Ymir, page 16
They are in the cave. The pool’s pallid glow illuminates living stone, splitting spars, architecture that looms and retreats ad nauseam. They are in the cave, which means the grendel is somewhere nearby. Yorick crouches down at the edge of the torpor pool, searching for their mother’s mine-bent body in a frozen sea of corpses-not-corpses. The current swirls them in a slow vortex.
“I found her insides,” Thello says, lifting his hook with a smile. Yorick nods approval at the dripping tangle, the stumps and sacks and tubes. Thello starts rinsing the stasis fluid off them with a hose. Yorick returns his attention to the pool.
He spots his mother’s bobbing back, knobby and scarred, but the current reverses, drags her the wrong way. He follows. Every time he closes, the current changes. Back and forth, back and forth, like a stuttering mechanical clock. Every time he tries to use the hook, she drifts just out of reach.
The stasis fluid is only hip-deep, so Yorick wades into the torpor pool, sloshing through human freight. Bodies drift and bump up against him, frost-furred. His own skin is steaming. Thello tells him to look for the one with the hole in her belly, and it’s because all of the not-corpses have the same shifting face: sometimes their mother’s face, sometimes the face of a little red girl.
“Come on,” Thello says, in his old-young voice. “Before it gets too deep.”
Yorick starts to tell him the stasis fluid is only hip-high, and the bottom of the torpor pool drops away. He kicks, flounders. The not-corpses bob, limbs churned by his waves. There is nothing below him. The stasis fluid reaches down forever, milky white, impenetrable. Hiding something below him.
Something old, and patient. Yorick feels it moving. Thello is at the edge of the torpor pool, and he says it’s a leviathan: ancestor to the frostswimmers, ten times the size and long extinct. The company found only ossified remains when they sounded underneath the eastern ice.
The stasis fluid starts to ripple. Yorick sees a woman with a dark hole punched through her stomach, and he swims. The surface is choppy now, stirred to frenzy by the leviathan readying to breach. He clambers over bodies. He ducks under them. He grips his mother by both her gnarled hands and she opens one bright black eye to greet him.
The stasis fluid is bubbling. He chokes down mouthful after mouthful as he hauls his mother toward the edge of the pool. Thello is dancing there, sometimes old, sometimes young. His jig shoes are gleaming. Freshly sharpened. He is waiting for the leviathan, because that was the whole point. Yorick is chum. They agreed.
He finds a final thrashing passageway to the edge of the pool. His mother climbs out, calm, unperturbed. He realizes she never needed his help. She was part of the performance. He turns, and sees the creature erupt from the stasis fluid. Its hide is gleaming black with lava cracks of red flesh.
Not a leviathan. There was never a leviathan.
Only a grendel in the shape of one, stretching its body impossibly vast and membrane-thin, hollow on the inside. It rises, shedding stasis fluid in rivulets, weeping cold white streams. Smaller now. Smaller still as it wriggles over the edge. The size of a skinny child, but ready to jig. It’s grown serrations all up and down its legs.
Their mother sits up to watch, spooling her intestines back inside her. Yorick can’t hear her, but he sees her purple lips forming familiar words. She hands him the needlegun.
CHAPTER 42
Yorick wakes up wailing, but he locked and muted his mandible for just this reason. All that escapes is a muffled groan, even though it feels like he’s splitting in two along the fault line of his crude surgical incision. He stuffed and sealed the cut with gelflesh, and knotted a strip of blanket tight around his middle, but some small shift in the night has dragged things apart.
Now his whole body is trembling. Supercooled sweat is sliming his back, stinging his eyes. He worms back to his original position on the floor of the bubblefab, trying to move as slowly as possible. Trying not to picture the unset gelflesh stretching like vatcheese. When he’s curled fetal around the incision again, the agony dips to discomfort.
His head clears enough to realize he has company. A monstrous shadow looms from the opposite side of the bubblefab—not the makeshift man, and not Thello with his drugs. The grendel looks like some sleep-paralysis demon. A ripple goes through its hide and Yorick sucks in a sharp breath, accidentally triggers another cascade of pain.
It knows what he did. It sensed it somehow, or maybe just recognized the foul coppery smell of spilled blood. He waits for it to grow jagged serrations, come finish the job. He waits for it to signal Thello, bring him and a half-dozen sleep-eyed clanners running. Instead it extends the filament again, looping and carving through the air.
Yorick’s pulse moves up his throat. Maybe the grendel wants to confirm its suspicions before it signals Thello. Maybe it knows nothing, understands nothing, is too far removed from the human lens to understand betrayal or captivity. Maybe it’s just a machine with a glitching algorithm Thello paints over with his own intentions.
The filament snakes closer. Another, stranger possibility comes to Yorick: this is a Faustian deal. The grendel wants to slide inside his gray matter in exchange for its silence. He turns his mandible back on and speaks in a humming whisper.
“You’re not going in my head. Fuck off.”
The grendel ripples again and mimics a face: strands of fibrous muscle and shards of xenocarbon knit together into a rough imitation of human features. It brings fragments of dream back to the surface of Yorick’s neural sea. He remembers Thello strapping on his jig shoes, their mother reassembling her innards, the grendel erupting from the bottom of an icy torpor pool.
The grendel has already been in his head. It was crouched here directing his dreams.
“Fuck off,” Yorick says, pleading now.
The grendel opens its gash of a mouth, and the voice that comes out, filtered through flesh and alien alloy, sounds like a thousand buzzing wasps. It pointillates the skin on the back of Yorick’s neck.
“They want to talk.”
Thello’s words, recycled. Yorick recognizes the intonation.
“Talk about what?” he asks, transported back to Linka’s bar for a moment, mistaking her for a mindless droid—he can’t make that mistake again.
“The ansible.” Thello still, faint echoes of his northern lilt in the swarm. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it. And terrifying.”
Yorick has never thought of the ansible as either. It’s landscape, an immovable behemoth on Ymir’s snowy horizon. He is trying to decide whether or not to reply when the grendel’s voice shifts, like it’s putting on some demented holopuppet show, and recycles words Yorick only vaguely remembers saying.
“This is valuable. This is more valuable than all the fucking mines combined.” Its voice shifts, turning soft, clipped, an imitation of Gausta pulled from his blurry post-thaw memory. “Thrilled to be home, I expect.”
Yorick stares, trying to piece together meaning. The filament moves in a slow circle, but it’s clear the grendel won’t bruteforce the interface. A normal grendel would have no qualms about that. A normal grendel would have torn him to pieces by now.
“Yorick the Butcher.” Its voice mutates again, approximating Fen. “Yorick-Who-Cooked-the-Cradle.”
Yorick’s curiosity seeps away to make room for his anger. He remembers the grendel is only pretending at restraint. It already rifled through his hippocampus without permission, bled his memories and dreams together, watched them unfold. Maybe as far as the grendel is concerned, it’s all a holopuppet show. Some flimsy organic drama. Some dim amusement.
He has nothing more to say to it.
Well. One thing.
“They’re going to vivisect you in a company lab. Render you down to molecules.”
The grendel is silent for a moment, then lurches forward. Yorick tenses; the muscle contraction sends a searing wave through his abdomen. But the grendel stops short, hovering overtop of him, pointing a tendril downward. Yorick looks at the red blot showing through his blanket.
“Verify the wounds,” the grendel says.
It steps over him, opens a slit in the bubblefab using some stored trace of permitted gene. It melts away into the dark shifting cave.
CHAPTER 43
Morning comes and Yorick is alive. He’s stiff from hip to rib but the pain has receded to a dull throb, only jagged if he twists. When he undoes the knotted blanket and peels it away from his midsection, he finds a rubbery pale swathe marbled with streaks of red from the excess blood. The gelflesh has bonded as well as he could have hoped.
He pulls his dead nerve suit back up his torso, slowly, gingerly, and seals it. Then he works on mobility, feeling out the safest way to step, to crouch, to bend. By the time Thello comes to get him, he can hide most of the tightness and swallow back most of the pain. His brother is wearing full thermal gear, goggles slung around his neck.
“Time to talk to Gausta,” Thello says. “Hood.”
Yorick takes the antisensory hood and shakes it out; the motion sends tiny barbs of pain across his abdomen. The long blind wander to the main shaft will not be easy. But Thello has a thousand things moving behind his exoskeleton eyes. Maybe his brother won’t notice if he’s clumsier than usual, if he hisses and grunts here and there.
“You did it again,” Thello says, tapping his jaw. “Why?”
Yorick feels a dart of ice down his neck. He forgot to cover the mandible. Even if he’d remembered, all the gelflesh is used up holding his guts inside him. He meets his brother’s gaze and dredges his hate to the surface, a twisted body from a torpor pool.
“You said something before,” Yorick says, softly, to keep the words from stinging his abdomen. “The first time in the tunnel. You said you didn’t know how it would feel, seeing me like this.” He taps the mandible. “How does it?”
Thello shakes his head. “It doesn’t feel like anything,” he says.
“They probably treated you like a fucking hero, afterward. Shooting a company man in the face and getting away with it.”
Thello stares at him, then puffs half a laugh. “Fuck you, Yorick. Fuck you. I got no sympathy left.” His voice shakes angry. “Hood. And before we call Gausta, you cover the jaw.”
Yorick takes that anger into the void with him. When he slips the hood over his head, to begin his final tour of the underworld, he sees violent images in the static.
CHAPTER 44
Gausta is slow to answer. Her avatar jitters on the holorig, clearly split between a dozen different tasks. Yorick exchanges pleasantries with it, tells it the grendel has slipped through his fingers again, tells it he is laying traps along Track Five and Track Six. Finally the vitiligo face contracts, a tension in the neck Yorick recognizes as masked excitement.
“You get all that?” he asks. “You look busy this morning.”
“You have no idea,” she says. “Do you recall my prediction? Of malcontents burning you in effigy?”
Yorick grimaces; it flexes the new gelflesh coating his mandible. “Yeah. I recall.”
“They’ve skipped that step.” Gausta nearly wriggles. “They’re burning down the whole of Reconciliation. Using half-grown biobombs and a zinc splitter stolen from the very mine you wander through so fruitlessly.”
Thello seems to swell in his peripheral, maybe proud of Fen’s work.
“We were too quick to ease the yoke. I’ve said it a thousand times.” Gausta’s silver eyes are splinters. “Policy change is long overdue. We’ve made eighteen in situ arrests, double that for algorithmic arrests. But now the clanners are joining the festivities, battering away at the Polar Six extraction hub with antiquated attack drones. It’s quite a sight.”
Yorick thinks back to the machine sounds he heard through the bubblefab wall. Drones being armed and loaded, maybe running more of the grendel’s code, something that let them stay off the company sensors until it was too late. His wound throbs, skin tugging on gelflesh.
“What do you want me to do?” he asks.
“I want you to leave the fucking grendel, obviously,” Gausta says. “I’ve diverted surface drones and a hot-squad, but the latter’s at least an hour away. You have your carbine. You remember how to kill clanners. Their drone operators are using shortwave. Get position on the rear of the Polar Six and find them.”
“My contract was for grendel work,” Yorick says, automatic.
“Your contract has been amended,” Gausta says. “Which you’d know if you weren’t so busy playing hide-and-find in a signal-sucking hole in the ground.”
Yorick stares at her. “Getting agitated doesn’t suit you so well.”
A flicker passes through Gausta’s eyes. “There is no one for whom it is well, is there, Yorick?”
Thello motions from outside the cone, impatient.
Yorick keeps his attention on Gausta. “I’m well,” he says. “I’ll do it. I just don’t like having my contracts fucked with.” He tips his head to one side. The spinal cartilage crackles, like an old man’s back. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
“You’ll be compensated,” Gausta says. “The hot-squad will meet you there.”
She ends the call. Thello is still for a moment, reviewing the conversation, dissecting it. Then he turns off the holorig and stands.
“Am I going to the Polar Six?” Yorick asks.
“No,” his brother says. “Hood.”
CHAPTER 45
When it comes off again, Ymir is howling. The voice matches the cold that has crept steadily through his bones for the past several minutes, as they rose higher and higher on some sort of platform, an improvised lift that swayed and lurched under Yorick’s feet. Every time he tensed to regain his balance, he felt the incision tug.
Now the platform is still, but he finds he can’t relax any part of himself. Not with Ymir’s pitch-black sky shrieking through the porthole overhead, not with the adrenal current crackling through the narrow vertical shaft. Blurred bodies are moving all around him, clanners checking each other’s surface gear, fitting their breathers. One of them dumps a bundle at his shins.
“Here’s yours, Butcher. Keep that gutjack good and warm.”
Yorick waits for his eyes to adjust to the light, reddish-orange, cast by biolamp. Then he gears up: one-piece thermal suit, clawed boots, mantle with a hood that’s much thicker than the antisensory one but equipped with goggles and earports.
All of it is typical clanner patchwork, repaired a hundred times over, punctures sealed with silicate or impact gel. Whoever patched the series of tears on this mantle’s back stylized them into plunging meteors, etched tails behind them. He can admit there’s an artistry to clanner gear. Same as jig shoes, same as the Cut’s best biomods. Ugly-beautiful.
He hinges too deep putting the boots on, and something shifts, throwing a hot lance through his midsection. He hisses inward.
Above them, the porthole grinds all the way open. The wind’s howl doubles, banshee-like, until Yorick seals his hood. The earports filter it to a background roar and amplify the more immediate sounds. Normally there’s a talknet, too, but he hasn’t been linked. He looks around through the goggles, lenses painting the shaft an eerie pale green.
He finally sees the grendel, clinging to the wall over their heads with several long spiny limbs. Its shape reminds him of the gutjack, just for an instant, before it reconfigures and scurries up through the porthole. The clanners are beginning to follow it, scaling a short metal ladder with the uncanny grace that only comes from half a lifetime in surface gear.
Yorick knows he will be clumsy, and the incision is already clawing at him. He searches for Thello, his specific way of moving, but can’t extract him from the others.
Someone who isn’t Thello prods Yorick in the small of his back. “You next,” they say. “Careful of the first rung.”
Yorick nods. It’s a short climb, and the microspines in his boots and gloves know when to anchor, when to release, but by the time he gets to the top his entire body is slicked with sweat. His breath is a rattling gasp inside his hood. Something has torn; he is sure of it now. He pictures stomach acid seeping through the fissure, pooling in his pericardium, eating his organs.
Thello’s fault. Thello’s fault, and Thello will pay for it in the same transaction he pays for Yorick’s jawbone turned to splinters. He kneels there in the snow for a second, then he tamps down all the fear, all the pain, and levers himself upright. He realizes this is the first time in twenty years that he’s stepped foot on Ymir’s wind-scoured face.
The dark extends in all directions. From the inside of a skid, cocooned in metal and electronics, the surface might as well be a holo sliding along the windows. Actually standing on it, boots holding to the hardpack while the wind whips and slices, the surface is real in all the worst ways.
There is a reason the clans were dwindling even before Subjugation. Even modded to handle the dark and the cold, humans crave their inverse. Even if the company never came to Ymir, mass migration to the Cut was inevitable.
The clanners are digging something out of the drift, hacking at the snow with heated shovels. He recognizes the tarped shape of a sled, the kind that runs on blubber well or gas badly, and it reminds him of his grandmother’s crumbling surface town. They’re intent on their work. He could start off across the ice and nobody would notice.
The grendel would notice. It’s stalking around the edge of the biolamp’s faint orange pool, extruding and retracting small cilia, tasting the wind, maybe gleaning something from the composition of the snow or the subtle tug of Ymir’s electromagnetic fields. Yorick stares off into the gloom.
An electric-blue pulse interrupts it. He feels a jolt of surprise as he reorients himself; the shaft spat them up much closer to the ansible than he realized. Maybe part of his dread is the faint ripple of xenotech. It’s been a while since the last round of dampers.
