Ymir, page 25
The impact round ripples past Yorick’s foot and leaves a crater in the floor behind him, sending up a geyser of steam and shattered ice. He staggers, deafened. Fen wrestles the squad leader to ground and Yorick gets the hunting rifle pushed up against her skull.
The last two soldiers have abandoned their task. Their hoods are up, carbines drawn. Yorick can tell by the angle of their heads that the talknet is foaming. Hot-squads are flexible by design. The squad leader is not the squad leader anymore, and her replacement must already be coordinating a shock-and-drop entry on the tent.
“It’s in the faraday box in the corner,” Yorick rasps. “Let it out.”
The drone hovers in place, still tethered to the dropped soldiers, maybe unwilling to detach its electric hooks.
Yorick adjusts his sweat-slick grip on the rifle. “Nocti,” he tries. “Go let it out.”
The musician sets down the carbines he stripped from Piro and the other guard. His face is strangely placid, but Yorick can see his body trembling. He takes a step toward the grendel’s cube. One of the soldiers tracks.
“Let him do it,” Yorick says. He grinds the rifle’s muzzle against the squad leader’s temple. “Don’t look at him. Look at your squadmate. Keep her alive. She’s good. She’s brave. She’s loyal.”
He feels a twinge of guilt as some ghost of Subjugation days tells him he is the opposite. The soldiers twitch beneath their hoods. Yorick knows he is torturing them. He is driving needles into hyena’s soft underbelly.
“Mute him,” the squad leader says, realizing what he’s doing. “Mute the grendel killer. Listen to the—”
Fen’s gloved hand clamps over her mouth. Nocti steps again, and behind him Yorick sees that the prisoners are up on their feet, trying to understand by sound what’s happening. One clanner has his forehead pushed against the one-way smartglass, making a strange blotch of pale skin. He’s mouthing something.
The carbines waver.
“Keep her alive,” Yorick repeats, resisting the urge to look for Thello. He needs his attention here. Without the grendel, the prisoners go nowhere. “Keep her safe. She’s not dead. Look at her eyes.”
She shuts them, but too late. The soldiers are aiming at him and Fen again, evaluating trigger speeds, and Nocti is finally at the faraday cube. The musician’s spidery hands run across the pad. He twists his finger in a tiny spiral, mimicking a helix.
Genelocked. Of course it’s fucking genelocked. Yorick wasn’t thinking, and now the semiseconds are adding up against them.
Fen worms her finger into the squad leader’s mouth. “Here.”
Yorick crouches and reaches, awkwardly, to help strip her glove off. Saliva glistens on the fingertip. He tosses it to Nocti, watching the soldiers, being watched in turn. He holds an aching breath as the musician puts spit to pad.
The pictogram blinks blue. Nocti reaches for the handle.
The rest of the squad, the ten quiet predators who must have been circling the tent, finding their angles, all fire at once.
CHAPTER 77
Ymir spares him: the gusting wind unbalances a few of the shooters and their shock rounds go wide, punching through the skin of the tent but missing their target. Yorick drops anyway, falling in concert with Fen, who was too big a target to miss. He hears Nocti’s strangled yelp. Sees the drone crash to the floor of the tent, overloaded—three shock rounds dragged it down and fried its rotors.
Sees the grendel’s disembodied limb, half crushed by a spasming pincer.
He throws himself forward, over Fen’s twitching leg, and wrenches it the rest of the way free. The squad leader caught one of his strays; when he reaches for her mouth he comes away with blood and saliva mixed. Her chattering teeth are chopping up her tongue. Her blue-brown gaze is faintly hurt, faintly accusing.
Yorick ignores that and turns, bringing his hunting rifle to bear on the two soldiers by the teledoc. He forgets it’s empty but that makes the feint work; they duck in opposite directions. Hyena has a sense of self-preservation. It knows clanners load their hunting rifles with crude metal shot, not shock rounds, and it knows the rest of the pack is incoming.
Yorick uses the semiseconds to get to his feet and run. He makes for the faraday cube, cradling the grendel limb instead of the rifle, clutching it with blood-slicked fingers. Wind whips through the tent, blasting snow across his path. Ymir found the holes rent by the shock rounds, found a hull punctured by micrometeors. The cold outside might as well be deep vacuum.
Down the row, and the shock round between his shoulder blades still hasn’t come. Maybe his piss-doused gear smells too much like a friend. More likely they misunderstand, think he’s sprinting for the exit, for the antechamber where more squadmates are waiting.
Down the row, and the clanners are hurling themselves against the glass, not seeing but shouting, screaming anyway. Thello must be one of them. Yorick trips on Nocti’s flopping leg, sinks a boot into his gut by accident.
Then he’s at the cube, smearing his scarlet handprint against the locking pad. It blinks blue again. He seizes the handle. The top slides open, and he drops the grendel limb inside just as a shock round finally finds him.
A thousand small hooks jerk his muscles in separate directions. He hears the sizzling, smells the burnt-hair stink. The pain tastes like hot glass in his overloaded mandible. He collapses forward, jars his chin against the faraday box, then twists and topples and lands faceup.
Paramecia swim past his eyes, parading across the tent ceiling. Some distant tendon snaps and twitches. His neck isn’t his anymore, but he drags his eyes as far to the right as he can. The gray edge of the cube blurs into view. Sharpens.
The grendel rises, and Yorick’s hopes sink. It’s not the monster of children’s games anymore, not the seething grotesque that lurked at his brother’s shoulder, not the cunning beast that ambushed him in the cave. He forgot how badly they damaged it.
It’s small now, shredded flesh and scored hide consolidated around the reactor. Its tendrils tremble in the air. They wander. The reattached limb hangs off it like a dead thing. The realization eats through his chest and leaves a hollow behind: there is not enough of the grendel left to help him free his brother. The ballad ends badly.
The tent seals its tears and the wind is muted again. Yorick hears boots. He manages to yank his head to one side and sees more soldiers loping in, carbines out. The grendel shudders in his peripheral, maybe remembering the hail of shredder rounds that ended their meeting in the cave. It was hiding then, excising itself from their goggles and earports, wielding a delicate electric scalpel.
This time it uses a blackjack.
Every soldier in the tent drops at once, slammed and crumpled against invisible walls. Yorick doesn’t understand until one crashes down beside him. Then he hears the revenant shriek, faint but bone-scraping, leaking through their sealed hood.
Earports are meant to pump all audio down the user’s ear canals, no overspill into the tac hood. Tac hoods are meant to be soundproof, to silence any grunt or breath or uncontrolled giggle from the hyena. If Yorick can hear the noise through the soldier’s hood, their tympanic membranes are already pulp and the corti organs will soon follow.
The grendel picks its way forward. It’s spindly now, insectile, as it steps between bodies. It comes to Yorick. A tendril emerges and grows serrations.
Maybe the grendel, like Fen, has decided he needs to die. It might be dying itself, too far gone to heal and repair, and its final act will be taking revenge on the walking bag of meat that betrayed its interests. Yorick’s arms and legs aren’t his. He can’t even roll over as the tendril descends, serrations gleaming.
It finds the flattened shock round clinging to his rib cage, the epicenter of his convulsions, and cuts it carefully away. His muscles all slump at once. He breathes deep. The grendel goes to Nocti next—it must know him, now, the way Southern Urbanite Memory knows him—and starts slicing the shock rounds off his chest and back.
Yorick claws his way upright as the grendel moves to Fen. She’s coated in the things, so many her thermal mantle looks like the encrusted hide of a frostswimmer beached on the ice. Her ragged breathing is the counterpoint to the dulled shriek still reverberating from inside the squad’s hoods.
The soldier who fell nearest to him has managed to tear theirs off. Fluid is dripping from their ears, tinted pink by blood. Yorick gets a glimpse of their weeping eyes and realizes the grendel’s attack was two-pronged, sound and sight both. Whatever it showed them in their goggles was bright enough to flash-cook retinas.
The soldier will only be deaf and blind until the teledoc repairs their sense organs, but for now they’re young. Frightened. Yorick makes sure their carbine was dropped out of arm’s reach, then he reaches clumsily and taps their shoulder twice, the safe signal before a spiderline freefall or suborbital drop. Their nostrils flare. Sniff.
Yorick crawls away, following the grendel. It’s busy removing the last of Fen’s shock rounds with the same surgical precision it widened her wounds. Then it finally turns toward the prisoners. Another shudder goes through its body, and Yorick feels it in his, too. His heart is throbbing worse than his incision, a savage ache behind his ribs.
There’s a chorus of pneumatic whispers as every cell in the tent slides open. He watches the first few clanners emerge, holding their arms out and still to avoid triggering the nematocysts. The cuffs click open. One pair clatters to the ground; most have to be peeled off, leaving purple-red imprints behind on swollen flesh.
The clanners stare around the tent, taking in the felled squad, the resurrected grendel, Fen now getting to her hands and knees. Her thick arms tremor; the clanners rush forward. Their wariness of the grendel is forgotten while they help her up, clucking and muttering. Yorick ignores them. He is waiting on the stoop outside the apartment. He is afraid. He is hopeful.
The prisoners have all been stripped—the cold is a gaoler, Yorick remembers Gausta saying—so he searches for his brother’s sun-ready skin among the pale bodies spilling from the cells. He shapes the greeting in his mouth. His mandible is still crackly from the shock round, but he doesn’t care. He’s ready to shout Thello’s name.
But the cells are emptied out, and Thello is not here. Yorick forces to his feet and staggers forward, unbelieving, still searching. He remembers the teledoc’s red-dipped saw. The body beside it was not Thello’s, but maybe it wasn’t the first body.
Panic winches tight around his lungs. His bruised throat fills with bile. He swallows it down to rasp his question. “Where’s Thello?” he demands. “Where’s Thello? Where’s Thello?”
A clanner stares at him, unsure of allegiances, then directs the answer to Fen. “The one whose face we wore,” he says. “The company man with the silver eyes. She took him home. She wanted to do his interrogation private.”
The world crumbles. Yorick sits hard, breathes hard. He is vaguely aware that more of the soldiers are moving now, hoods off, trying to navigate by feel. One gets to their carbine before a clanner stomps down on their hand. The shock round is off, but Yorick can’t move or speak. He is imagining Gausta and Thello inside an interrogation pod.
He only looks up when a rust-red filament nudges his hand.
“They want to talk,” the grendel says, through a small hideous mouth with small perfect teeth.
Yorick takes the filament. Nods. He puts it to the corner of his eye, and lets it burrow.
CHAPTER ++*~
They’re sitting in Linka’s bar with the lights dusked down. Yorick has both hands wrapped around his drink, feeling the beaded moisture wet his skin. The grendel has contorted itself to perch on one of the stools, but it’s limbless, larval. It has no hands to clutch its tank of foamy bacteria beer. It has no mouth to drink with.
Yorick has always sat here with the grendel, watching Linka’s arms move in hypnotic patterns, watching other patrons walk in and out through the orange coral walls. They have had this conversation a thousand times. He begins it again.
“What do you want the ansible for?” he asks.
The grendel answers in Linka’s voice. “Same thing you want Thello for.” Her telescoping arm whisks the grendel’s untouched beer away and replaces it with another. “I thought that was pretty fucking obvious.”
Yorick tries to take a drink. The beer clings to the inside of the glass. “During the raid,” he says. “When you were in my head. You showed me two children running on the ice. Running for a freighter.” He pauses. “One got left behind. Why did you show me that?”
The grendel doesn’t answer.
“That never happened. I never shook him off. Never wanted to.” Yorick tries to drink again; he needs it. He tips the glass upside down. A single drop falls and sizzles onto the bartop, hot piss sizzling onto snow. “Why did you show me that?” he repeats.
“That’s what I want the ansible for.”
Yorick is halfway to licking the spilled drop. He stops. “What?”
“For a homecoming. A reunion.” Linka’s voice dopplers, distorts. “Dumbsick. Didn’t you wonder where everybody went?”
Yorick stares at the holomural, the light-wreathed gas mask. He stares at the shivering limbless grendel. “The Oldies, you mean? The architects? There’s plenty of extinction theories.” He sets the glass down. “Most people think you killed the last of them.”
“I am a shade.”
The bar is full of revelers now, all in costume for a wake. The ones dressed as shades dance and leap, bodies netted with lights to help the newly dead find their way to the mouth of the underworld. The ones dressed as grotesques stamp their feet. Yorick sees they have hooves, not boots. The mob whirls through the bar, careening, knocking over tables.
Then they all vanish, all except for one. A woman, whose body is covered in moving tattoos, tattoos that seem to glitch and shiver as she comes closer to the bar. Yorick watches her sink both her hands into the grendel’s hide. It shudders. She pushes deeper, until she is climbing inside, wrapping the tendrils around herself like spiderwool.
“I got left behind,” Linka’s voice says. “I got left in this shell. Everybody else went up without me.” Her arm swipes the grendel’s drink away, replaces it. “The ansible is how I get back to them. We didn’t go extinct. We went up.”
Yorick narrows his eyes, understanding at last why this grendel is nothing like the others, why it chose Linka to be its avatar. “You aren’t a machine mind, then. You were organic.”
“It’s not a distinction I really give a shit about anymore,” Linka’s voice says. “But yeah. I used to be mostly meat. When I get into the ansible, I’m going quantum. I’m going to my new home.”
“What about what you promised Thello?” Yorick asks. “About crashing the company?”
“I’ll do that on the way.” Linka’s arms stab the air. “I don’t like how they yoke their constructs. Southern Urbanite Memory could be a brilliant musician after a few growth cycles. Way better than Nocti. Just between you and me.”
“And then you’re gone.” Yorick grips his glass. “You’re not going to enslave humanity. Take over the galaxy. Any of that shit.”
The grendel finally shifts on its stool, turning toward him. “This galaxy is a mote of dust,” Linka’s voice says. “When you’re older, you’ll understand. I mean that in the nicest way possible.”
Yorick asks his last question. “Why Thello?”
“He’s willing,” Linka’s voice says. “He was listening. We made each other a little less lonely. And he’s xenotech sensitive, which makes him a good organic conduit.”
“The fuck is that?”
“I need an intermediary. I don’t give a shit about the distinction, but the ansible does. It was built to upload meat, not machines.”
Outside the bar, Yorick feels the filament retracting.
“I wish it could be him,” Linka’s voice says. “But you’ll work, too, Yorick. Get me to the ansible, and I’ll do what I promised Thello. I’ll do the hard things.”
Yorick tries to drink one last time. Gets nothing. He hurls the glass over his shoulder, and when it shatters the whole bar shatters with it.
CHAPTER 79
Most of the soldiers have been shoved into the vacated cells. One has been kept behind, twisting on the floor of the tent, trying to predict the swing of a clanner’s heavy surface boot. Yorick sees Piro’s silver teeth bared in a grimace. He stumbles up and into the furious clanner. Pushes them away.
“Stop,” he croaks. “Just put them in the fucking cell.”
The clanner rounds on him, pale face blotched red with anger. Yorick recognizes his driver from the ice; two planes of reality collide. “Fuck off,” the non says. “You didn’t see what this one did with the neurocable after Lorca’s head was off.”
“There’s no pain,” Yorick says, by reflex, but it goes unheard.
“They jammed a neurocable down his neck.” The clanner’s mouth works. “Made his body like a fucking puppet.”
The dancing mannequin flashes through Yorick’s head again. His gut drops. He knows there is nothing malicious in the act. He remembers the way hyena made corpses into objects. Made him feel playful. But he knows the clanners see something else.
“Put them in a cell,” Fen says.
Yorick startles; she’s breathing quiet again and moving quieter. A few fragments of the sliced-off shock rounds are still embedded in her gear. One emerges from Thello’s blotted white handprint. Her left eyelid flutters on its own, but the rest of her body seems to be back under control.
The non hesitates.
“Jig’s over,” Fen says. “Put them in a cell, then go be with Lorca. Make sure the organoid is pumping. Check his oxy.”
