Ymir, page 26
The clanner’s gaze flicks to the end of the row. Someone has already snapped the saw off the teledoc. Someone else has found the biotank, a heavy chlorine-green model made to fit four debodied prisoners officially, more in a pinch.
“Alright,” the clanner says. “Yeah.”
They drag the soldier away—not Piro after all; same teeth but different face—and that leaves Yorick with Fen. “What did the grendel say?” she asks heavily.
“Same as always.” Yorick tries to arrange the fractured conversation in his head. It’s starting to slip, like a dream. “It wants to go to the ansible. The deal hasn’t changed.”
The giant nods. “Then we go to the ansible,” she says, her voice thick. “Now.”
Yorick stares. “No. No, we don’t. We go to Thello.” He hunts for the conversation in the bar. “The grendel needs him to get into the ansible,” he says, even as he remembers Linka’s mimicked voice: You’ll work, too, Yorick. “Needs him as a—an organic conduit.”
Fen’s hands twitch; Yorick’s throat clenches. “Don’t lie,” she says. “Anyone xenotech sensitive will work. Thello told me.” Her nostrils flare. “That’s why we brought you along the first time. You were the backup.”
“We need Thello,” Yorick rasps. “I need Thello.”
Fen shakes her head. “Gausta’s cut off by the storm,” she says. “And we have weapons now. The grendel can unlock the carbines, the biobombs. Maybe hack and jack the autocannon. It’s learning fast.”
“So it can help us get to him—”
“No,” Fen snaps. “So it—so they—can help us do what Thello wanted. The blizzard won’t hide us forever. As soon as Gausta or the algorithm realizes what’s happening, more flyers come up from the south. More soldiers, more drones. We won’t get a better chance at the ansible than this. You know.”
He knows. If they go now, in the storm—two skids running dark and armed to the teeth—they can punch through the ansible’s outer ring before the algorithm stirs.
But once they do, Gausta will start to align the pieces. By the time they’re at the ansible itself, she’ll know what he did at the hotel, at the skid terminal, here at the camp. She’ll be angry. She’ll be angry the way he was angry twenty years ago, when he thought Thello had betrayed him and blown his face apart.
Yorick remembers all the dark things he rehearsed in his head then. He thinks now of all the dark things Gausta will do to Thello because she needs her pound of flesh and Yorick is elsewhere. Fen must be thinking the same. Her eyes are finally melting, all the ice trickling down her cheeks.
“You know,” she repeats, not trying to hide the tears. Her voice is steady. “This is what Thello wants. When it’s done, we go find him.”
“Find what’s left,” Yorick says, not for her but to make sure he understands it himself. “Or find nothing at all.”
The possibility crouches between them, draining all the air. But there’s another one.
“We can get to the ansible now,” he says. “But we’ll lose people on the way. Autocannon takes one. Drone takes one. Guard takes one.” He looks over at Nocti, who’s helping rifle through the crates, searching for missing bits of surface gear. “Maybe it’ll be Nocti. Maybe one of your family.”
“It’ll be fewer than seventy-eight,” Fen says, her voice tight.
Yorick touches his neck. “It can be zero,” he says. “If we go there with Gausta. No holomasks this time. The real Gausta. We take her from her own house.” He has never seen her home here in the north, but he imagines it as a fortress, stark angles rising from the snow. “She’ll let me in,” he says, forcing certainty into the words. “And then I take her. I find Thello. We all go to the ansible.”
Fen is silent. She says this is not some fated thing, some ballad, but he can tell from her face that she wants it to be so badly. Her gaze goes to the grendel, the red-and-black rorschach at the center of it. She plucks at the dangling shred of shock round. Traces the shape of Thello’s handprint.
“Okay, company man,” she says at last. “Thello first, then the ansible.”
Yorick feels helium filling his hollow chest. The grendel will understand. It knows about Zabka-Thello-brother-wound. It knows about reunion.
CHAPTER 80
Gausta’s house juts from the center of a frozen lake east of the camp, a black spar disconnected from the Cut but also from the smaller enclaves, from the communes where company higher-ups huddle together against the hostile environs. She can work by holo; she doesn’t live in the north out of necessity. Yorick suspects nostalgia.
Or maybe the south is too gentle for her. No blasted plains of ice, no storms strong enough to pluck a flyer out of the sky. They’re using the skids instead: Yorick and the grendel in one, Fen and Nocti and eight of the freed clanners trailing behind them in the other, lights off.
Yorick has his amped all the way up, and he set the skid to widecast company signals on every band possible. They are a bright noisy lure in the dark. The blizzard is flying thick now, but Gausta should be able to spot them before her security system makes its own decisions. The smooth glossy skin of the lake likely hides smart mines.
He looks across at his companion, a bundle of sharp angles anchored to the floor of the skid, no limbs or head. The grendel agreed to his plan back in the tent, on the condition it came along. Said something about organic conduits and honoring genebonds. But it hasn’t offered the filament, or opened its unnerving mouth, since they set off.
“Six kilometers to the house,” he says.
The grendel doesn’t respond, only gives a strange shiver.
“You having second thoughts?” he asks.
A miniature mouth finally peels open in the grendel’s center. “Northern Ymir is home to a small but fascinating ecosystem,” it says, an echo of the host droid’s voice. “The reproductive cycles of its two dominant organisms, the frostskimmers and the frostswimmers, are inextricably entwined.”
“Thanks for that.”
“The frostswimmers.”
“Yeah. I’m aware.”
“The frostswimmers,” the grendel repeats, its voice buzzing louder.
Black code streaks across the smartglass. The throttle jerks under Yorick’s grip, hauling the skid sideways. He understands a moment before the ice erupts all around them.
CHAPTER 81
The skid is thrown skyward; Yorick slams into the ceiling. He catches a fractured glimpse through the smartglass: a geyser of steam and shattered ice, and then, filling the whole sky, too big to be real, a mountain of hard gray chitin swatched with glowing parasites. The skid spins, caroms. Yorick is cartwheeling through the air when the impact gel finally deploys.
He jerks to a stop, suspended in a bubbly orange sea. The grendel is beneath him, caught mid-shapeshift, an insectoid specimen in amber. A shaken-loose lantern and empty water sac float beside it. Then the skid crashes back down, and the gel becomes a rippling blur. His pulse roars in his ears. He imagines the skid plunging through dark water, down to the dark bottom, joining the leviathan bones.
The skid settles, and he feels solid ice beneath them. He sucks down a slimy breath—the impact gel is laced with air pockets—and swims for the hatch. The grendel is already prying at it. They grip the emergency bar together, two hands and one tentacle, and the hatch splits open. They slide out in a mess of tangled limbs and gurgling gel.
The cold greets them. Yorick fumbles his hood on and wipes the goggles clear to see the frostswimmer corkscrewing in place, shedding a few last shards of ice. The scene is illuminated by its own armored hide, encrusted with phosphorescent parasites. Some of them fall and splash into the thick black water as the frostswimmer’s chitinous head slides apart.
The palp emerges, a delicate spiral of latticed nerve endings. It ripples in the blizzard. For a moment Yorick thinks the wind might tear it away. Then it retracts, and the frostswimmer descends. Yorick is jerked off-balance, barely keeps his feet. The spray drenches him, freezes to him like an exoskeleton, frosts his goggles opaque. The world slants. Creaks. Moans.
He drops low, clawing at his goggles. He can feel the ice shiver under his splayed fingers. He waits for the cracks to find him, to dump him and the grendel both under. The dream from the cave flashes through his head. Maybe they’ll join other bodies under the ice, hundreds of not-corpses spiraling through the water, wreathed in ghostly blue ansible lights.
The world steadies. His goggles come clear again to see the last of the frostswimmer’s head vanish, leaving a vortex of shredded ice behind. Yorick stays crouched, staring at the enormous rift that ends bare meters from the nose of their wrecked skid. He tries to bring his heartbeat back down. He is only dimly aware of the grendel crouched beside him, mimicking his pose.
Once his pulse has subsided, he finally hears Fen. “You alive? Company man, you alive?”
Yorick spots the other skid on the far side of the rift, small dark figures clustered around it with lanterns. He tries to reorient himself. “Yeah,” he says. “Our skid’s done, though.” He surveys the smashed chassis still leaking impact gel. “Yours?”
Fen’s voice comes staticky in his earports. “Engine swamped and died. We’re fixing it. Fast as we can. Then we’ll have to go around.”
Yorick watches the shadowy figures across the rift, squatting at the engine cowl, breaking out tools. His gut churns behind his incision. Repairs are slow work in a blizzard. More time for Thello in the interrogation pod. More time for Gausta to realize what’s happened to her temporary camp.
He turns and looks the other way, into the blowing snow. Before the frostswimmer interrupted, they were only six kilometers from Gausta’s house. He can survive six kilometers of blizzard if he wastes no more time, no more heat. If he starts moving now.
“We’ll meet you there,” he says. “Same plan. Gausta lets me in, I let you in.”
Fen pauses. He imagines her running through options, parsing and discarding. “Alright,” she says. “We’ll follow as soon as we can.”
Yorick finds two extra lanterns, digging them out of the impact gel’s rapidly congealing pond, and clips them to his thermal suit. The grendel tracks him, a bulb-shaped head swinging back and forth. He activates the first lantern. A pale green globe of light expands around him, swirling with snow.
“Northern Ymir is known for its hazardous blizzards,” he says.
The grendel doesn’t respond, but when he starts walking, vultured against the wind, it slithers along after him. They are a few meters from the wrecked skid when Fen’s voice comes faint in his earports, already shredded by the storm.
“Nocti says good luck.”
Yorick remembers that this is how all colonist ballads end, with someone wandering off into a blizzard to die. But he’s not wandering anymore.
Kilometer 1
The wind has teeth now. It shrieks and flails. Yorick keeps his head bowed, his shoulders hunched, following the map he loaded to his goggles. The carmine trail reminds him of another night, another blizzard. He widecasts a company signal as he walks, in case Gausta’s smart mines spot him, and uses his mandible to amp and loop a voice clip: There is no one for whom it is well. There is no one for whom it is well. There is no one—
He struggles along to the tempo of his own synthesized chant. His breath is searing hot inside the foul-smelling hood. His body is drenched in sweat. Pushing into the gale makes every step twice the effort, and every step tugs at the incision. The fresh tissue might be tearing again. He imagines blood seeping into his interstitial spaces and filling up his pericardium like a balloon.
He glances backward. The skids are long gone, swallowed by the dark. The grendel is still following. It’s bipedal again, a spindly imitation of a human. In the pale green wash of the lantern, it looks like a living shadow.
“Let me know if any more frostswimmers are coming up,” Yorick says, because he suspects the grendel can detect their bioelectric fields as they hurtle for the surface, and he knows by the time he feels the ice vibrate under his boots it will be too late.
The grendel grows one tendril and twists it into a braid, imitating the palp.
“Yeah,” Yorick says. “They like to taste the wind, sometimes. The southerly wind.”
The grendel must know that already, though. Yorick remembers the dream in the cave, Piro’s mad theory about the Oldies genejacking themselves to become aquatic leviathans instead. He remembers the grendel is a thousand years old, and he shivers in his thermal gear.
The goggles pulse. One kilometer of six.
Kilometer 2
The wind beats him. Batters him. It finds tiny ingresses—the bends of his knees, the tips of his boots—and lets the cold creep through. For a few beautiful minutes, he hits equilibrium. The chill soothes his fevered skin, dabs gently at his incision. He tries to enjoy it. From now on it will only get colder, and before the numb sets in there will be pain.
He keeps his eyes on the carmine trail. Sometimes it looks like a stream of blood, and he imagines following it to a frostswimmer carcass, not the giant that nearly dumped them under but a manageable calf. He imagines finding a pair of fat-hunters at work flensing it, not for the blubber, nephew, but for the little beasties living inside it.
Ice and death and shit. Yorick’s head is full of those ballads now as Ymir’s starless gut pushes down on him, as Ymir’s voice howls in both his ears. He is a frightened child, listening to his mother’s stories about patchwork bogeymen. He can almost feel Thello’s small bony shoulder pressed to his.
The goggles pulse. Two of six.
Kilometer 3
The grendel is ahead of him now. He’s not sure how that happened, but it helps him keep pace. He tries to sync to its stride, imagining that he is stalking it through the tunnels of the Polar Seven, that he is smothered in heat. Or maybe it’s a shade, leading him to the underworld. Beyond the pale green globe of his lantern, the blackness extends forever, in all directions, and could contain anything.
“Our mother used to tell this story,” he says. “About a rich man.”
He wishes Nocti were here to sing it. It would distract him from the tug in his abdomen, from the cold leaking slowly into his gear. His fingers chill and burn. His face turns gummy, the gelflesh almost indistinguishable from the real. All the sweat on his skin has turned to slime, and soon it will be frost.
If Yorick finds grotesques dancing around a bonfire, he will throw himself onto it just to be warm.
“Or maybe it was about a company man,” he says.
The goggles pulse. Three.
Kilometer 4
The cold lives inside his thermal gear now. Inside his spiderwool. He’s not sure when it happened, but now it feels as if he’s always been cold. His toes have always been numb stumps. The cartilage of his ears has always thrummed and ached. It’s hard to keep hold of the lantern. He watches the snow flurrying inside its globe, radioactive lime.
He gets a mad thought: he is carrying the blizzard along with him and could end it if he only turned the lantern off.
Something tugs at his ankle. He realizes he has stopped walking. He is swaying in the storm, staring into the lantern. Now he looks down and sees the grendel’s hooked limb wrapped around his boot, pulling him on. Pulling him toward Gausta and Thello.
He wrestles forward into the dark. The goggles pulse.
Kilometer 5
The wind renders him down, slices through his numb skin and stiffening muscle, aches inside his heavy bones. His lantern flickers and dies. For a moment he is at the bottom of Ymir’s frigid sea. His hindbrain seizes with terror. He fumbles for the second lantern. Squeezes. The pale green bloom illuminates the grendel. Its face is a cavity centimeters from his.
Its tendril is chipping the ice away from his boots. He yanks his feet free and starts moving again. He can’t remember if the carmine trail is leading him to Gausta’s house or to a maintenance hatch, the one on top of Laska’s Cradle. His whole body is numb and his head is vapor.
Hypoxia. Not enough oxygenated blood in the capillaries, not enough fuel for the neurons to fire. He knows it, but he can’t stop it. The world begins to slant and slide around him. He overcorrects, trying to stay upright, and crashes into the snow. His head spins. Lurches.
The grendel looms over him, and in his earports he hears a buzzing imitation of his own voice. “You having second thoughts?”
Yorick’s lungs are spent, and the artificial nerves in his mandible have gone dead, disconnecting it, making it a foreign thing implanted in his frozen face. He can’t even tell the grendel to get fucked.
It hauls him up by the armpits. They keep moving.
Kilometer 6
The grendel drags him across the ice, half its body wrapped around his, moving his limbs like an exoskeleton. He can feel slow undulations in its xenocarbon hide, its recycled flesh. Its reactor is faring better than his circulatory system. Yorick realizes he might die without it noticing, realizes it might walk his frozen corpse all the way to Gausta’s door.
The carmine trail is blood again. Maybe Wickam’s blood from the pit, or Linka’s blood, leaking from the bioprinter that devoured her body. Maybe Canna’s blood, draining into the snow. Maybe his blood, half-blood, half-blood.
The grendel drops him. He feels the jolt, then feels it peeling away from his numb body. It’s decided he is deadweight, and will conserve its energy by continuing alone. Yorick wants to rage at it, wants to tell it that it will never be able to infiltrate Gausta’s house without his help. His arms buckle as he readies himself to crawl.
He cranes his head, and suddenly there’s light blooming and warping inside his goggles. Harsh light, floodlight. A company drone is scuttling toward him, white-hot gaze sweeping across the ice. Yorick hopes the grendel remembers the plan. His own synthesized chant echoes through the dark: There is no one for whom it is well.
Gausta’s icon blinks onto his goggles.
