on the ice, so they can use its sails as skin. And to make the eyes and mouth, they take a shard out of the blackest part of the sky.”
Their mother always pointed up when she said that part, and they tipped their heads back, and instead of cracked concrete ceiling, Yorick remembers seeing Ymir’s starless sky. He tries that now, looking up into the ceiling of the bubblefab. He sees nothing in particular.
“They take all that shit back to the underworld and piece it together,” he murmurs. “Branch bones, animal skin, lichen hair. The rich man’s shade, he’s not happy with it, but it’s better than nothing. He climbs inside and makes the body come to life.” He pauses. “There is a guard at the mouth of the underworld. I should have said that before. There’s a guard with a big snuffling nose instead of a face, two nostrils where the eyes should be.”
The gutjack pulses in his stomach. Yorick slides one hand from behind his head and lays it across his abdomen instead. He flutters his fingers against the nerve suit’s dead skin.
“The rich man walks right past the guard, who can only smell deadwood, dry lichen, skimmer carcass. He walks right out of the underworld. The grotesques are so proud of their work that they follow him, dancing all the way. He goes straight to his big ice-house, to see his family.”
Yorick imagines the man in his makeshift body shambling across Ymir’s surface, slip-sliding over the ice, desperate for his reunion. It interplays with another image: a prisoner fleeing camp on foot, on Yorick’s watch. He remembers waiting with a mixture of dread and anticipation for the gutjack to go off, for the prisoner to crash to the snow, shredded inside out.
“But the rich man’s children don’t recognize his empty sky eyes,” Yorick says. “And when he opens his mouth the only sound that comes out is howling wind. They think he’s a monster.”
Yorick strokes his own face, feeling the hinge where flesh meets mandible. The gutjack seems to wriggle in his stomach, as if it knows the gambit that has occurred to him, the idea that makes his heartbeat upshift. His palms sweat.
“His oldest daughter, she grabs his rifle and chases him out,” Yorick says. “He has to run. But when he runs he knocks over a tank of fuel, and when she shoots at him she sets it alight. The fireball burns her up on the spot. Leaves just her skeleton, charred, black. The flames spread and the ice-house starts to melt. The walls collapse in. His other children are trapped under the snow. He tries to dig them out, but his deadwood hands are too brittle. They snap. They splinter.”
The prisoner who fled across the ice never collapsed. Their gutjack never went off. Yorick had to shoot them in the back instead, splintering their spine with a tracking round from his carbine. He was reprimanded for it—he’d missed an order, tagged by a glitch in his goggles as low priority.
“His children suffocate, one by one, and their shades slide up out of the snow, one by one. All of them are weeping. They float away over the ice, to the tunnel all shades are drawn to, the one that leads to the underworld. He chases after them, but his deadwood feet are so slow. And when he gets to where the tunnel should be, it’s gone. He has a body now, so he can’t find it.”
Yorick opens a tiny nacelle in the underside of his mandible. His fingers find the microtool he uses to tune his nerve conduits, to do minor repairs. To try to get rid of a clicking sound.
“The grotesques pull the blubber out of the rich man’s storage huts,” he says, no longer for Nocti. “They feast on it. They find the rest of his fuel, and they use it to start a bonfire on the ice. I think they burn his sleds. Anyway, he sees the fire and comes back. He tries to make another deal with the grotesques, but they’re not listening. They got everything they want.
