Ymir, page 23
“Linka,” he says. “Please. All those prisoners, they’re going in the biotank because of me. But I can stop it. Let me stop it.” He gives a wild laugh, almost a hyena laugh. “Don’t ruin your fatality rating. Remember? Picking noodles out of my—out of my fucking pericardium?”
Linka doesn’t answer; Yorick twists his head to Nocti.
“I’ll die after,” he says. “I promise. I’ll wander off into a blizzard, how they do in the ballads. Last night on Ymir. But not yet. No dirge yet.”
Nocti takes his fingers off his leg like it scorches them. His sad sealie eyes dance away. “Goodnight, Yorick.”
He’s alone with Fen, and there is no Thello here to keep him alive, to make sure she at least gives him good jig shoes. His voice pitches up, a whining insect. “Let me undo this one thing,” he pleads. “Not all of it. Not anywhere near. But this thing. Let me undo this thing.”
She wipes her massive hands on her spiderwool, and Yorick knows it’s too late, too late.
Time can’t run in reverse.
“It’s not about Thello,” he says, still fumbling for the right echo. “Not about me. Not about you. Ymir free and the company dust. Ymir free and the company—”
The hands wrap around his windpipe. His mandible sputters and buzzes like a wasp with one wing. Fen’s face blurs and whirls above him; fleshy shadows push in from the sides. Yorick sees Thello’s face instead, his brother’s head sliding under the teledoc’s saw.
No clemency this time. He could have begged Gausta again, but he spent those critical hours drinking with a geophage, and even Gausta can’t alter so many charges of conspiracy and insurrection. Thello will go into the dark and never come out. The company won’t sponsor him. They won’t hook him to a neural construct in a hotel.
Yorick grieves. His lungs burn. There’s a foamy roar in his ears, a long needle piercing the center of his forehead, his brain begging for oxygen. He sees a blur in his peripheral as Linka and Nocti move in uncanny sync: Linka’s arm wraps around Fen’s elbow and Nocti darts forward, saying wait, wait, we can’t, we shouldn’t.
Nocti’s hoarse voice blends with Linka’s bellowed protest. Yorick is dimly grateful to them both, even as Fen shrugs Nocti off, sends him sprawling, even as she bears down against Linka’s arm. Her grip slacks for a half second while she readjusts. Yorick sucks down a half mouthful of air, but it will only prolong the process.
His starving neurons put on a last holoshow: the smartglass on the walls starts to pulse on, off, on, off. It glows the same color as the ansible, bathing the bar in a ghostly electric blue.
The pulse accelerates. Fen’s head turns. Her hands lighten just enough for Yorick to follow suit, twisting his bruised neck by increments under her fingers. It’s an interesting hallucination. Host droids are spilling down the stairs, weaving their way into the bar, a procession rerouted from every dusty corner of Southern Urbanite Memory.
Yorick doesn’t have air to laugh. Doesn’t have synapses to guess. The droids stumble into each other as they pad across the floor, following his smeary footprints.
“Linka?” Fen asks.
“Don’t know,” Linka says. “The reboot never finished. The hotel’s still sealed. Or looks it, at least, in the cams I got back.” Her arms are still tight around Yorick’s torso. “It’s like it’s sleepwalking.”
“Dreaming,” Fen mutters, and her hands peel away from his neck.
Yorick gasps. He forces air down into his searing lungs, imagining all the crumpled alveoli reinflating. It’s the first breath after torpor. He takes another. Another. He watches, through blurry eyes, as Fen goes to retrieve the grendel limb.
The droids get there first. They lift it off the floor with their manipulators—carefully, almost reverently. They hold it aloft like a reliquary.
“Apologies, Mister Bellica,” the hotel says, through all the droids at once. “I am experiencing an error. Would you like me to arrange a surface tour this evening? A hazardous blizzard is expected. Northern Ymir is renowned for its hazardous blizzards.”
CHAPTER 69
If Fen decides to finish strangling him, it will take more than thirteen hacked-and-jacked host droids to stop her. But for now, she leaves him alone. When Linka’s arms finally release him, the red even lets him get up. He slides down to the floor on unsteady legs. He leans there on the bar, fingers exploring his swollen throat, while the droids mill around him.
They stay between him and Fen, a ring of clumsy bodyguards, but apart from the chitinous clicking of their joints they’ve gone silent again. The grendel limb keeps circulating, passed from one cluster of manipulators to the next.
Nocti eyes that warily as he refills his vapor pipe. “So they’re grendel now? It has the whole hotel thralled?”
“Most of it,” Linka says, deep in her construct, arms frozen. “And it’s trying to do more. It’s trying to get into the Cut.”
“Let it.” Some of the storm is back in Fen’s pale blue stare. “If we can’t get the grendel to the ansible, let its subroutine, its shade, whatever, fuck up the local net. Do a last bit of damage before the company roots it out.”
Nocti’s pipe clatters to the floor as he comes upright. “Fuck you say, Fen?” His long white hands clench to fists, even though Fen dwarfs him and could take him apart like a child taking apart an effigy of Yorick the Butcher. “Linka needs the net. We let you hide here long enough, you should know that.”
Fen is on the balls of her feet, and Yorick knows there is a part of her that always wants to jig. But it’s only a reflex this time. Her icy eyes flick to the biotank behind the bar, and she looks ashamed for a half moment.
“I’m sorry, Linka,” she says. “Spoke fast.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Linka says. “The grendel mind, it’s not damaging anything. It’s barely even touching it. Sort of just—copying shit. Building an overlay, a lattice overtop. Using that to work the hotel cams, the droids, the doors.”
Yorick thinks of the grendel’s filament in the bubblefab, hovering, waiting, retreating. So different from the way it uses its razor-tipped spines. He tries his voice. Air whistles through his swollen-shut throat and drags glass shards behind it; nobody hears.
“The guards outside are forcing the door,” Linka says. “There’s a pair of drones with them, too. Security drones. Armed.”
Yorick amps the volume in his mandible. “I’ll talk them down,” he says. “Send them away.” Even with the synthesizer compensating, his voice is a shredded whisper. “Fen can stand behind me with a blockgun if you want.”
The giant turns her gaze back to him, to his flimsy barrier of waist-high host droids. “I don’t have a blockgun.”
“Tie a cable around my leg,” Yorick rasps. “I don’t give a shit. Let me get rid of them, so we can get to Thello.”
Fen’s eyes turn to slivers. “What were you doing in the hotel net?” she demands, head cocked toward the bartop where he was laid out only minutes ago. “And why the fuck do you have that lopped-off arm?”
Yorick economizes, to spare his vocal folds. “Memories,” he says.
The host droids go still.
“Mister Bellica, I would like to extend you a special offer,” the hotel says, or the grendel says in its voice. “I am experiencing an error. I’m afraid my—” The chorus distorts. “Zabka-Thello-brother-wound. Is not responsive.” Yorick pictures the brutalized grendel in its faraday cube, his brother in a holding cell. “I would like to extend you a special offer and host your private party.”
“Are you making it do that, Yorick?” Linka asks wearily. “Are you making it talk?”
Yorick shakes his head. He doesn’t know where to look when he speaks—the seething smartglass, the eerily still host droids, the dark ceiling—so he shuts his eyes. “We get the rest of your body,” he says, pushing the words through his raw throat. “We get Thello. We go to the ansible.”
The silence stretches. He opens his eyes. Fen and Nocti are staring in opposite directions, but both of them are listening for the answer. Linka in her biotank must be, too.
The host droids tremble. “I would be happy to do that for you, Mister Bellica. Ymir’s distinctive ansible is visible for kilometers around.”
From up the stairs, Yorick hears Southern Urbanite Memory’s exterior door crack like a bone.
“Go,” Fen says. “I’ll be behind you.”
CHAPTER 70
The security guards scan Yorick’s tattoo twice while he explains, even though they let him inside just a few hours ago. Drone-Te and drone-Vesper are less concerned, floating lazily overhead, untroubled by ancient hotels with cascade glitches. The dancing host droids in the lobby corroborate Yorick’s story, but the guards linger.
“Your neck?” one asks, pointing to his pulped throat.
“I was masturbating,” Yorick says. “These things always happen at the worst times, don’t they.”
The security guards slouch back outside, carrying a jug of fresh bacteria beer to help their shift along. The drones stay. Yorick waits, sweat dampening his spiderwool, for them to grow Gausta’s face, for them to start combing the lobby for hidden insurrectionists.
It takes him a minute to realize the drones are moving in the same anticlockwise circles as the host droids. The grendel fragment is still finding new limbs.
“Safe,” he mutters, massaging his throat.
He traces the shallow craters, the yellow-purple imprints of Fen’s thick fingertips, as she emerges from behind a grime-caked sitting couch. Nocti scampers up from the bar a moment later, more host droids in tow. They seem to like him.
“Now what?” one of them asks, and the voice is harsher than usual, a familiar cadence.
Yorick blinks. “That you, Linka?”
“Yeah.” There is a ghost of satisfaction in her voice. “Yeah, I’m everywhere now. It let me into the overlay. Feels good to—to stretch.”
“You know where they’re holding prisoners, company man?” Fen demands, already crossing the lobby to the lift.
Yorick dredges it from his last conversation with Gausta. “Temporary camp just outside the Cut,” he says, trailing after her. “Just east, probably. Away from the mines.”
Fen pries the lift doors open, and Yorick feels an incongruent giddiness to finally see the inside of it. Nocti’s obviously been squatting, off and on, for a long time. The cage is a miniature home: the walls are foamed with insulation, probably to keep in sound more than heat, and there’s a nest of rugs and blankets on the floor.
A small shiny tower of mugs and plates sits in one corner, a compact toilet in the other. It’s hooked to a planter, where one minuscule patch of mosscarpet—in sharp contrast to the dead shit everywhere else—grows a springy vivid green. Yorick pictures Nocti singing to it in the gloom, strumming his leg.
Fen fills most of the space when she steps inside. The past day has probably not been comfortable for either of them. He watches as she snatches up a tied bundle of surface gear. A holomask. A hunting rifle, folded down.
“No rounds,” she says, hefting it carefully. “Linka, can you override us the printer restrictions? Get the hotel to make some pellets, at least?”
“Don’t know,” Linka says, through another host droid. “Don’t know how to ask for something that’s not in the printer memory. I can get you flares. More surface gear. Thermal coats. Lanterns.”
“Get us all that,” Yorick says, thinking of Southern Urbanite Memory’s weather prediction. “Please. Dark colors, no glow strips.”
The last thing Fen pulls from the lift is a rattling black bag. She plucks out a familiar medicine capsule. “I was supposed to give you this if he couldn’t,” she says, baleful. “But I guess the company sorted you out.”
“He gave me his,” Yorick says.
Fen shakes her head slightly. She must be thinking what Gausta thinks, parasitic fraternal attachments, but she doesn’t say anything. She reaches back into the bag. “Dampers,” she says, waving the bubbled strip. “For when we get to the ansible.”
“Good. Good.” Yorick works a bit of saliva out of his dry glands, trickles it down his raw throat. “Save them for the last minute.”
Fen nods, but her tawny brows knit together. “Even if we free Thello and the grendel and the others—especially if we free them—the ansible security will be jacked all the way up. No more fooling it with a fucking holomask.”
“We’ll find a way,” Yorick says, and he doesn’t say that this is a fated thing, but he knows it in the cold half of his blood. He hears a murmured conversation, one side of it a synthesized hiss. He turns around.
Nocti is standing beside one of the host droids, holding hands with its manipulator. His face is etched with worry. “Last night on Ymir,” the musician says.
“Yeah,” Yorick says. His artificial tongue tiptoes his teeth. He asks. “You get more doxy yet?”
Nocti shakes his head. “No. I’m coming with you, though.” His dark sealie eyes flick down to the droid. “We decided.”
“You shouldn’t,” Yorick says, and surprises himself with how strongly he feels it. “You two aren’t implicated yet. All that happened here was a glitch.”
“We’re pretty fucking implicated, Yorick,” Linka says from the host droid. “They just have to think about it for half a second.” Her manipulator squeezes tight to Nocti’s hand. “Maybe it’ll work. You and Thello and your fucking grendel game. If it does, no more company prisons. No more chop lotto.” A jagged electric laugh. “If it doesn’t work, we were in the shit anyway.”
“Maybe we’ll finally match,” Nocti says, thoughtful, no hint of a smile. “Two beautiful biotanks, set behind a long gray bar.”
Linka makes the same electric sound, but Yorick knows it’s the other one.
CHAPTER 71
The printer spits out the last of their gear and they use the nearest hotel room to double-coat their spiderwool, thick as they can make it without binding their limbs. The grendel fragment compacts itself, pares enough code to fit back into the detached arm and the security drone carrying it. Linka says the void left in the hotel net sort of echoes.
“Dam Gausta might call the hotel,” Yorick says, turning in circles under the spiderwool nozzle. “If she does, can you be me? There should be enough camtime from the mirrors. The smartglass.”
“Southern Urbanite Memory respects the privacy of its guests,” Linka says, her electric voice somehow bone-dry. “Yeah. There’s plenty. I can try.” She pauses. “You speak to yourself a lot. How I did, back when I was teaching the synthesizer.”
Yorick switches off the spiderwool nozzle. “I form habits easily, I think.”
“I wasn’t going to let Fen do it,” Linka says, in a crackly whisper. “Even if you deserve it. I was about to stab her in the foot when the droids showed up. So—I don’t know. So make that count for something, I guess.”
“Yeah. I will.”
“Anything specific I should do? For the call?”
“If she asks if I’m well, tell her there is nobody for whom it is well. Those words. Specifically.” Yorick swallows. “Otherwise, just act like me.”
“A little sad, a little dumbsick,” Linka says. “Got it.”
“Yeah.” Yorick finds his throat has somehow closed even tighter. “Yeah. Thanks.”
CHAPTER 72
They leave through the back, a loading bay that’s all dying dust-caked coral and rusty metal. First Fen, scarved in company yellow that can pass at a distance. Then the drone, which will do the rest of the work. Then Yorick, ready for his final night on the ice.
Nocti last; the host droid has been whispering to him. Before he follows them out, he kisses his pale hand and waves it through the dark, like he’s leaving traces for Linka to find.
CHAPTER 73
Nobody stops them on the way to the secondary skid terminal. The company soldiers are on the surface; the company drones observe three employees and one of their own escorting. The cold-bloods stay far away. Yorick feels a brief jolt of surprise when he sees someone at the end of the block, another jolt when he sees they have no head.
The mannequin. It’s still dancing, the same way it danced that first morning he passed it with Fen. Somebody must have hacked its head off—likely during the protest with seventy-eight attendees, judging by the fresh red graffiti on its chest. One colonist character, no translation: AGAIN?
Yorick wants to say no, no, not again. But its herky limbs and missing head make him think of the prisoners in the camp, being digested by inevitable processes: The communal cells first, where they’ll speak to each other if they’re unwary and give the algorithm targets. Then the interrogation pods. Then, if their crimes are severe enough, or if a viable claim of overcrowding can be made, the saw.
The decapitated mannequin feels like a bad omen, but Nocti ducks in close to rub his hand against a worn spot on its knee. Fen ignores it. Yorick takes a wide berth. They’re walking quickly and he forgot to bring his phedrine. He can finally feel his scarred-shut incision again. He tries to time his steps to the small dull throb.
Nearly to the terminal. The uptube is lit at night, a column of blinking yellow holo that stretches up through the dark like the spine of some enormous sea creature. It lures the four of them in, all the way to the blue-tiled entrance. Yorick’s eyes momentarily imprint Wickam and the other miners playing dice on an overturned crate.
They stop at the door. He drinks from the waterbag Linka gave him, forcing the warm saline down his crushed throat. He’s already half emptied it.
“My geneprint will alert every company system in the Cut by now,” Fen says. She glances upward at the drifting drone. “Other than our little shadow.”
Yorick touches his neck. His tattoo will probably override the door, but Gausta will know he’s left the hotel. He’s still weighing things, still wishing he had his hounds, when the drone floats forward. Its chassis shudders; there’s a surge of static and the terminal opens.
