Ymir, page 15
“So he throws himself on the flames, thinking if he dies a second time, his shade can go join his dead family. The lichen shrivels up. The skimmer hide twists and crackles. But his petrified bones don’t burn. The heat can’t touch his sky eyes, his howling mouth.”
Yorick’s mandible is company tech. So is the gutjack, even if Fen and the grendel have corrupted it. They speak the same language. He inspects the contact points on the microtool, then slips it back into its groove. It might work, but it won’t be enough on its own. He’s going to need something sharp.
“The man can’t die a second time,” Yorick says. “The grotesques think that’s funny. They dance circles around the bonfire, wearing one jig shoe each. Eventually, he gets up. He wanders off into a blizzard. That’s how it ends. Our mother never told us what it meant. I never asked her.”
A distorted silhouette appears on the other side of the bubblefab wall. For a moment Yorick is still a child, and he knows he’s conjured the makeshift man from the story, made it angry with his shit recitation. He tenses, scrumbles upright. Then the shadow resolves, and he realizes it’s someone carrying his squirming rucksack.
The bubblefab peels open to let Thello in. He has the rucksack in one hand and a pair of bioplastic cuffs in the other, the kind ringed with nematocysts that sting in response to sudden motion—more old company tech. He tosses them over. The little orange polyps ripple in their grooves.
“Put those on first,” Thello says. “You remember how they work. Then we’ll get you your immunos. You tell me what to load and I’ll do the injecting.”
Yorick tries to read his brother’s lined face. Maybe Thello is cultivating a bit of goodwill for whatever happens next in his mad plan, whatever they still need a company man for. Maybe Thello just wants to see him wearing the same cuffs the company clamped people with during Subjugation. Yorick doesn’t really care about the motivation if the end result is him getting a hit.
He picks the cuffs up, very slowly, and slips his hands inside. The gel cushioning is surprisingly comfortable. His brother sits down across from him, and Yorick sees that they didn’t bother trying to hack the kit’s genelock, just slit it open with a knife. Its squirming pneumatic limbs make him feel a small, nonsensical pang of guilt.
It passes when Thello pulls the frayed fabric wide, exposing its contents—picked over but intact.
“The yellow one,” Yorick says, trying not to sound too eager.
Thello inspects the little vial, then shakes his head. “That’s phed.”
“Label’s wrong,” Yorick says. “The seal broke on my immuno canister, so I transferred it.”
His brother tips the vial, watching the viscosity as the liquid slides end to end. “That’s phed,” he repeats. “Stop fucking around, or you get nothing.”
Yorick wants to claw the disdain off Thello’s face, but the cuffs read the signs and give a warning pulse. The cool gel can turn to acid barbs in an instant, and then it’s a feedback loop of agonized writhing until the body exhausts itself. Not many people can hold still when the cuffs start to sting.
“Gray one,” he says. “Blue sigil. The injector knows how much to load.”
Thello sets to it. “You like phedrine now,” he says, in the same question-not-question mode that always pissed Yorick off when they were younger.
“Sure.”
“Used to always be doxy. You and Tuq always had blue teeth.”
“Doxy kicks different every place you go,” Yorick says, the older brother again for a strange moment, bestowing the bad knowledge their mother won’t. “Phedrine’s more dependable. And I got a taste for it when I was in the clinic having my face reassembled.”
Thello’s eyes dart to the mandible again, and Yorick regrets the jab. He doesn’t need his brother thinking about the mandible. He angles his head so Thello will be looking at his neck instead, at the company tattoo and the flaky red skin around his overused injection point.
His brother hesitates for a moment, then plugs him with the anti-immunos. The microneedles bite deep. Yorick’s head rushes.
“She told it different, near the end,” Thello says. “That ballad.”
Yorick stares. He wonders how long his brother was crouched listening by the bubblefab wall, wonders if Thello saw, in blurry silhouette, the microtool come out of the mandible. “She was telling you ballads?”
“Telling herself them,” Thello says. “How you just did. Especially the kind where someone wanders off into the dark to kill themselves.” His face works. “When she told that one, she said ‘company man.’ Not ‘rich man.’ She made it so it was a company man trying to buy his way out the underworld.”
“That’s anachronistic of her,” Yorick says, and resists the temptation to ask if she ever gave the company man a name, if it was ever his name. There is a reason he left for Shipfall in the dead of night.
Thello tucks the injector back into the kit, keeping his eyes there. “She was halfway to the underworld herself by then. I was hoping the grotesques pulled her finger- and toenails both.” His mouth thins. “But even when we were imp, I never needed her to tell us what that one meant. Thought it was obvious.”
“Sure.”
“Dead things have to stay dead,” Thello says stonily. “People who leave can’t come back.” He nods his head at the quivering door. “It’s been five hours. Time to call Gausta again. Keep it short, keep it sharp, and I’ll give you the phedrine after.”
“Sure,” Yorick repeats, and this time he is glad for the mandible’s toneless buzz.
CHAPTER 39
When the hood comes off again, they’re in the main shaft. It seems bigger, emptier, now that the skid is gone. Yorick blinks the static from his eyes, looks around. Thello was the one leading him this time, through a series of turns and forks Yorick is sure were subtly different from the ones he took with Fen. The grendel accompanied them.
“There’s a holorig in here,” Thello says, opening the door to the generator hut Yorick saw earlier. “Tell her you’re still hunting. Try for another six hours. She should have other things on her mind by now.”
Another six hours. It’s not unfeasible. Yorick has hunted the grendel for days at a time before, tracking it across vast salt flats or creeping like a cutworm through fog-shrouded ruins. The Polar Seven’s tunnels are deep and extensive, and he’s already told her this grendel is abnormally clever. He takes a last glance at it—the machine is scuttling up the craggy wall of the shaft, animalistic again—then follows Thello into the polyresin hut.
His brother puts him in front of the holorig and tightens the projection cone. It’s a battered thing, cracks running through the bioplastic, a long sliver sticking off it. Yorick traces it with his eyes. Thello traces him, up and down, evaluating.
“You peeling the gelflesh off your prosthesis, will that mean something to her?”
“I’ll just tell her the heat was making it droop,” Yorick says.
Thello considers it, then goes to the aid station on the wall. Its white shell is flecked with blood, likely Fen’s. While his brother retrieves a roll of gelflesh, Yorick reaches forward and adjusts the cracked projection cone.
“Here,” Thello says, back with the roll in hand.
Yorick takes it wordlessly, starts working the gelflesh over his mandible. The motions are practiced, automatic, but concealing the mandible while Thello watches makes him feel strangely furious. It’s like they’re pretending that last day on Ymir never happened, the way Yorick tried pretending for so many years. Like they’re pretending Thello never grabbed the needlegun.
Once color seeps into the gelflesh, matching to Yorick’s skin, they make the call. Gausta appears in full body this time, which makes him think it’s her and not her avatar. She’s sitting lotus-legged on some distant floor, unclothed, chin propped on her laced-together hands.
Yorick normally pictures Gausta in her bright yellow coat, the one that contrasted so sharply with the gray spiderwool and blue-black thermal gear favored in the Cut, or in her military chamsuit. The sight of her without either jars him for a moment. She dispenses with the pseudonym, too.
“Hello, Yorick. Have you found our elusive grendel?”
“Not yet,” he says. “It has about a hundred fucking hidey-holes to pick from. I’ve been moving on foot to keep things quiet.”
“You may have company soon,” Gausta says. “This closure has gone on far longer than anticipated. I’ve suggested we remodel work contracts for the Polar Seven Mine, offer a hurtpay increase for xenocasualties, and send them back to work.” She gives a tranquil smile. “The news has not been well received in Reconciliation.”
“I’ll find it,” Yorick says.
“They’re quite testy already,” Gausta says, unhearing. “It seems you set something in motion with your bit of fun in the fighting pit.” She blinks. “The family of the deceased, this Wickam Pajet, are clamoring for blood. As if the cold-bloods don’t kill a dozen of each other in the jig every year.”
Thello remains stock-still where he stands outside the projection cone, but Yorick sees a tendon move under his jaw.
“Yeah,” Yorick says. “They always did like killing their own. Give me another six hours.”
“There was an impromptu remembrance in the north end today,” Gausta says, eyes gleaming. “Supposedly for Wickam Pajet, but with seventy-eight attendees—not the subtlest nod to Laska’s Cradle. There are rumors that the company man in the pit was none other than Yorick the Butcher.”
Yorick’s heart stutters. He watches Thello in his peripheral, trying to read from his brother’s body language if this was the work he needed done in the Cut, if Fen has been stoking this anger.
“I imagine they’ll be burning you in effigy soon,” Gausta says, still smiling her contented smile. “Six hours, you said?”
Yorick’s stomach clenches. The gutjack throbs. “Six hours, yeah.”
“Are you cowering down there, Yorick?”
Yorick blinks.
“Are you afraid your presence in the Cut will set the tinder alight, and you’ll be caught in the flames?” Gausta’s voice is airy, innocent. “Simply because someone tossed a half-grown biobomb at the facade of your hotel? Simply because the cold-bloods are being cold-bloods?”
Yorick remembers the ragged hole burned through Southern Urbanite Memory’s signage. “I’m doing the work you brought me here for,” he says, even though he knows in his bones that she brought him here for lighting tinder, that she always intended for his identity to be uncloaked.
“You don’t need to worry about retribution from the locals,” Gausta says. “I have measures already in place. But if you’re wallowing down there in the mine, you won’t be able to enjoy the show.”
She ends the call. Thello disables the holorig. His face is etched with worry, but his jaw is set, determined. Yorick recalls the expression from the first time his brother sparred with one of the older children, one of Yorick’s false friends who had twice his reach and muscle. Maybe Mara.
He remembers feeling a fierce electric pride every time his brother slipped a gap or hooked a leg. He remembers a boiling frustration every time his brother didn’t hit hard enough, every time he hesitated. Thello took a beating that night.
But that was a different life, maybe a different Thello. His brother is old now, hardened by the mine and the ice, powered by twenty years’ worth of gangrenous cold-blood anger. Yorick knows he is going to hit as hard as he can. Which will make it that much better when Yorick disassembles his plan and drops him right into Gausta’s soft and hideous hands.
He runs his artificial tongue through half a mouth, thinking of the pain when the conduits went in, the loneliness of the clinic where Thello left him for dead.
“Can I get the phedrine now?” he asks.
“In the tent,” his brother says. “And you should try to sleep off it. Tomorrow’s going to be strenuous.”
Yorick doesn’t doubt it. He has to survive tonight first, though.
CHAPTER 40
They give him the phedrine, and food, too: a bowl of flash-cooked noodles and a long strip of cured meat. Skimmer, judging from the blue tinge. He remembers dreading wild meat as an imp; the cold-bloods gobbled it down but Yorick and Thello were always liable to vomit it back up. He knew it was some shameful weakness imbibed from their anonymous father. He didn’t learn for years and years that their half-sealie enzymes were struggling through alien protein chains.
Yorick is hungry enough now to give it another attempt, but he doesn’t. Instead he drops the meat into the small red waste bucket they gave him, then empties his bowl after it, stomach groaning regret as the spice-smelling noodles splash down to mix with his own dehydration-yellow piss.
Temptation removed, he sits down at the far end of the bubblefab, where his silhouette is least distinct to his neighbors, and waits. The phedrine extends his patience. He can drift there and think of nothing at all as the noise from outside—muttering voices, humming machinery, preparation sounds—slowly subsides.
The cave’s strange sourceless light dies off, too, leaving only the biolamps. Yorick wonders if the grendel’s done that, if it’s accessed some hidden xenotech lampswitch for the benefit of Thello and his clanners’ sleep cycles. He arranges the inflatable pillow and thin blanket left in the corner of the bubblefab, ready to fake slumber if someone comes for the bowl.
Nobody does, and eventually the biolamps start to blink out. Yorick peels all the gelflesh off his mandible again, joins it to a lump he pocketed earlier when he was with Fen. He opens the nacelle and retrieves his microtool. He reaches into his boot and finds the shard of bioplastic he snapped off the holorig while Thello was turned away.
It’s time. Yorick’s modded eyes have adjusted as well as they can to the dark tent. Now he visualizes himself in a company clinic, but not as the patient. He is going to be the teledoc, smooth and unhurried, unable to doubt itself. Of course, the teledoc could go laparoscopic, or better, feed him a little origami nanosurgeon to slide down into his esophagus and manufacture the chiral molecule without setting off the gutjack.
Yorick will have to do things the old-fashioned way, with a large abdominal incision. He uses the back end of the microtool first, abrading the tip of the shard to a crude scalpel, sharp enough to pierce skin and hopefully muscle. He peels his nerve suit down past his hips and etches himself a target under his lower left rib.
He has the same company modifications as any other foot soldier. His body chemistry is shock-resistant, and wounds heal fast. He remembers a squadmate who dug shrapnel out of her hip and abdomen in the field, but she was following the motions of an animated surgeon in her goggles, and had numbing tabs besides.
Yorick has the dregs of his phedrine high and his own grasp of anatomy, gutjack placement. He can’t even run a sim first. An image creeps through the back of his mind: Ymir’s most hated traitor bleeding out in this bubblefab, exsanguinated. He uses the thought of Thello’s dispassionate face to trade dread for anger. Anger for focus.
He takes a deep breath, and starts to cut.
CHAPTER 41
It starts off so well.
His skin splits easily. He only needs a bit of pressure to get the shard through, to widen the incision. Watching his hands, his smooth-slow hands, he feels almost like he’s watching an animated surgeon. Blood seeps out, a red flower blooming on his torpor-paled belly. He wipes it away with his forearm and peers through his abdominal wall.
What he sees is a nauseating tangle, slick and raw-pink. His heart speeds up. He needs the pylorus, the lowest twist of stomach, where a gutjack takes root, but he can’t extract a single feature he recognizes from the quivering mess. He takes a guess, moves the shard, and suddenly the trickle of blood becomes a gush.
Panic slams through the last of his high. He felt nothing tear, felt only the slightest give, but somehow the blood is pouring now. He sees Wickam, sinking to his knees in the silicate pit. He sees Canna spread-eagled in the snow, pumping her life away through a hundred cuts.
There is no one for whom it is well.
He drops the shard and scrabbles for the gelflesh. He tries to find the source of the bleeding, tries to feel it out by pressure. He tears off clumps and slaps them everywhere he can reach. Blood spurts through his fingers and he is not a teledoc and he is not the clanner who nearly escaped, he is Yorick the Butcher, Yorick-Who-Pricked-the-Artery, and it was dumbsick to think he could do this in a dark bubblefab—
The gushing stops.
Yorick barely dares to exhale, afraid of dislodging the gelflesh and letting whatever vein he nicked burst back open. He chants another borrowed phrase in his head: Nothing is wrong. You’re coming out of torpor. Nothing is wrong. You’re coming out of torpor. He lets the air out of his lungs one molecule at a time. The gelflesh holds. He inhales, just as slowly. The gelflesh holds.
His trembling hand finds the shard. He wipes it off on his thigh. There will be infection, and foreign bodies, but it’s hard to care about that right now. He studies the tangle again, sponging away the excess blood. He swims through half-remembered anatomy games on a company tablet, medroid projections in the clinic, every time he ever saw his body or another torn open.
He picks a new pylorus, and this time, when he wriggles through the gap the gutjack is waiting, clinging to his stomach lining with its tiny spines. It’s a small piece of tech, a simple piece. It only has two real functions. Cold-bloods are much more familiar with one than the other.
Yorick reaches for the microtool.
The gutjack gives a curious pulse.
CHAPTER <<`#&
Yorick and Thello are dredging their mother out of a torpor pool. They stalk around the edge with their hooks at the ready. Electricity hums the air, but they are not inside a freighter or bowlship. They are not at Laska’s Cradle, either, which is a relief to Yorick. He knows Thello has forgotten about that, and he doesn’t want to remind him.
