Ymir, page 12
The sound of the grendel, the click and squelch, sends one more dart of adrenaline down Yorick’s spine. He’s only ever this close to a functioning grendel when things have gone very wrong for him. Things might still go very wrong for him.
“You’ll want the nerve suit off,” Thello says, in a deafening whisper. “For your own safety.”
Light is beginning to trickle through Yorick’s optic nerve. Recessed in the rock ahead, a small sheet of metal, the dimensions of a door. There’s a locking pad where the handle would be. Thello’s arm reaches past him, offers a palm, and the door groans open. Cold air rushes out like a ghost, accompanied by a familiar lambency.
Yorick manages to switch the nerve suit off before it flenses him. The unshielded xenotech beyond is bright and active; even without the nerve suit’s amplification he feels a hit of nausea. He realizes they have followed the grendel home. He sucks in a breath of icy air and crawls through the door.
CHAPTER -2
Yorick leaves camp in the dead of the night cycle. An unmarked flyer carries him north, drops him on the ridge with a chamsuit and a black box. Gausta comes with him: a voice in his ear, a miniature face in his hood’s combat display. Even with thermal coils wrapping his entire body, even with half-sealie genetics and the company’s metabolic tweaks, the cold bites.
The wind does worse, slicing to his skeleton, shattering ice against his chamsuit. He moves low, following the digital directions in his goggles. The trail pulses arterial red in the dark. He climbs. He crawls. The blizzard batters and shrieks at him. Once it nearly plucks him off his feet and hurls him into the void.
By the time he finds the maintenance shaft, he barely knows who he is, why he is there. All he wants is to go inside and be warm. He rubs his chest with stiffening hands while the company tool, a binary beast they call a hound, does its work. The shaft shutters open.
“Way down we go,” Gausta says, silver eyes flashing.
Yorick descends, clumsily at first, then more easily as his circulation returns. The howling wind cuts away. Its absence leaves a cavernous hollow in his skull. At the bottom, he switches on his chamsuit and the chromatophores turn him into a sooty ripple. He moves through the maze of Laska’s Cradle exactly how he did in the sims, heading deeper and deeper.
The first deviation is minor: In the sims he smelled nothing. Now he smells his own fearful sweat, pungent, sour. Gausta assures him the chamsuit contains it.
The second deviation is major: In the sims his path led him to the munitions cache, to the clanner-hacked smart mines and homegrown biobombs. In the sims Yorick’s black box rendered them unusable, turned them to sludge. Their destruction tipped a panoply of small scales. The war withered. The algorithm rejoiced.
He has been led to the hibernation pod instead. It’s a crude imitation of bowlship torpor, more of a pit than a pool, but it churns the same cargo: naked bodies with frosted flesh, tangling and untangling. It’s hypnotic. He verifies the map in his goggles, trying to pinpoint some error in the reconnaissance.
“No mistakes, Yorick,” Gausta says, soft. “This is just where you’re needed.”
Yorick stares at the black box.
“There are seventy-eight people in there,” she continues. “I won’t call them insurrectionists, or clanners, or otherwise dehumanize them. Of those seventy-eight people, three planned the initial bowlship assault. Two more directed the raids on the mines. Some are gifted in tactics, others only in charisma or brutality. All are dedicated, ready to prolong this war for a generation.”
Yorick subvocalizes his question. “The algorithm?”
“A catastrophic failure in this hibernation pod will break the spine of the surface resistance,” Gausta says. “Subjugation will advance unimpeded. The algorithm predicts 4800 ± 100 casualties averted. Most of them northerners.”
Yorick goes to the lip of the torpor pool and crouches there. Tendrils of vapor rise from the surface of the stasis fluid. Clanners drift just below it, eyes gummed shut. He can feel the cold coming off them. Bile rushes up his throat; he swallows it, mutes his groan.
“They’re already dead, Yorick,” Gausta says. “Now, in the hibernation pod. A few years from now, in the war. I’m only asking you to excise the slice of time between those two points, and in doing so save thousands of other lives. There will be no pain.”
Most of the clanners are reds—broad-faced, foreheads plastered with flames—but Yorick sees a sealie who looks almost like his mother. He waits for her eyes to spring open, dark and accusing. She would hate him for this. She would beat him for this. In a way, this moment is the culmination of all her sins. Not his.
“After this, offworld,” Yorick whispers. “No more people. Only grendels.”
“Two berths on the next bowlship,” Gausta says. “It’s arranged. It has been for weeks.”
In his head, Yorick understands the numbers: he is trading 78 lives for 4800 ± 100 lives. In his gut, Yorick understands that he is trading this torpor pool for another one, the one that will carry him and his brother away from Ymir forever.
“Thello will never know,” Yorick says, without meaning to.
“No,” Gausta agrees. “He wouldn’t like this very much.”
A timer in Yorick’s peripheral starts to pulse. The patrols, the ones he thought were guarding a weapons cache, will be coming back soon. He straightens up, nearly falls. His legs are weak and watery, but when he goes to the black box and opens it, his hands stay smooth. There’s a small canister of biophage inside. He carries it to the edge.
The frozen clanners and insurrectionists won’t feel any pain. In a way, he envies them. He remembers the bowlship blown open in orbit. He remembers Canna, the recruit who was exsanguinated on the ice. He drops the canister into the pool. The stasis fluid swallows it whole.
Yorick is kneeling, packing up the black box, when the torpor pool begins to bubble. The bodies slowly become a pinkish soup of denatured proteins. He watches them dissolve for as long as he can, because somebody has to watch, then slips away. He thinks of the company fountain, of the frostskimmer carcass dumped inside.
He chants the words in his head: Thello will never know. Thello will never know.
CHAPTER 33
The passage unfurls into something otherworldly. Everything is moving without moving, swelling in perpetuum. A high-vaulted ceiling erupts, ribbed with beams that bend and jut like broken limbs. The floor becomes an intricate web, slate-gray cut through with recursive channels. Yorick’s eyes slip and slide off the inhuman architecture, and a new tide of vertigo sets him afloat.
“We have dampers,” Thello says. “Here.”
Yorick hears the click of an injector being loaded, then it’s pushed into his hand. He stabs himself. Breathes. As the vertigo dulls, he forces his eyes to follow the curve of the chamber. He still half expects to see drifting shades, shambling grotesques. He accepts it. This kind of site sets off the same synapses as deep-sea dives and old religion, magneto-cranial stimulation and falling dreams.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it. And terrifying.” Thello is crouched beside him, swigging from a water sac. “I guess you’ve probably seen better. Maybe on Tyr.”
He passes the sac to Fen, who attaches a sort of metal straw and jabs it through her membrane to drink. A red-and-black flash in Yorick’s peripheral makes him remember the grendel. It scuttles past him—quadrupedal, vaguely reptilian—and heads deeper into the den’s rippled gray architecture. Yorick tracks it with his aching eyes.
The light comes from wet green veins in the floor and ceiling, illuminating the grendel as it ambles down a row of strange shapes, maybe sculptures, that loom and recede. They remind Yorick of bones grinding in sockets, stubborn children slowly shaking their heads. Staring at them too long prickles the back of his neck.
One shape doesn’t belong: a solitary digger, twin to the stalled machine at the end of Track Five. The man-made angles of its chassis are comforting. Its geometry makes sense in all the brain-stem ways the chamber doesn’t. At the far end of the cave, he sees more human traces. A cluster of bubblefabs. A tool-strewn workbench. Drooping biolamps. A small generator.
His brain takes in these small details, rotates them, observes them from all angles, and even before he sees the moving silhouettes inside the bubblefabs, he knows it’s too much equipment for a two-person operation. He remembers Gausta’s fears of conspiracy.
This is where the grendel woke up, but it didn’t tunnel out on its own. Thello-as-Zabka must have scrubbed the mine’s maps, kept all the digging unlogged, as he and Fen and whoever else slowly worked their way here. They freed the grendel on purpose.
Yorick’s throat is mummified dry, but the mandible compensates. “What is this, Thello?” His voice is hoarse. “What are you doing?”
Thello twitches slightly, and Yorick realizes it’s the first time his brother has heard him speak using the mandible, heard the soft buzz of it. He takes the water sac back from Fen, guzzles a last mouthful, and passes it to Yorick.
“It’s the grendel game,” he says. When he pulls his goggles down, his eyes are bright. Feverish. “You been having odd dreams, Yorick? Since you thawed?”
Yorick feels like he’s having one now.
CHAPTER 34
They talk in one of the bubblefabs, so its curved walls can provide a breaker against the cave’s disorientating tide. Thello goes in first, then the grendel, then Yorick, with Fen looming behind him like a thundercloud. The entrance mollybonds shut with a wet sound, sealing the four of them into a dark room that smells of gasoline and yeast.
Thello swings up onto a battered orthochair and Yorick sees a ghostly glimpse of their mother, laid out exhausted after her shift. The grendel moves to the corner of the bubblefab. It’s bipedal again, crouching. The hump where its head would be is orbited by jagged fragments, a rotating crown.
Fen detaches Yorick’s useless weapons—the carbine off his back, the howler, the needlegun from his hip—but misses the graft-knife, sheathed flat and fleshlike against Yorick’s forearm. She takes up position behind him, blocking his egress, and Yorick can feel the future violence radiating off her: The instant you’re not useful, company man, you’re dead.
But that’s a backdrop. Yorick’s preoccupation is with Thello and the grendel, the grendel and Thello, two elements that have somehow become entwined. He keeps picturing the red filament—a tool, not a weapon—sliding into his brother’s eye socket, burrowing all the way to his gray matter. He’s never seen that before. Not on any world.
Thello observes him from his sagging throne. His dark eyes snag on the mandible, but only for a moment. “You don’t look that old. They must keep you in torpor a lot. Keep you in transit.” He pauses. “How long has it been for you?”
“Ten years,” Yorick says.
“More, here,” Thello says.
“Yeah.”
It feels unreal and ordinary at the same time, speaking to Thello. Yorick wants to throw his arms around him and embrace him. He wants to wrap his hands around his throat and hurt him. He knows Fen will stop him before he does either. Fen, or maybe the grendel seething slowly in the corner.
When Yorick turns his head to watch it, it mirrors the motion. “How long has it been behaving like this?” he asks.
Thello blinks. “Since we were children, I think. They’ve been trapped down here for a long time.”
Yorick feels an old flare of children’s anger, for his brother deliberately misunderstanding. “How long have you been controlling it?” he clarifies. “When did you find the exploit?”
“I’m not controlling them.” Thello looks repulsed by the idea. “We have an understanding. A deal.”
The world tilts. His first thought is that Thello’s damper drugs are bad grade, cut with cheap benzo, and two weeks of hiding in this nightmare architecture has loosed him from reality. A grendel’s machine mind is complex enough for cognition—some theories put them equal to vatgrown dogs, others leaping far past humans—but the processes occur in a lockbox, and their response to all stimuli is insensate aggression.
The company algorithm has never managed to build a base language, not in a billion simulated iterations. You can’t talk to grendels.
“What interface?” Yorick asks faintly.
“All in here. All wetware.” Thello puts a crooked finger against his skull. “Right to the lobe is best, but they can broadcast, too. They use memories. Dreams.” He blinks. “They’ve been trying to talk to you for a while now.”
Yorick thinks of his vivid midnights, his half visions. He stares at the silent grendel. “This is valuable,” he says. “This is more valuable than all the fucking mines combined.”
Fen gives a contemptuous snort, but Fen is not the one who can speak to the grendel, and Yorick sees it now, why he’s been brought here. Thello wants him as his intermediary when he negotiates with the company.
“What do you want?” Yorick asks.
He is already anticipating a likely list of demands: amnesty for company prisoners, clone-grown bodies for Linka and the hundreds like her who lost the chop lotto, erasure of indenturement contracts, blinders on the algorithm. The company will batter it down to size, but they’ll acquiesce. Not everyone is Gausta, nostalgic for bloodshed, and access to this grendel’s machine mind is potentially worth more than all of Ymir.
Thello doesn’t say any of those things. He looks over at the grendel, then back to Yorick. “The ansible,” he says simply. “We want the ansible.”
Yorick gets a nonsensical image, company droids loading the massive xenostructure into a delivery crate, then realizes what Thello means: he wants to plug the grendel into Ymir’s node. Thello wants the one thing the company will never allow. They barely let hounds through the ansible; there’s no fucking chance they let a sapient warmachine tap in.
“When Fen locked your weapons, that was grendel code,” Thello says. “With the ansible, they can do that all across Ymir. They can disable every arsenal, erase every gene record, dissolve every implant, even drop the satellites out of orbit if we ask them to.” His eyes glisten and burn. “We’re going to undo Subjugation.”
Yorick stares. Twenty years later, and somehow Thello is still a child, not understanding. The company has hollowed Ymir out and poured itself into every crack. This world can’t survive untethered from company credit, company infrastructure. The swollen cities won’t empty themselves back onto the ice to hunt and migrate and play at being clanners.
Time can’t run in reverse.
“Not just here, either,” Thello finishes. “On every world. We’re going to unmake the company, Yorick.”
“You’ve been down here too long.” Yorick taps his head. “Or maybe that thing drilled holes in your cerebellum.”
Thello shrugs. “It doesn’t matter what you think of it,” he says. “It’s been a long fucking time since I cared what you think. Probably longer than you realize. But you’re here, and you can help us.”
Yorick doubts it; Thello’s plan is a delusion, a dangerous one. But he hardly cares. A question has been assembling itself in the corner of his mind, a question that somehow means more than collapsing the company or putting out the sun.
“Did you know it would be me?” he asks. “When you heard the company was bringing a grendel killer, did you know it would be me?”
Thello’s face softens for a moment, and he looks almost like Yorick remembers him. Then he speaks. “No, Yorick. When Fen found out who was on the bowlship, that was the first time I thought about you in years. Years and years.”
The words hit his gut like cement. For a moment Yorick wants to peel back all the gelflesh, show Thello the memory he cleans and maintains every day of his fucking life. He wants to scream his pathetic buzzing scream.
“But it makes sense,” Thello says, meeting Fen’s eyes over Yorick’s shoulder. “Since Dam Gausta is head of operations now, and you were always her favorite tool for dirty work.”
“I forgave you,” Yorick says, choppy, distorted.
Thello’s eyes dull to exoskeleton. “Yeah, Yorick. You probably did. You have so much love to give.”
The venom in his voice makes Yorick flinch.
“You’d do it again,” Thello says. “I’d do what I did again. We haven’t changed any.” He nods his head at the grendel. “But this, this is a change. This is a chance.”
“What do you want from me?” Yorick asks, meaning it in every way possible.
Thello’s voice is flat and vicious. “I want you to do what you do best,” he says. “Save your own skin. Slide across to the winning side. Tell a few lies and slit a few throats.”
Yorick feels something buckle and split in his chest. He feels cold rushing into the gap. Thello has not forgiven him. Thello never will.
“I did it all for you,” Yorick says, biting the words. “Especially what I did in Laska’s Cradle.” He feels Fen the clanner tense behind him, rising for the bait, and Yorick is a collapsing star now, so he finishes the job. “I whispered your name when I dropped the biophage in.”
A big hand smashes into the back of Yorick’s skull, sends him reeling, and this is the damage Yorick wanted, Yorick needed, so he rolls and sends the graft-knife whistling through the air in a savage parabola. It slashes Fen’s membrane-coated knee, comes away bloody.
Fen doesn’t make a sound, just lunges for the knife’s prehensile stalk, teeth bared. She’s impossibly quick for her size, but the graft-knife has had hours to bond, and Yorick can move it like he moves his own nimble fingers. It dances under her, plucks at her back.
This time she grunts. He jabs again and again, searching for a femoral artery. Blood is welling into her membrane, a cloud of dark red ink. Then she gets hold of the stalk and snaps its cartilage spine with a single torsion.
Yorick’s new limb goes numb; nerve feedback deadens his arm, too, and he doesn’t have time to detach the graft-knife with his other because Fen is on top of him now, a knee in his ribs that could crack them apart with one more pound of pressure. The blood he drew is swirling across her pale skin, still trapped by the membrane.
