Ymir, page 24
“Clever little shadow,” Nocti murmurs.
Cleverer than the hounds, even now that it’s shrunk down and cut off from the hotel net. Yorick thinks of the grendel’s other nodes, the other electric brains arrayed around its semiorganic reactor. If each one has this fragment’s capacities, they must be frighteningly fast in concert.
That’s what they are going to unleash into the ansible: not some ravenous vatdog, but a machine mind smarter than the company algorithm, far smarter than the walking bags of meat it’s been cooperating with.
The thought uneases him as they follow the drone inside. He smells metal, spilled gas. The terminal is murky but Fen knows her way through it. She leads them past the mouth of the uptube. Their footsteps clank and echo against the grilled floor, the drains built to catch runoff when they deice the skids. Yorick can hear wind far above him, howling over the top of the uptube, shrieking along tiny irregularities in the seal.
The blizzard is coming.
Fen finds the smallest skid and unclamps it, no need for the drone this time. She must have left her own backdoor in the locking system when she brought it back from the Polar Seven. The skid thunks to the floor, reverberates. She opens the hatch.
They shove their bagged gear and equipment inside, then barge the skid over to the uptube. Yorick regrets assisting; something deep in his gut strains on the last shove. He straightens up with a sudden film of sweat on his face. He swigs from his waterbag again, ignores the wormy pressure in his bladder.
Fen rotates the skid on the edge of the uptube, making the metal chassis look light as hardfoam, then pushes it into empty space. It bobs slightly on the magnetic cushion.
“Southerly wind.” Nocti is staring upward at the distant seal that keeps the Cut closed. “All those skimmers will be out tonight. That herd you mentioned.”
“Some of them,” Fen says, distracted. “Some spored too early.” She puts her shoulder into a lever, and far above them the top of the uptube grinds open. “We’re not hunting skimmers,” she adds, and gives Yorick a blank look. “Are we, company man?”
She swings into the skid before he can tell her they’re not hunting anything or anyone. Not with the drone’s short-range stunner and one empty rifle. Not when there are fifteen company soldiers at the camp—the eight who handled the Polar Six, the seven who survived the cave raid—with carbines and sidearms.
They will have to be clever, like the drone that’s now folding itself through the skid hatch. Nocti follows. Yorick takes a last look around the inky terminal, remembering the first morning he came here with Fen, Gausta on her holomask, and how bad the doxy comedown was. He still wishes he had a tab of it to wall off the growing ache in his abdomen. To wall off his fear, too.
He climbs inside and closes the hatch. He pictures the dancing mannequin, its arms flailing goodbye.
CHAPTER 74
Running dark again. The skid windows might as well be opaqued. Yorick can see nothing of Ymir, but he can hear its arrhythmic scream. He can feel it, too. The wind is strong enough to slew the skid from side to side as they churn over the ice. His surface boots anchor him to the rocking floor, but it’s still hard to aim his piss. He only gets half into the emptied waterbag.
“Couldn’t wait till we stopped fucking moving?” Fen asks, shifting her foot away from the rivulet. She watched impassively while he undid his thermal suit, while he dug his cock out of the spiderwool; Nocti looked politely away. The drone didn’t seem to notice.
“Was bursting,” Yorick says, holding carefully to the bag while he rearranges his spiderwool.
The urine laps against itself, a hot dark yellow. He dips his fingers inside and starts rubbing it on his neck and wrists. After a day in the clinic, after a binge and a purge virus, there won’t be much of the wardrug left in it. But even faint traces are better than nothing.
“Hyena,” he says, by way of explanation. “Better if it smells its own.”
Fen’s nostrils twitch. “The soldiers will all be running hot, then.”
“Probably half of them,” Yorick says. “The other half will be coming down. You stagger it.” He gets a waft of the ammonia smell and tastes it in his raw throat. “Some people microdose all the time, so it’s just swells and tapers. You can put the ugly morning off for months.”
Fen frowns. “The ones getting an ugly morning. What are they like?”
“Not as sharp,” Yorick says. “But antsier. Angrier. When I could, I always went in a sim to ride it out. Went in my goggles.” He holds out the bag. “It won’t do much for me. For you, less. But it might mean a finger”—he mimes in the air—“is a semisecond slower to a trigger. Semiseconds, you know, they count. They add up.”
The red’s gaze flicks to Nocti. The musician shrugs. “I don’t deal hyena,” he says. “But I know it breaks down slow. Real slow. You maybe get pheromone traces out of urine. Yeah.”
Fen takes the bag and starts smearing her neck. She does it calmly, no glare or threat even though she’s putting a company man’s piss on herself. Yorick isn’t sure if that’s because she has committed herself to the ballad, or because she’s committed to killing him once Thello and the grendel are free. He might already be a corpse in her head.
Nocti takes the dregs. “I think they might wonder, though,” he says, dabbing his neck, “why you and your prisoners smell like piss.”
“They will, but it won’t matter.” Yorick taps his temple. “The tweaks, they’re pure subconscious.”
The musician gives a strange smile. “All of us are subconscious,” he says. “We barely breach for air. I wrote that line last week.”
Yorick pictures him in Linka’s bar, draped out at the corner table, scribbling characters on a tablet. Or maybe huddled in his stalled lift-house, reciting to the patch of growing mosscarpet. He looks out of place here in the bright-lit skid. The surface gear swallows his skinny frame.
Nocti is in a superposition; Yorick wishes he’d stayed behind and is intensely glad he didn’t. If the ballad ends badly for him, there will be no matching biotanks behind the bar. The company is not sentimental. Most likely Nocti and Linka will never see, never hear, never touch any part of each other again, not even in a neural construct.
Fen is wearing her own thermal mantle, not the hotel fashions. When she seals up, Yorick notices a fractured handprint on her midsection, the smaller counterpart to the one he saw on his brother’s shoulder. Thello’s handprint. He waits to feel fury, then to feel jealousy like a hook under his ribs. They don’t come.
“I know why you do that,” Yorick says hoarsely. “The handprints.”
Fen’s eyes flicker.
“We always chalked up before the jig,” Yorick says. “Better grip, in case it went to ground. Thello’s idea.” He puts his hand against his own shoulder. “He left the mark on me by accident the first time. But we won that night, so we got superstitious. We did it every time. My hand on him, when he fought. His on me, when I did.”
“He always told me to make sure it was the only mark on me,” Fen says, speaking to her blurred doppelganger in the skid window.
“Does he spar still?” Yorick asks. “He was always quick. He was always so fucking quick.”
Fen shakes her head. “Thello doesn’t jig. Not for years.” She taps her kneecap. “Bad joint.”
“How long have you known him?” Yorick asks, thinking of how she gripped Thello’s hand in the bubblefab, how his brother paled while the grendel sliced at her back.
She gives him a long look. For a moment he thinks she won’t bother replying. “My whole life,” she says. “He knew my da. He joined the clan before I was walking.”
Yorick remembers he has been gone for twenty years. Fen’s known Thello—the real Thello, not the one from tortured and faulty memories—for as long as he ever did. It should make him sad, but somehow it does the opposite. Thello was not in torpor while he was gone. Thello was living and dreaming.
If Yorick can keep him that way, if he can pry him back out of the trap he laid, there are years and years left to go. Maybe his brother will even be happy, like in the rarest kind of colony ballad.
“Good,” Yorick says. “That’s good. That’s long.”
He splashes the rest of the piss over their outer gear. The stench is becoming unbearable when the smartglass finally shudders an alert. A cluster of red icons appears on the edge of the map, each one pulsing like a tiny heartbeat.
CHAPTER 75
They’ve found the camp, and a moment later the camp finds them. Yorick watches their electronic handshake. Then he hurls his data packet through the storm: company tattoo, contract status, emergency objective. He waits, sick from the smell of the skid and sick from the many fluctuating variables in their plan.
The silent drone is one of those. It hangs from the skid’s ribbed ceiling, welded there by its larger pincer, not unlike the way the grendel clung to the cave walls. Yorick explained the scenario to it twice, feeling dumbsick. It seemed unmoved. When he tried a few directional commands, it ignored those, too.
It still has the grendel’s abandoned limb secured in its smaller pincer, but he wonders now if this fragment of the grendel has a half-life. Separated from the other nodes, cut off from the reactor, it might be unstable. Devolving. Southern Urbanite Memory’s energy grid replenished it for a while, but a drone battery is nowhere near that.
Yorick is yanked from that worry by another. A familiar face is blooming onto the smartglass, one eye wood brown, the other blue—not glacier-pale like Fen’s, but almost cobalt. The squad leader from the cave raid isn’t smiling anymore. Her wide mouth is terse.
“We nearly set the autocannon on you,” she says. “Cams can’t see worth shit out here. Turn your lights on, then bring the prisoners to the meat shop.”
Yorick feels Nocti’s shudder in the air and wishes she’d used a different term. He returns his voice, but no image. He doesn’t want her to see the expression on Fen’s face. Even with the freshly printed cuffs on, her radiating anger will trip the squad’s adrenaline. Might make them more eager to use the saw.
“Four minutes out,” he says, activating the skid’s running lights. “Prep two cells. Please.”
The squad leader blinks her blue and brown eyes. “We’ll empty two,” she says. “Overcrowding.”
She crumbles off the smartglass, leaving Yorick with an ache in his throat and a tremor in his leg. He finishes gearing up, not looking at Fen, not looking at Nocti, either, as they approach the camp. The wind is still building. Ymir rages on all sides.
Inside the skid, there is taut-wire silence. The air reeks. Yorick hasn’t turned his heating coils on yet, but the thermal suit is sweltering. Sweat collects at his groin, under his arms. It puddles in the hollow of his collarbone. He has an unbidden thought, nonsensical and horrible:
Fen has uncapped a canister of biophage inside the skid, vengeance for the seventy-eight, and he is dissolving. She will rescue Thello herself. His brother will never know he was here. He will only see a red mess on the floor.
They pass through the camp perimeter, gapped where two spindly sensor arrays blew over. Yorick guesses they tried to anchor them instead of lopping them off their tripods and shaping some snow into a windbreak. He remembers southern recruits and offworlders making that sort of mistake back in Subjugation days.
In another quantum branch, he might have been able to stealth through the ragged perimeter instead of making this mad bluff. In their branch, their skid heads for the center of the camp. The flyer that brought the squad here is hunkered down inside a ring of storage units and bubblefabs. One tent is already torn halfway up, flapping like a scab.
These soldiers are unaccustomed to northern weather. Yorick hopes most of them are huddled together in the communal bubblefab, cursing the storm. He lets the skid follow the squad leader’s directions. They slow to a crawl, heading for an elongated tent with sensor-meshed walls.
Yorick’s heart batters his ribs. He can’t stop touching his throat, prodding the bruise. The small jab of pain makes things real. When they’re close enough to see the two soldiers waiting in the antechamber, two silhouettes that stomp and shiver, he seals his hood shut.
The goggles take a moment to adjust to the geometry of his face, suctioning to his eye sockets. Then every centimeter of skin is covered. The heat and the stink smother him. He hears Nocti behind him, choke-coughing in his own noxious hood. But even for the dash from skid to tent, they don’t want to let the cold inside their gear.
The skid lurches to a stop. Fen and Nocti both have their cuffs on, flimsy bioplastic things the hotel normally prints in lurid pinks or playful fluorescents. Linka managed to make them the same stark white as company-grade cuffs, but they will only pass briefly and from distance. Their hoods are up, so Yorick can’t tell from their eyes if they’re as scared as he is.
He’s shivering from it. Even though he’s geared up, even though the interior of his thermal suit is cooking him in his own sweat. He is about to commit insurrection of the most blatant variety, and if it succeeds he will come face-to-face with the brother he betrayed first. The brother who has tried so fucking hard to save him from the black hole.
The drone finally stirs, detaching itself from the skid ceiling. Yorick is glad he didn’t have to beg. He fits Fen’s empty hunting rifle in the crook of his arm, then raps on the hatch. It flexes open. The drone goes first, disappearing into the howling dark. Fen and Nocti drop down after it, cautious with their cuffed hands.
Yorick last. The wind nearly drags him off his feet when he touches ice. It makes him think of a hull breach, the bowlship that was punctured in orbit twenty years ago, torpor-white bodies being hurled out into vacuum. Soon the air will be thick with flying snow and visibility will drop to zero. For now, the path to the tent is clear.
They hurry, heads down. The drone crawls, using its pincer as a piton, to keep from being torn away by the wind. Yorick feels the cold as a concept, but none of it seeps through, and then they’re at the entrance. The membrane peels open for them. Squelches shut behind them.
He recognizes the squadmate called Piro even before they wave. “Hello, grendel killer.”
The other soldier’s body language is foreign; they must be from the other half of the squad. Both are running hot. Yorick can feel it in the way they wordlessly divide responsibilities: Piro keeps their carbine on Nocti, the other soldier takes Fen. They ignore the company drone.
“The cuffs?” Piro asks, flashing metallic teeth.
Yorick pulls his hood down. “Best the printer could do,” he says. “They’re secure.”
The other soldier sniffs the air, narrows their eyes. Yorick knows however many parts per million he salvaged from his piss is not enough, but he’s already fixated on the second door, the one that leads to Thello.
Piro is studying Fen. “The giant?” They flick a questioning glance in Yorick’s direction. “You caught the giant, grendel killer?”
Yorick remembers Fen and Nocti are breathing ammonia; he unseals their hoods in turn and yanks them down. Fen’s face is impassive as ever. Nocti is chewing his lips. Piro smiles, then jerks their head toward the next door. The six of them pass from antechamber to interior, and the stink in Yorick’s nostrils is joined by others.
The familiar smell of fear sweat and copper and Subjugation makes his skin crawl. The prisoners are celled individually, two rows. Yorick can’t stop his eyes from scouring the closest cubes, searching for Thello. He recognizes a few of the clanners from the cave, bodies slumped but arms held at careful angles—clamped in real cuffs, the kind that sting.
The third cube in the row is unoccupied. His stomach churns. His eyes slide to the end of the row, and he sees two more soldiers spraying down a body with no head. The teledoc sits behind them. Inside the clinic, the smooth white shell and pneumatic limbs always looked comforting.
Here in the dimly lit tent, they belong to an ambush predator. The surgical saw is bared at last, oversized, gleaming. The serrated edge is spattered with gore.
Yorick flicks back to the body, heart hammering. Not Thello. The exposed arm is too long, too pale. He feels a surge of guilt-laced relief.
“Yorick.” The squad leader has appeared from nowhere. Her voice is impatient. “Does Dam Gausta know?”
He misunderstands for a moment, thinks hyena has somehow growled his secrets in her ear.
“The storm’s shredding our link,” the squad leader says. “But she’ll want to know.” Her head cocks in Fen’s direction. “She’s been waiting for this one.”
Yorick forces his fractured head together. Piro and companion with carbines drawn, the squad leader with only her sidearm, the two soldiers at the end of the row busy with a body. No other targets. He remembers the missing piece.
“I told her from the Cut,” he says. “From Reconciliation, I mean. I been trying to tell you, too. Choppy signals.” He glances at the silent drone drifting over Piro’s shoulder. “Where’s the grendel?”
He feels a sudden sharp fear. Maybe they’ve already shipped it south to some company warlab, risking the blizzard. Maybe Gausta received termination orders from higher-ups uninterested by an aberrant grendel, or afraid of it, and the squad finished it off.
“It’s here,” the squad leader says. Her face is growing steadily colder, no trace of chemical affection left for him. “Why?”
Yorick scans the row again, as if he might see the grendel cuffed and slouched inside one of the cells. Then he spots it: the dull gray faraday cube is stacked in the corner with a pair of equipment crates, as if the thing inside is no more valuable than neurocables, no more dangerous than carbine ammo.
They’ve forgotten the cave quickly. Or maybe they resent it, remembering Shammet, remembering the feeling of being stalked, and are trying to forget.
“Now, please,” Yorick says.
CHAPTER 76
The drone fires its stunners; two crackling live wires arc through the air and bury into two turned backs. Piro and companion drop. The squad leader has wired reflexes; the weapon seems to leap from her hip to her hand while Yorick’s still raising his hunting rifle, but Fen is somehow even faster, closing the gap to smash the squad leader’s arm aside as she fires.
