Ymir, page 18
His arm stretches. Stretches. He has a brief flash of a fat-hunter wriggling their way into a tiny sleepstack, saying their skeleton is all cartilage, good and flexy. His nerves scream. He screams, too, a harsh electric cipher. Then the sled banks, swinging him against metal, and his dislocated shoulder clacks back into place.
He gets his other hand on. The shoulder pain downshifts to join the rest, so he climbs, driven half by reflex, half by hate, up the back of the sled. The microspines in his boots anchor him when he reaches the top. Thello is obscured, still hiding halfway inside the grendel’s mutating body. Beyond them, the ansible, impossibly big, swallowing up Ymir’s horizon. It puts helium in Yorick’s forehead.
The company flyer comes from nowhere, strafing low. Emps erupt in the snow ahead of them; Thello snaps the steering column left. They slew hard, tipping almost parallel to the ice before the sled’s gyros bob them back upright. Yorick’s goggles are scrubbing themselves clear, but not fast enough. All he sees is pale green rime.
He rips them off and catches a disjointed image: Thello’s lanky arm emerging from the grendel’s red-and-black rorschach, his hooded head turning. Yorick lunges at them, not caring if the grendel’s serrated limbs slice him apart. All he wants is to end this game.
He leads with his lowered head, diving into the grendel. Something gives: flesh, not xenocarbon, something picked off the massacred bodies at the end of Track Five. He claws past it, reaching for Thello. They bank again, and Yorick sees the wind-sculpted drift just before the nose of the sled plows into it, sending up a wave of shattered crust.
Force snaps the microspines in Yorick’s clinging boots. He’s hurled upward; so is Thello, both of them still latched to the grendel. For an endless nanosecond they all hang suspended in the dark. Yorick has a giddy thought in his hindbrain. Time has stopped. It might even run in reverse.
Then: crash.
CHAPTER 50
Back in the torpor pool, cold stasis fluid all around him. Yorick’s head is fragments, bits of brain orbiting his pounding skull, but he knows something has gone wrong. Torpor pools are designed for the clinically dead. Conscious means alive, means he is going to starve slowly to death as the bowlship crawls from one world to another.
He tries his limbs, praying the bowlship’s sensors will notice irregular movement. They move through snow instead of stasis fluid, and reality snaps back into place. He picks up. Down. Readies himself, then starts digging with numb hands. Every motion sends him afterspikes of pain: shoulder, stomach, now neck from the impact.
He imagines it helping him, keeping his muscles hot as the snow tries to sap them cold. He digs. His lungs winch tighter and tighter. For a terrifying moment he wonders if he’s inverted, burrowing deeper under the surface, dooming himself to suffocate.
Then he pierces the drift and sees Ymir’s black sky. He pushes his head clear. Inhales thin air. He fumbles his goggles back into place. The sled is half buried, overturned, gyros finally losing to gravity. Sparks fizz from its dissected engine cowl. Beyond it, a drooping autocannon. Beyond that, the ansible, smaller again.
The wrecked sled’s flicker illuminates a body. His heart crashes against his ribs. Another flicker, and he sees the body split apart, twins coming unjoined as the grendel disgorges Thello from a fleshy cocoon. Yorick was tossed clear on impact, into the soft belly of the snowdrift, but Thello and the grendel landed on hard ice.
Yorick thrashes the rest of the way free, shedding snow as he staggers forward. The grendel hunkers over Thello’s prone form. The filament probes the air between them. Yorick reaches on instinct for his carbine, for his howler or needlegun—all gone. His toe catches a jagged spar of ice. He stumbles. The grendel pivots.
A nonsensical splinter of dream comes to Yorick: the grendel wants to jig.
Instead, it runs away. He watches it go, reaches again for his phantom carbine, but of course the grendel’s not running from him. The company flyer is setting down. Yorick can feel the hot blast of its breath on his back, feel it hammering the air. Company signals are finally flaring through his tattoo again, ghostly vibrations in his mandible.
He confirms his identity and ignores the rest. Ignores the grendel loping away across the ice. He goes to his brother like it’s one of his dreams, feet floating. He finds Thello broken: His left leg twists strangely beneath him. Blood pumps from one mangled hand. Maybe he split it grabbing for the skirt of the sled; maybe it got caught and chewed apart in the grendel’s shifting body.
Sweat is freezing in halos around his dark eyes. His gaze is alert. Alive.
“It doesn’t feel like anything,” Yorick says. He has to howl it, to make sure Thello hears him over the shriek of the wind, the roar of the flyer.
His brother’s intact hand twitches. Yorick watches it move sluggishly across the ice, up onto Thello’s chest. It fumbles to a pocket on the front of his mantle, just below Fen’s white handprint, and strokes the enzyme zipper.
Yorick knows what’s inside. A verbal trigger would be too prone to error. Thello has kept things simple. Corporeal. A small mechanism, fed off his own bioelectricity, that will trigger the gutjack at the touch of his thumb. Yorick thinks of seizing his brother’s arm, twisting it, snapping it to match his demolished leg.
He crouches down and unwraps Thello’s scarf instead. He finds the spiderwooled gap between hood and mantle, and puts his hands around a bobbing throat. The microspines cling. He thinks he can feel a tiny wriggling pulse below them.
“You or me, Thello,” he says. “Do it.”
The pocket peels open. Thello worms his fingers inside.
This is the right way to end the ballad. Thello pulls the trigger again and sends Yorick to the void. There will be nobody to beg the company for clemency. His brother will be debodied, fed to the recycler, and drift in biotank purgatory for as long as the company can keep him there. Maybe decades. Maybe centuries.
If there is an underworld, some hidden quantum kingdom their mother’s stories unknowingly intuited, their shades will eventually meet there and start the cycle over again.
Thello’s fever-bright eyes are glassed over now, dull from shock. He doesn’t have company modifications. Yorick wills him on, how he did in the jigs, as his trembling hand emerges from the pocket. The trigger is small and cylindrical, coated in graphene. When it tumbles out of Thello’s stiff fingers, when it clatters onto the ice, Yorick’s heart stops.
He releases his brother. He crabs backward, scrambling through the snow. He stares at the tiny medicine capsule, the not-trigger, that Thello pried from his pocket.
“These past few hours have been quite eventful, haven’t they, Yorick?” Gausta’s voice in his ear, her hand soft on his aching shoulder. “I’m pleasantly surprised to see you alive.”
Yorick can’t reply. His mandible is intact, functional, but the flesh parts of him are not. He looks up, thinking for a moment that Gausta has come in person to comfort him. To assure him he did hard but necessary things.
The company soldier wearing Gausta’s face checks his vitals, running a scan wand up and down his body. He imagines it finding nothing but slick black ice.
CHAPTER 51
They have a teledoc in the back of the flyer, and it confirms all of Yorick’s fears, all of his failings. The fallen capsule has his chiral molecule jellied inside. The teledoc feeds it to him, prodding it into his slack mouth. The gutjack sees its perfect mirror and dissolves into harmless proteins. He feels it as a soft implosion.
“A grendel that talks.” Gausta has no holo now; her voice comes disembodied. “A grendel that cooperates with an insurrectionist crew of miners and clanners in order to gain access to our ansible. This really is a fascinating deviation.”
Yorick has told her what he knows, told it mechanically, reflexively, as if he was a recruit again and she was the company man in the yellow coat. She has told him a few things in return. The Cut is quiet again, locked down tight by swarms of redeployed security drones. Half the hot-squad is moving by skid to hunt down the clanners at the Polar Six Mine.
The other half is here. They followed the gutjack, the same digital whisper that attracted the ansible’s remaining security drones, and cleaned up the aftermath of the ambush. Yorick is not the only one lying in the back of the flyer. The clanners from the sleds are arranged all around him, still studded with shock rounds. Their jerks and twitches are smaller now that their nerves are exhausted.
“We didn’t see your clever monster from the flyer,” Gausta says. “Our troops on the ground didn’t see it, either. Though they were, admittedly, focused on your safe retrieval.”
The teledoc shuttles to the next patient over, and Yorick pulls himself upright. “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “I saw it. If it can’t get to the ansible, it’s heading back to the cave. Back to the mine. It knows it can hide down there forever.”
He has to think tactics. Think hunting. He can’t think about the body at the edge of his peripheral, the limp hand being stapled shut by a whirring white tool, the blood being suctioned away by a puckered bioplastic mouth. Hands are so full of veins.
“The same place Zabka hid, I assume.” Gausta’s voice is thoughtful. “After his supposed demise.”
Hearing Thello’s false name again jolts. Yorick thinks for a moment that she must be doing it intentionally, mercifully, trying to distance him from the moment in the snow and the body beside him. But then he remembers his alterations to the company records, and remembers that here in the flyer, still wearing surface gear, Thello looks like any other clanner.
The teledoc is done with the hand. Now it goes to the leg, slicing the thermal suit away for access. The small blade snicks and sighs.
Yorick presses his eyes shut. “There’s a shaft that goes vertical, all the way from the cave to the surface,” he says. “You have the geotag trail from the gutjack. We can follow that back to the shaft.” His closed eyes only make the sounds of the teledoc more vivid—shifting bone now, as it sets the wrecked leg. “Either we find the grendel on the way, or we find it down below.”
“And the remaining conspirators?” Gausta’s voice is almost joyful. “Did they all vacate their hiding hole? Or are there more of them waiting below, anticipating revolution?”
Yorick thinks back to the bubblefabs, to his blind headcounts. Maybe there’s a rearguard, or maybe every able body left to do Thello’s work, whether on the ice or in the Cut. He doesn’t know, but it doesn’t matter.
“More of them,” he says. “More prisoners. More blood.”
Gausta pretends not to hear the last bit. “Then we’ll drop the other skid,” she says. “The skid will go to the shaft, quickly and quietly. The flyer will watch the Polar Seven’s main entrance—the Maw, as they call it. In case it regurgitates any fleeing insurrectionists.”
“I’m going in the skid,” Yorick says, because he needs to be anywhere but here.
Gausta is silent for a second. When she replies, the concern in her voice sounds almost real. “Your entire torso is a patchwork of badly bonded gelflesh, Yorick. Better you watch from the flyer while the teledoc works on you.”
“The teledoc can have me after. You need me now, for the grendel.”
“You said your nerve suit is rendered useless in the cave. You’ll just be a soldier.”
“Good.” Yorick looks at the squad members moving around him, the way they cock their heads, the near-instantaneous ripple of body language. “I’m nostalgic,” he says. “I miss the hyena.”
He can picture Gausta’s distant smile. “So do I,” she says, then, switching code: “Because the teledoc advises against your participation in this raid, you will not be eligible for additional hurtpay if you sustain further injuries or exacerbate current damage. Do you accept that?”
“Yeah. Accepted.”
“If you find the grendel, try to take it functioning,” she says. “If it self-immolates, as I understand grendels are wont to do, so be it. My main concern is that no insurrectionists escape the long bed they’ve made for themselves.”
“I understand.”
“Alright, Yorick,” Gausta says. “Go have your fun, then.”
The teledoc slides back over, baring an injector. He’s so grateful he almost sobs.
CHAPTER 52
Yorick knows, in theory, that he’s falling apart. He knows he should be watching this raid from a distance, with a forest of stemtags stuck in his belly. But as the skid hurtles across Ymir’s ice, halogens cranked to catch the grendel’s silhouette, he feels goddish. His body is a bundle of razors and electrical wire. Everything around him is bright, humming, clean.
He’s amped to the gills on hyena and pain-eaters. He can feel the former doing its work as he looks over the squad—his squad. Eight company soldiers in raid gear, swaying with the motion of the skid. With their hoods down and chamsuits active, sponging up the gray textures of the interior, they look like eight debodied heads.
But he doesn’t want to think about debodying, about Linka in her biotank or prisoners under the teledoc. He only wants to think about his squad. They’re young. Smooth faces, raw eyes. Most of them look like offworlders; two look part sealie, but they’re from the south, where the company rooted early and deep, so they’ve never been called half-blood.
All eight of them are so beautiful, so good—the way they angle their shoulders, the way they hold their weapons—it makes Yorick’s throat ache. Hyena does that. That’s why it’s the wardrug he loved and hated most back in Subjugation days.
It comes on like phetamine at first. Laser-scoured focus. Boosted reflexes. Mitochondrial explosions of speed and stamina. But in conjunction with company pheromones, the behavioral tweaks come out to play: upped affection for anyone giving off the right scent, and upped aggression for anyone who’s not.
Yorick still remembers the first time he took hyena. He cried inside his tac hood, fogging the goggles, overwhelmed by the cell-deep knowledge that his squad loved him and he loved them. He couldn’t move, let alone run surface drills. The soldier who injected him apologized. They said they must have miscalibrated, made the dose too high.
The comedown was a sick shivering thing, and Yorick avoided the drug for weeks afterward out of guilt. He felt like he’d somehow betrayed Thello by using it. He was haunted by the fragile happy memory of it, by a ghost of serotonin.
Now guilt and confusion are impossible fractals. He feels no anger, no anguish, not even prefight fear. The hyena washes all that away and replaces it with a diffuse happiness, anticipation bubbling up underneath. The world binaries: friends inside the skid, targets outside it.
“Bleak up here, isn’t it?” The hot-squad’s leader is beside him, smiling out the window. “So dark. Like the bottom of a sea.”
She’s not from here. Her eyes are heterochromatic. Her skin is deep brown. Her face is small but her hands are brawny and bony, combat implants bulging under the flesh. Every part of her is so perfect.
“There’s a sea, too,” he says. “Out east, under the ice.”
She cocks her head. “Right. Right. I remember the school-sim.”
Yorick feels his head cock the same way, and when she touches him, idly adjusting his shoulder cam, he feels a thousand tiny hands sprout from his skin and strain for hers. Out of all the drugs he used to approximate desire back when he was young, back when he felt ashamed to lack it, hyena came closest. It’s the only thing that ever made him want to touch gently.
“That’s the sea where they found the giants’ bones,” says another soldier, one of the part sealies. “The leviathans.”
“I know a woman says those were the Oldies.” This soldier has gleaming silver teeth. “When the grendels came for them, they genejacked themselves into big old fishes and hid down there in the dark. Tried to wait them out.”
“We can ask,” the part sealie says. “We can ask the grendel when we find it. This one talks.”
“The algorithm will talk to it,” Yorick corrects. He feels a rhythm in his skull, a buzz saw coming online, going off. “You and me are going to hunt it.”
The reminder of his differentiation, that he’s a stranger brought in by bowlship, not a fellow soldier from the garrison, reignites their curiosity for a moment. Eager eyes flick across him, lingering on his mandible. Yorick feels no shame. The pheromone comfort fills the whole skid, makes it safe as a womb.
“We’re going to hunt a grendel,” says the soldier with the silver teeth. “And have a few insurrectionists for afters.”
They give a happy shudder, and Yorick feels it, too, the sly electric thrill of violence to come. The shudder catches, rippling through the entire squad. Then the giggling, the one side effect the company never managed to excise from their favorite wardrug. Yorick doesn’t think they tried very hard.
When silence is essential, hot-squads mostly use pictograms and directionals anyway, no mics. When silence is not essential, there is something about being stalked through a battlefield by oil-black laughter, giddy and predatory, that makes enemies lose their nerve.
He squeezes his eyes shut and ignores the impulse. It’s his own small tradition, this vestigial defiance. He always held out against the laugh for as long as he could—maybe trying to assert mastery over his chemistry. Now, when he closes his eyes, he sees mangled Thello in the snow. He sees the chiral molecule that his brother couldn’t have meant for him, but did.
It doesn’t matter. Hyena makes everything simple: get the grendel, get off Ymir. Gausta will have a bowlship waiting for him. A torpor pool, waiting for him. He’ll sink under the stasis fluid and sleep with no dreams. Maybe she can even put him on the long orbit, a slow loop through company space, and by the time he thaws nobody will know about Yorick or Thello Metu.
The buzz saw comes again, choppy, vibrato. Yorick finally recognizes the sound: his own giggle, forced through the mandible’s synthesizer. He’s joined the laughing already. He was the one who first set it creeping through the skid.
