Ymir, page 5
Her face freezes and fades. Fen yanks the mask off and for a microsecond still bears the snarl that was hiding underneath. The flicker of malice floods Yorick’s body with fight-or-flight, prickling his skin and bowels.
Fen’s face smooths over. “Come on, company man,” she says, and turns her broad back.
CHAPTER 13
The secondary skid terminal is only a few blocks away from Southern Urbanite Memory, which is likely how the company decided on his lodgings. Yorick can recognize it by the enormous uptube piercing the sky like a proboscis.
The hour is early, but the Cut is busy. Old men are dragging cooking vats out onto streetside conductor pads. Vendors are cleaning yesterday’s skin and grime out of their gene scanners. A woman walks past carrying a spool of electric cable on her head like a halo. The sidewalk is already clogged with bikes and walking markets.
A block from the hotel, there’s someone dancing naked. People part around them, unperturbed, and when Yorick gets closer he realizes it’s just a mannequin advertising some sex house. All its jittering limbs are intact, but somebody has scrawled graffiti onto its muscly stomach. The wasp of the company pictogram, crudely anthropomorphized, humping a snowman.
Yorick follows Fen down the shopping alley that bisects the block. The red has her own gravity when she walks; the crowd seems to bend and split around her. Yorick is her irregular satellite. Halfway down the alley, Fen pauses at a particular vendor and buys a half-dozen steamed buns that quickly fog their plastic bag.
The smell triggers a memory: biting into wobbly dough, hot grease spurting down his hand, the savory vatmeat and browned onion. He would rather keep the taste memory intact than let his new tongue try to approximate it, but his stomach gurgles loudly enough for Fen to hear.
“Have you eaten?” the red asks.
“A while ago.”
Fen doesn’t offer, just knots the bag and continues down the alley. Up ahead on the corner, Yorick sees the little red girl, the one who tried to steal his shit. Today she’s selling filter masks, flimsy pus-color things printed from bioplastic. Her face doesn’t have any bruises, but they might be on her body instead, hidden under the linty spiderwool.
Her eyes flare with recognition as they approach: delight for Fen, confusion for the man trailing after her. Yorick’s paranoia jabs him again, tells him this show is for his benefit, a way of reminding him that cold-bloods take care of their own and he is not their own.
But there’s no show. Fen drops the bag into the girl’s lap without breaking stride. Yorick briefly considers buying a filter mask, to demonstrate that he is not a soulless company man, but it wouldn’t fit over his mandible. The little red girl scowls at him on the way past.
Outside the blue-tiled skid terminal, a handful of miners are playing dice on an overturned crate. Four sealies, two reds. All of them look up at Fen’s approach; the dice keep clattering but it becomes performative, an attempt to mask the sudden stretched-wire tension. Yorick remembers Gausta’s voice: rumors of a strike.
“What’s news?” asks a man with cobalt-blue tats capping his cheekbones. “You here to put the company face on and tell us to go back down the Maw?”
Fen’s nostrils flare. “Company sent us a grendel killer,” she says. “I’m taking them under.”
“That’s a grendel killer?” A woman narrows her bloodshot eyes and waves a vapor pipe in Yorick’s direction. “Don’t look like a grendel killer.”
“There’s no specific geneprint for it,” Yorick says.
She squints at his mandible. “Grendel fuck up your face, then?”
“Yes,” he says. “On Baldr.”
Fen doesn’t let him tell the story. “Be gone when we get back, Wickam,” she says, addressing the sealie with the facial tats. “You lot strutting about here helps nothing.”
The miner called Wickam folds his arms across his concave chest, plants his feet. “Easy for you to play both sides, Fen,” he says. “Things get messy, you can always fuck off back to your surface clan. Some of us, we got stakes.”
He points to a scar on his arm: an indenturement implant, paying off damages from Subjugation days. Yorick thought that would all be over by now.
“What happened to fuck the company?” Wickam asks. One of the others giggles low in her throat, anticipating Wickam’s next words. “Or are you letting the company fuck you now?”
The dice stop clattering. The scene ices over. Then Fen moves, and she does it fast, suddenly looming over the man like a thunderhead. Yorick can see Wickam’s bony knee start to quiver. But the sealie’s brave from the vapor pipe, and he meets Fen’s cold eyes.
“You want a jig, you tell me now,” the giant says. “If not, you keep your mendacious fucking mouth shut about what you don’t understand. And you go home.”
A vapor pipe can only do so much. Anger is radiating off Fen’s body, and Yorick can imagine those blue-veined hands crushing a throat with ease. Wickam can probably imagine worse. The miner blinks his oil-black eyes. Then he crumbles, and slides out of the way without a word. The others keep their heads down as Fen strides to the terminal doors.
“Mendacious,” Wickam mutters. “Fuck’s that mean, then?”
Yorick follows Fen in. The secondary skid terminal is cramped compared to the main, space for just a half-dozen transports arrayed around the uptube he saw from the street. Fen uses her thumb to unlock the smallest skid from its clamp. Lightweight, roughly oblong fuselage, anchor spikes equipped to tether it to the ice in a blizzard.
She doesn’t ask for help, so Yorick watches her haul the skid to the uptube all on her own, muscles furling and unfurling under her spiderwool. It thunks into the uptube shaft and bobs there, suspended.
“Looks like tensions are running a bit high,” Yorick says, trying to gauge how much of the red’s anger, if any, is performative. “How far is the mine?”
Fen blanks him, expressionless, and climbs into the skid. Yorick has a premonition: Fen knows. The overseer spotted some bit of evidence, maybe saw through his spiderwool somehow, saw the scars on his shins. She knows that Yorick is the worst sort of company man, the kind who betrayed his own blood during Subjugation.
As he follows Fen into the skid, Yorick reminds himself that he’s only been thawed for a day, and that paranoia is a symptom of sleepsickness. That extended torpor often causes heightened anxiety, minor audio hallucinations. His nervous system was frozen for months, starved for input, and now it’s readjusting to the land of the living.
He straps himself down. An electronic voice recites safety protocol while they drift to the dead center of the uptube. Fen grips the handles above her orange head. Yorick wraps both arms around himself, and a second later the uptube sends them hurtling toward a hole in the sky.
CHAPTER 14
The skid stays low, hugging the ice, and the rush of wind becomes familiar white noise. The glow of the Cut’s blister roof has already receded in the distance. The uptube spat them out thirty klicks from the Polar Seven Mine, and Fen is quickly making up the difference, controlling the skid’s throttle herself.
Yorick stares out the side window. They are back under Ymir’s real sky, the howling black void, and as they soar across a frozen lake the skid’s running lights throw their wobbly reflection back at them. The ansible lurks in the distance, pulsing electric blue. His hounds are bogged down somewhere inside its quantum anatomy, cycling through the procedural diagnostics that ensure they haven’t gotten too clever.
Without his hounds, without his nerve suit, this meatspace visit to the mine is very nearly pointless. Gausta must know that, so Gausta must want him there for some other reason. Yorick ponders it as the Polar Seven approaches, entrance demarcated by glowing yellow pylons, and wishes he’d brought something to drink.
Fen starts to slow as soon as they pass the first marker. By the time the mouth of the downtube appears, they’re moving at the perfect speed to drop right in. Yorick braces himself, but the down is gentler than the up, and aside from a slight bubbling in his stomach his body barely notices it. The skid settles at the bottom of the tube and its running lights shut off.
For a moment there’s perfect darkness. He feels Fen moving in the black, undoing her harness. Sudden fear jabs through him. Fen and Gausta have conspired. He knows it in his gut. They’ve brought him here to kill him and hide the corpse deep, deep.
Yorick focuses on his breathing. The biolamps around the edge of the downtube swell to life at last, leaking blurry orange light through the skid fuselage.
“I have so much love to give,” he says—aloud, by accident.
Fen’s voice is acidic. “What?”
Yorick undoes his harness. “Nothing.”
The skid clamps itself to the rim of the downtube and Fen exits first. Subtracting her weight makes the vehicle surge a half meter higher; Yorick has to jump down. His boots echo when they hit the dirt.
The main shaft is an enormous hub hollowed out around the downtube, lit by clusters of biolamps awoken by their arrival. Smaller shafts branch out in all directions, following veins of zinc through Ymir’s crust, winding deeper into the dark. He sees the glinting metal vertebrae of hauling tracks, but nothing moves on them.
“You worked underground before?” Fen asks.
“A few times,” Yorick says. “Grendels like to burrow deep.”
“Same as the company.” Fen jerks her head toward a polyresin structure on the other side of the downtube; judging by the web of electric cables, it houses one of the mine’s main generators. “Glue bath’s this way.”
Yorick follows her around the edge of the downtube. The biolamp lighting is dim, slightly hellish, limning everything in furnace orange. They are deep enough in the earth that the frigid air of the ice field is a distant memory. Sweat is already soaking into Yorick’s spiderwool, and he knows they’re not done descending.
Fen ducks through the polyresin door; a moment later the echoing shaft is filled with a low hum, power restored to the necessary hauling tracks. Yorick hears a sloshing noise and follows it around the corner of the generator hut. The glue bath is a small circular pool, maybe two meters across, fed by a chugging black fabricator. A waxy yellowish skin on the surface begins to churn, dissolving into itself. Fen shows up to scoop the last of it away with a long-handled skimmer.
The bath’s contents are glossy and clear now, swirled by sluggish ripples—organic membrane, grown from a tweaked tardigrade geneprint. Ship technicians use the same stuff for vacuum work. Yorick assumes it’s cheaper for the company to repurpose a bowlship’s fabricator than to print individual heatsuits for its miners.
Fen strips down, peeling off her spiderwool. The miner’s legs are laced with telltale scars—one fresh scab on her shin stands out, reddish black on anemic white. Yorick sheds his coat and boots, removes the spiderwool from his arms and torso, but keeps his lower body covered. He doesn’t want his legs naked in front of the red.
“Eyes shut, don’t breathe in,” Fen says, then lowers herself into the bath. Her shoulders scrape the sides. The membrane closes over her head for one second, two seconds, then she tightens her grip on the rungs and levers herself out. She doesn’t drip. The membrane warps the light, sending rainbows across her face when she turns her head.
“Now you,” she says. “Two seconds is enough.”
Yorick stands on the lip of the bath. It makes him think of torpor, except by the time he gets dumped into the torpor pool he’s already clinically dead. For this he has to climb in on his own. The membrane wriggles at him. He eases himself down, shuts his eyes, sucks in a deep breath, and goes under.
The membrane is cool and dry against his skin, alive, undulating slow and steady. His tailbone grazes the bottom of the bath, and he settles there. No sounds from above. No light behind his eyelids. It’s tranquil. It feels almost like not existing. He imagines expelling his air and inhaling the membrane instead, letting it flood his lungs and baptize him inside out.
Massive hands, Fen’s hands, hook him under the armpits and drag him out of the bath. Yorick opens his eyes—the membrane allows them a small air pocket—and sees the red is giving him a strange look. He was under longer than he realized.
“Two seconds is enough,” Fen repeats.
“Sorry.”
Fen dons the holomask again, pulling it taut over her glistening head. Gausta’s signal has to bounce far and deep from her house on the ice. Her face jitters, freezes, but her voice comes clear.
“Hello again, Oxo. I hope you and Fen are getting acquainted.” Her wolfish smile stutters wider and wider. “Let’s go have a look at the kill site.”
CHAPTER 15
Track Five is unfinished, only a few kilometers long. They rattle down its magnetic spine in an empty ore-scoop, moving through an increasingly narrow tunnel, then continue on foot from its terminus. The air is hotter down here; the membrane stays cool against Yorick’s bare skin but starts to snag on his spiderwool.
“No visual record of the attack,” he says, recalling the brief. “Why?”
He hears Fen shape a breath, but Gausta interrupts. “We have Fen’s deceased predecessor to thank for that,” she says. “He lobbied quite strongly for decreased worker surveillance. Farcical at the time, and now deeply inconvenient.”
“No cams in the tunnels?” Yorick presses, charting the muscle tension between Fen’s swooping shoulder blades.
“As I understand it, they are triggered only by seismic shift or gas leak,” Gausta says. “The grendel was not classified as either. We’ve modified the parameters since, but the grendel has yet to make an appearance on the feed.”
They pass through a gauntlet of stalled extractors, jagged silhouettes looming from each side of the tunnel. The ground grows uneven. Every few steps, Yorick trips, catches himself. Fen somehow knows without looking where the divots are. As the slope of the tunnel increases, the heat ratchets upward. Sweat trickles down his spiderwooled legs, puddling in the membrane under his feet.
His calves are aching when they finally see the end of the tunnel. A single enormous digger sits there, drill plunged forward into the rock face. The ceiling is low enough now that Fen has to stoop, but she does it with practiced ease, still holding the biolamp steady.
In the orange illumination, Yorick sees the machine has been smashed, leaving a deep gouge of crumpled metal and torn wiring. Dried blood is crusted onto it in a splash pattern.
“Here… we… are.” Gausta’s micvoice chops and echoes. “Show him.”
Fen taps the holomask, widens the projection. Gausta vanishes, and the tunnel fills with corpses. Yorick is standing ankle-deep in one of them. For an instant there’s a phantom stench in his nostrils, the death smell, and his stomach gives a dangerous lurch. But it’s only a holo, and the eviscerated miner has no scent.
He takes a long look. The body is nearly split in two, cloven from shoulder to groin, shards of rib cage jutting at odd angles. Their torn-open membrane puckers and curls around the wound. Their limbs have been shorn away. Their face is strangely relaxed.
“I was impressed upon by the brutality,” comes Gausta’s wavery voice. “I had never seen… aftermath… one would…”
“Cayetano,” Fen says dully.
Yorick recalls the name from the incident report: indentured worker, six years in the Polar Seven Mine, three in the Polar Four before that. The ferocity of the damage is consistent with the ferocity of a grendel woken from hibernation. They tend to disassemble their victims.
He moves around the holo-skinned tunnel, over digital dirt coating actual dirt, to inspect each body in turn. Fen names them all, even though they are all just rearranged meat. It reminds him of a colonist ballad, one of the gruesome ones. The fourth corpse is draped across the digger. She’s a red, shorter than Fen, head hanging at an ugly angle. The grendel presumably picked her up and smashed her onto the machine, snapping her spine.
“It’s rather reminiscent of Subjugation days,” Gausta says. “Smart mines had a similar way of strewing pieces all about.”
Yorick doesn’t want to think about Subjugation days. “Where’s the fifth body? The old overseer?”
Fen answers. “Zabka wasn’t found.”
“He’s listed as a casualty, not a lost miner.”
“Membrane degrades after eight hours,” Fen says. “Zabka’s been missing eight days.”
“The drones have found no sign of him.” Gausta’s voice has solidified. “But the auxiliary tunnels are extensive. Fen suspects he fled, and later asphyxiated in some hidden crevice.”
Yorick is not particularly curious. He’s exhausted, and angry. He could have loaded this holo at the hotel and inspected it there. Either Gausta dragged him to the mine because she wanted to bait Fen with the sight of fellow miners shredded to pieces, or Gausta dragged him to the mine because she knows he spent last night drinking and snuffing doxy. She always was a sadist.
But Yorick is not a recruit anymore. He claps his hands together. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, well. Without hounds and a nerve suit I’m as useless as either of you. I think now we head back to Reconciliation and get a drink. My buy.”
Fen grunts, a surprised sound, but waits for Gausta to speak.
“If you really feel you’ve gleaned all you can from this, Oxo,” she says. “I’ll advise you when your equipment is ready. In the meantime, do try to sleep a bit.”
Fen switches off the holomask and the bodies disappear. She yanks the company tech off her face. Yorick is not expecting gratitude, but maybe some flicker of relief that Gausta’s game has been cut short. Instead, Fen’s nostrils are flared with disgust, and her pale blue eyes feel more like a blizzard than ever. It’s the kind of hate that could collapse a star.
Yorick’s sleepsick brain assures him, in a chemical whisper, that one of them will have to kill the other before he can leave Ymir. He is too dehydrated to piss himself.
CHAPTER 16
For today, Fen lets him live. The giant doesn’t speak on their way back across the ice, and when they return to the skid terminal Yorick slinks off without attempting a goodbye. The terminal entrance is empty now, the crate shoved to one side and the miners long gone. He keeps his head down on the short walk to Southern Urbanite Memory. His unease comes in peaks and troughs.
