Ymir, page 19
That makes him laugh even harder.
CHAPTER 53
The geotag breadcrumbs lead them to a metal-plugged hole in the ice, northeast of the Maw. Yorick knows he emerged from it only a few hours ago—him and Thello, the grendel, nine clanners—but it feels like a different lifetime. A different Yorick.
Now he’s the ninth man of a hot-squad, the ninth head of a beautiful and dangerous organism. The tac hood is so different from the hood he wore down below. Instead of black static, he sees everything: heat trails wafting through the air, quicksilver echoes, color-coded swathes of background radiation.
His chamsuited squadmates are visible again, betrayed by their scalding blood, their thudding organs. Their vulnerability makes him squirm. He needs to keep them safe, needs it like oxygen. The talknet tags each of them with vitals, objectives, directionals. He can see the ghosts of where they intend to be next, like motion blur run in reverse.
The giggling has stopped. They’re focused now, studying the cave layout Yorick dredged from rough memory. Hyena doesn’t play well with neuroleptics, so they’re going down without damper drugs. Only one soldier has done ansible shifts, but all of them have simmed combat in xeno-architecture, and the company’s sims have only gotten better in the past two decades.
They know what to do. When the skid shivers to a halt, Yorick knows, too. They spill out of the hatch, establish sight lines, converge on the entrance. He slips into his spot on the flank like slipping into a familiar coat, the one the company always prints for him. He barely feels the cold. Raid gear doesn’t have thermal coils, but on hyena it doesn’t matter.
Hot-squads run hot.
A simple pictogram shuttles from point to point in Yorick’s hood, successive confirmation: bare ice, no sign of the grendel. Maybe they passed it on the way; it could have burrowed into the snow and they thundered past unseeing. Maybe it beat them back here and is waiting down below. He scans his empty stretch of ground one more time, then adds the final all clear.
The squad has consensus. Two sniff the metal plating for explosives or dead man’s traps; a third readies the thermite lance. It hisses to life, a miniature sun gushing sparks into the void. The hyena makes Yorick feel like he can track the trajectory of each and every one.
The burn illuminates a few details he missed last time he was here. He sees a snow ridge shaped by hand, not wind. Telltale ripples of melt and refreeze. If this was the clanners’ only way in and out of the cave, someone must have seen them out here. Seen them hauling supplies over the ice, sending them down.
But if it was reported, it was probably reported to Petra Zabka, Polar Seven overseer. Yorick shakes himself. His nearest squadmate mirrors it.
The lock melts; the lance goes dark; gloved hands reach into the steam and haul the metal plating away. The squad leader puts Yorick’s ghostly future self beside her. He steps forward and peers into the shaft. It’s smaller than it seemed in the dark, maybe a quarter the diameter of the mine’s main entrance. Not wide enough to drop a skid.
He inspects the rickety lift, cannibalized from bits of hauling track, that he rode to the surface. There are gaps in its metal floor. He crouches to look through one, and way down below he sees the faint alien glow of the cave. He remembers another long climb, a lonely one with an unpleasant task waiting at the end.
The squad leader touches his elbow. He wonders if she knows about Laska’s Cradle. Maybe it’s part of the prep for surface work in the north. Or maybe the company has expunged it from their net entirely, the way Yorick tries to expunge it.
“Nothing triggered,” the squad leader says. “Good and ghostly so far. We can drop a drone—a quiet one—to clarify your map.”
The cave layout he shared in the skid reappears in his hood. The drone would do better, but Yorick is wary after seeing the grendel’s newest trick, the way it made the ansible’s sentinels turn on each other. Not worried—he can’t be worried on hyena. But wary.
“If the grendel’s down there, it might hack and jack it,” he says. “This one talks.”
She nods. “Alright. Better to go in blurry than hand over our own eyeballs.” She stares at the mouth of the shaft; he pictures the beautiful blue-brown dyad behind her goggles. “No drones. All weapons on manual, how you said. Shielded talknet.”
“Are we climbing?” Yorick asks, flexing his hands. These gloves aren’t as warm as the last pair, but they have other advantages: a sheathed claw for combat, hydrostatic muscles and cilia for climbing. Better than microspines, but it’s still a long way down. The incision he can no longer feel might split open from the repeated motions.
She regards him briefly, then shakes her head. “We’ll use spiderlines. Good and fast and quiet.” Her voice carries a zen sort of pleasure, like the plan is something pulled from a fond reverie. “Chamsuits are built to fool humans,” she says. “Do they fool grendels?”
Yorick looks down at the small feedback cascade where her camouflaged hand imitates his arm, his camouflaged arm imitates her hand. “Sometimes,” he says, feeling an incongruous grin on his face. “But this one’s a quick learner. And usually, down in the dark, they adapt to see infrared.”
“We see infrared.” She sounds almost offended; Yorick understands why. Hyena doesn’t like having its dichotomy—us or them, friends or targets—bridged by similarities. “I guess if we need to, we can drop flares and fuck all visibility equally.” She rubs absently at his arm. “Work by echolocation instead.”
Her orders scroll through Yorick’s hood. The thermite lance flares again, this time to cut the bottom out of the lift. Two squadmates haul a portable fabricator to the lip of the shaft. It starts to spin, regurgitating silvery-gray strands that come out gleaming wet, wafting steam.
By the time the hole is ready, so are the spiderlines. Yorick watches the first soldier step up. He can tell from their movements that it’s the one who shuddered, the one with silver teeth. The acid-yellow tag over their head calls them Piro.
Yorick helps them hook on, mollybonding the line to the back of their chamsuit. Another squadmate checks the tensile. Taps their shoulder twice. Piro crouches at the edge of the hole, then tumbles forward, diving into the dark. Yorick feels a warm flush of pride for their grace, their fearlessness. He hooks on next.
“Way down we go,” Gausta says in his ear.
Yorick can’t tell if it’s her, or her avatar, or his own memory. He dives.
CHAPTER 54
The fall feels good. The spiderline spins out behind him at the perfect speed, a hair from freefall, and the skeletal harness in Yorick’s raid gear is there to distribute gravity’s crush. It turns the rushing dark to a buoyant cloud. He can see his squadmate below him, sense the one above him. The hyena makes it feel like they’re sharing a dream.
Then the shaft opens up, and it goes nightmare. The dark peels away, replaced by the sourceless light, almost day, almost night, tingeing everything a poisonous pale green. There are jagged shapes hurtling out of the walls, or seething just beyond them. He can’t tell if he’s falling down or up. Maybe the spiderline is retracting, pulling him back to the surface.
He switches fully to infrared. The architecture around him turns uniform, everything the same cold shade of violet. It cuts his vertigo as he decelerates. The spiderline brings him to a smooth halt, his toes just scraping the floor. Piro has their carbine drawn, sighting angles; Yorick frees them from the line and takes their place.
The cave is a gelid sea of purple, bubblefabs rising off to the left like red-orange islands. He unracks his carbine, then covers his squadmate while they chase and replace their doppelganger, getting deeper position. The next squadmate has already touched down. He feels their gentle hands unhooking him from the spiderline.
In moments, eight of their nine are fanned out across the cave’s shifting floor. The part sealie called Shammet is kneeling, hit harder by the brain-bend; Yorick feels a pang of mirror neuron worry. The squad leader pictograms a little company soldier ducking out of a firefight, flashing the okay: if you can’t ride it out, stay down.
Yorick adds his assent to the digital wave, throat welling with empathy, then they stalk forward as eight. He scans his wedge of ground and ceiling for any sign of his quarry. Any flashes of waste heat. Grendels run hot, too. Nobody’s ever managed to reverse-engineer the pulsing semiorganic reactors that power them.
Most Oldie tech is beyond detritivores. As they push forward into the cave, moving low and quiet, they enter the row of structures Yorick remembers from his brief captivity or else from a bad dream. He sees them as avian skeletons hatching from trapezoidal cysts, then biomechanical trees sprouting downward into the earth.
Maybe the grendel knows what they’re for, if they’re art or machine or natural extrusions of the unnatural biostone. Yorick doesn’t talk to grendels, though. He hunts them. It’s been a long time since he hunted in a pack, but the hyena in his bloodstream makes it feel like he never stopped.
The next pictogram is pincered arrows, revolving eyes, a snarl of tendrils. Yorick understands it in his central nervous system, his distributed gray matter, more than he does in his brain: we clear the bubblefabs, but stay watchful for the grendel.
He follows his grainy electric ghost along the left flank, gliding between two glowing orange squadmates. They close in on their assigned bubblefab. The red blobs differentiate to their individual heat sources. He sees a sputtering cooker, scalding mugs forgotten on top.
Three bodies—the count is confirmed over and over in his hood. Three clanners in argument, their booming muffled by the bubblefab walls. He can’t split words from the northerner cadences, but he can tell they’re agitated, maybe scared. Hyena is excited by that. He can feel the giggle building in his throat. He verifies his mandible is muted.
The other pincers of the squad arrive at the other bubblefabs. They report no occupants. Some iterations of the pictogram droop slightly, wistful. Scant targets. Yorick sympathizes, but he’s also glad to be one of the shooters. His blood is humming. The bubblefab membrane isn’t reinforced. A shock round should penetrate with minimal deviation.
He scopes, finding the center mass of a blister-red body.
A directional bursts in his hood. His head swings, yanked to the firework going off over Shammet’s. Her vitals are flaring. She’s not screaming, but she’s gurgling, a weak wet sound that comes loud on the otherwise silent talknet. She is struggling against air.
He drops the infrared, and it inverts. Shammet’s chamsuit is barely visible, a nauseating ripple of green and gray, but the grendel is clear. Its body is all spines. Half are coated in blood. One plunges into Shammet’s blurry head, and Yorick almost feels the bone crunch.
Hyena bays and weeps.
But it knows she’s dead, so when he snaps his carbine over from shock rounds to shredders he uses a wide spray. His nanotipped rounds join an entropic hail; every squadmate with an angle raised and fired simultaneously.
The grendel doesn’t collapse. It vanishes, reappears two meters left, holding the remains of Shammet’s corpse over itself like a shield. It drops her. Flickers again, a glitching holo, and is suddenly halfway to the wall of the cave. Flickers a third time, and disappears.
Yorick has no time to figure out this new trick, how it turned its miasmic body into a chamsuit. The squad leader pulses an urgent reminder in his hood, another directional, just before the bubblefab breaks open. The clanners spill out: two with blockguns, one hefting a fat-hunter’s harpoon. He wheels and rescopes to his assigned target.
The pair with blockguns go down twitching, but Yorick’s clanner does something else. The man’s body from hip to rib cage turns to chunks and spatter. The cloud of blood and fabric and bone fragments seems to blossom outward, and in that adrenaline eternity Yorick has time to remember that all weapons are on manual, and he never snapped back to shock rounds.
Hyena shrugs.
Three targets are incapacitated; the fourth will take more work. He pivots back into place, resorbed by the pack, and they hunt. Confirmation loops through his hood: nothing on infrared, now nothing on standard optics, either. He flips filter to echolocation and sees a jumble of shapes, silver on black, none of them the grendel.
He remembers the jammer in the tunnel. The security drones that turned cannibal on the ice. He unmutes his mandible, but the squad leader is quicker.
“It’s in our goggles,” she says, using the talknet, no easy pictogram for something that has never happened or even been simmed before. “The grendel’s hacking and jacking our feed. Hoods off, implants off if you have them. Naked eyes only.”
Yorick shuffles through the spectrum one more time, sees a brief glance of Shammet’s sundered body slowly fading to bluish purple. Then he undoes his hood and peels it away from his sweat-slimed face. The cave feels like a living thing again, swelling and contracting. Shadows are not where they should be. The floor seems to be shrinking away from his feet.
Hyena whines, amped nerves overloaded, but it quiets when he sees his squad. They’re a ragged row of floating faces, and they’re as fiercely beautiful as ever. Stepping off a never-ending precipice is nothing if he does it for them. He forces his way forward.
They comb the cave, find the tunnel entrance still genelocked shut. They fire exploratory rounds on Yorick’s call, first shock, then shredder, into the walls and ceiling. The architecture absorbs most of them scarlessly, seems almost to swallow them. None of the rounds drive the grendel out of hiding.
On Yorick’s other hunts, on Wodin and Hod, his quarry was savage, single-minded, no smarter than a vatgrown dog. This one is so different. The grendel has been awake for a long time, trapped deep underground. It’s patient. He has that memory again, of Thello babbling in the dark, and pushes it away.
The row of structures pulls him in. He angles toward them, drifting slightly out of sync, stretching the invisible tether between him and Piro and the soft-footed squadmate called Nim. They tweak their own trajectories to accommodate him. His chest chokes up with momentary gratitude.
The structures have mutated again, less Euclidean than ever. It brings his vertigo back and reminds him they can’t stay down here much longer without damper drugs. Maybe the grendel knows that. Maybe it’s waiting them out, waiting for the brain-bend to pulp their cerebellums.
Yorick moves down the row. His nerve suit is stashed in the skid. If he retrieves it and gets it tuned right, using it in tiny bursts, maybe he can stand the interference just long enough to get a glimpse of the—
It erupts from the structure, or was the structure. Yorick has no hood to send the directional for him, to warn the squad, and as he goes for the trigger the grendel’s serrated limb drops through his carbine. The weapon cleaves apart in his hands. Another limb hooks his legs; he amps his mandible to scream but the cave floor slams the wind out of him. He only makes a humming wheeze.
The grendel swells above him like storm cloud. He sees the punctures across its body, places where shredders managed to burrow through xenocarbon. The elastic red cracks are all sealed up now. All except one, a gash opening over his head. A mouth.
For a vivid moment he knows the grendel is going to eat him. It will render him down, recycle his traitor’s anatomy. Then the wasp voice swarms his ears:
“Don’t, Yorick. Don’t fucking do this.”
Thello’s voice in pantomime, pitched too high this time, nothing Yorick remembers hearing. It’s making its own scripts now. He thrashes against its weight, trying to free his pinned arms. The grendel’s red mouth turns inside out, fractures, reforms as a tendril. It looks wet in the cave light, a wriggling eel. Yorick kicks.
He smells ozone. A squall of shock rounds hammers the grendel from all angles, sparking and sizzling. The overspill bristles his skin as static, stands his body hair on end. But the squad won’t fire shredders until he’s clear; he knows it in his bones and it makes him want to weep. He focuses on freeing his left arm. The socket is still loose.
He waits for the tendril to sharpen into a spine, to drive through his neck. It doesn’t. It goes even finer, becoming the rust-red filament he should have expected from the start. It traces his face, searching for an entry. The grendel wants an explanation.
Yorick jerks his head back, but a pincer clamps around his skull, holding him in place. The filament hisses into the corner of his eye how it did to Thello. He feels it wriggling, sliding past the tear duct. Brushes a nerve, makes him see sparks, and then—
Two children are walking through a desert. Snow, not sand. They are not hand in hand. The older is moving quick and determined, the younger is trailing behind, weeping. They crunch through the snow. They breathe small packets of steam into the icy air. A butterfly is leading the way. The butterfly is a dirty metal drone, buzzing and clacking.
They crest the wind-carved snow dune. On the other side: the ship, a towering freighter, cradled and ready to be launched. The older boy starts to run, skidding down the slope. The younger follows, keeping pace.
“Don’t go,” he says, in a strange buzzing sob. “Don’t go, don’t go, don’t fucking do this, don’t—”
Outside himself, Yorick feels the filament yank backward. It slithers along his orbital. His vision swims. The grendel is somewhere above him; he can feel it shuddering, contorting itself. His left arm feels nearly free. He wrenches it the rest of the way, blind and enraged. He unsheathes the combat claw in his glove and slashes in a wild arc.
The blade splinters on xenocarbon, no better than a graft-knife, but he manages to wrap his hand around one of the grendel’s limbs. Hallucinatory afterimages are still stamped behind his eyes: the freighter rising up out of the snow, Thello’s pleading face.
That never happened. That never happened, and Yorick is going to tear the grendel apart for piping one more bad dream into his head. He pulses his grip to activate the hydrostatics; silicate muscles swell and climbing cilia burrow into the grendel’s slippery armor. He is hanging off the sled all over again, desperate, hideously angry.
